Ubiquitous dissent

The chair of Peace Now in France, David Chelma, is helping coordinate a European effort to dissent from Israeli policies by means of a nascent initiative dubbed JCall – to evoke Washington-based J Street – and featuring a web-based petition entitled "European Call for Reason" demanding "pressure on both parties" in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. More than 3,500 people have signed including luminaries on the pro-Israel Left such as philosophers Bernard Henri-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut. Israel's former ambassador to France Elie Barnavi is also a backer.

Campaigners say they are exasperated with the "monolithic" Jewish mainstream. Chelma wants to show that "it's okay" to criticize some Israeli policies. "Systematic support of Israeli government policy is dangerous," according to the text published in six languages on www.JCall.eu. The Israeli broadsheet Haaretz lauded JCall for rejecting "automatic support" of Israeli policies especially regarding Jerusalem neighborhoods over the Green Line. Critics were further incensed over advertisements placed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel describing Jerusalem as "the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul" and urging that the city's fate be dealt with at a later stage of peace negotiations. J Street is countering Wiesel by placing a retort by former Meretz Party leader Yossi Sarid in US Jewish newspapers.
The notion that dissent within the pro-Israel community is muffled is taken as axiomatic. Yet opposition to Israeli peace and security policies among Israel's Diaspora friends is hardly out of the ordinary. Nahum Goldmann, the venerable head of the World Jewish Congress, publicly broke with Israeli policies in 1967. In 1973, rumor had it, he helped finance Breira, whose 100-member Reform and Conservative rabbinic advisory council advocated the creation of a PLO-led state alongside Israel decades before Yasser Arafat ostensibly recognized the country's right to exist. Goldmann also appealed to US decision-makers to pressure Israel into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza. Similarly, Philip Klutznik, who succeeded Goldmann at the World Jewish Congress, aligned himself with the International Center for Peace in the Middle East to further dissent from Israeli policies.

Indeed, the JCall petition recalls the 1978 letter signed by 37 prominent US Jews – academics, writers, theologians – demanding Israel show greater flexibility in negotiating a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1980, the New Jewish Agenda following in Breira's footsteps mobilized against the 1982 Lebanon War. Also in the early 1980s, Rabbi Alexander Schindler of the Reform movement asked: "Must we indulge in annexationist fantasies in order to prove that we are passionate Jews?" In 2010 his successor Rabbi Eric Yoffie said he stood with the Obama administration and against the Netanyahu government on the matter of a construction freeze in east Jerusalem. Indeed, the roster of Jewish figures that have campaigned against Israel's settlement policies includes former chairs of the Presidents Conference and a leader of Conservative Jewry. If anything, criticism of Israel's approach to peace has become institutionalized with more Presidents Conference organizations dissenting than supporting.

The one constant -- from Nahum Goldmann's day through JCall – has been the absence of any countervailing pressure on the Arab side to lobby Fatah, Hamas and the Arab League into adopting less intransigent policies.




-- May 2010

Ambivalent Jordan

Jordan's King Abdullah II returned home from Washington earlier this month having ostensibly urged President Barack Obama to offer his own peace plan to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli "tinderbox." The king's interests in a settlement are doubtlessly sincere yet by no means straightforward.

Abdullah was in the US to attend a two-day Nuclear Security Summit. He had a private lunch with the president as well as a formal Oval Office meeting becoming the first Arab leader to visit the Obama White House. Photographs showed the two leaders smiling and looking relaxed.

In a subsequent interview with the Chicago Tribune, Abdullah predicted that a Middle East war this summer is inevitable given that "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not interested in peace" and that the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative is set to expire in July. Contrary to statements by Arab League officials, Abdullah told the newspaper that the initiative was not "a take-it-or-leave-it document." On Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, the king professed to be sanguine: "If you solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, nobody needs a nuclear weapon."

In an earlier Wall Street Journal interview, Abdullah intimated that Israel intended to "push" West Bank Palestinians into Jordan. Jordan's Foreign Ministry recently summoned Israel's ambassador to "harshly" protest a (nonexistent) "West Bank expulsion rule." The Hashemite Kingdom, with its mostly Palestinian population, has long feared a "Jordan is Palestine" designation. Though it continues to see itself as the custodian of Muslim and Christian holy places which need defending against "continued [Israeli] provocations," Jordan does not want to reassume responsibility for the West Bank. A recent speech by Queen Rania announcing the launching of "Madrasati Palestine," an initiative to renovate Palestinian schools in east Jerusalem affiliated with the Jordanian wakf, was carefully coordinated with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
The 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty has resulted in a decidedly frosty relationship. The king says ties with Israel have never been worse and that economically Jordan was better off "before my father signed the peace treaty." Yet the Jordanian stock market is rebounding from the global economic downturn, and the kingdom continues to enjoy the trade benefits from its peace with Israel.

But Abdullah is under constant pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood and the intelligentsia to sever ties with Israel. Soon after two IDF soldiers were killed in an encounter with Palestinian gunmen laying mines along the Gaza border fence, and as news reports circulated that Iranian SCUD missiles had been shipped across Syria to Hizbullah-dominated Lebanon, an editorial in the Jordan Times accused Israel of being determined to start another war despite the prevailing "calm."

What does Jordan want? Assaf David, a Hebrew University expert believes that while Jordan genuinely wants peace between Israel and the Palestinians it simultaneously fears such an accord would permanently codify the Palestinian presence in Jordan and threaten Hashemite rule.





-- April 2010

Civil Liberties

Civil liberties - In their classic introduction to American politics, The Irony of Democracy, Thomas Dye and Harmon Zeigler show how popular commitment to civil liberties -- understood as the rights individuals have against unwarranted governmental intrusion -- can fall by the wayside when abstract principles need to be translated into practice.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the US, and the July 5, 2005 bombings on the London underground, cherishing civil liberties while tightening security became an everyday democratic dilemma. Across the political spectrum, the more people feel threatened the lower the support for civil liberties.

No democracy serves as a better "laboratory" testing the limits of civil liberties under traumatic conditions than Israel. The results are sometimes incoherent, but the common denominator is that freedoms are mostly safeguarded so long as lives are not endangered.

Some recent illustrations: a Jewish extremist was not prosecuted for holding up a sign calling the president a "traitor." But another was for advocating on the radio the expulsion of Israeli Arabs. A right-wing activist was brought to trial for writing that the official charged with implementing Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was worse than the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. But the case was dropped, part of a general amnesty covering everyone charged with breaking the law during disengagement protests.
A deputy Knesset speaker, an Arab nationalist, is free to hang an oversized poster of Yasser Arafat, against the backdrop of a PLO flag, in his office. A Galilee-based Islamist has not been charged for urging Arab students to sacrifice themselves as shahids [martyrs] against Israel.
But antiwar activists were barred from holding a strident rally outside the Defense Ministry one evening during the recent Gaza conflict on the grounds that they did not have a police permit. Still, left-wing organizations face no restrictions on gathering or disseminating damaging data about the army. And radical groups may encourage conscripts not to serve in the citizen army.
A story now making headlines in Israel -- initially presented as a civil liberties conundrum -- turns out to be more knotty. It involves Anat Kam, a 23-year-old budding journalist who as a corporal doing obligatory army service unlawfully copied 2,000 highly classified documents onto a (now missing) computer disk. Kam provided a copy to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau who wrote a controversial magazine piece claiming the army had unlawfully killed two Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Kam's attorneys said she copied the material because she thought a war crime had been committed. After examining the facts, Israel's attorney-general, however, certified that the mission in question was perfectly legitimate. Kam is now facing trial; Blau is negotiating the return the stolen material in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

What emerges from Israel's experience is that the country's security predicament notwithstanding, the legal system's default position is to provide citizens with the same protections enjoyed in other Western democracies.

-- April 2010

Lose Nukes

Loose Nukes - Were terrorists to detonate a 10-kiloton nuclear device near New York City's Empire State Building, everything within a third-mile radius would be utterly destroyed; anyone within 3/4 of a mile would almost certainly be exposed to fatal radiation levels; damage to buildings would be extensive; a large swath of Manhattan from river-to-river would be ravaged. Obviously, if terrorists had access to the kind of explosive power, that devastated Hiroshima (13 kilotons) or Nagasaki (21 kilotons) much of metropolitan New York would be obliterated.

Representatives of over 40 countries, including Israel, have been meeting yesterday and today in Washington under the auspices of the Obama administration at the first-ever Nuclear Security Summit. The administration's goal is to gain public (and private) commitments on a "work plan" to be implemented within four years committing countries to keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorist groups, "combat nuclear smuggling and deter, detect, and disrupt attempts at nuclear terrorism."
The US government says terrorist groups have persistently sought the components of nuclear weapons. Experts agree that the hardest part about making a bomb is securing the nuclear material.
In 2007, for instance, unknown attackers sought unsuccessfully to penetrate a South African facility where enough enriched uranium was stored to build 12 atomic weapons, according to The New York Times. Approximately, 35 pounds of uranium-235 (about the size of a grapefruit) or nine pounds of plutonium-239 is enough to make a working nuclear bomb, according to political scientist Graham Allison. An estimated 4.6 million pounds of nuclear material is dispersed in 40 countries.

Unfortunately, Egypt and Turkey are set to exploit the nuclear terrorism meeting to criticize Israel's reputed nuclear weapons capability. Faced with the prospect that his attendance would be used to sidetrack the conference, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu opted to stay home and send Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, whose responsibilities include intelligence and atomic affairs, to head the Israeli delegation. In the words of US National Security Adviser James Jones: “The Israelis did not want to be a catalyst for changing the theme of the summit."
In any event, Israel will not be mentioned in the final communiqué being crafted by the administration. Moreover, the parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will meet next month at UN Headquarters in New York where Arab states can be expected to claim that it is politically untenable for them to confront the real and present danger of a nuclear-armed Iran without debating Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity.

Of course, the menace of nuclear terrorism is linked solidly to Islamist extremism. A.Q. Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist -- and an array of his associates -- provided nuclear knowhow to North Korea, Libya and Iran. For its part, Teheran maintains a murky relationship with al-Qaeda and open ties with Hizbullah and Hamas. These organizations have shown no compunctions about engaging in anti-civilian warfare. Worse, it is doubtful whether the Cold War strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction would deter atomic suicide bombers who have no national allegiances. That may explain why the US president calls a nuclear weapon in the hands of a terrorist organization the biggest threat to the Western world.




-- April 2010

On the Heritage Trail

Unlike Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not have to take a stroll on the Temple Mount to provoke Palestinian Arab leaders into threatening mayhem. Instead, Netanyahu simply announced a comprehensive plan to strengthen Israel's national heritage by rehabilitating and preserving archaeological and historic sites, developing historic trails, and conserving photographs, films, books, and music of archival value. "A people," he declared, "must know its past in order to ensure its future."


Unveiled on February 2, the plan was greeted with a yawn by the mainstream Israeli media, mixed with a few deprecating remarks about Jewish chauvinism, and was largely ignored by Palestinians. Not until three weeks later did Arab riots break out in Hebron and spread to Jerusalem's Old City and the Temple Mount, where dozens of Palestinian youths locked themselves in a mosque after hurling rocks at visitors to the plateau.

What happened in the meantime was this. Right-wing Israelis protested when it emerged that neither the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron nor Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem, both of them integral to the civilization and sacred history of the Jews, was on the list of designated sites. On February 21, Netanyahu duly announced their inclusion. But the two sites (whose status remains otherwise unchanged) are in territory claimed by the Palestinian Authority, which views Israeli Jews as colonialist interlopers. PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas promptly warned that Netanyahu's "provocation" could "lead to a holy war." Forget could, said Hamas premier Ismail Haniyeh, urging an intifada: should.

Yet the projected enterprise, whatever missteps may have attended its inception, is both entirely normal and entirely legitimate. It is also an urgent need. The state of Jewish identity in the Jewish state is, paradoxically, shaky. In the private lives of many, Judaism has decreasing significance. Many secular youngsters attend schools where neither Jewish subjects nor Jewish values are high on the curriculum. Meanwhile, among their insular ultra-Orthodox counterparts, civics and Zionism are hardly taught at all. And then there are the post-Zionists, some of whom fully embrace the Arab narrative and see the establishment of their country as "original sin" while others shun any emphasis on the specifically Jewish aspect of their national history.

This, then, is the context in which Netanyahu's call should be understood. Nor is his a lone voice. Natan Sharansky, the new chairman of the Jewish Agency, has launched his moribund organization on a new mission: to build the Jewish people into a connected family—and to link Israelis to their Jewish roots. Both men are saying that the culture, traditions, and historical consciousness handed down through the generations comprise the birthright of the Jewish people. Is this national heritage to be lightly abdicated, and in the name of what?


-- March 2010