The Obama - Israel "Crisis"

What comes to mind when you think about great moments of crisis in U.S. foreign policy? The Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis, Iran's seizure of American hostages? Or, perhaps, Israel's decision to build residential housing in northeast Jerusalem?

Whether current tensions with Washington do constitute a crisis, and whether yesterday's crisis talks between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lead to a reduction or intensification of those tensions, will become apparent soon enough. But whatever the outcome, it is a fact that strains between Washington and Jerusalem have been part of the "special relationship" ever since President Harry S Truman granted Israel de-facto recognition in 1948.

Let us count the ways. After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Eisenhower administration forced Israel to withdraw from captured territories despite Egypt's continued belligerency. The opening of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the early 1960s contributed to strife with the Kennedy administration. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a supportive Johnson administration nevertheless issued Washington's first condemnation of Israeli settlement activity.

The beat goes on. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, the Nixon administration set forth the Rogers Plan, which sought to force Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 armistice lines. At one fractious point, the Ford administration ordered a complete reassessment of U.S.-Israel relations. Jimmy Carter was continually at odds with Menachem Begin, blaming him for every setback in the Camp David peace talks with Anwar Sadat.

Relations were no less bumpy when Ronald Reagan sold advanced electronic-surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; withheld weapons from Israel in punishment for its airstrike against Iraq's nuclear reactor and then again over the 1982 Lebanon war; demanded a settlement freeze; and granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO. Things hardly improved with the arrival of George H.W. Bush, whose administration refused loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jewish refugees until Israel agreed to a settlement freeze. Secretary of State James Baker scornfully told Israeli leaders to telephone if and when they were interested in peace.

Bill Clinton's years, dominated by the fallout from the 1993 Oslo Accords, were similarly marked by relentless pressure on Netanyahu (in his first term) to be more forthcoming to Yasir Arafat. Finally, in 2003, over Ariel Sharon's protestations, George W. Bush proclaimed a "Road Map" toward a Palestinian state in the midst of horrific Palestinian violence.

In the light of this recitation, does today's crisis with the Obama administration take on a less worrisome aspect, as simply another stage in an ongoing but finally harmless pattern? Not necessarily. For one thing, as with similar episodes in the past, this one can strengthen the perennial expectation among Arab foes of Israel that Washington will, ultimately, force Jerusalem to capitulate to their maximalist demands. For another, should the current administration seize this opportunity to attempt to impose its own "peace plan," that could indeed precipitate a real, genuine crisis.

-- March 2010

Ramadan 2010

Three near-certainties accompany the Muslim holy month of Ramadan: in Islamic countries, the stock market climbs; in Jerusalem, the already amplified pre-dawn adhān, or call to prayer, becomes even more piercing than usual; and there is a steep rise in Muslim bloodletting.


At around the time Jews will be celebrating Rosh Hashanah, more than a billion Muslims will mark the conclusion of Ramadan with festive Eid al-Fitr meals. For the past month, observant Muslims have abstained from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset to commemorate the handing down of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. The faithful are entreated to curb wicked intentions, practice humility, and pray for forgiveness.

No doubt, for many of the faithful, Ramadan is a period of quiet reflection and spiritual serenity. For many others, however, especially in places where large numbers of Muslims cross paths with Hindus, Christians, or Jews, it is an occasion for barbarity. It is said that the gates of hell are closed during Ramadan, funneling martyrs to heaven with ease.

In Kashmir, Muslim violence against Indian security forces regularly spikes during Ramadan. Elsewhere, killing a Christian during Ramadan is deemed especially meritorious: a Syrian Catholic abducted in Mosul, north of Baghdad, was murdered this year even though the kidnappers' ransom demands had been met. All up and down Iraq, suicide bombers, roadside bombs, and snipers have taken an ungodly toll of innocent lives. In Somalia, Islamist suicide bombers killed 31 people at a Mogadishu hotel. In Lebanon, Sunnis killed Shiites and Shiites killed Sunnis in disputes over turf.

Thousands of miles away, in southern Thailand where Muslims are in the majority, Islamists set off a deadly explosive device killing, among others, a two-year-old boy. Again the reason given was Ramadan, a period in which, the Chinese news agency Xinhua notes matter-of-factly, "violence in the region always flares up." In Chechnya, bands of men attacked women in the street for not wearing headscarves. Scores of foreign troops battling the Taliban in Afghanistan have been killed, as have many civilians targeted as they shopped for food to break the fast.

Practicing Muslims are now a visible element of daily life in Europe and the Americas, and Ramadan is no longer on the margins of Western consciousness. This year, many British and U.S. news outlets provided coverage of the start of the month-long fast; others helpfully offered special features ranging from news of pertinent iPhone applications to discussions about the propriety of Muslim women visiting hair salons during the month.

Spokesmen for other faiths, trying to look beyond the miasma of violence, have conscientiously focused on the season's spiritual aspects. The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue sent greetings in 31 languages, attributing Ramadan-related violence—obliquely termed a "manipulation of religion"—to ignorance, poverty, and injustice. In India, The Hindu published an article by a Muslim author extolling the festival, while from the U.S. a respected Hindu leader sent Ramadan greetings to Muslims worldwide.

In Israel, Christians and Jews distributed food baskets to 250 needy Muslim families in the town of Lod, while in Acre the town's chief rabbi joined an Iftar banquet tendered to promote respect for non-Jewish holidays in the Jewish state. Israeli soldiers who come into contact with Palestinian Arabs have been given sensitivity training and instructed not to eat in front of fasting Muslims. Israeli authorities have gone to great lengths to facilitate access for West Bank Muslims to their shrines atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

But no amount of ecumenical goodwill can change the fact that Ramadan is a blood-soaked period. What can be done about that? Only the Muslim faithful themselves can challenge Islamists bent on brutality. There is a glimmer of hope that this is beginning to happen, but it will take a thorough political and theological reformation before the bloodletting is taken out of Ramadan.


-- September 2010

"Israeli Apartheid Week"

We have come a long way since the 1967 Six-Day War. Before that watershed event, Diaspora Jewish life was not noticeably animated by a vigorous commitment to Israel's cause. But the country's spectacular victory in war, in tandem with the energies released by the burgeoning mobilization to free Soviet Jewry, as well as with larger societal trends favoring ethnic assertion of all kinds, served to deepen and solidify the connection between the Diaspora and the Zionist enterprise. In America, pro-Israelism became the defining characteristic of Jewish life.
Over the ensuing decades, however, the stubborn refusal of the Arab-Muslim war to abate, and the decisive turn of the United Nations and the international Left against the Jewish state, have led to a palpable wavering in elite Jewish opinion—and, today, signs of an actual pulling-away. This is manifested at the extreme in the open involvement of a minuscule but vocal number of Jews and Israelis in the Arab cause. More worrying is the articulation of feelings of "exhaustion" on the part of some Jewish liberals and the silent but palpable disengagement of many others from Israel's cause.

Since most American Jews have never visited Israel, it is perhaps no wonder that they are at a loss to defend its strategic policies against daily barrages of criticism. Already a decade ago, a survey by the sociologist Steven M. Cohen found that relatively few American Jews felt "extremely attached" to Israel. Today, the extent of disaffection may be gauged in a symptomatic proposal for launching a "Birthright Diaspora" program to vie with Birthright Israel for the allegiance of young Jewish adults (including Israelis).

The hate-fest known as "Israeli Apartheid Week," now taking place in cities around the globe, is bound to affect the morale of Diaspora Jews, if in different ways. Some may be induced to lower their pro-Israel profile, others to dissociate themselves from the Jewish state and its policies, still others to affirm their solidarity ever more resolutely.


A mirror phenomenon can be detected among some Israelis who, isolated and resentful, have either misplaced their sense of connectedness to the Jewish people at large or seem positively determined to cut the thread binding them to what one writer derides as Israel's "symbiotic relationship" with the Diaspora. Since we are no longer one, if we ever were, why pretend to an interest in the perpetuation of Jewish life abroad? Why promote, in the manner of Tel Aviv's Beit Hatfutsot museum, the idea of a "global Jewish people"?

Such are a few of the contending currents of the present situation—a situation that planners of "Israel Apartheid Week" and similar excrescences must hope will issue in an ever greater splintering of the Jewish collective. As against the massed anti-Israel forces, one can but posit an oddly cheering fact: the more they rail, the more they testify to the bedrock persistence of the oneness they strain to obliterate. Acknowledged, unacknowledged, or repudiated, Zion was, is, and will likely remain at the core of Jewish civilization.

-- March 2010

India & Israel

Celebrating its Independence Day on August 15, the nation of India marked 63 years since the end of British rule in the sub-continent. In light of the two countries' more or less contemporaneous struggle for self-determination in the immediate aftermath of World War II, one might have thought that India would establish close ties with the newly born state of Israel straightaway. It did not happen.

Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India saw itself as a leader of the "non-aligned" bloc, and Israel as part of the West. Notwithstanding its conflict with Pakistan, its overwhelmingly Muslim neighbor, New Delhi also sought to establish itself on good terms with the Arab and Islamic world. To that end, it wholeheartedly adopted the Arab line at the UN and mapped out third-world strategy with Egypt's Gamal Nasser.
When it came to Jewish history and Zionist aspirations, India's founding elites labored under profound misapprehensions. In late 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht, Mohandas Gandhi wrote that he had no sympathy for the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. His advice to desperate and despairing European Jews was to face the Nazis with passivity; to the Jews in Palestine, he counseled an effort to convert Arab pogromists into friends.

India did finally recognize Israel in 1950, allowing Jerusalem to maintain a consular presence in Mumbai (then Bombay). But not until 1992 were full diplomatic relations established. By then, the Soviet empire had collapsed; Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was working feverishly on an Islamic bomb; and Egypt had long since made its peace with Israel.

In the years since then, the two countries have gradually drawn closer. Israelis are unabashedly smitten with India: about 35,000 of them, including many youngsters just out of army service, visit the country each year. Annual trade, which started at $200 million, has by now reached $3.5 billion, and this year India surpassed Europe as Israel's number-two export market (after the U.S.). Israel sells India minerals, fertilizer, chemicals, electronics, and, most significantly, military equipmemt.

Since the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, security ties have also strengthened. Reportedly, the two countries are jointly developing a medium-range air-defense system. The Indian navy has visited Haifa port, and India has launched commercial satellites into orbit for Israel.

But then there is Iran, on which Delhi and Jerusalem are at cross-purposes. Iran is India's second biggest oil supplier, and India—competing with China in a race to dominate the world's economy—is heavily invested in Iran's energy sector. India-Iran trade has reportedly tripled in the past five years. Geopolitics plays a role as well: India imagines Iran can be persuaded to dampen Islamist extremism in the sub-continent and curb Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan.

And there are also the cold facts of demography. True, Israel's population of seven million includes 70,000 Indian Jews—but India is a vast, multiethnic country of a billion people, and its Muslim minority, 13 percent of the population, numbers 153 million, exceeding the combined populations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Second only to Iran, India has the largest non-Arab Shi'ite population in the world. It is notable that Indian Muslims have no history of involvement in terrorism, and their religious authorities abjure political violence. Nor is India as a whole troubled by indigenous anti-Jewish sentiment. Still, the country's elites are thoroughly exposed to the prevailing global fault-finding of Israel and the concomitant rise in global anti-Semitism.

So the Israel-India relationship, while mutually vital, is delicate. Jerusalem would emphatically prefer New Delhi to stop enabling Iran, even as it must appreciate that India will calibrate its relationships according to its interests as it sees them. Under the circumstances, the question is what it would take to convince Indians that appeasing the imperialist mullahs in Tehran will in fact undermine India's long-term welfare and national interests.



-- August 2010

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.