An Umbrella for British Jewry

An Umbrella for British Jewry

The Board of Deputies of British Jews is almost certainly the oldest continuously functioning representative body of Jewry in the world. Its first meeting, held at London's Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1760, was recorded in Portuguese, the language of its Sephardi founders. A new book by Raphael Langham, the first complete history of the Board, has been published to coincide with its 250th anniversary.

Operating at the center of the British Empire, the board worked to advance the conditions of British Jews at home and to harness England's global power on behalf of Jewish communities around the world. At home, its agenda included protecting the rights of Jews to observe their religious traditions, protecting shechita or kosher meat-slaughtering and absolving Jews of taking Christian oaths for purposes of employment. Abroad, for instance, it intervened with the British government in 1840, to request intercession with the Ottoman authorities over the Damascus Blood Libel.

Today, Britain is no longer an empire, the Board is no longer overseen by a small coterie of fabulously rich and powerful men and the golden years of British Jewry are behind it. The BOD came into existence when there were 10,000 Jews in England. Today there are 267,000 but this figure is down from a peak of 420,000 in 1955. Today's community is a study in contrasts: demographically contracting, with intermarriage running at about 50% yet religiously vibrant and diverse and with notable points of cultural vitality. Middle ground traditionalists are holding their own -- barely; the ultra-Orthodox are thriving, while there are also effervescent pockets of Reform, Masorti and Liberal Judaism.
Some say the BOD has lost its clout. Yet its president is still seen as the lay leader of British Jewry. The government will always turn to the board when it wants to say something to the community, even if it also turns to other bodies. The board continues to play an instrumental role in civil rights advocacy, protecting shechita (still under assault) and in grappling with occasionally violent anti-Semitism stemming from Britain's growing Muslim population and extreme nationalists. The autonomous Community Security Trust, which looks after the security needs of British Jewry, takes its cue from the BOD.

Some see today's board as too democratic. In 2003 the Jewish Leadership Council was formed after the board rejected overtures from a small group of benefactors who offered to back its activities in exchange for control of its agenda. Nevertheless, the BOD and the JLC often operate in tandem. There are other welcome signs of unity. Though the ultra-Orthodox Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations walked out of the BOD in 1971 over religious differences, its representatives did attend a recent communal gathering marking the board's anniversary.

On Zionism, from the early years of the state, the BOD has been mindful that British Jewry was faced with accusations of dual loyalty. Consequently, the deputies had tried to set Israel's position before the public without appearing boldly partisan. This stance has evolved into one of public solidarity without, though, endorsing specific Israeli policies over which the board is itself divided. In that context, board leaders have met with the the new Cameron government's top Middle East minister. Contrary to pre-election pledges from the Tories, the Board has been unable gain the government's commitment for a change in the Universal Jurisdiction law which has been exploited by anti-Israel campaigners against visiting Israeli officials.
Surveys show that 80% of British Jews are supportive of Israel, according to Langham, including those with doubts about its policies. During the 1982 Lebanon War, the Board mustered 40,000 pro-Israel supporters in Trafalgar Square. A January 2009 demonstration during the Gaza War drew, at best, half as many. To be fair, Britain's Jewish community functions in a troublingly anti-Zionist political and media environment.

Like vital umbrella organizations everywhere, the Board can speak publicly with one voice on Israel only by restricting itself to bland and non-committal statements. Yet defining and articulating communal interests that are faithful to Jewish civilizational values must surely be the truest test of leadership -- in the UK and elsewhere.
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East Jerusalem

During Vice President Joseph Biden's visit to Israel last week, a routine bureaucratic approval of additional dwellings for ultra-Orthodox Jews was leaked to the media, thereby setting off a crisis in relations between the two countries. The neighborhood in question, Ramat Shlomo, is said to stand in Arab East Jerusalem. But what and where is East Jerusalem?


The term is an artificial construct, and a misnomer. Jerusalem is a city built on hills, embedded on a mountain ridge; Samaria lies to the north, Judea to the south. The city has no grid system—no Fifth Avenue to divide the east and west sides. Until Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, parts of Jerusalem were artificially separated along the armistice lines resulting from Israel's 1948 war of independence. North, south, and east Jerusalem lay under control of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

By June 28, 1967 the barriers had been dismantled. The city's boundaries were dramatically expanded beyond the six square kilometers of the Jordanian municipality, including the Old City, to embrace the Mount of Olives with its Jewish cemetery, Mount Scopus and the pre-state campus of the Hebrew University, and 28 nearby Arab villages. All were incorporated into Israel proper. Today the city's Palestinian Arabs carry ordinary blue Israeli ID cards and make full use of universal health coverage as well as other social benefits. They also enjoy the right to vote in municipal elections, but so far have opted to boycott political participation.

When the city was first liberated, former premier David Ben-Gurion called for a national effort to settle the empty spaces of metropolitan Jerusalem. Since then, international opposition notwithstanding, all Israeli governments have worked to solidify control of the city by constructing a sequence of strategically placed residential neighborhoods: Gilo and Har Homah in the south; East Talpiot in the east; Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Pisgat Ze'ev, Neve Yaakov in the north; and Ramot on the northern flank of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. Although some Jordanian government lands and some private property were confiscated, most of the strategic sites chosen were on barren hills. Only in recent years have small numbers of ideological settlers moved into densely populated Arab neighborhoods. As for Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood at the center of the latest flap, it lies to the west of Ramot—that is, in northern Jerusalem.

And where does the United States stand? Among those bodies opposing Israel's 1967 annexation was the State Department. To this day, the American consulate is housed in an antiquated compound on Nablus Road in east Jerusalem, while a separate facility in the center of the city serves as the consul general's residence. (A newly built consulate in west Jerusalem stands empty.) The embassy is in Tel Aviv, since Washington does not recognize Israel's sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem—west, east, north, or south.

Yet on June 19, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson declared: "No one wishes to see the Holy City again divided." Today, any fair-minded visitor would have to acknowledge that Jerusalem is a mosaic of neighborhoods built on hills and in valleys where Jews and Arabs live in proximity and share common spaces. There may come a time when a borough arrangement will permit them to administer the city conjointly; some Israeli governments have also offered parts of the city to a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, to imagine Jerusalem divisible along east-west lines bespeaks a profound ignorance of both history and political geography.


-- March 2010

Getting Abbas to the Table

The barrier built a decade ago to protect the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo from Fatah fire is being dismantled.Some residents are worried: today's tranquility is welcome, said one, but why tempt fate when there is still no peace agreement with the Palestinians, and not even direct negotiations?

Actually, direct negotiations, or a semblance of them, may be in the offing. Under intense American and EU pressure, Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority is expected grudgingly to end its year-long boycott and return to the bargaining table. But there is no sign that Abbas has any intention of seizing the moment to engage Israel in a fruitful give-and-take. Rather, the Palestinian leadership, its electoral legitimacy long expired, appears simply to have run out of excuses.

Abbas had insisted he would not talk with Benjamin Netanyahu unless Israel stopped housing construction over the Green Line. When Israel duly instituted a building moratorium, he said it was not enough since the freeze did not include Jerusalem. A further, unfulfillable precondition then followed: Israel had to commit itself in advance to withdrawing to the 1949 armistice lines. Then Abbas insisted that talks begin where they had left off with former premier Ehud Olmert, whose final magnanimous offer he had simply pocketed without comment.

Now, even as the Palestinians are being dragged back to the table, they are demanding that the construction moratorium they have denigrated for the past eleven months be extended beyond its September sunset date. If not, in the words of chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the talks will be "buried" before they can be re-launched.

Jerusalem appears unlikely to accede to this, though the cabinet might agree to limit new building to settlement blocs: i.e., strategic areas that all agree must remain within Israel in any deal. Meanwhile, the international Quartet—consisting of the U.S., the EU, Russia, and the UN—may set parameters for direct negotiations framed by its earlier statement catering to Palestinian preconditions while giving short shrift to Israel's sensibilities. If so, Jerusalem is expected to take part only in response to a separate invitation from Washington, and without preconditions. As for the other half of the Palestinian polity, the one autocratically run by Hamas in Gaza, it refuses either to entertain an accommodation with Abbas or to accept Israel's legitimacy under any circumstances.

If the fractious Palestinian polity is in no way ready for a viable deal, and if imposing a solution on Israel is politically unfeasible and strategically self-defeating, what explains the full-court press to cajole Abbas to the table? The answer appears to be this: George Mitchell (for the American administration), Tony Blair (for the Quartet), and Catherine Ashton (for the EU) are deeply invested in the notion that Abbas is prepared to deliver on a historic two-state solution, and therefore even the illusion of momentum trumps the status quo.

But does it? Yes, Israel wants to achieve a breakthrough through direct talks. But ill-conceived negotiations, in which Abbas is encouraged to advance maximalist demands regarding refugees, borders, Jerusalem, and security, could prove as counterproductive this time around as at Camp David in 2000—when, unprepared for compromise, the Palestinians unleashed a years-long paroxysm of violence.

Getting Abbas to the table, like dismantling the concrete slabs protecting Gilo, is the easy part.
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August 2010

Rank Rivalries In the IDF

A bare majority of Americans know that David Petraeus commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It's anyone's guess how many can name Navy Adm. Mike Mullen as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In contrast, the IDF chief of staff is a household name in Israel, has operational control over the armed services and is an ex-officio cabinet member.

That is why the current friction between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi is making headlines in Israel. Barak decided against extending Ashkenazi's term beyond February 2011 and has embarked on a highly-publicized – some say premature and humiliating – course of finding a replacement. With no dazzling general waiting in the wings the three main contenders are Yoav Galant, chief of the southern command and rumored to be Barak's favored candidate, Benny Gantz, deputy chief of staff, and Gadi Eizenkot, head of the northern command. As the unpopular leader of the waning Labor party, with his own political fortunes uncertain, Barak would not mind having Ashkenazi take early retirement and have his man ensconced sooner rather than later.

Lacking institutional processes, the quest for the chief of staff job has characteristically involved behind-the-scenes scheming. In this instance the curtain has been clumsily lifted. Thus someone – perhaps with Barak's interests at heart – leaked top secret testimony from the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that laid blame for the IDF's poorly-executed interdiction of the Gaza-bound Turkish on Ashkenazi's shoulders. Then came the bombshell that Galant had engaged wily political strategist Eyal Arad – a nemesis of Premier Benjamin Netanyahu -- to help him elbow out the incumbent. Television pundit Amnon Abramowitz broke the story based on a leaked strategy paper containing Arad's logo. Galant says he knows nothing about the paper; Arad denies authorship. The matter is now being investigated by the attorney-general.

Genuine or forged the document is a jarring reminder that the IDF chief of staff role is hardly above the political fray.
There are no ex-generals in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives. Since 1900, only one general, Dwight Eisenhower, reached White House. In Israel, however, a generalship is a stepping stone to politics. Prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were former chiefs of staff; Ariel Sharon was a major-general. Since the 1967 War, only a handful of chiefs of staff have opted against a political career.
Yet, as an institution, Israel's military is by and large apolitical just as David Ben-Gurion wanted it to be. The supremacy of the civilian echelon is sacrosanct. Still, the political leanings of prospective chiefs of staff plays a role in their selection. Moreover, influence runs both ways. In 1949 active army generals associated with the left-wing Mapai party appeared on its Knesset candidate's list – nowadays there is a cooling off period before officers can enter politics. In 1956, then chief of staff Moshe Dayan donned civilian clothes to lobby the ruling Mapai party on a sensitive security matter. General Mordechai Gur bickered with Dayan over policy when he served as Golda Meir's defense minister after the Yom Kippur War. More recently, Sharon refused to extend General Moshe Ya'alon's term as chief of staff because he was unenthusiastic about the Gaza disengagement.
That said, jingoism is not a feature of the high command's ranks. When generals formally enter politics their positions are anything but monolithic; some like Amnon Lipkin-Shahak turn left, while others like Ya'alon head right. Tel Aviv University professor Yoram Peri, a former editor of the now defunct Labor newspaper Dvar, maintains that with Israeli politics stalemated, politicians find it convenient to push ex-generals who share their security orientation -- whether hawks or doves -- into the front ranks of politics.
As Israelis gloomily observe the spectacle of their top generals and defense minister being investigated over the leaked strategy paper, and with the process of picking Ashkenazi's replacement now on hold, they can only trust that the cutthroat competition for the military's top spot and the lack of esprit de corps exposed by this episode will not impact life-and-death national security decision making.

Meeting Elhanan Yakira

Elhanan Yakira, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has all the credentials of a man of the Israeli Left: born and raised in Tel Aviv as a Zionist and socialist , a lifelong secular Jew, an opponent of West Bank settlements, an advocate of government intervention in economic policy. Yet many of his colleagues on the Left denounce him as a right-winger and a traitor.

Why? Because he maintains that Israel was not born in sin at the expense of the Palestinians Arabs and that it has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Yakira's critique of his fellow leftists, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (subtitle: "Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel"), was rejected by five Israeli publishers before finally being brought out in 2007-- only to be greeted in the Hebrew press by a months-long silence. The controversy, when it at last erupted, was fierce; Yakir, a philosopher who did not set out to be a polemicist, had started a debate on the Left.

In April, Elhanan Yakira will be speaking in the United States about the English-language edition of his iconoclastic work, just published by Cambridge University Press and carrying endorsements by, among others, Michael Walzer and Fouad Ajami. We talked in the living room of his Jerusalem home .

In Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, you coin a phrase, "the community of opprobrium." Members of this community maintain that Israel exploits the Holocaust to justify its illegitimate existence, and that the Jews have been doing to the Palestinian Arabs what the Nazis did to the Jews. In brief: blame Israel and the Jews first.

Well, I should explain that the Hebrew essays- only later did they become a book - were intended as a polemic against the Israeli community of opprobrium. As I worked on the English edition, it became clear that the Israelis are nurtured by an international community: a huge subculture devoted to the de-legitimation of Israel, the Zionist idea, and the Jewish nation. What I did in the book was essentially to take one element of this campaign-the manipulation of the Holocaust-and show how it was morally and intellectually wrong.

Who are the big names in the Israeli community of opprobrium?

There are so many, and no doubt most of them are unfamiliar to English readers. Haifa-born Ilan Pappe, who now teaches in England, completely embraces the Palestinian narrative. There is Yehuda Shenhav, who has a new book out challenging the right of Israel to exist even within the 1967 "Green Line." I devote part of my book to Adi Ophir, former editor of the post-modernist Hebrew journal Theory and Criticism and an academic at Tel Aviv University and the Shalom Hartman Institute. There is also Oren Yiftachel at Ben-Gurion University, who speaks of Zionism as a "colonialism of refugees" and "creeping apartheid." Then there is the Haaretz crowd, including Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. Outside Israel, a key name is the historian Tony Judt, with his advocacy of a bi-national state.

The community refers to Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria as, in your words, "occupation with a capital O."

To be perfectly frank, I accept much of their criticism: the settlement situation is catastrophic. But what the capital-O crowd advocates is the now fashionable "one-state solution." It's completely unworkable. Daft! They also refer to Zionism as guilty of "original sin." Their opposition to Israeli policies is so visceral that it carries them to the point where they support policies that are, in effect, annihilationist.

You write that "there is not much point in talking with the anti-Zionists."

That's right. There is no point. They can't be swayed by facts. Their anti-Zionism has a structural affinity to anti-Semitism. It is irrational. I don't want to speculate or indulge in psychoanalytic explanations. Instead, what I do in the book is to talk about anti-Zionism.

It is a condition that seems to have permeated the Israel Left.

It's actually a complicated picture. I am convinced that the silent majority on the Israeli Left is not anti-Zionist. That is certainly the case in my department at the university. But the anti-Zionists are highly mobilized. They combine ideological zeal with academic pretense—or, rather, their academic work is placed at the service of their ideology. These instructors have created an uncomfortable climate in the classroom. I myself never use my lectures as an excuse to propound my political views.

Over time, not only have the academic anti-Zionists had a devastating influence in the universities, but everything they say is nurtured and amplified by the media and the international community of opprobrium. It's a vicious circle. The non-Israelis point to the Israelis in justifying their own anti-Zionist line. For their part, the Israelis basically direct their efforts toward the outside world, which rewards them by inviting them to travel, speak, and publish their academically worthless rubbish.

Let's talk about Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), to whom you devote an entire chapter in your book. By coincidence, the first Hebrew translation of her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), is just out in Hebrew. In reviewing it, Shlomo Avineri has said that she was not tainted by Jewish self-hatred but was "a proud Jew."


I agree; she was a proud Jew. She was also a complicated Jew, and extremely ambivalent about her own Jewish identity. Though at times in her life she operated in a very Jewish milieu, she knew very little about Judaism. She grappled especially with, on the one hand, the need for Jewish political expression through a state and, on the other hand, her opposition to Jewish particularism. Still, until her death—we can't speculate beyond that—I don't believe she would have challenged the right to Jewish self-determination or countenanced calls to dismantle the state of Israel.

You refer to her Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) "a bad book" and "morally scandalous."

Well, she talks about things she doesn't understand. Her portrait of Adolf Eichmann was harnessed to her larger polemical aims. The concept of the "banality of evil," which she made famous, wasn't even hers. It originated with the German philosopher Karl Jaspers—who by the way stood courageously by his Jewish wife against the Nazis. Jaspers went on to write a book about German guilt, which Arendt read. The term "banality" appears in his letters to her.

Moreover, the Eichmann book does not propound a real theory. What she said about the "banality of evil" was intellectual gymnastics, pathetic nonsense.

In the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt was accused by her friend Gershom Scholem of lacking ahavat Yisrael, fidelity to the Jewish people.

Yes, she had this inner conflict about her Judaism and about Israel. She grappled with the place of the Jew in European culture. Her writings are often interpreted as relating to the place of Jews and of Israel on the global stage, but in fact she was addressing the dilemma of how others, particularly Westerners, understand Jews and Jewish identity. Her life was the embodiment of this dilemma—which has now been transferred to Israel and within Israel.

So what was her answer to the Jewish problem?

Integration. But I am not sure she had a coherent position. About Zionism, as I say, she was always ambivalent. That ambivalence was Hannah Arendt.

An ambivalent thinker with an incoherent position, yet an icon whose writings are constantly invoked by the community of opprobrium.

Exactly. An entire Arendt hagiography has evolved. My feeling is she would not appreciate being so used, but it is mind-boggling how many anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis, relying partially on her work, play such an important role in the campaign against Israel.

What impels some Diaspora Jews to lead the charge against Israel? You contrast them with the Chinese Diaspora, which appears to react with equanimity to the truly egregious human-rights violations of Beijing.

Yes, the Jews, unlike the Chinese, somehow feel pressured to dissociate themselves from their ancestral homeland. You'd have to ask the one-state proponent Tony Judt or the philosopher Judith Butler, who is pushing the anti-Israel boycott, to explain what motivates them and why they are emotionally invested with Israel to such an unhealthy degree.

-- March 2010