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.