Obama & Israel .....

Cool it!


To illustrate the nadir to which America-Israel relations have sunk, one Hebrew-language tabloid revealed that when IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi travelled to Washington several weeks back to meet with US decision-makers about the worrisome speed with which Iran is moving toward a nuclear bomb, neither Secretary of Defense Robert Gates nor Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would make time to see him.

The trip, said the paper, ended in failure.

Shocking story - but not true. Ashkenazi's visit didn't take place weeks ago, but months ago. The general chose to cut his visit short to participate in urgent cabinet deliberations about Gilad Schalit. And he wasn't in the US on official business, but to attend a Friends of the IDF fund-raiser.

Then there was The New York Times report about Washington toying with letting Israel fend for itself against the UN's built-in Muslim and Arab majority, to pressure for a settlement freeze. On Tuesday, administration sources denied the story.

There are those in America and Israel who, albeit for differing reasons, think talking-up tension in the US-Israel relationship is a good idea.

For those who want to create a political environment conducive to forcing Israeli concessions, it makes sense to spotlight differences over settlements; which is also a convenient way to dissociate the pro-Israel community in America from Israeli government policies, since support for the settlement enterprise is hardly widespread.

That's why Monday's loutish behavior by the "hilltop youth" in Samaria who attacked Palestinians, torched fields and burned tires was a godsend to proponents of a settlement freeze. Such images strengthen the myth that all settlers are wild-eyed religious fanatics to whom violence is second nature.

Meanwhile, dovish American Jews, hankering for Obama to impose "peace," are promoting a story that has White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel purportedly telling an unnamed Jewish leader that no matter what, a Palestinian state will emerge in the next four years; and that if Israel wants action on Iran, it will have to withdraw from West Bank territory.

This account portrays the savvy Emanuel as not only petulant, but naive - as if the Palestinians have no role to play, and Israel alone will bear the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Playing up tensions with the Obama administration also serves the interests of Netanyahu's domestic opponents. One pundit wrote Tuesday that the US and Israel aren't heading for a collision - they've already crashed. Implication: All would be well if Tzipi Livni was premier.

Paradoxically, commentators on the Right are saying exactly the same thing: that Washington has launched an all-out diplomatic and media assault against Israel that's "worse than a crisis."

We ask them: What useful purpose does it serve to demonize so popular a president, or claim his policies are motivated by animus, when it's hard to discern where they differ substantively from those of his predecessors?

GOING into his Thursday reconciliation speech in Cairo addressed to the Arab and Muslim world, Obama has been signaling that he expects gestures from them to encourage Israeli reciprocity. To interviewers reveling in the perceived chasm between Israel and Washington, the president is saying that unlike the 24/7 news cycle, which feeds on crises, diplomacy requires patience. And as The New York Times reported yesterday, he wants to play down differences over settlements.

Obama is reportedly planning a major Washington policy address next month detailing his approach to Arab-Israel peacemaking. Those who want to manipulate the environment to Israel's detriment will continue to foster an ambiance of crisis. But those who want what's best for Israel should be working in the opposite direction.

Our government can create a better atmosphere by permanently dismantling unauthorized outposts; reiterating Israel's "no new settlements" policy, and rethinking the wisdom of refusing to endorse previous Israeli governments' policy on the two-state solution.

Can we ask Obama to honor understandings about settlement blocs reached by Israel with his predecessor when we are not honoring agreements his predecessor reached with us?

Once we have taken these steps, we can feel more comfortable about disagreeing with other Obama policies without seeming to be disagreeable.

War Siren at 11 a.m.

Welcome to our reality

Say you live in any one of these cities: Oslo, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, London, Stockholm or Washington, and at 11 a.m. today the war siren goes off. You've been told it's just a drill - your city isn't being attacked by ballistic missiles or long-range rockets. Your country neither plans to attack anyone, nor is there intelligence indicating it is the target of imminent attack.

Still, the wailing siren - a curiously anachronistic instrument for the 21st century - is upsetting. You do as you're told and seek out a nearby bomb shelter, or enter the reinforced-concrete room common in homes built since the 1990s.

At work, there is some gallows humor as colleagues file into the bomb shelter. At school, your children will head into the shelters with their teachers. It may strike you that the authorities were imprudent in collecting for refurbishment those cardboard boxes with their plastic shoulder-straps containing gas masks and a chemical-warfare antidote.

Of course, if you do live in any of the above-mentioned capitals, this scenario is beyond far-fetched. There are no shelters. No safe rooms. No gas masks.

No one is threatening to wipe Sweden, Germany or Scotland - or any of the others - off the map. There are no Sajil II ballistic missiles aimed your way. Your country didn't absorb 5,000 rocket hits in the course of a single summer. It doesn't share a border with a country that deploys Scud D missiles. And the notion that missiles laden with WMDs could explode over your head is simply beyond imagination.

Though Muslim extremists struck in Spain, Britain and the United States, the sense that any further danger looms is not widespread. That's why no one undergoes a security check to enter a supermarket, department store or cinema. And why armed guards are not posted outside schools.

WE ISRAELIS live in a very different reality.

That truth was brought home in remarks Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made at Sunday's cabinet meeting regarding Turning Point 3 - the week-long nationwide emergency drill.

The exercise is "routine," something the country does annually, he said, adding that it "reflects the special way in which we lead our lives - which, upon reflection, is not all that routine."

Want to understand the Israeli psyche? Consider that when our country was born, those with whom we sought to share this land rejected our right to exist. Though we have created a technologically advanced, Western-oriented country, and made peace with Egypt and Jordan, our "normality" still demands that a high-school graduate head not to university or for a gap year, but to basic training.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s (when there were no settlements and no "occupation") our homeland was under attack anyway. A single example: On March 17, 1954, gunmen ambushed an Eilat-Tel Aviv commuter bus. First they murdered the driver, then they proceeded to shoot the passengers, one by one.

In the 1970s, we fought off a surprise attack on our most solemn holy day - after having withstood a war of attrition. In the 1980s, we fought bitter wars in Lebanon to fend off attacks against our northern border.

In the 1990s, we signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian leadership. And since then? More Israelis have been murdered by terrorists than ever before.

Efforts to reach an accommodation with a violently fragmented Palestinian polity have thus far proven fruitless. The "moderates" appear no less unyielding than the fanatics.

We caught the Syrians, to our north, building a clandestine nuclear facility under North Korean tutelage. They make no secret about hosting Hamas's politburo, pressuring it to resist even a tactical timeout in its anti-Israel belligerency.

Hizbullah dominates Lebanese affairs and provides Iran with shock-troops along our border.

Then there is Iran, which may have enriched enough uranium to manufacture a nuclear bomb by year's end. Even as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens our obliteration, he insists that the Nazis did not systematically destroy European Jewry. Yet he is feted at UN forums, while Europeans shamelessly subsidize trade with his country.

That is our reality. It's the one many of us will be contemplating at 11 a.m. today, when the siren sounds.

Obama & Israel. The president takes the wrong approach

Paradigm shift

President Barack Obama says he doesn't have time to watch cable television news. We sure hope he hasn't given up reading The Washington Post, and that he made time for Jackson Diehl's remarkably illuminating column, "Abbas's Waiting Game" (May 29).

Diehl interviewed the Palestinian leader prior to his White House meeting with Obama on Thursday. The columnist, not a known Zionist apologist, labeled Mahmoud Abbas's thinking "hardline."

If the president wants to know why leaning on Israel while basically giving so-called moderate Palestinians a free ride won't advance peace, he'll find the answers in Diehl's column outlining Abbas's Five Noes: Would he negotiate with Binyamin Netanyahu without preconditions? No. Would he recognize Israel as a Jewish state? No. Would he consider territorial compromise? No. Would he compromise on refugees? No. Would he modify the Arab Peace Initiative to make it a more viable negotiating tool? Absolutely not.

Sitting next to Obama in the Oval Office, "Abu Mazen" sounded like a different man, telling reporters: "I believe that time is of the essence," and that talks with Israel needed to resume "right now."

But just the day before, Abbas told Diehl he had all the time in the world. He'll wait out Hamas (though his US-trained elite forces killed several of their gunmen in Kalkilya on Monday). He'll wait "for Israel to freeze settlements."

"Until then," Abbas candidly admitted, "in the West Bank we have a good reality... the people are living a normal life."

This from a man who claims that "time is of the essence."

Palestinian negotiators say there's no point in talking to Netanyahu because he does not want to discuss final status issues. Conveniently forgotten is the fact that when Abbas was negotiating precisely those issues with Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni in 2008, he refused to take yes for an answer and close a deal with them.

PALESTINIAN "moderates" say they'll wait patiently for Obama to force a collapse of the Netanyahu government allowing the supposedly more pliable Livni to become premier.

That's curious.

The Kadima government offered Abbas 97 percent of the West Bank (plus land swaps in Israel proper to make up the difference). Olmert was willing to concede on territory, refugees, even on Jerusalem.

Diehl: "[Abbas] confirmed that Olmert 'accepted the principle' of the 'right of return' of Palestinian refugees - something no previous Israeli prime minister had done - and offered to resettle thousands in Israel. In all, Olmert's peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of [George W.] Bush or Bill Clinton..."

Not good enough, said Abbas.

Yet now he is pushing the idea - on a willing administration - that it is Netanyahu and the settlements that are the stumbling blocks to an agreement.

US policymakers have always opposed Israel's presence beyond the Green Line. Condoleezza Rice was here only last June complaining about settlements. Still, there's no denying the disturbing change in tone emanating from Washington, which is elevating the settlements issue to an importance which is disproportionate. It's being accompanied by a paradigm shift: pressing Israel while coddling the Palestinians.

This approach is destined to leave both Israelis and Palestinians embittered and no closer to resolving the conflict.

Final borders need to be negotiated. And when they are, all settlements on the "wrong" side of the line will be dismantled - just as they were when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. It would therefore be reasonable, in the interim, for Washington not to make an issue of modest levels of natural growth in these communities.

At the same time, a freeze within the strategic settlement blocs, including Jerusalem, that Israel intends to retain in any agreement is simply not on the agenda.

That said, the Israeli government needs to better articulate the fact that no new settlements are being authorized beyond the security barrier. And it needs to move with all deliberate speed to dismantle illegal outposts permanently.

When American decision-makers denigrate painful Israeli sacrifices - including disengagement; when they disregard the commitments of their predecessors, they are not fostering peace. Rather, they're giving mainstream Israelis cause to fear making further sacrifices.

Psychopathology -- on the individual & international level

Erev shavuot- happy holiday to all. Back with a new positing on Monday
-- elliot


A moral vacuum


We now know that around midnight on August 1, 2003, Adwan Yihya Farhan murdered Dana Bennet outside Tiberias. The Chicago-born 18-year-old was "killed for the sake of killing," said Dep.-Cmdr. Avi Elgrissi.

Farhan's criminal history, which dates back to 1994 when he was 18, includes the murders of Sylvia Molorova, a traveler from the Czech Republic, Aharon Simahov, with whom he shared a Tiberias lock-up, and a nameless man in his 40s. He committed other violent crimes including kidnapping and rape. When he was arrested, the one-time police informer was being held in a Beersheba-area jail for raping an Australian tourist.

Writing in Wednesday's Jerusalem Post, eminent sociologist Shlomo Giora Shoham noted that Adwan "displays the behavior of a typical psychopath. He doesn't have a conscience, he doesn't have empathy. He kills without reason." Triggered by a combination of nature and nurture, the psychopath's compulsion to kill is sexually-driven, Shoham wrote.

NEWS OF Farhan's capture competed for attention Wednesday with North Korea's announcement that it has abandoned the 1953 truce ending the Korean War.

On Monday, the Pyongyang regime illegally detonated a huge underground nuclear explosion - eliciting worldwide condemnation and the relaunching of the US-led multinational Proliferation Security Initiative aimed at uncovering the transfer of weapons of mass destruction to state and non-state actors.

The North Koreans' response: yet more saber-rattling. They test-fired more missiles, revved up their weapons-grade Yongbyon reactor and rallied the country's hapless masses. They then proclaimed that any stopping and searching of North Korean shipping would be viewed as "a declaration of war." They were particularly incensed at South Korea's joining the multinational initiative, launched originally by president George W. Bush on May 31, 2003. At the time, China, which along with South Korea is the only country with leverage over the North, refused to cooperate. With Washington focused on Iraq, the initiative was quietly shelved.

Analysts have been debating Pyongyang's motivation for Monday's blast. Some argue it was to solidify support for the ruling clique at a time when Kim Jong-Il, who is both dictator and deity, is fading. Others speculate that the detonation followed a pattern in which the North behaves outrageously to garner attention, and is paid off in return for better behavior.

But the explanation we prefer suggests that as a proliferator of nuclear technology to countries such as Syria and Iran, the North Koreans need to show their customers that what they're selling really works.

Though they also make ends meet by trafficking in heroin and methamphetamines, and by exporting citizens for forced labor and sexual exploitation, nuclear proliferation is the country's most lucrative export.

THESE TWO stories, breaking within a single week, show very clearly how psychopathology can exist on both the individual and the international level.

Both the serial killer and the malevolent leadership in Pyongyang are guilty of extreme immoral and antisocial behavior, the one compelled by bloodlust, the other by calculated depravity.

There are no angelic nation-states, including ours. All countries are adept at rationalizing behavior that is patently morally wrong. Ask certain European nations, for example, why they conduct billions of Euros worth of trade with a fanatical regime that threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and the reply will likely be that they are actually bolstering international tranquility.

Nations, like individuals, sometimes lie to themselves.

Not North Korea, apparently. It is unapologetic about its illegal nuclear testing and proliferation activities. It doesn't feel compelled to lie to itself about why it engages in commerce with Iran or Syria. Like the lone psychopath, its leaders are narcissists who show a reckless disregard for others, a lack of empathy and an inability to tell right from wrong.

AS WE ponder what happens when law and morality vanish, the Jewish world prepares to celebrate Shavuot tonight and Friday. By tradition, the holiday marks the giving of the Torah - the basis of law and morality in Judaism - at Mt. Sinai.

Heaven knows, we too often fall short of what is demanded of us.

Yet, as we saw again this week, when the shackles of a higher moral code are absent, the world becomes even more dissolute, brutish and riddled with delusions of grandeu

Tzipi Livni & Bibi Netanyahu ...the saga continues

The loyal opposition


For the first three decades of the state, Menachem Begin was Israel's sole leader of the Knesset opposition. Since 2000, however, Israel has had nine opposition heads. Today's politics may be more volatile, but it's less ideologically coherent. Political campaigns increasingly center on the leader's personality and character.

It is amid this ambiance that the four-year-old Kadima Party has been either governing, under Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, or leading the opposition, under Tzipi Livni.

Just months into this role, Livni has formed a "shadow team," not quite akin to the British concept of the "shadow cabinet" - yet complete with shadow ministers and area experts to basically parallel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's cabinet.

Since Kadima is a relatively new party, the idea is intended to help it develop positions on a range of issues. With any luck, novice "shadows" will become sufficiently proficient in their areas of responsibility to produce informed critiques. From a morale point of view, the idea is to diminish opposition MKs' feeling that they are wasting away in the political wilderness.

The scheme, for example, calls for Shaul Mofaz to shadow Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Ronnie Bar-On shadows Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz. Meir Sheetrit shadows Interior Minister Eli Yishai. Avi Dichter shadows Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch… and so on down the line.

Area experts include Otniel Schneller on how to bridge Judaism and democracy. Yohanan Plessner will examine the Tal Law and national service. The party has also designated liaisons for Gush Katif evacuees, Diaspora affairs, Negev and Galilee development and Beduin concerns.

It's an altogether splendid idea that could generate a level of reasoned criticism and hone policy expertise. So we'd like to believe it's more than a gimmick developed by Livni's political consultants. The credibility of the plan, a revolutionary rethinking of how opposition politics should work, would have been enhanced had it not been disseminated via a Monday night press release issued by the party's spokesman. Nevertheless, we credit Livni with the approach and encourage her to actualize it.

IN HER new role, Livni is to be commended for generally recognizing that politics stops at the water's edge - meaning criticism of government policies should be tempered while abroad, or addressing foreign audiences. She acquitted herself well in telling a recent AIPAC audience that in regard to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, there are no policy differences between the government and the opposition. She also appears to be in synch with Netanyahu on how to handle Hamas in Gaza.

On the Palestinian track, however, in a recent Newsweek interview, Livni labeled the Netanyahu government "very right-wing." Asked how an international audience should understand the categorization, she replied that "just saying no" doesn't take into account a new camp of Arab moderates.

Speaking on Army Radio Monday she was understandably more explicit: "This government doesn't want to talk. It is dragging its feet in an attempt to refrain from renewing contacts with the Palestinians," and concluded that Netanyahu's policies are already leading toward a "diplomatic collapse."

We don't begrudge Livni the need to differentiate Kadima from Likud. But she'd be both more credible, and more effective in the international arena, if she noted that she herself engaged these same Arab moderates with not much to show for it, and that at the end of the day, her policy differences with Netanyahu are not all that substantive.

Like Netanyahu, she would wait until after an agreement on final borders before dismantling any settlements. Livni, no less than Netanyahu, opposes unfettered Palestinian sovereignty - and if we've got that wrong, Ms. Livni, do enlighten us.

While saying he does not want to rule over the Palestinians, Netanyahu won't commit to the "two-state solution" until he knows what that entails for Israel's ability to defend itself.

Here Livni's public diplomacy style is wiser. By forthrightly espousing the two-state solution, she places the onus for opposing an end to the conflict where it belongs - on the Palestinians. After all, it's their intransigence - on borders, refugees and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state - that's prevented a deal.

She can enhance her stature as leader of the loyal opposition by making that clear, at every opportunity.