A Zionist Citadel

Zionist citadel -

This week the 73rd annual meeting of the board of governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem takes place in Israel's capital. Opened in 1925 on Mount Scopus in northeast Jerusalem, in the presence of British grandees Lord Balfour and Lord Allenby and the Zionist leadership headed by Chaim Weizmann, the fate of the university has been intertwined with that of the Yishuv and the nascent State of Israel. The school wrestled with the challenges of institution-building, offered a platform for the fierce competition of ideas, and developed the country's human potential, while encouraging Jewish-Arab coexistence. The demands the university confronted were a microcosm of the larger struggle for Jewish national survival in the face of wars, terror, boycott and de-legitimization.

With the end of the First World War and the arrival of the British Mandate, Weizmann helped to spearhead the creation of a "university of the Jewish people" whose library would become the Jewish National Library. In 1918, twelve foundation stones on land purchased from the estate of Sir John Gray-Hill were laid. Albert Einstein, delivering his opening remarks in Hebrew, gave the first formal university lecture – on the theory of relativity – in 1923. Judah Magnes became the institution's chancellor awarding the first degree in 1931. The university's teaching hospital, thanks to the munificence of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization, was to become a preeminent medical center.

In April 1948, Arab gunmen slaughtered a convoy of medical and university personnel making their way through east Jerusalem to Mount Scopus. When the 1948 War of Independence was over, Mt. Scopus remained an Israeli enclave though too dangerous to access. Classes were instead scattered throughout west Jerusalem, while Einstein and others appealed for donors to build an alternative site -- eventually inaugurated at Givat Ram in 1953. Only with the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem was Mount Scopus redeveloped into a flourishing campus.

In a Jerusalem whose population is growing increasingly non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox and Arab, the university today is a bastion of liberal Zionism. One illustration: In partnership with Hadassah and the Israel Defense Forces, HU now offers a distinctive six-year fast-track track physicians-training program in "military medicine." Nevertheless, the conduct of a number of graduates and faculty, with their compulsive anti-Zionism and obsessive embrace of the Palestinian Arab cause, has tended to capture the headlines. After years of indulgence, such whinging is no longer going unanswered.

Day-to-day, however, the "crisis" that most concerns the university's president, Menahem Ben-Sasson, is financial. Government support has been reduced by $8 million; HU is saddled by burdensome pension obligations; it foots a NIS 30 million security bill (nine students and staff were murdered in a 2002 bombing of a campus cafeteria by Palestinian terrorists); the global economic downturn resulted in a $17 million drop in foreign donations. Negotiated salary cuts and summer furloughs notwithstanding, HU ended its 2008/2009 fiscal year with a $30 million deficit.

All is not bleak. The task of strengthening the "university of the Jewish people" is now more equitably shared by a board that is divided, roughly, into one-hundred Israeli and one-hundred Diaspora governors. The university is doing well in garnering grants for its researchers: $45m from Israeli sources; $12m from US granting agencies; $8m from German sources and so on, last year. Its Amirim program identifies and nourishes undergraduates with outstanding potential. [There is healthy intellectual cross-pollination with other world-class institutions. For example, a doctoral student in music and another in Talmud are now studying at Princeton University in an exchange program sponsored by the Tikvah Fund.] The university is vigorously seeking to reverse Israel's brain drain, enticing back scholars and thereby further boosting the university's ability to capture research grants. And since undergraduates do not arrive on campus after IDF service with a sufficiently broad educational background, the university recently instituted a scheme to provide them with a solid grounding in the liberal arts.

Like the state it preceded into existence, Hebrew University finds itself in the throes of crisis. Yet a balanced assessment would note reasons for optimism: international stature, tens of thousands of enrolled students, illustrious faculty, alumni that include six recent Nobel Prize laureates, custodianship of Einstein's literary legacy, and an abiding role in fostering the Zionist enterprise.

Arab Moderates: Help, or Hindrance?

At the re-launching of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, attention will be focused on Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu. But Egypt's ailing president, Hosni Mubarak, will also be in attendance, as will Jordan's King Abdullah II. To maintain their bona fides as Arab moderates, the two men helped cajole Abbas to resume face-to-face negotiations with Israel. So did other Arab states in the U.S. orbit, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates.

Their support was needed: left to his own devices, the politically enfeebled Abbas would no doubt have preferred to stay put. He and his team are already threatening to walk out when Israel's moratorium on settlement-building expires on September 26. At home, Abbas's participation in Washington is opposed by the leaders of all factions of his own organization, the PLO; Hamas's Khaled Mashaal has declared the talks "illegitimate" and not binding on the Palestinian polity; and ten other Syrian-backed rejectionist groups have similarly condemned the talks.

Thus, even if, for argument's sake, Abbas sincerely wants to break the cycle of self-destructive rejectionism characteristic of Palestinian Arab politics for the past century, he will need truly unequivocal backing from Mubarak, Abdullah, and the rest. But would Cairo and Amman take the lead? If history is any guide, the answer is no.

On his way back from a round of negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Yasir Arafat went straight to seek the support of Mubarak. Yet far from encouraging compromise with Israel, Mubarak adamantly opposed it. For his part, Abdullah, who had come to the throne the previous year, kept his head down. Today, the situation is, if anything, even less conducive to supporting peace with Israel.

In Egypt, Mubarak's party has just nominated the eighty-two-year-old ruler for a sixth presidential term, should he want it. (Rumors are rife that he might step aside in favor of his son Gamal.) Meanwhile, ordinary Egyptians are embittered by the regime's miserable economic performance and cynical about prospects of political reform. But when it comes to Israel, opinion hardens: Mubarak, who patented the "cold peace" paradigm, is criticized as being too soft. The blackouts plaguing the countryside in this summer's withering heat have accelerated demands that Egypt stop exporting natural gas to Israel.

Abdullah's position is possibly even more complicated, because much of Jordan's population is Palestinian Arab. The king's attendance in Washington this week has been denounced by Jordan's Trade Unions Council as a betrayal of the Palestinians. Jordanian chemists have refused to invite their Israeli colleagues to an international conference scheduled for the fall in Amman. The government, under intense pressure over a troubled economy, faces an Islamist-inspired boycott of parliamentary elections slated for November.

Abdullah, Mubarak, and Abbas may get points from the Obama administration just for showing up alongside Netanyahu. The Gulf Arabs won't even do that much. Timid though they have been in their peacemaking rhetoric, they are roundly condemned for it at home.

In the long run, this playing for time by the so-called Arab moderates is unsustainable: it agitates rejectionists while offering nothing tangible to Israelis who want a deal. The Arab states were instrumental in creating, perpetuating, and exacerbating the Palestinian problem. If anyone has a moral obligation to solve it, they do. A good place to begin would be to make it explicit to Abbas that they will back him unreservedly should he decide to negotiate with Israel in good faith.

-- August 2010

On Eagles' Wings

The story of Israel's determination to survive is inextricably linked to the military aircraft deployed to defend its skies and take the battle to the enemy. A new chapter is now opening with the decision by Defense Minister Ehud Barak to approve, pending cabinet ratification, the purchase from the United States of twenty F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft at a base price of $96 million each. The manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, promises the new jet will be capable of penetrating the most sophisticated air defenses. Unfortunately, the plane is only now going into production and won't reach the Israel Air Force for at least five years—too late to play a role in any immediate solution to the Iranian nuclear threat.


The various eras of Israel's politico-military history can be limned through its planes. During the 1948-49 War of Independence, the front-line aircraft was the Sakeen, manufactured in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, procured in disassembled form, and brought to the country in defiance of an international arms embargo. Complemented by an odd assortment of other planes and heroic pilots (many from abroad), the Sakeen helped Israel achieve control over its own skies by the end of the war.

In the early 1950s, as the Soviet Empire turned sadistically anti-Semitic, Jerusalem had to look elsewhere for weaponry. Unable to establish a much-desired strategic relationship with Washington, it turned to the world market for military-surplus aircraft. These included the British-manufactured Spitfire and the American-made Mustang. Israel's first military jet, the British Meteor, was bought openly in 1953. All these saw the country through the 1956 Sinai campaign.

When realpolitik brought France and Israel into an early-1960s alliance, Jerusalem finally had a reliable flow of arms—most crucially, starting in 1962, the Mirage jet, which proved indispensable to victory in the 1967 war. But the French connection ended abruptly several days before the war when Charles de Gaulle declared a weapons embargo. Fortunately, it was then that the Johnson administration established the U.S. as Israel's main arms supplier, selling it, among other things, F-4 Phantom fighter bombers and A-4 Skyhawk ground-attack aircraft.

The American bond, initiated in earnest with the Kennedy administration's sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, became an authentic "special relationship" rooted in shared values and mutual security interests. Israel fought the 1973 Yom Kippur War largely with U.S.-supplied equipment. By the 1980s, the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon fighter-bomber, along with the E-2 Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning system, had joined the arsenal.

Indeed, the sale of military aircraft came to be a barometer for the general health of the Washington-Jerusalem relationship. A frosty Carter administration, piqued over Israeli policies in Lebanon and the West Bank, rejected a request to co-produce the F-16 and prevented Israel from selling its Kfir jet (built with U.S. components) to Ecuador. The use of F-16s and F-15s in Israel's 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak elicited threats of an arms embargo from the Reagan administration.

Israel Aerospace Industries, established to lessen the country's dependency on outside sources, would become a world-class manufacturer and exporter of weaponry. But in 1987 Israel made the fateful decision not to proceed with production of its own multirole Lavi fighter—a choice that Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, continues to maintain was short-sighted: had the Lavi been perfected, he asserts, it would today have obviated the need to purchase the F-35. Other critics of the new F-35 purchase worry that it will beggar the defense budget; some even argue that now should be the moment for Israel to make the quantum leap to unmanned strategic aircraft.

While Israel produces its own AWACS planes, plus a variety of aerial drones, its efforts at self-sufficiency are constrained by its small size, limited resources, and ultimate reliance on Washington. With its population exposed to an unprecedented ballistic-missile threat, Jerusalem has needed to collaborate with the U.S. on perfecting the Arrow defense system and to deploy U.S.-made Hawk and Patriot surface-to-air missiles. Nor could the soon-to-be-deployed Iron Dome, designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars, have been manufactured without U.S. support.

Clearly, in all these cases the U.S. has benefited greatly from the lessons of Israel's experience in wartime. But whatever the merits of the current decision to go with the F-35, this latest prospective sale also illuminates Israel's continuing, vital, and enduring—albeit dependent—relationship with the United States.

-- August 2010

World Zionist Congress

The 36th congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) opens in Jerusalem today, bringing together hundreds of delegates drawn from political parties in Israel's Knesset as well as from Zionist and Jewish organizations in the Diaspora. On the agenda are subjects ranging from the condition of Zionism in Israeli society and worldwide, to settlement in Judea and Samaria, to Israel-Diaspora relations. Unfortunately, no matter how stimulating the speeches may be, no one anticipates any fateful decisions or even any serious grappling with existential questions.


This is a far cry from, for example, the sixth congress in 1903, Theodor Herzl's last, which wrestled with whether, in the face of spiraling anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, Jews should settle for a homeland anywhere at all rather than holding out for the land of Israel. Or take the momentous twelfth congress, held in an atmosphere of comparative optimism with the end of World War I and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration; there, the assembled Zionists debated their relations with the Arabs.
Then there was the seventeenth congress of 1931, which took place in the shadow of continuing Arab violence and ended in organizational rupture over demands by Vladimir Jabotinsky that the movement openly declare its aim to be the creation of a Jewish state. Exactly two decades later, three years after the birth of Israel, the congress met for the first time in Tel Aviv, where delegates sought to map out the relationship between movement and state.

By contrast, the prosaic issue confronting today's congress involves the possibly baleful influence of the WZO's newest constituent, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party—undoubtedly nationalist, but with no philosophical connection to Zionism—on religious pluralism inside the movement.

Some will ask whether vestigial bodies like the WZO—and the Jewish Agency, for that matter—serve any real purpose. Both are funded largely by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Israeli government. Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, is seeking to revitalize that organization by means of a new mission: actively fostering Jewish identity and unity between the Diaspora and Israel. As for the WZO, its main role is to provide patronage and funds to constituent organizations, the best of which promote youth movements, educational programs, and scholarships, dispatching emissaries to Diaspora communities and advancing the cause of aliyah.

All the while, Zionism today is under unremitting intellectual and political assault around the world, and it is excruciatingly obvious that the case for Zion has to be made anew—as if the fate of the entire enterprise hangs in the balance. If the World Zionist Organization is not up to the task, who is?

-- June 2010

Meeting Efraim Karsh

Author of Palestine Betrayed,


Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.

This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.

The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.

Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.

In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough.

Who "betrayed" Palestine?

Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.

You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?

A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.

What were the obligations of Great Britain under the Mandate for Palestine?

The League of Nations instructed the British to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine as envisaged by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

How did Britain fulfill these obligations?

Almost from the beginning the British authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab efforts to avert the implementation of the Mandate. Finally, in July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward. The Peel Commission, appointed by London, concluded that Arabs and Jews couldn't peacefully coexist in a single state and recommended repudiating the terms of the Mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with what was then called Transjordan, and a truncated Jewish state.

But hadn't the British "twice promised" Palestine, first to the Arabs and then to the Jews?

Certainly not. In his correspondence with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, which led to the Great Arab Revolt during World War I, Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner for Egypt, specifically excluded Palestine from the prospective Arab empire promised to Hussein. This was acknowledged by the sharif in their exchanges and also by his son Faisal, the future founding monarch of Iraq, shortly after the war.

You bring to light a World War II conversation about atomic weapons between Nazi-SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the mufti Hajj Amin Husseini.

Yes. Arriving in Berlin in November 1941, and promptly awarded an audience with Hitler, the mufti spent the rest of the war in the service of the Third Reich, broadcasting Nazi propaganda and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the German killing machine. Himmler and the mufti spent hours ruminating on the absolute evil of the Jews. It was during one of these conversations, sometime in the summer of 1943, that Himmler gleefully told Hajj Amin of the Nazi "final solution," which by that time had led to the extermination of some three million Jews. He also confided the great progress made in developing a nuclear weapon that in Himmler's opinion would win the war for Germany. The mufti would never forget this conversation, boasting decades later in his memoirs that "there were no more than ten officials in the German Reich who were privy to this secret."

Arab historians and others now say that Israel's victory in the 1948-49 War of Independence was preordained, given the weakness of the Arabs.

Hardly. By April 1948, after four months of fighting against the mufti's men as well as an irregular pan-Arab force-dubbed the Arab Liberation Army-that had penetrated Palestine from outside, the Jewish position had become precarious. It was only after the Jews launched their first large offensive in early April, aimed at breaching the siege of Jerusalem, that the Palestinian Arab war effort began to unravel rapidly, culminating in total collapse and mass exodus by mid-May.

Then Israel proclaimed its independence.

Yes-and immediately the country was invaded by the regular armies of the neighboring Arab states. The previous succession of Jewish victories was checked, the nascent state was thrown back on the defensive, and the fight became a struggle for its very survival. Ultimately, the newly-established Israeli army managed to turn the tables, at the exorbitant human cost of one percent of the new state's population.

At the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948, the Irgun, a pre-state paramilitary force, is said to have massacred hundreds upon hundreds of innocent and unarmed men, women, and children.

According to a reliable report a day after the event, some 100 Arabs, including women and children, were killed in the fighting for the village. This figure is confirmed by Arif al-Arif, the doyen of Palestinian Arab historians, in his seminal Arabic-language study of the nakba (disaster), as Palestinians refer to the events of 1948-49. Al-Arif stipulates heavy fighting on both sides, claiming that the villagers killed more than 100 Jewish fighters (the actual figure was four dead and 32 wounded). Of the 110 Arab fatalities, he alleges that only seven were killed in action while the rest were peaceful civilians murdered in their homes. By contrast, an intelligence report issued three days after the event by the Haganah, the main Jewish fighting force, underscored the operational incompetence and disarray of the attacking Irgunists as well as their lack of discipline, manifested among other ways in acts of plunder, but makes no mention of a massacre.

In Palestine Betrayed you come to essentially the same conclusion as does Benny Morris in his recent book 1948: namely, that the only party systematically interested in "transfer" or "expulsion" in this period was the Arabs.

Morris does seem to have tacitly disowned his early writings, not least by acknowledging that the underlying cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict was and is the adamant Arab and Muslim refusal to accept the idea of Jewish statehood in any part of Palestine. Millions of Arabs, Jews, and foreign observers of the Middle East fully recognized these facts as early as 1948; at that time, the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society were nowhere described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. Regrettably, this historical truth has been erased from public memory.

But in the case of the town of Lydda, the Haganah did drive out Arab residents.

The Lydda expulsion of July 1948 was the only instance where a substantial urban population was driven out during the course of the war. It stemmed not from a pre-existing plan but from a string of unexpected developments. Only when Israeli forces encountered stiffer resistance than expected was the decision made to "encourage" the population's departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east. The aim was to avoid leaving a hostile armed base at the rear of the Israeli advance and, by clogging the main roads, to forestall a possible counterattack by the Arab Legion.

This is not to deny that Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinian Arabs. But these were exceptions that occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations-notably the need to deprive the enemy of strategic sites where no Jewish forces were available to hold them.

You write that, in any case, hundreds of thousands of Arabs had fled Palestine while the British were still in place-that is, prior to Israeli independence.

That is correct. And this tells us that even if the Zionists had instigated a plot to expel the Palestinian Arabs-which they most certainly did not-Britain's extensive military presence in the country would have precluded the slightest possibility of a systematic "ethnic cleansing."

What then was the catalyst for their flight?

The fear, disorientation, and economic privation that accompany all armed hostilities. But to these must be added, crucially, the local Palestinians' despair of their own leadership, the role taken by that leadership in actively forcing widespread evacuations, and perhaps above all the lack of communal cohesion or of the willingness, especially at the highest levels, to subordinate personal interest to the general good.

You cite documents by Jewish figures in Haifa actually pleading with the city's Arab leaders not to flee.

They did not listen to such pleas, no doubt because remaining would have amounted to a tacit acquiescence in Jewish statehood.

The UN says there are 4.7 million Palestine refugees today. How many Arabs actually fled Palestine?

By the time of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, some 300,000-340,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled their homes. By the end of the war several months later, the numbers had swollen to 583,000-609,000 refugees.

Why didn't Israel welcome them back afterward?

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet on September 12, 1948 that if direct talks with the Arabs should culminate in a real peace, the refugees would return. On the other hand, "Should [postwar arrangements] fall short of peace with the Arabs, we will not allow their return."

You contend that Palestinian Arabs, if left to their own devices, would have chosen coexistence.

Therein lay the great tragedy of the 1920-48 era. Despite constant terror and intimidation, including the killing by Arab fanatics of moderates within their own community, peaceful coexistence with Jews was far more prevalent than were eruptions of violence, and the violence was the work of a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.

It was the Arab leadership that rejected Jewish statehood even in a small part of Palestine-not from concern for the national rights of the Palestinian Arabs, but from the desire to fend off a perceived encroachment on the pan-Arab patrimony.

So the Arab war goal was not to create a Palestinian state?

It was common knowledge at the time that the pan-Arab invasion was more of a geopolitical scramble for Palestine than an attempt to secure the Palestinians' national rights. After 1948-49, neither Egypt nor Transjordan moved to establish an independent Palestinian entity in Gaza and the West Bank; this reflected the wider perception of the Palestine problem as a corollary of the pan-Arab agenda rather than as a distinct or urgent issue in its own right.

Abdel Rahman Azzam, the first head of the Arab League, once mused that it took centuries for the Arabs to reconcile themselves to having lost Spain; he wasn't sure they could ever adjust to losing any part of Palestine.

Unfortunately, the prospect of such an adjustment still seems far from auspicious. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state provided the Palestinians recognized Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's negotiator, reacted to this by warning that Netanyahu "will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him."

And so, more than six decades after the mufti condemned his people to statelessness, his reckless policies live on and are continually reenacted. Only when today's Arab leaders end this legacy of intransigence can the Palestinians hope to put their self-inflicted nakba behind them.
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