The unlovable Avigdor Lieberman

Avigdor Lieberman's September 28th speech at the UN General Assembly – delivered in English and broadcast live by Al-Jazeera – was not well received. The doyen of Israeli left-wing columnists, Yediot Aharonot's Nahum Barnea, dismissed his country's foreign minister as a "clown." Haaretz editorialized for Lieberman's resignation. Britain's Daily Telegraph characterized the address as "inflammatory.”

And dismissing Lieberman as "a West Bank settler" not "committed to peacemaking," the Los Angeles Times editorialized that Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin would never have allowed a foreign minister of theirs to articulate views that contradicted government policy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must either be duplicitous, in implying Lieberman's address did not have his backing, or politically enfeebled, the newspaper adjudged.

There is no disputing the fact that the speech was "off-message" -- differing from the accommodationist tone Netanyahu has set – and delivered by a reviled envoy. What is debatable is whether Lieberman's unhelpful address deserved the opprobrium heaped upon it; and whether the claim that foreign ministers loyally adhere to the political line set by their premiers is factual.

First to the substance of Lieberman's speech which began by stating the obvious: Israel's political arena is not divided between those who want peace and those who prefer a Greater Israel. Instead, Israel's majority is divided over how to secure peace. The Arabs controlled the West Bank and Gaza for nearly two decades and "no-one tried to create a Palestinian state," Lieberman pointed out. Yet, later, settlements notwithstanding, "peace agreements were achieved with Egypt and Jordan." There being no trust between Israelis and Palestinians and with policy differences as knotty as they are, Lieberman recommended that the parties aim for "a long-term intermediate agreement" rather than an absolute resolution of the conflict in a matter of months.

More controversially, he argued that "the guiding principle for a final status agreement must not be land-for-peace but rather [an] exchange of populated territory." Conflicts elsewhere, he stated, which had involved competing national and religious narratives -- post-communist Czechoslovakia and of East Timor, for instance – had been eased by redrawing boundaries. "Let me be very clear," Lieberman said, "I am not speaking about moving populations, but rather about moving borders to better reflect demographic realities."

Lieberman's plan may be geographically unworkable, as veteran Israeli journalist Yaron London has convincingly argued. Few imagine it will ever garner Palestinian approval. Yet on a purely moral plane, it would be hard to argue an exchange of populated territory is inherently a more nefarious idea than advocating a complete Israeli withdrawal to the hard-to-defend armistice lines in effect between 1949 and 1967 – Abba Eban's "Auschwitz borders."

Lieberman's decision to present his scheme at the General Assembly highlights a structural anomaly in Israel's political system. The job of foreign minister is a patronage appointment. Prime ministers usually have to tap rivals from within their own party or from among requisite coalition partners. As a result, foreign ministers seldom see themselves as loyal-bound to a premier. Moshe Sharett vehemently disapproved of David Ben-Gurion's security policies. Moshe Dayan represented Menachem Begin only to the extent that their views coincided. Shimon Peres offered territorial concessions to the Palestinians without first clearing them with Yitzhak Rabin. Tzipi Livni sessions with Ahmed Qurei were a sideshow to Ehud Olmert's bargaining with Mahmoud Abbas. Silvan Shalom was hardly Ariel Sharon's vicar of foreign policy any more than David Levy or Shimon Peres were for Yitzhak Shamir. Thankfully, during the crisis years of the second intifada, Sharon and Peres worked mostly in tandem because they agreed on the overriding need to quash Palestinian aggression.

It was therefore not all that odd for Netanyahu's office to distance itself from Lieberman's speech, to state that the foreign minister had not coordinated his address with the premier, and to recall that Netanyahu – not Lieberman – is actually heading negotiations with the Palestinians. Some will seek Machiavellian explanations for the speech and the premier's response to it, perhaps giving the two more credit, as politicians and statesmen, than they deserve.

What would it take for Israeli foreign policy-makers to speak with one voice?

Nothing short of jettisoning Israel's electoral system of pure proportional representation, and empowering premier's to dismiss wayward cabinet ministers without grievous political cost. Plainly, it is easier to lash out at the unlovable Avigdor Lieberman than muster the integrity and energy necessary to fix what is really wrong.

-- October 2010

Introducing Ed Miliband

The newly elected leader of the British Labor Party, 40-year-old Ed Miliband, pledged during his campaign to visit Gaza, the West Bank and Israel to see first-hand "what is happening on the ground." But Labor's first Jewish leader is expected to make Britain's budget and debt burden – not foreign affairs – his top priority. Though union support gave Ed Miliband his narrow margin of victory over brother David, he has moved quickly to jettison his "Red Ed" moniker.

What to make of Miliband's Jewishness? He makes no effort to deny his origins; neither is there any sentimentality for Jewish civilization. His parents fled Europe as Jews but raised their children to embrace exclusively "progressive" values. His Polish-born mother is an ardent pro-Palestinian activist. His late Belgian-born father was said to have evinced early Zionist sympathies before becoming permanently enamored with Marxism.

Plainly, Miliband will be no particular asset to Britain's 262,000-plus Jewish community. Likewise, his frosty attitude toward the Jewish state is not likely to undergo metamorphosis. He has described himself as a “critical friend of Israel” who opposes "blanket boycotts of goods from Israel." As a Euro-liberal he acknowledges Israel's right to self-defense purely in the abstract. For Miliband, even Israel's "right to exist" is implicitly conditioned on its ability to deliver "justice for the Palestinians." No wonder that party hard-liners fixated by the Palestinian Arab cause gravitated to his campaign.

Miliband takes the helm of a party that has always been of two minds about Zionism and Jews, its early association with the urban Jewish working classes notwithstanding. Nowadays, demographic and class shifts – there are fewer Jewish cabbies and more Jewish lawyers – have left Jews without influence in unions and their political loyalties mostly split between Labor and the Tories.

Founded in 1900, Labor began as an amalgamation of the Fabian Society, trade unions and a precursor socialist party. This did not automatically translate into tolerant attitudes toward Jews. The unions, for instance, supported passage of the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at restricting Jewish immigration from Czarist Russia. In 1911, trade unionists carried out a pogrom in Wales that forced out local Jewish merchants. On the other hand, in 1917, Labor warmly championed Jewish settlement in Palestine. And in 1922, Labor sent its first Jewish member, union leader Manny Shinwell, to parliament.

In the dark days before World War II, Labor only grudgingly accepted the necessity of rearmament against Nazi Germany. In opposition in 1944, Labor's platform was friendly toward Zionist aspirations; and in 1945 the party was calling for an end to Britain's heartless barring of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

All that changed within months of Labor's sweeping post-war election victory as foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, a former labor organizer with strong anti-Jewish prejudices, totally embraced the Arab line. The party remained hostile toward the Zionist enterprise until end of mandate and beyond. Paradoxically, this same Labor electoral victory sent an astounding 26 Jews to parliament. But as Prof. Geoffrey Alderman makes clear, not only did they not form a Jewish caucus, only six could be cajoled to venture the slightest public opposition to Bevin's catastrophic Palestine policies.

After Israel's War of Independence, the Labor government petulantly withheld diplomatic recognition until February 1949. Similarly, in 1956, Labor's Jewish MPs, then in opposition, refused to break ranks with party leader Hugh Gaitskell over his nasty criticism of Israel during the Sinai Campaign.

By the 1960s Labor's hard-left factions were on the ascendant. Yet even moderate prime minister Harold Wilson was cold to Israel's entreaties in the lead up to 1967 war. After Labor's 1979 defeat by Margaret Thatcher, the party only barely adjusted its leftward drift replacing Michael Foot with Neil Kinnock. The moderates regained control over the party when Tony Blair led "New Labor" to power in 1997. During Blair's long reign hostility toward Israel – and oftentimes obliquely toward Jews -- by Labor's supporters in the media, unions and academia became viral. Though Blair incessantly lobbied Washington to extract strategically costly diplomatic concessions from Israel during the second intifada, his continuing opposition to the Jewish state's de-legitimization tarred him as a philo-Zionist among leftists.

That era ended in May when Conservative David Cameron defeated Blair's successor Gordon Brown. Now, Miliband's victory makes it official: New Labor is finished.
Miliband is a radical optimist with a pragmatic streak. The new leader's hardheaded assessment may be that Israel-bashing provides few political benefits against an incumbent premier whose lack of empathy for the Zionist enterprise parallels his own.

-- September 2010

No Kudos to Castro

Castro's Conversion

I suppose for an entire generation, Fidel Castro is a harmless old baseball fan, and maybe a former principled Latin American revolutionary.

Forgotten is the fact that he tried to instigate a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States that would have cost millions of people their lives – though he's apologized for that, kind of.

And put aside that Castro deprived the people of Cuba of their liberty, tortured opponents and forced hundreds of thousands of Cubans into exile.

Realizing that his days on this earth are numbered and that he will soon go to meet Marx, he is in the process of rehabilitating his image.

And what better way to begin that process than by calling in a liberal Jewish American journalist (and an old Castro-hand, Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations) to have an extended conversation about Jews, Israel and Iran among other things.

The old dictator had read Goldberg's recent Atlantic article which argued – mistakenly in my view – that it was just a matter of time before Israel went to war against Iran to stop the mullahs from deploying atomic weapons.

Castro – now reinventing himself as some kind of humanist -- is all of a sudden worried about the danger of a nuclear conflagration.


So Castro drops Goldberg a couple of nuggets.

Does he think that Israel has a right to exist?

Uncle Fidel answers: "Si, sin ninguna duda" -- "Yes, without a doubt."

Gosh. I'm glad we got that out of the way.

And what about Jews, Goldberg asks? Does Uncle Fidel have a soft spot for Jews?

"I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything."

Not bad for a guy who kept equating Israelis with Nazis.

And what about Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial?

"The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust," Castro tells Goldberg.

Goldberg: "I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me."

Castro: "I am saying this so you can communicate it."

It gets better.

Now that Castro has dissented from Ahmadinejad, Goldberg reports that Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, has announced that he too, felt great "love and respect" for Jews."

Well, I suppose it's better than a slap in the face.

But let's get down to cases.

I do not like to see Castro air-brushing out the bad he has wrought. He's not getting a pass from me.

Castro is not an anti-Semite in the classical sense. Certainly, as a "dialectical materialist," he rejects Christian-rooted theological Jew-hatred. He admires Jews in history, most prominently Marx.

But his record of warfare – political, diplomatic, and military -- against the Jewish state is damning.

You can't want to snuff-out the Jewish state yet claim to love the Jews.

It would be like saying you love Muslims but want to destroy each and every one of the 57 Muslim states in the world because, maybe you think Islam is just a religion so Muslims don't deserve political states.

What follows is part of what Castro did against the Jewish state. And remember, he had no reason. Israel is on the other side of the world. We never did boo to him.

Castro began to train Palestinian Arab terrorists in Cuba in 1966. Keep in mind that there were no "occupied territories" in those days.

He did not break diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 following the Six Day War along with the rest of the Soviet client states.

He did so only in the wake of 1973 Yom Kippur War at a solidarity with the Palestinians meeting of the so-called non-aligned nations in Algiers.

Cuban military instructors trained Palestinian Arabs gunmen in Middle East countries starting in the 1970s.

That's when the Palestinians patented airline hijacking, slaughtering Olympic athletes and leaving bombs in supermarkets.

You may think 9/11 was the start of the terror campaign against airports around the world. But it was the Palestinian terrorists who got that ball rolling.

Anyway, in 1973 and 1974, Cuban MiG and helicopter pilots were actually based in Syria. I think they even engaged in dogfights with Israeli planes.

Castro granted diplomatic relations to the Palestine Liberation Organization and in 1974 and allowed the PLO to establish an "embassy" in Havana.

Bear in mind that at this stage the PLO did not even claim to recognize Israel or to accept a two-state solution. Nowadays it at least makes believe it does.

But in those days it behaved like Hamas does today.

Still Castro extended his support to a movement dedicated to "liberating" Palestine from the Jews.

In 1974, he stationed a tank brigade on Golan Heights. That same year, as many as 3,000 Cuban soldiers were based in Syria working for Assad I.

This is what Castro said in 1975: "It is no secret to anyone that at any given moment of danger and threat to the Republic of Syria, our men were in Syria."

By 1976, the CIA estimated that 300 Arab fedayeen were training in Cuba.

In 1977, Nayef Hawatmeh of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (an outfit set up to allow Christian-born Arabs who were Marxists to fight Israel alongside the Muslims) visited Cuba.

All along, mind you, Castro ostensibly claimed to support direct negotiations between parties.

In 1978, he hosted Yasser Arafat and George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Arafat's "state" visit to Havana was to discuss terror training not coexistence with Israel.

Fast forward to 1991: Cuba voted against a U.N. Resolution to revoke the infamous 1975 General Assembly Resolution that the Arabs pushed through besmirching Zionism (the national liberation movement of the Jewish people) as "racism."

In 2001, just as Arafat had launched his second intifada that would claim 1,000 Israeli lives, Castro called on the delegates attending the -- incongruously titled -- U.N. World Conference "Against Racism" in Durban, South Africa to "put an end to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people."

"Genocide"???!!

Now, fast forward to …today.

Cuba's Communist Party newspaper still "reports" on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict purely in black and white terms. Hence the headline:

"Palestine Refuses to Negotiate If Israel Resumes Colonization."

Look, I am delighted that Castro is not a Holocaust-denier, these days you can't take anything for granted. But he's still a defamer of Israel.

What would it take for me to bury the hatchet?

I want to see him take responsibility for what he did to Israel all these years.

I want him to stop Cuba from automatically voting with the Arab and Muslim bloc at the UN.

I want him to re-establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

Let him prove that his interview with Goldberg was the substantive beginning of a trend, not just an old commite trying to spin his image.

REBRANDING POLAND

How should Jews think of Poland?

As Israel's best friend in the European Union, according to the Israel Council on Foreign Relations and the Polish Institute for International Affairs, organizers of a recent [September 19-20] Jerusalem conference which marked the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries twenty years ago.

It is time, they emphatically say, to take a more nuanced view of Poland; to obsess less about the killing fields implanted on Polish soil by Nazi Germany and reflect more broadly on the preceding 1,000 years of Jewish civilization.

It's not an easy sell. The image framed by Polish-born former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir of Poles imbibing anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk persists. The reasons are plain.

Before a single Nazi boot set foot in Poland, Jewish college students had been obliged to sit on segregated classroom benches. By 1937 a "cold pogrom" had systematically eliminated Jews from Polish economic life. There is Jedwabne, where in July 1941, 1,600 Jews were burned alive in a barn by local Poles before the Nazis could lay hands on them. There is the 1946 pogrom in Kielce which claimed the lives of 42 Jews who had survived the Holocaust.

Moreover, Communist Poland's post World War II record toward Jews and Israel is also spotty. To its credit, Poland allowed the Haganah to set up a military training camp and was among the first to recognize Israel's independence. On the other hand, when Stalin's policy shifted against Israel so did Poland's. By 1953 Israeli diplomats had been declared persona non grata.

The elevation of Wladyslaw Gomulka in 1956 improved matters. Relations remained muted, but Polish authorities permitted tens of thousands of Jews to make aliya. However, with the 1967 Six Day War, Gomulka not only broke diplomatic and trade relations with Israel, anti-Semitism again became an element of domestic propaganda. In the 1970s low level trade ties with Israel resumed. By 1986, as the party began having doubts about the permanence of the Soviet empire, Poland sought improved relations with Israel in the transparent hope of impressing the U.S. "Jewish lobby" and thereby swaying Washington.

Momentously, relations between democratic Poland and Israel were re-established shortly after the communists lost power. Since then Warsaw has gone to great lengths to rebrand its image among Jews. When the Soviets allowed indirect Jewish immigration to Israel, Poland in 1990 crucially provided a clandestine staging area enabling 100,000 souls to reach Zion. In 1995, Poland created the post of minister plenipotentiary for Polish-Jewish relations.

Over the years, President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were all welcomed in Poland. Jewish travelers describe a country whose elites genuinely want to turn over a new leaf. Israeli and Jewish authors are prominently featured in bookstores. Kletzmer music is all the rage. A renewal of Jewish life is underway. And a Jewish museum is under construction in Warsaw.

Annual trade between Poland and Israel stands at $500 million. Polish entrepreneurs seek to invest in Israeli hi-tech; Israelis are active in Polish real estate. Israeli-owned companies are a presence in Poland. Teva ranks as the number two pharmaceutical firm there.

Israeli analysts assert that Poland has become an invaluable diplomatic asset to Israel within the EU -- siding with Jerusalem against the tainted Goldstone Report; refusing to participate in the Durban II conference; derailing a Swedish initiative on Jerusalem inimical to Israeli interests, and as Europe's leading voice against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's despicable Holocaust denial. Deepening Israel-Polish security cooperation has become a further element in the relationship. And in November relations are to be taken to an unprecedented level when Poland's top leadership echelon is expected to arrive in Israel for inter-ministerial meetings.

All Poland asks in return is for Israelis to see it with fresh eyes and to influence other Jews to do so as well. Not to ignore the ignoble aspects of Polish history, but to place them in the context of a very long, at times positive, and always complex relationship. For some Jews – influenced less by realpolitik than by painful memories – this may be asking too much.

September 2010

London's Jewish Museum

The next time you are in London, make it a point to visit the Jewish Museum .

I was there over the Rosh Hashana holidays. The museum is located near two Northern Line tube stations in Camden Town. It is new, open, sunny and not overwhelming.

I started out on the top floor which is showing a temporary exhibit of illuminated Hebrew manuscripts some of which were on loan from the Vatican -- which I know begs the questions: where did they get them from? And several others which came from various British universities.

Most are of Jewish interest though some are also of Christian interest.

The exhibit which ends on October 10 is modest in size -- as is the museum, but worthwhile.

Downstairs is a permanent installation on British Jewish History. Just the right amount of explanation...audio visual ... and artifacts.

Jews first came to England in 1066. I learned that the first blood libel took place in Norwich in 1144.
And that Jews were forced to wear distinctive badges.

In 1290 the Jews of England were expelled. That explains why Shakespeare who died in 1616 could not have come across many Jews.

The Jews were allowed to return to England in 1656.

By 1855 there was a Jewish Lord Sheriff.

In 1858 Rothschild was allowed to be sworn in on a Hebrew bible as a member of Parliament.

In the 1880s England experienced a great immigration. This coincided with the pogroms on Russia. The East End became a major Jewish neighborhood -- like New York's Lower East Side. So Jews were big in Whitechapel.

I learned further that Jewish women did piece work: making cigarettes and were paid 2 shillings and sixpence for 1,000. The tools they used were on display.

At their economic situation improved, the Jews moved to better neighborhoods like Stoke Newington.

Between the wars there was upward mobility and that is how it transpired that many Jews became cabbies in London. Yiddish was out and English was in.

In 1938-39 the community took in some 10,000 children from Europe ...rescued from Hitler's clutches.

On the main floor there is a general exhibit on Judaism which I thought was very well done. Plenty of good explanations for beginners. There is also a small Holocaust section anchored to a British Jewish citizens who found himself in Europe and survived the Holocaust.

Israel does not feature prominently -- but it does feature -- in the museum; this is not a museum about Israel. It is mostly aimed at British people including non-Jews.

There is a gift shop and a cafeteria which sells sandwiches (kosher + meat) and soups as well as hot drinks. A bit overpriced for my budget but pleasant.