Absolute atheism

Godlessness is all the rage, but faith remains a virtue

To maintain its New York State accreditation, my Manhattan yeshiva high school offered us 10th-graders a semester or two of Greek and Roman mythology. The textbooks were kept in a locked room, with monitors distributing them for our lessons and collecting them afterwards.

Orthodoxy during the 1970s was moving toward greater insularity - not an unreasonable phenomenon given the debasement of popular culture then taking place.

Frankly, paganism was not a spiritual threat in our neck of the woods. What the rabbis feared from unfettered exposure to Greek and Roman mythology (other than our adolescent gawking at illustrations of comely female gods), was that unguided philosophical inquiry might weaken our absolute faith.

The slippery slope our Old World teachers feared was that we might become vaguely "less religious."

The prospect of outright godlessness - apikorsus - could not have weighed heavily on their minds. After all, the Bible warns obsessively about false gods and polytheism, but it is silent about atheism.

THESE DAYS, however, talk of atheism is all the rage, driven by Richard Dawkins's new book The God Delusion, an international best-seller ranking among the top 20 on both Amazon and The New York Times lists, and by Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation.

In the US, ABC's Nightline program devoted a segment last week to atheist activists who proselytize believers, including teenagers, via the Web. One such posting read: "My name is Joel. I deny the Holy Spirit, as well as God, Jesus, Buddha, Zeus, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Sponge Bob, the pope, Santa Clause [sic], Mother Mary, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, Optimus Prime, all the saints and Spiderman."

The National Catholic Register devoted part of an issue last month to "Answering the Attack: The Incoherence of Atheism"; while the blogosphere is agog with godless talk including debate over whether a person can be Jewish and atheist.

It used to be atheists kept a low profile. At Brooklyn College I took a couple of science classes in Ingersoll Hall, never realizing that its namesake, Robert G. Ingersoll, was a renowned atheist. Okay, the name Madalyn Murray O'Hair, "the atheist," would come up in the news, but she was the Christians' problem; and to us they were anyway on the wrong track.

I wonder if atheism has been propelled so high up the intellectual agenda as a consequence of the clash of civilizations. Militant Islam seems to know where it stands and what it wants. The pews of the Judeo-Christian world, in contrast, stand empty, with the ethos of Western society seemingly up for grabs.

The situation is made knottier by American social conservatives who are leading the campaign against the Islamist threat while simultaneously waging a cultural war over such issues as abortion and homosexuality.

Notwithstanding 9/11, those raised to be broadminded find it hard to acknowledge that the planet is being propelled into a sort of medieval time warp.

Meanwhile the detested war in Iraq has conflated all too many hot-button issues which are at the nexus of religion and politics, leading some to ponder whether "Bush's God" is really all that preferable to Osama bin Laden's.

This is the context in which Dawkins, an Oxford professor who's dedicated his life to promoting science among the masses, has elbowed his way onto the scene. The God Delusion is an unabashedly intolerant disputation against God and the religious.

THE BOOK offers the classically false either/or choices so favored by pundits, politicians, theologians and even scientists with an ax to grind. These alternatives are intended to paint the reader into a corner: Are you with God, or with the devil? With the Creator of Genesis or with Darwin? Do you believe in a supernatural micro-managing lord of the universe, or that everything in life is a throw of the dice? Do you embrace scriptural inerrancy - and with it divine dictation - or do you dismiss the Bible as middlebrow literature? Do you stand with promiscuous homosexuals, or the nuclear family? Do you favor killing babies in the womb, or a woman's right to control her own body?

It's the job of polemicists to frame the debate categorically, but the rest of us need not cede the field to those who abhor the possibility of a middle ground. Dawkins's straw man is absolutist religion - his antidote, absolutist atheism. He paints faith as inherently fundamentalist and those who embrace it as dangerously delusional.

Dawkins's reliance on secondary sources (he's a lapsed Anglican) leads him to mistakenly assume that Orthodox Jews are Bible-literalist - when in many ways they are far from it. Nevertheless, the more theologically conservative one is (Jewish, Christian or Muslim) the stronger Dawkins's rationalist challenge may seem.

His is an incendiary argument: Monotheism is in no way superior to polytheism. Belief in a supernatural God, or one who answers prayers, is delusional; but if you discount God's supernatural qualities you're playing fast and loose with the very definition of God. Agnostics are gutless for straddling the rational/delusional fence; and, as you might have guessed, Dawkins holds that religion doesn't deserve any more "respect" than witchcraft.

WHEN WE do good, behave altruistically or display empathy, writes Dawkins, such moral behavior is actually part of our evolutionary development; in contrast, blind adherence to the Bible's teachings often leads people to immorality - at least by the standards of contemporary humanism.

Among the many stupid or evil things preached, or done, in the name of God, Dawkins lists the kidnapping in 1858 of Edgardo Mortara in Italy after a "secret baptism." He decries both the fanaticism of the Church in not allowing a baptized child to be raised by his Jewish parents, and of Edgardo's parents for having employed a Christian nanny in the first place, out of their own misguided faith which necessitated the presence of a shabbos goy under their roof.

As for all the evil caused by atheists, writes Dawkins: "Individual atheists [like Hitler and Stalin] may do evil things, but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism [while] religious wars are really fought in the name of religion, and they have been horribly frequent in history."
Dawkins taunts readers who view religion in a favorable light: "Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral certitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?" Have they read Deuteronomy 20, which advocates "genocide"; or Leviticus 20, which would get you stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath?

And he has no patience whatsoever for those who, as he sees it, pick and choose those parts of the Bible they take literally while either interpreting or dismissing as archaic those elements they're uncomfortable with.

THERE'S A lot in The God Delusion to grapple with. I'll leave it for Bible scholars and theologians to pick up the gauntlet.

But Dawkins is worth reading because he forces non-Orthodox traditionalists like me to distinguish between God and religion, to contemplate what we mean when we speak about God; to reflect on why we pray; to wrestle with Dawkins's critique of the moral conduct of even God, let alone that of Abraham, Moses and Joshua - which, let's face it, frequently leaves us baffled.

Yet his atheist alternative to faith leaves me cold. What matters is whether humanity can soar higher with God or with humanism. Even if we grant that Karl Marx had a point in arguing that "religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world... the opium of the people" - what solace do the atheists have to offer humanity in its place?

Dawkins retorts: "Religion's power to console doesn't make it true." If the demise of God leaves a yawning gap, so be it.

But, as I said, much depends on a willingness to buy into Dawkins's anthropomorphic conception of God. And for Jews, I venture to say, God is incomprehensible and cannot be defined.
Jewish civilization allows for a variety of avenues to God. He is present in the lives of hassidim as well as in the lives of Reconstructionist Jews. For the former, God is an almost tangible presence, for the latter, depersonalized and ephemeral. But as Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan wrote: To believe in God is to reckon with life's creative forces, to affirm that life has value. It is a hypothesis about reality that we call faith.

Personally, I'm with the post-rationalist approach of British rabbi Louis Jacobs who, back in the 1950s, rejected the either/or model of thinkers like Dawkins: "We refuse to accept that the only choice before us is the stark one of either rejecting all modern knowledge and scholarship or rejecting belief. We must believe that we can have both."

Or to paraphrase the Kotzker Rebbe: If I could understand God, I would be God. A god that Richard Dawkins can describe? Phooey - I don't need such a god.

Boker tov, 'Economist'

Modern Jews have been examining
"what it means to be Jewish"
since the Enlightenment

Here's one version of reality: Once upon a time, "being a potential Israeli citizen" was the "anchor" for "what it means to be a Jew." But now, "as the threat of genocide or of Israel's destruction has receded, a growing number of diaspora Jews neither feel comfortable with always standing up for Israel, nor feel a need to invoke Israel in defining what makes them Jewish."

Big Jewish organizations "have not caught up" with this reality and often lobby not so much for Israel as its "right-wing political establishment."

This "tendency to stand by Israel right or wrong" especially over its policies in the "occupied territories" is hardly any incentive for keeping Diaspora youth from "leaving the faith." Indeed, while some youth find "defending Israel uncritically" "distasteful," "others simply find Israel irrelevant."

That's how last week's Economist (January 13-19) evaluated "The state of the Jews" in an editorial entitled "Diaspora blues."

In a further three-page inside feature, Economist editors concluded: "Jews around the world are gradually ceasing to regard Israel as a focal point. As a result, many are re-examining what it means to be Jewish."

I'LL COME back to how long Jews have been "re-examining what it means to be Jewish" later. Suffice it to say that the constant redefining of Jewishness is part and parcel of what modern Jewish life is about. But I'll grant that pro-Israelism as a touchstone of Jewish identity is on the wane. The pro-Israel phenomenon began only after the 1967 war, coincided with the freedom for Soviet Jewry movement, and is now dissipating.

If, however, Economist editors really think that millions of well-heeled Diaspora Jews once held visions of becoming "Israeli citizens," they are less sagacious than I imagined.

I've got more news for The Economist: Dissociating Diaspora Jews from Israel's policies in the "occupied territories" goes back almost to their 1967 capture. The Diaspora establishment never embraced the idea of Jewish sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Gaza. And the record shows that Jewish machers have never hesitated to criticize Israel - not even back when Golda Meir was premier.

Take Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who was chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations until just after the Six Day War. He championed a Jewish "declaration of political independence" from Israel. And as early as December 1967, left-wing critics were calling on Jerusalem to trade land - not for peace, but for free navigation through the Suez Canal.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, heavy-hitters such as the World Jewish Congress's Nachum Goldmann and Philip Klutznick were habitually critical of Israeli policies. And by the time Menachem Begin became prime minister in 1977, up and down the Jewish mainstream toeing the Israeli line was the exception, not the rule.

As for non-establishment groups on the Jewish Left, they had been "re-defining" what it meant to be pro-Israel from at least the 1970s. For instance, Breira, founded in 1973, supported unconditional inclusion of the pre-Oslo PLO in the diplomatic process. Before Breira there was the Radical Zionist Alliance, and after Breira came the New Jewish Agenda.

So The Economist is wrong in promulgating the idea that to be a critic of Israel in the Diaspora is somehow avant garde.

THE NEWSPAPER - it doesn't like being called a magazine - is also mistaken in insinuating that threats to Israel have receded. Show me a kindergarten, bus line, cafe or mall that - embracing The Economist's sense of serenity - has removed its armed guards.

The Economist says that "the threat [to Israel] of genocide... has receded." Really. Does the name Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ring a bell? And the last time I checked, the best offer we were getting from Hamas was a 10-year truce, conditioned on a pullback to the 1949 armistice lines, and on opening our doors to millions of "refugees" (and their descendents) "returning" to our truncated state.

What about Fatah's more moderate Mahmoud Abbas? From where I sit, he and Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh seem to disagree more over means than ends (see, for instance, Abbas's January 11 speech in Ramallah).

YET WHILE its editorial is way off the mark, the inside feature, "Second thoughts about the Holy Land" provides an informative, albeit tendentious, summary of Israel-Diaspora relations.
The paper, not known for its Zionist sympathies, seems to revel in highlighting the chasms between the Diaspora and Israel. Nevertheless, it has pulled together all the right data, such as a study (several years old) showing that "only 57%" of American Jews say Israel is "very important" to their Jewish identity. It correctly points to the senseless cleavages created by our narrow-minded Orthodox establishment in their condescending attitude toward the world's pluralistic Jewish majority; it correctly notes that being Jewish is, for many young people in the West, only one part of their multifaceted identities; and it draws attention to the welcome revival - quite unconnected to the Zionist enterprise - of Jewish life in such places as Moscow, Berlin and LA.

It belatedly discovers that young people are finding new, non-Zionist ways of "doing Jewish" such as the fine tikkun olam work of The American Jewish World Service.

To its credit, while The Economist may delight in Israel's discomfiture, it reasonably acknowledges that a "fruitful fusion" between Zion and the Diaspora is the best hope for both.

BACK WHEN I was in college, I was assigned a book of essays edited in 1971 by James A. Sleeper and Alan L. Mintz and entitled The New Jews. So I was intrigued to see The Economist cite a recent work with a similar title in arguing its thesis. New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora by Caryn Aviv and David Shneer rejects the very idea of a "diaspora" with Israel at the core. At first blush this sounds radical - even anti-Zionist. After all, what are we Jews absent the covenant idea of a shared past, a blueprint for the future, and Israel at the center?

That may be my ideal, but in practice modern Jews have been "redefining" what it means to be Jewish since the Enlightenment in the 1700s. If anything, the destruction of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, the subsequent birth of Israel, and the growth of a heterogeneous, acculturated Diaspora in the West has only served to accelerate the debate over "Who is a Jew" and "what it means to be Jewish" into the 21st century.

In an exchange of e-mails, Caryn Aviv, a lecturer at the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, and David Shneer, director of the center, write that Israel radically changed the way Jews identify, both as individuals and as a collective. "The legacy of Zionism cannot be ignored in Jewish life today. But neither is Israel necessarily the center of all things Jewish today for all Jews." Israel, they say, is but one of a number of cultural centers reflecting the diversity of Jewish life.

How relevant is Israel to your own lives?
Israel is deeply relevant - as are other Jewish centers around the world. We both spend time each year in Israel. Aviv has lived in Jerusalem. And we each subscribe to the JTA Daily News Bulletin - though we wish it had more news about global Jewish communities and less about the "crisis in the Middle East."

You've suggested that maybe in 10 years' time there could be a sort of "birthright" to take Diaspora youth to Vilnius to study Yiddish, or Prague to study art...
Why not? These places might be just as effective and compelling to engage young Jews, the way birthright Israel has tried to cultivate a connection to Israel.

How do you assess 'The Economist's' contention that Jews around the world are ceasing to regard Israel as a focal point?
Our book argues along a similar line, although we'd say that Israel is becoming one of many centers on a global Jewish map. It is interesting to us that our somewhat radical rethinking of the global Jewish map that discards the concept of diaspora encourages people to think that we're anti-Zionist, which our responses hopefully suggest we're not.

We're also not in the mainstream, which still holds onto the notion that there are Israeli Jews and everyone else is a diaspora Jew, rather than seeing all Jews as global.

What of the dangers Israel faces?
Sure we see the dangers, but our book is about global Jewish life and the multiple ways Jews live it. Focusing on anxiety about existential threats that Israel faces often obscures other important issues within Israel, not to mention important stories about the resilience and vibrancy of Jewish life in lots of other places.

Anyway, your presumption is that championing Israel should come first. But the reality is that it's a balancing act - for some Israel is indeed a high priority, but for a larger group it's not. We don't see that as a problem.

You Israelis need to focus on finding long-term solutions to your problems, and US Jews who are invested in Israel can help. At the same time, we Jews would be smart and strategic to focus on nurturing and sustaining our own communities.

Does the relationship have to be either, or?
Absolutely not. Jews should, can, and do support thriving Jewish communities around the world, including in Israel. We argue that by imagining a global, rather than "diasporic" Jewish world, all Jews benefit. Philanthropy, people, and ideas should be flowing in many different directions.

You've posed the rhetorical question: What does a middle-class professional, secular Jew in LA have in common with a working-class Sephardi Orthodox Jew in Bnei Brak? And your answer is...
That by self-defining as Jews they opt into a common past and heritage (though each would also have her own) which can - but does not always - create an imagined bond between them.
Sure, in terms of practices, beliefs, cultures we find little in common between the two. And we think this condition (which isn't anything new) is okay; that Jews will survive and thrive even if those two imagined Jews have little in common.

PERSONALLY, I'm not sanguine, much less laudatory, about a Jewish world in which Israel is not the cultural, spiritual and political hub, and where two imagined Jews who each think of themselves as Jews have so little in common. But I see all this grappling with identity, alienation, faith and the Israel-Diaspora relationship as part of a continuing process that is "good for the Jews," keeping us from becoming stultified.

Where The Economist sees "Diaspora blues," I see an ancient and stiff-necked people struggling not just with God, but with itself.

Memo to Mrs. Merkel - think trusteeship

The illusion of momentum isn't a good enough reason to reinvigorate the Quartet's involvement.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in her capacity as current head of the European Union, is back in Berlin after a lightning visit to the White House, where she obtained President George W. Bush's agreement to revive Quartet involvement in what is euphemistically known as the Middle East peace process. The Quartet, you will recall, is comprised of the US, the EU, Russia, and the UN.

Bush said it was a "good idea" to convene the Quartet. Merkel added that it would help in achieving a two-state solution if the US and EU "speak with one and the same voice."
Preempting the "why now" question, the chancellor opined: "I simply think that we ought to try time and again to achieve some sort of results in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Merkel has a lot on her plate. In addition to her national and EU responsibilities she's also currently chair of the G-8. But the Middle East is high on her agenda. In February she's scheduled to visit Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

WITH PALESTINIAN factions killing each other in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, the steadfastly rejectionist Hamas controlling the government and President Mahmoud Abbas as politically impotent as ever, Merkel's desire to go down the Quartet's road map path again strikes me as worse than futile.

To get a better handle on what's driving the chancellor to breathe new life into this plan, I asked Emory University political scientist Christian Tuschhoff in Berlin.

Tuschhoff answered that Merkel's government (her Christian Democrats had to enter into a coalition with the rival Social Democratic Party) is unpopular and desperate for a success - and it's unlikely to come on the domestic front. So Merkel, wisely, is turning to foreign policy, exploiting Germany's leadership of both the EU and G-8.

Tuschhoff accepts that her foreign policy agenda won't produce more than "a high profile on television," given the intractability of the problems she's confronting. This is true, incidentally, not only on the Arab-Israel front but also on energy issues, security and the moribund EU constitution.

Which is why, he said, no one really expects results from the revived Quartet.
So why bother? "Germans think it is better to have the process going than no effort at all. If the Quartet can reengage Israel and the Palestinians, they believe this will divert their activities from armed conflict."

GERMANS SEE themselves as uniquely qualified to help reconcile Israelis and Palestinians. Berlin has the respect of both sides and is thought of as having the most balanced stance within the EU. Political culture also plays a role: Tuschhoff argues that "reconciliation is a key trait of German foreign policy generally."

As a further domestic explanation of Germany's efforts to revive the Quartet, another source in Berlin suggested that policy on the Arab-Israel conflict was partially driven by the close cooperation between Social Democrat Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and a government-funded foreign policy think tank called Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP).

The director of SWP, Volker Pertes, seems able to influence government decision-making.
Some of Steinmeier's initiatives - reaching out to Syria, for instance - are traceable to Pertes's influence, my source said.

BEYOND DOMESTIC drives, the international arena also offers clues to Merkel's Quartet-revival initiative. From the EU's point of view, the Arab-Israel conflict is key to regional stability, political scientist Tuschhoff explained.

To create a sense of policy consistency and follow-through, Merkel is coordinating her approach with Portugal and Slovenia, respectively scheduled to follow Germany's six-month EU presidency.

Moreover, if Merkel can demonstrate that she has genuine influence with the Bush White House, Berlin's weight within the EU can only increase.


EU members are supposed to pursue their foreign policy goals exclusively within the EU framework, Tuschhoff explained. And the Quartet is the best channel through which the EU can exert a role in our region.

It's not clear whether Germany embraces the latest French call for an international peace conference. But Berlin and Paris closely coordinate their foreign policy initiatives. "It would surprise me if France issued a proposal without prior consultation with Germany and possibly German approval," Tuschhoff said.

As we concluded our exchange, Tuschhoff ventured a speculation: "The key [to solving the conflict] is to educate the Palestinian side to act with much greater responsibility and move them away from jihad and terrorism.

"If some international recognition or venue can achieve that 'civilizing' effect on radical Palestinian factions, it should be tried."

THE QUARTET'S contribution to Arab-Israel conflict resolution is the 2002-2003 road map for peace. As the State Department describes it, "The plan is a performance-based, goal-driven plan, with clear phases, timelines, and benchmarks. It involves reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic, and humanitarian fields. The destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict."

The road map's first phase called for ending terrorism and normalizing Palestinian life. The Palestinians were to end all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere. Jerusalem was to commit itself to a sovereign Palestinian state living alongside Israel, which prime minister Ariel Sharon did.

Among other things, Israel also committed to freeze all settlement activity and dismantle outposts not authorized by the government. But Israeli officials have long argued that implementation of the road map is contingent on the Palestinians taking concrete steps to dismantle the terror infrastructure.

Since that never happened, neither did much else.

If anything, since the road map evolved the situation on the ground has gotten only more complicated. In January 2006, Hamas - which rejects the very idea of living in peace alongside a sovereign Jewish state - won the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Since then the Palestinian polity has fragmented owing to outside pressure - to shed its rejectionist stance - and internal political cleavages. Today anarchy reigns, with violent clans and splinter groups carrying as much weight as the main terrorist organizations.

It is against this background that Merkel wants to revive the Quartet - as if the Palestinians were capable of agreeing among themselves on a course of action; as if a deal cut with Mahmoud Abbas would hold water with the Islamists; as if the fundamental political culture of Palestinian society, which viscerally rejects accommodation with Israel, could be swept under the rug.

IF MRS. MERKEL wants to do more than engage in the illusion of momentum - and reconvening an international peace conference under the current conditions would be just that - she must have the courage to lead the EU in a radically new direction.

To that end, I direct her attention to Martin S. Indyk's "A Trusteeship for Palestine?" in the May 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs.

We can dispute the details with Indyk (and his scenario anyway needs updating). But the principle that the Palestinian polity desperately needs an invasive "re-socialization" remains key. Merkel should accept that a prerequisite for Palestinian statehood is creating an institutional framework (political, educational and security) that fosters representative government, centrist politics and pluralism.

Can this be done in the Arab context, post-Iraq? What roles should Jordan and Egypt play? What sacrifices would Israel have to make to create the right atmosphere?

These are worthwhile questions that Merkel will need to grapple with assuming she can get first the EU and then the Quartet to make the major philosophical leap of abandoning the road-map illusion that the Palestinians are ready for statehood and investing, instead, in an approach that aims to prepare them to join the family of nations - trusteeship.

Policy trumps presidential personality

I didn't vote for Gerald Ford.
I went for his pro-Israel opponent, Jimmy Carter.

LAST WEDNESDAY night, hours after former US president Gerald R. Ford died at 93, I found myself at the Gielgud Theater in London's West End being captivated by Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon.

It's the story of the televised interviews with the disgraced Richard Nixon conducted in 1977 by British talk-show personality David Frost. Nixon had been largely incommunicado since resigning the presidency on August 8, 1974, after the House Judiciary Committee recommended he be impeached.

Michael Sheen plays the hyperactive Frost adroitly, capturing his mannerisms, while Frank Langella plays Nixon in all his pathos. The original televised interviews were culled from 28 hours of taped cross-examinations conducted over 12 days in San Clemente, California.
The flamboyantly Jewish Hollywood agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar is portrayed negotiating the deal that made the interviews possible (and the ex-president $600,000 richer).

The premise of the play, which mixes fact with fiction, is that by pardoning Nixon on September 8, 1974 rather than forcing him to stand trial, Gerald Ford deprived America of its chance of moral and psychological closure over its long Watergate nightmare.

In the playwright's mind, the Frost/Nixon interviews were necessary so that Nixon would publicly confess.

Paradoxically, to my mind, rather than providing left-liberals with the closure they sought, Nixon's mea culpa - "I let down my friends, I let down our country" - put him on the road to political rehabilitation. He went on to publish his memoirs and a series of books on world politics. By the time he died, in 1994, he was an elder statesman - almost as if Watergate had never happened. President Bill Clinton delivered Nixon's eulogy, with four ex-presidents in attendance.

BUT I LEFT the Gielgud thinking more about the newly-departed Ford than about Nixon or Frost.

Ford's presidency lasted a mere 896 days. He completed Nixon's term, famously met Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at Vladivostok, had the dubious distinction of being the White House incumbent when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, and signed the Helsinki Accords, which recognized the East-West divide but also obligated the Soviet Union to respect human rights. This in turn boosted the Soviet Jewry movement.

Ford had earlier signed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment into law, which made most-favored-nation trading status (something the Soviets desperately wanted under detente) dependent on their willingness to open the iron gates and allow Jewish emigration.

Nevertheless, at the time I was convinced that Ford was bad for the Jews and bad for Israel, and voted against him. When he was defeated by Jimmy Carter on November 2, 1976, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Now with Ford dead, and Carter, at 82, writing books the likes of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, I find myself wondering whether I did wrong by Ford.

BUT YOU'VE got to recall the context. Months after Ford took over from Nixon, the October 1974 Arab summit in Rabat gave the Palestine Liberation Organization an internationally stipulated role as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian Arabs. Their cause was on the ascendant. The UN General Assembly invited the PLO to take part in its sessions, culminating in Yasser Arafat's triumphant speech there on November 13, 1974.

The administration made all the right noises about the PLO, but granted it no fewer than 20 entry visas to attend the UN session. It also authorized UN ambassador John Scalli to meet with pro-PLO Arab-American lobbyists.

And, in December, vice-president-designate Nelson Rockefeller expressed affinity for the PLO position, observing that Israel "took the land" of the Palestinian Arabs. Speaking during his confirmation hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, Rockefeller said he didn't know whether he would recognize the PLO if he assumed the presidency.

The pro-Israel community was understandably getting nervous, so Republican Jewish macher Max Fisher set up a White House meeting between the Jewish leadership and Ford. The president reassured them that his administration would not court the PLO. That still left plenty of unease - about the administration's plan to sell F5E warplanes to Saudi Arabia, for instance.
By the start of 1975, it had become obvious that Ford would balance support for Israel with criticism of its West Bank policies, coupled with arms sales to pro-US Arab states.

WHEN SECRETARY of state Henry Kissinger's efforts to broker an Egyptian-Israeli deal in the Sinai faltered in March 1975, Ford's administration let it be known that Jerusalem was to blame. Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had demanded, and Anwar Sadat had rejected, an arrangement that would have exchanged Israeli control of the Abu Rudeis oil fields plus the strategic Mitla and Gidi passes in return for an Egyptian pledge of non-belligerency.

Privately, Ford complained to Rabin: "I am disappointed to learn that Israel has not moved as far as it might."

All this - cozying up to moderate Arab states with weapons sales, generous visas for the PLO and a soon-to-be-unveiled policy "reassessment" - was largely the work of the Machiavellian Kissinger. To tighten the screws further, Kissinger refused to take calls from Israeli ambassador Simcha Dinitz.

Then the administration went public. In April 1975, Ford declared his "total reassessment" of US policy in the Middle East. American ambassadors from Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan were all summoned for talks at the State Department.

Kissinger also made a point of meeting with a group of foreign policy "wise men" including George Ball, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Averell Harriman and John McCloy - all of whom supported Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines.Ford then used his connections with leading US Jews, hoping to get them to pressure Israel into being more forthcoming. He told Fisher: "Max, it's the most distressing thing that's happened to me since I became president. Rabin and [foreign minister Yigal] Allon misled us into thinking they would make a deal. I never would've sent [Kissinger] if I didn't think we had an agreement. The Israelis took advantage of us."

Ford spoke about the need for "evenhandedness" in US Middle East policy, insisting he would not meet with Rabin unless he also met with Arab leaders.

Reassessment eventually drew to a close; it had served its manipulative purpose. But relations between Kissinger and the pro-Israel community were at a nadir.

When - with behind-the-scenes encouragement from the America Israel Public Affairs Committee - 76 US senators signed a letter critical of Ford, Kissinger went ballistic, telling Dinitz: "You'll pay for this! What do you think? [That] this is going to help you? This letter will cause people to charge that Jews control Congress."

On September 4, 1975, an Israeli-Egyptian Sinai Agreement was finally signed, the second following the Yom Kippur War. The deal called for a further Israeli pullback in the Sinai and a limited three-year non-belligerency pledge. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, no direct talks between Egypt and Israel had taken place. On the bright side, the US committed itself not to talk to the PLO so long as it didn't recognize Israel's right to exist. Kissinger would later deny that it was binding on future presidents.

WITH THE benefit of hindsight, it's clear that Ford's brief presidency adhered to the fundamental policy followed by every US administration since the 1967 Six Day War: getting Israel to withdraw from (most of) the captured territories in exchange for an accommodation with the Arabs - in other words, land for peace.

An independent Palestinian state was not then on the agenda, but forcing Israel out of Judea, Samaria and Gaza always had been. Ford's Middle East envoy William Scranton, for instance, declared - probably coining the phrase - that Jewish settlements in the territories were "obstacles to peace." Over the years, administrations may have differed over how best to implement this goal, but the essential objective would never change.

Ford's only full year in office, 1976, continued to be characterized by bumpy relations with the organized Jewish community. He repeatedly turned to Max Fisher and other shtadlanim to assuage the sensibilities of the pro-Israel community while simultaneously trying to get it to lobby in Jerusalem on behalf of the administration's policies.

WHICH BRINGS me to Jimmy Carter. As a Democratic presidential candidate, Carter, seeking a primary win in my home state of New York, actually told voters that he supported Israel's settlement activity and would never want to see it relinquish the Golan Heights or east Jerusalem.

He told Jewish audiences what we wanted to hear: Israel hadn't caused the Palestinian problem, so why was the Ford administration caving in to the Arabs' blackmail and selling them arms? Why didn't it support legislation opposed to the Arab boycott of Israel? And he said all this during an upsurge in Arab rioting in the territories.

On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan was challenging Ford for the nomination, and one of Reagan's foreign policy advisers, Jewish Republican lawyer Rita Hauser, was calling on Ford's State Department to stop "creeping toward tacit recognition" of the PLO.

That's particularly ironic because it was Hauser, acting as a private citizen (with the approval of the Carter administration), who was instrumental in facilitating US recognition of the PLO in December 1988.

Carter went on to win the Democratic nomination. Ford overcame Reagan, but was weakened by the intensity of the primary campaign. It would be Ford versus Carter in the 1976 presidential race.Arab Americans announced their support for the "evenhanded" Ford. And I voted, naturally, for the "pro-Israel" Carter.

IT WOULD take me years to fully appreciate this fundamental fact: Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, US policy on the Arab-Israel conflict remains the same. Sure the personality of the president matters, but mostly on the margins.

America's perceived interests in the region dictate a certain course and Washington calibrates its commitment to Israel's survival against its other interests in the region.

US policy-makers adhere to a premise many of us in the pro-Israel community find dangerously naive: that the Arab-Israel conflict has shifted from a winner-take-all, zero-sum game to one that can be solved through compromise. Having embraced the idea that the Arabs no longer seek Israel's destruction, everything else - selling them warplanes, flirting with the PLO, pressuring Israel into vulnerable borders - falls into place.

I had been kidding myself into thinking that supporting Carter over Ford would bring America and Israel closer. From Lyndon B. Johnson to George W. Bush, the American line has not wavered: Israel needs to withdraw from the Golan, the West Bank and Gaza.

It would not have mattered if Nixon had survived Watergate; if Reagan had defeated Ford that year for the Republican nomination and gone on to beat Carter.

When he finally did become president, Reagan sold the Saudis AWACs, visited Bitburg and, in the closing days of his administration, granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO - a necessary precursor to the Oslo Accords five years later.

I don't envy Americans who may want to consider support for Israel as they try to decide between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, between John McCain and John Edwards, between Joseph Biden and Mitt Romney, or between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich.

It's likely to be a pointless exercise - the play's already scripted.

‘Death will find you’

The Looming Tower
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
By Lawrence Wright
Knopf
480 pages
£20/NIS 165


Last month an Islamic seminary in northwest Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, was attacked by Pakistani helicopter gunships. Though 80 “seminarians” were killed, the raid’s primary target, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s No. 2 and one of the most wanted men in the world, managed to elude liquidation – again.

Reports mount that al-Qaida is planning a mega-attack, perhaps against a European target, over the Christmas holidays. British security officials are convinced that al-Qaida is actively trying to acquire a nuclear device.

Five years after the assault against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, al-Qaida’s top leaders remain at large, and the organization seems to be reinvigorating its operations from havens along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Against this threatening background comes Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Not just another 9/11 tome – there are some 5,000 in print – The Looming Tower may well be the most comprehensive, authoritative and balanced work available.

Wright, a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, has produced an engrossing story not only about the events leading up to the assaults, but about the men behind them – Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri – and their main pursuer, anti-hero FBI agent John O’Neill, ironically killed in the WTC attacks that fateful day.

The Looming Tower is a serious work of political history, but it reads like a thriller. The title comes from a passage in the Koran: “Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.”
Wright answers the great “what if” that so consumes political historians: What if bin Laden had been killed early on – would al-Qaida have become the force it is now?

As with the development of the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s, the combustible ingredients were all there; but a catalyst was needed. Bin Laden is to the Islamist movement what Hitler was to the Nazis. Al-Qaida could not have developed in the way it did absent the Saudi-born prince of darkness.

So it is all the more heartbreaking that efforts, so vividly presented by Wright, to kill bin Laden before he became a household name failed so miserably.

It didn’t have to be this way. Had America’s political and intelligence echelons done their jobs, Wright asserts, bin Laden would have been caught or killed before al-Qaida’s greatest success: 9/11.

AFTER THE August 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in which 213 people were killed it transpired that the CIA knew about the plot a year earlier, but hadn’t taken the information seriously.

Bin Laden survived thanks to a combination of incompetence and fate. In retaliation for the Kenya attack, and a simultaneous one in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Clinton administration ordered a cruise missile assault against al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, as Wright explains, “it takes several hours to prepare a missile for firing, and the flight time from the warships in the Arabian Sea across Pakistan to eastern Afghanistan was more than two hours.”

As luck would have it, both bin Laden and Zawahiri were out of harm’s way by the time the “nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of armaments” rained down on their training camps in Afghanistan and, simultaneously, on what turned out to be a genuine pharmaceutical plant, not an al-Qaida biological or chemical weapons facility, in the Sudan.


TIME AND again Wright shows that a combination of bad luck, bad intelligence and a myopic refusal to share pieces of a complex puzzle within the American intelligence establishment – among the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, even with the White House – allowed the 9/11 plot to proceed.

Even after the 9/11 terrorists infiltrated the US, had the various intelligence agencies shared fragmentary data – in particular, had the CIA told the FBI what it needed to know – the dots just might have been connected.

There is plenty of blame to go around. The CIA feared exposing its intelligence to the FBI, knowing that the FBI viewed terrorism as a police problem. The Bureau would have sought indictments against suspected terrorists, which, to stand up in court, could reasonably have been expected to have jeopardized the CIA’s assets and methods.

How painful to read that on July 5, 2001, intelligence “chatter” had reached such proportions that Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, called a White House meeting of all the relevant intelligence agencies to declare: “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon.”

But by then the FBI’s O’Neil, who knew the most about bin Laden, was being eased out of the Bureau and was preparing to take a private job as head of security at the WTC.


BEYOND THE nuts and bolts of how the plot went forward, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in a broad understanding of how the Islamist menace to Western civilization developed.

Wright provides the theological and historical setting to explain al-Qaida’s emergence. He ties the teachings of Sayyid Qutb, the sexually frustrated theoretician of the Islamist idea, to the emergence of today’s Muslim fanaticism. It was Qutb – executed by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966 – who theorized against secularism, rationality, pluralism, individualism, mixing of sexes and tolerance, all of which had seeped into Muslim society through its encounter with the West.
Basically, those Arabs who lost faith in their leaders’ ability to harness the energies of their civilization – first through Arab nationalism and then through pan-Arabism, so their shattered world could withstand the “modernity virus” – became Islamists.

The turning point was the 1967 Six Day War, when Arab efforts to destroy even a truncated Jewish state backfired, leading to the loss of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.

The Arabs’ shift to pan-Islam was unexpectedly bolstered by the 1979 revolution in Iran, in which Persian nationalism was replaced by Shi’ite fundamentalism. Whether spread by Sunni fundamentalists in Arabia or the Shi’ite mullahs of Iran, the nature of the Muslim struggle against Western influence had now taken on added momentum.

It doesn’t matter that the various Islamist strains despise one another, or try to outdo each other in closed-mindedness. What does matter is the direction in which they are taking Muslim civilization.


ARGUABLY, SAYYID Qutb’s successor was the blind sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman. Now sitting in a US jail, Rahman is the key figure connecting the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, to the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York in 1990, to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing carried out by Ramzi Yousef. And it is Rahman who was Zawahiri’s spiritual mentor.

Had US authorities relentlessly pursued the clues left behind by el-Sayyid Nosair, Kahane’s killer, the menace of the burgeoning Islamist threat might have been revealed much sooner.

As biography too, The Looming Tower is simply captivating. Bin Laden is the scion of the Yemen-born Muhammad bin Laden, who came to Saudi Arabia as an impoverished construction worker and found his way into the hearts of the royal family, eventually building a global dynasty.

As Wright tells it, Osama had a religious epiphany during adolescence that would lead him to a life of asceticism. I was fascinated to read that he fasted on Mondays and Thursdays (as do some pious Jews).

Wright also unveils the personality of the equally devout Ayman Zawahiri – a bookworm and himself scion of an Egyptian medical dynasty. Both men abandoned lives of comfort and security to pursue their vendetta against the West. (Wright suggests that Zawahiri may well be the real brains behind al-Qaida.)

The Looming Tower is also a work of political psychology, providing glimpses into the pathological minds of the Islamist leadership. We meet men from middle-class backgrounds, many of whom “return” to religiosity. They share a sense of displacement; some are expatriates, or the offspring of ex-pats. Many have issues about their sexuality.

One example: Muhammad Atta, the Egyptian leader of the 9/11 hijacking team who piloted American Airlines Flight No. 11 into the WTC, gave these instructions about the handling of his martyred remains: “Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.”

Yet in telling the stories of the main fanatics, Wright also illuminates the life of their chief nemesis, John O’Neill, the agent-in-charge of the FBI’s national security division. A practicing Roman Catholic, O’Neill was also an adulterer, emotionally dependent, a bigamist and a spendthrift. Most significantly, he was an indefatigable lawman obsessed by his pursuit of bin Laden.

There were a handful of others equally dedicated scattered throughout the security establishment. But they were often forced by institutional rivalry to work at cross-purposes, or ignorant of each others’ efforts.


ABSENT THE Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, there would have been no 9/11. An amalgamation of mujahadeen fighters backed by the US, China, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia had indeed overcome the Soviets. But, as Wright reveals, bin Laden played a thoroughly minor role in that effort.

Yet thanks to a combination of hubris, delusion and religious fanaticism, bin Laden convinced himself that his band of Arabs had been ordained by God to wage jihad, that just as they had overcome the Soviets, so too they would beat America.

In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself that the United States was at the root of all that was wrong in Muslim society. Wasn’t it America that was dragging Arabia toward modernity? Wasn’t it America that stood behind Israel and the oppression of the Palestinians? Didn’t it corrupt a pious Saudi regime to the point where Riyadh had actually invited infidel soldiers to defile the holy soil of his homeland?

Washington had corrupted all that was holy.

Today, bin Laden has inspired – it’s not an exaggeration to say – millions of followers with his ideas. His perniciously-enticing Islamist theology has metastasized.

One doesn’t put The Looming Tower down with anything but a sense of foreboding and a despondency over the failure of Europeans and even many Americans to acknowledge that a civilizational war has been declared against modernity and the West.


QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Lawrence Wright is an author (six books), screenwriter (The Siege) and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He received an MA in applied linguistics from the American University in Cairo.


Q) Are reports that Iran is grooming Saif al-Adel to replace bin Laden and Zawahiri true?

Iran has worked with al-Qaida (AQ) in the past, especially during the time when Osama bin Laden was in the Sudan from 1992-96 – when Iran and Hizbullah trained AQ operatives. Ayman Zawahiri supposedly sold information to Iranian intelligence, and he may have maintained those contacts. Moreover, many al-Qaida operatives took refuge in Iran after the invasion of Afghanistan by US and coalition forces in November-December 2001. One Saudi paper said that as many as 500 AQ members were in Iran, which sounds really inflated to me.

The two most prominent members of al-Qaida known to be in Iran are Saif al-Adl, the organization’s security chief, and Saad bin Laden, one of Osama’s most committed sons. The nature of their sanctuary there is unclear.

So there is a long-standing association between Iran and al-Qaida. But that doesn’t mean that the two entities can function together, because AQ is an entirely Sunni organization, and part of its dogma is that Shi’ites are heretics.

The FBI tells me that Saif al-Adl and Saad bin Laden are under a form of house arrest in Teheran. In one of Zawahiri’s letters to the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [leader of al-Qaida in Iraq] before an American bomb found him, Zawahiri chastised him for promulgating a war against the Shi’ites, and reminded him that Iran was holding al-Qaida hostages.

Al-Qaida strategists would like to see Iran pulled into open conflict with the US and the West, and to that extent I think the leaders would be willing to work with Iran. But there’s no possibility that AQ will ever become an organ of a Shi’ite state.

Q) Is Iran providing assistance to al-Qaida units operating in Iraq?

It’s very difficult to know what’s true now in Iraq, but if there was any substance to such reports it would indicate that Iran has decided that chaos serves its immediate goals, though not its long-term ones.

Iran is in a dilemma in that it doesn’t seek a regional war – at least not until it’s secured a nuclear weapon – and that is a lively prospect if Iraq’s civil war begins to spill over the borders; on the other hand, a democratic Iraqi state, even a shaky one, poses a threat to the Iranian example.
The Iranian goal is to keep the Iraqi state weak enough to not ever be a threat again, but not so weak as to utterly fail. That’s a difficult balancing act.

Q) Does the al-Qaida that masterminded the 9/11 attacks still exist?

The old, hierarchical al-Qaida, where a member had to fill out forms in triplicate to buy a new tire, the organization that offered health benefits and paid vacations – that’s gone, but AQ strategists had planned, as early as 1998, for a new model, one composed of smaller groups that may not be networked at all, functioning more like street gangs. We’ve already seen this in Madrid and London.

That’s not to say that bin Laden and Zawahiri are irrelevant. Every day they are free is a propaganda victory for AQ. Moreover, they are still able to give direction to the movement and inspire followers.

Q) Some Israeli analysts here are talking about al-Qaida having set up up operations in Gaza. So al-Qaida still lives?

Yes, of course. It still lives as an organization, although the mother ship is much reduced. But as a movement it has certainly grown, especially in Europe.

Q) What can Israel do to undermine the al-Qaida idea?

Israel doesn’t really matter to bin Laden. He’s never attacked it, except peripherally, although he talks about it all the time. If the Israeli-Palestinian problem were resolved tomorrow, he would be heartbroken. No issue has served AQ propagandists better than the chronic stalemate that has fueled the anger of Muslims all over the world.
[That’s why] I have been urging that the US administration renounce the settlements. Half a million [settlers] should not be allowed to stand in the way of a just resolution to the Palestinian cause.
There are many causes of terrorism, but what they have in common is that they usually spring from the hopelessness and sense of futility that is so common in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Al-Qaida really is an engine that runs on despair. And it’s going to be with us as long as there is not sufficient hope to change that balance.