Politics & Manipulation -- Obama & Netanyahu

Shabbat shalom to all --
elliot


A 'crisis' manipulated

Diplomacy involves an element of political manipulation - sometimes even psychological warfare. We're now witnessing this in the US-Israel relationship.

The Obama administration has made a strategic decision to pressure Israel pointedly, relentlessly and publicly, while, for now at least, asking little of the Palestinians. The diversionary issue employed in this campaign is housing construction over the Green Line.

Washington cannot realistically think that Israel is going to knuckle under and stop building within strategic settlement blocs, or in post-'67 Jerusalem. So it appears that the administration is engaging in confrontation for the sake of confrontation. The object? To gain credibility with the Arab world in the belief it will give them an incentive to make peace.

It's the same failed approach pursued by practically every administration since 1967 - only on hyper-drive. And this time, it's characterized by manipulatively overplaying the chasm in the US-Israel relationship.

Thus US Defense Secretary Robert Gates ostentatiously warns against an Israeli military strike on Iran's nuclear bomb-making facilities on the grounds that it would undermine American interests. Yet, as the clock ticks, Washington still hasn't quite figured out how to "engage" the mullahs and talk them out of building a bomb.

The manipulation comes in various forms: word from the State Department that talk of a cut in US aid to Israel over the settlement controversy is "premature;" stories leaked to Israeli pundits sympathetic to the administration's line - for example, that George Mitchell will be packing binding timetables requiring Israeli concessions when next he arrives in our region. Or claims that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama are headed for a "collision."

To heighten the sense of crisis, one newspaper here sympathetic to the administration's approach claims that the IDF is poised to evacuate all unauthorized West Bank outposts in one 24-hour blitz. The story is erroneous.

Further leaks claim that the Americans are planning an international peace conference which will find Israel isolated, facing the "moderate" Arab world, an unsympathetic Europe and an irritated administration. We're told that tensions between Washington and Jerusalem are so bad that the White House will send a "friendly face" (Dennis Ross) to accompany other ostensibly less sympathetic US officials.

IN RESPONSE, Israel engages in its own, clumsy manipulation.

Responding to implicit threats of a cut in military aid, the IDF is said to be "brainstorming" for the day when it will tell Washington what it can do with its $3 billion, because Israel will purchase what it needs to survive from Vladimir Putin's Russia.

And when our new ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, held his first overview meeting at the State Department, it was Israeli officials who leaked the false story that he had been "summoned" to hear US protests over Jewish housing construction in east Jerusalem.

The Netanyahu government is wrong to think that exacerbating the perception of a crisis in US-Israel relations is the wisest method of setting "red lines" for future negotiations with the Palestinians. There must be better ways to point out that the Shepherd Hotel is located in the geographically vital Sheikh Jarrah section of the capital, a couple of bus stops from Hebrew University. Nor is playing up bilateral tensions a smart way to encourage the pro-Israel community, already signaling uneasiness over White House tactics, to speak out.

IT'S TOO bad that the Obama administration, which came to Washington promising change, is going down the old, demonstrably counter-productive road of its predecessors. It too fundamentally misreads the source of Arab reluctance to make peace with Israel.

Washington acts as if both sides want the same thing: coexistence. But the Arabs still reject the right of a Jewish state to live anywhere in their midst; still favor demographically inundating Israel with Palestinian refugees and millions of their descendents; and still insist Israel pull back to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines.

Under these circumstances, the administration's one-sided pressure on Israel, and its tepid response to Netanyahu's historic Bar-Ilan speech, entrenches Arab intransigence.

It's an even bigger shame that the administration is expending so much energy on an approach that actually reduces the prospects of a breakthrough - and that in so doing, it is employing manipulative tactics that make mainstream Israelis even more fearful of taking risks for peace.

How the UN helps prolong the Arab-Israel conflict

Dump the CEIRPP


Over the years, the United Nations has done its fair share to prolong and exacerbate the Arab-Israel conflict. The explanation for this lies not with the world body conceptually, and certainly not with the ethos of its founders. But the UN can't but reflect the values shared by the bulk of its members, the efforts of an enlightened minority notwithstanding.

With the arguable exception of General Assembly Resolution 181, which in 1947 called for the establishment of independent Jewish and Arab states - and which the Arabs rejected out of hand - just about every subsequent UN/GA stand on the conflict has been to Israel's detriment. The most recent pertinent GA resolution, for instance, ES-10/18 of January 2009, basically regurgitated the Palestinian position on Operation Cast Lead, codifying it in international law.

There are now 192 member-states in the UN, most of which maintain diplomatic relations with both the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel. In practice, however, the PLO has a built-in majority for just about any resolution it champions. Start with the 22-member Arab League and add (though allow for some overlap) the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, then throw in "non-aligned" countries such as North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. The result is that one would be hard pressed to come up with a single instance in which the General Assembly sided with Israel against the Arabs.

Not once has the GA unequivocally reprimanded the PLO or Hamas for engaging in airline-hijackings, bus bombings and other forms of anti-civilian warfare. Israel, in contrast, is censured at every opportunity.

THE international body sank to its moral nadir on November 10, 1975, when the General Assembly passed the odious Resolution 3379, by a vote of 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions, labeling the national liberation movement of the Jewish people - Zionism - as a form of "racism." The fact that the resolution was revoked in 1991 by no means entirely removes the ethical stain with which the world body remains tarnished.

But perhaps the single most damaging step the organization took to institutionalize its bias against the Jewish state came with the creation in 1975 of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP).

Unlike the Kurds, Roma, Copts, Uyghur, Tibetans, and others peoples' who plead for international support, only the Palestinian Arabs have a permanent UN-funded body which does nothing but agitate on their behalf.

As part of a revolving door of injustice, each year the GA meets to "discuss" the "Question of Palestine" and each year it passes the recommendations of the CEIRPP. The biases of the committee have metastasized throughout the UN system owing to its ability to poison attitudes toward Israel from within.

It is the CEIRPP which came up with the charade known as the "International Solidarity Day with the Palestinian People," held annually on November 29, and which sponsors an array of meetings, seminars and conferences targeting Israel.

The committee - which convenes again today and tomorrow in Geneva - is comprised of Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Cyprus, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey and Ukraine.

It will not question the Palestinian decision to reject former prime minister Ehud Olmert's magnanimous 2008 peace offer. It will not tell the Palestinians that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's seminal Bar-Ilan speech offers a way forward toward. It will not tell the Palestinians to end their boycott of the peace negotiations. The CEIRPP will never call on Hamas to recognize Israel, end terror and accept previous Palestinian commitments - as demanded by the Quartet.

Of course, the committee will do none of these things - because its raison d'etre is not peace but the vilification of Israel.

That is why this newspaper endorses a campaign initiated by the New York-based the Anti-Defamation League urging UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to dismantle the committee on the grounds that it is the "single most prolific source of material bearing the official imprimatur of the UN which maligns and debases the Jewish state."

The CEIRPP is also an obstacle to peace - it needs to go.

London Jewish School Crisis

The JFS lesson

The decision earlier this month by a British appeals court, holding that the admissions policy of the country's largest Jewish school was illegal, underscores a schism within the Jewish world over identity, conversion and the nature of our civilization.

The school, JFS, was chartered in 1732 under Orthodox auspices but had long maintained an enlightened approach toward all segments of the community. The litigation came about because JFS now admits only converts who meet the standards of the haredi-oriented London Beth Din, which is out of touch with the majority of Britain's 260,000 Jewish people.

It's doubtful that most of JFS's 1,900 students lead Orthodox lifestyles, though the court decision does not affect those students already at the school.

The case at hand resulted from the school's refusal to admit a new boy whose mother had been converted by the Liberal stream. His parents divorced; she left the fold, and the boy is being brought up by his halachically Jewish father. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's office refused to certify the child as Jewish - a necessary step for JFS admission - because his mother did not have an Orthodox conversion. The father challenged the rejection in court.

He was supported by the Lightman family, whose children were also barred from JFS. Kate Lightman was converted by an Orthodox Bet Din in Israel and does lead an Orthodox life. She was married by an Orthodox rabbi in New York to a kohen - a member of the priestly class which brought animal sacrifices during Temple times. A strict constructionist interpretation of Halacha would, arguably, bar a kohen from marrying a convert. Hence Sacks held that Lightman's conversion was insincere and that the couple's children were not Jewish; and thus ineligible to attend JFS.

In a third case, unrelated to the litigation, JFS barred the children of Helen Sagal, though she too was converted by an Orthodox Beit Din in Israel, on the grounds that the family no longer leads an Orthodox lifestyle.

THE COURT of Appeal found that using ethnicity or race of the mother as the criterion for entry rather than faith, however defined, breached the Race Relations Act. Without taking sides on the JFS case, the Board of Deputies opposes this decision because of its ramifications for all Jewish schools.

JFS tried to appeal the case to the House of Lords, but the court denied permission. The school is likely to pursue a direct petition to the Lords, but this could take time, and there is no guarantee of victory even if the case is heard.

As Simon Rocker of The Jewish Chronicle reported, JFS will now have to rewrite its entry rules; instead of being based on the lineage of an applicant's mother, admission will be based on religious observance - such as synagogue attendance.

But as Prof. Geoffrey Alderman points out, the school has painted itself into a corner. If it produces narrow Orthodox criteria to measure observance, it will transform itself into a haredi institution; and if they are very broad, what's the point?

Yet is JFS even capable of setting middle-of-the-road faith criteria? How will it respond to families that are observant but affiliated, say, with the Conservative or Reform movements?

It's a pity that a school which played so pivotal a role in British Jewish life now finds itself in the clutches of haredi obduracy. Fortunately, a new cross-denominational school is scheduled to open in 2010.

THE JFS controversy is a larger dilemma in microcosm. Those who favor greater insularity and artificially enforced homogeneity, who insist uncompromisingly that they alone are privy to God's purpose, will continue to advocate for a Judaism that is unwelcoming.

The Jewish majority in the Diaspora as well as in Israel - running the gamut from neo-Orthodox to progressive, yet also embracing the affiliated secular - need to develop sensible answers, rooted in Jewish law and tradition, to the issues of identity and conversion.

In so doing they will be hammering home the point that Judaism is a thriving and evolving civilization rooted in sacred history, religious ritual, a shared past and the sense of a common destiny.

It is not synonymous with haredism.

To the Moon

And that's the way it was...


On July 20, 1969, at 10:18 p.m. Israel time - 40 years ago today - Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon.

President Barack Obama will have to weigh the advice of a panel of experts due to report in August and decide whether to spend an estimated $100 billion so that Americans can return to the moon on the 50th anniversary of the first landing.

Lunar colonies could serve as a stepping-stone for an eventual manned mission to Mars. From the moon, astronauts might travel into deep space to the asteroid Apophis, when it passes near Earth in 2021. Later they might reach Mars' moon, Phobos. Some experts hope that humans could journey to Mars as soon as 2031.

Or should space exploration be relegated to cheaper robotic proxies? It's a tough decision.

America finds itself $11 trillion dollars in debt. This year's budget deficit alone is $482 billion. With a wobbly economy, rising unemployment, wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq, and millions of Americans without health insurance, can Obama afford to be extravagant on space?

THE NIGHT of that moon landing, Americans were mesmerized by a grainy black-and-white simulation of the Eagle approaching the moon. Millions were tuned to CBS, where Walter Cronkite was anchoring coverage of the descent to the lunar surface. Mission control called off the numbers until there were none left - and Cronkite exclaimed: "Man on the Moon!"

A moment later came word from the astronauts: "Houston, Tranquility base here; the eagle has landed."

Cronkite, who died on Friday at 92, recalled that despite years of preparation, he was nearly speechless with joy. On earth, the War in Vietnam was taking its toll; campus unrest and racial tension roiled. But all that was placed in abeyance as eyes turned heavenward - via the miracle of television - to see Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon, with the words: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

This week, the Endeavour space shuttle with its seven-member crew docked with the International Space Station, a structure now as large as a four-bedroom house, presently home to 12 men and a woman - seven Americans, two Russians and two Canadians. When this mission is over, the station will contain an "outdoor" observatory. Only seven missions remain before the shuttle fleet is retired, NASA says.

ISRAELIS COULD not view the live telecast of the first moon landing - our technology was not that advanced. Israel Radio instead broadcast the news in real time, translating each milestone into Hebrew.

The country tried to put aside its reality to share in the excitement. In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the US Cultural Center was screening NASA films every 30 minutes.

Israel's victory in the Six Day War notwithstanding, a war of attrition raged on with Egypt. And as Michael Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin were orbiting the moon, the IAF shot down five Egyptian planes over Suez. Around the time the Eagle rejoined Columbia in orbit, Jordanian artillery was shelling Beit She'an.

Israel's Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak Nissan, prayed that the moon walk would not deepen man's hubris, but that instead people would better appreciate the act of Creation.

Both Egypt and Jordan devoted more news coverage to the moon landing than to their war against Israel; not so Syria. Palestinian Arab terrorism continued unabated: an attack in Hebron on Israelis making a pilgrimage to the Cave of the Machpelah; the murder of a man waiting for a bus in Tel Aviv by an exploding parcel.

As the astronauts splashed down safely, the IAF downed seven more Egyptian planes after 40 enemy aircraft crossed the Suez Canal. In Haifa's outdoor market, three bombs planted in watermelons detonated, injuring shoppers.

LOOKING back, it is heartening that Israel is now at peace with Egypt and Jordan, though endlessly disquieting that Palestinian intransigence has stalemated reconciliation on that front.

The exploration of space, meanwhile, is a constant reminder that all of us are denizens of the third planet from the sun, and part of something far bigger than meets the eye.

Haredi intifada

Gevalt!

An innocent and devoted mother sits in jail because Zionist authorities want to make an example of her to intimidate God-fearing haredim struggling to preserve the sanctity of Jerusalem. The trumped-up charge that keeps this selfless (pregnant) lady behind bars is that for two years she starved her little boy almost to death.

They claim she is suffering from a psychiatric disorder, Munchausen syndrome-by-proxy, which caused her to harm her son to win attention for herself. What nonsense! Everyone knows she is perfectly normal.

Why isn't the media reporting the truth? The child suffered from cancer and had undergone chemotherapy. The doctors told his mother not to allow him food by mouth - which is why the three-year-old became so emaciated, requiring multiple hospitalizations, and ended up weighing seven kilograms. Everyone in the Hadassah oncology department knows this to be true; they saw how she stayed with the child from early morning until late at night.

Then one day she said something that offended some big-shot doctor, because they were doing experiments on the child. Naturally, our community is in an uproar over her unjust arrest…

THIS IS a composite of the conspiracy theories circulating not just on the streets of Mea She'arim and Ramat Beit Shemesh, where the extremist, anti-Zionist Toldot Aharon hassidic sect - to which the troubled family adheres - and its fanatical Naturei Karta allies hold sway, but also in other ultra-Orthodox areas such as Jerusalem's Har Nof, where denizens lead considerably less insular lives. There is sympathy in the wider haredi world for the grievances of the rioters, who have vandalized traffic lights, burned garbage dumpsters and thrown projectiles at police, city workers and passing vehicles.

Haredi women have conducted special prayer meetings for the mother's release. Hassidic politicos have denounced as "collective punishment" Mayor Nir Barkat's decision to suspend municipal services in the affected areas after city social services and sanitation workers came under attack. (Only Lithuanian haredi rabbis have urged their followers not to participate in the rioting.)

For the record, Dr. Yair Birnbaum, deputy director of Hadassah hospital, has confirmed that the abused child never had cancer, and was never treated with chemotherapy. Also that since the boy's separation from his mother, he has been gaining weight and his physical condition has improved.

THAT THE haredi world - particularly Ashkenazi hassidim - finds it enormously difficult to grapple with child, sexual and spousal abuse comes to light when community members turn to the state for vital medical and social services. That's how we learned about Rabbi Elior Chen, who instructed a gullible mother to cleanse her child of "satanic possession." And about Yisrael Walz, who shook his son to death - that became known when the infant was brought to hospital. Some haredim, fearing the diabolical designs of Zionist authorities, say they now hesitate to take their children to hospital.

There are dysfunctional families among all strata of Israeli society. But the only stratum that reacts with collective violence when abuse is exposed is the most insular subdivision of the haredi world.

Why is such antisocial behavior tacitly countenanced by the more conventional hassidim? Because they share values which hold that men should be gainfully unemployed, women socialized to believe that the back of the bus is where God wants them, and youths reared to be clueless about the outside world.

Violence - stopping archeological digs (which might unearth Jewish graves) and protesting the opening on Shabbat of cinemas, 24/7 mini-markets, and parking garages outside their neighborhoods - has become a default, communally sanctioned response.

THIS impulse is emblematic of an alienation which, because it is ripping Israeli society apart, begs to be better understood. Haredim, like Arab citizens of Israel, want to be accepted as different, yet feel shunned.

The Kerner Commission was established to examine the causes of rioting in America's inner cities; in Britain and France, commissions have examined Muslim unrest. Here in Israel, the Orr Commission investigated Arab rioting.

Perhaps we need a state commission to tell us not only why a volatile minority of hassidic sects periodically runs amok - but also how to discourage the culture of extreme insularity that lies at the root of their self-perpetuated estrangement.