Who Lost the Democratic Party?

For some decades after 1949, US politicos debated how the Communist Party under Mao Zedong managed to seize the China mainland from Chiang Kai-shek’s American-backed Kuomintang Nationalists. Were Washington’s policies to blame for the loss of China? Who lost China?

I thought about that historical debate as the IDF’s “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” which began on May 10 slogged on and as I beheld the US Democratic Party’s near abandonment of Israel.

Was it something we did? Was it payback for a dozen years of Binyamin Netanyahu tying our country to the Republican Party? And more latterly to a Trumpian GOP.

I have argued that Donald Trump’s administration did incalculable damage to the stability, mores, and resiliency of the American political system and what’s bad for America is bad for Israel. Brownnosing Trump may have been obligatory, but brand Israel paid the price. I had no doubt that Trump had it in him to proffer a bad “deal” to Israel if only Palestinian diplomacy had been adroit. Providentially, instead of playing Trump, Mahmoud Abbas went into a deep sulk,

Whatever his mistakes, however, Netanyahu did not lose the Democrats. What lost Israel the support of Democrats is the party’s demographic, social, and political makeup. Barring the sexagenarian-plus crowd who still retain a spark of pro-Israelism, the sentiment of the party is with “Palestine.”

How come? Start with African American voters, whose numbers alone make them a potent Democratic constituency. Historically speaking, Black Americans have not been a reservoir of philo-Semitism. Add in the three-million-strong Muslim community that’s lately come of political age. There are four Muslims in the US Congress but that belies their influence. Both Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian Arab, and Ilhan Abdullahi Omar are combative charismatic personalities, PR savvy, and committed to anti-Israelism. Omar is also one of 56 members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Into this interlocking directorate factor about 90 House members who align with the Congressional progressive caucus. Uber-progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leading efforts to block arms sales to Israel.

This brings me to the Democrats’ Jewish constituency. Jewish America has changed irrespective of the Arab-Israel conflict. Few US Jews ever voted based on a candidate’s support for Israel. Now, the American Jewish community is shrinking, and its identity is fading. Sure Jewish progressive Democrats in the coming decade will still eat kosher-style-plant-based deli, chortle at comedians offering shtick stand-up, but the serious sacrifices they’ll make will be at the Altar of Woke. I’m saying changes in America and within the US Jewish community – and not Israeli policies per se – have driven a permanent wedge between us in Israel and much of our family in the US. This is not an original insight but it deserves to be reiterated.

We don’t see things differently – we see different things.

Part of the “credit” goes to the assiduous efforts of progressive Jews (encouraged by various administrations since Jimmy Carter and plenty of dark money) to dissociate the American Jewish community from Israeli policies toward the Palestinian Arabs. I wrote about this trend back in 1994. There have been influential non- and anti-Zionist American Jews since there’s been an Israel. Only briefly, between 1967 and 1973 were ardently pro-Zionist American Jewish leaders ascendant. The narrative that it took courage to criticize Israeli policies inside or outside the Jewish establishment is bogus. It has been peddled since David Ben-Gurion’s days.

The J-Streeting of American Jewry has been 48 years in the making. The idea was always to offer US Jews fed up with the “occupation,” “settlements,” dead Gaza babies, West Bank checkpoints, settler fanatics, and in-your-face-Judaism, an off-ramp that leads to a new normal. For some, J Street’s sham “pro-Israel and pro-peace” mantra is not enough, and they’ll slither down to more radical anti-Zionist groups with their own clergy, catechisms, and utopian theology.

Given this lay of the Democratic land, heartfelt kudos to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, age 81, who has held off anti-Israel resolutions in the House. When the time comes, her successor, to paraphrase Exodus 1:8, will not know Israel. If there will be such a bird as an unequivocally pro-Israel House Democrat, they will be in the closet and shtum.

The Senate’s leading progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have labored to salvage Hamas’s battered fortunes by demanding Israel adhere to a premature ceasefire. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Brooklyn Jew, has seen no political downside to letting Israel twist slowly in the wind. New Jersey’s Sen. Robert Menendez, Chairman the Foreign Relations Committee, once a reliable friend of Israel, let Schumer be his moral beacon. But it’s not personal – it’s strictly politics. The Democratic side of Capitol Hill is today J Street-occupied territory.

In this context, Israelis need to express Hakarat HaTov – gratitude – to 78-year-old President Joe Biden for having Israel’s back during the first 11 days of the conflict. He had supported Israel for as long as he politically could, repeatedly blocking Western Europe and the Arabs from pushing through one-sided anti-Israel UN Security Council resolutions. He kept lines of communications open with Netanyahu, made his criticisms as private as such interchanges allow, and refrained from publicly panning the Jewish state.

Thank you, Mr. President. 

We Israelis appreciate that you are among the last of a generation of Democrats who are Israel-friendly even though you disagree with some of our policies. I know there will be a price to pay for your forbearance, and we will face your demands when the time comes.

Ancient Israelite history teaches us that forming alliances is a tricky business. Under conditions now extant in Washington, progressive Democrats have sided with the Islamic Resistance Movement of Hamas. In contrast, Trumpian Republicans are pro-Israel and viscerally antagonistic toward the Islamist agenda.

So Republicans and Israel are political bedfellows. I am grateful for GOP support, mindful that politics is about interests, not friendships. I’d prefer if the Democrats reversed themselves on Woke and the GOP reversed itself on Trumpism. However, realistically Israel needs to play the cards it has been dealt.

Politics in the grownup world is seldom straightforward. That helps explain why Israel simultaneously bombs Hamas installations in Gaza and supplies the territory with water, electricity, and truckloads of food and supplies. 

A final word. If you are a befuddled young Jew in the US and facing what The New York Times has the chutzpah to characterize (for it has spent decades fanning the flames) an “identity crisis” because woke-ism is at odds with pro-Israelism, I ache for you.

It is a make-or-break moment. I pray you consider siding with the Jewish people in the land of Israel. Come on aliya. Come up to Zion. Help us repair our imperfect Zionist enterprise. Serve in the IDF. Learn Hebrew. Become Jewishly literate. Struggle with Judaism and how to make it personally meaningful in your homeland. Discover the Covenant.

Such a choice requires tremendous spiritual and emotional strength. So it depends on what you want for the children of your children (there's a thought!) and how best they can be “a light unto the nations.” 

Our bad bet on Hamas: the Sheikh Jarrah intifada (with Addendum)

With Israel in the grip of domestic anarchy and under attack from Palestine-Gaza, it is difficult to maintain a dispassionate perspective. So, I tell myself that this conflict began before I was born before even Israel was reborn. That Arab opposition to the idea of a Jewish national homeland in Eretz Israel dates back over 100 years.

If you are Jewish and oppose political Zionism and believe Israel never had a right to be born or that we were born in original political sin of the Balfour Declaration, I have nothing to say to you. I do not engage in polemics with Jews for Jesus, Scientologists, messianic Chabadniks, or Jewish quislings. What's the point? Disappointed? Get your relief here: https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ

However, if you are stuck in the density of the forest and can't see the wood for the trees, you need to know that the Arabs are engaged in a zero-sum, winner-take-all game. They do not countenance our presence. They utterly reject the legitimacy of our claims to any part of this country. No Arab leader says Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. The millennial generation of Palestinian Arabs was raised on a narrative of victimization, taught to demonize us by a generation that had already canonized the Book of Intransigence. The most moderate Palestinian Arab member of Israel's Knesset sees us as colonial interlopers and as the "occupation." An occupation, they’d say, that in 1967 we extended to the West Bank and Gaza.

In 2005, we unilaterally pulled out of Gaza, but their line is that we didn't. Indeed, we supply Gaza with its electricity and water. Ours is a Kafkaesque relationship with Palestine-Gaza, which is simultaneously at permanent war with Israel and in permanent dependency to Israel. Through COGAT https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/faq/faq_gaza we try to square what really can't be squared.

Palestine-Gaza should be the Singapore of the Middle East. Instead, it is more like Hezbollah-Lebanon. That is the choice of the Islamic Resistance Movement, popularly known as Hamas. And if free elections were held in Gaza and in the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, surveys show Hamas would win. So, the choice to turn Sunni Gaza into Iran's rabid lapdog of Shi'ite imperialism is a price Palestinian Arabs are willing to pay in their vitriolic hatred of Israel.

Now, I want to zoom in on the events of the past several weeks. 

This did not need to happen. It caught us with our pants down.

The conflict finds us at a point where tribalism is superseding Israelism. We have what amounts to a caretaker government. Many key ministerial positions are unfilled or are held by ministers who barely speak with the prime minister.

Voters keep going to the polls – in 2015, twice in 2019, in 2020, and in 2021. The Binyamin Netanyahu-led Likud keeps winning a plurality but can't muster or maintain a governing majority. There are two main blocs: pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu. The anti-Netanyahu camp is comprised of disparate parties and personalities that run the gamut of Israel's political spectrum.

Now, the country is on its way to a fifth round of elections.

If Netanyahu had the country's best interests at heart, he would step aside so that Likud colleagues Nir Barkat or Tzachi Hanegbi, or Israel Katz could become acting prime minister and form a broad-based Emergency Unity Government whose goal would be to uproot the Islamic Resistance Movement from operating as a military force in Palestine-Gaza.

But Netanyahu's biggest bet has been on Hamas. Every month he funnels $100 million of Qatari money into Gaza to keep Hamas afloat. "Success Has Many Parents, Failure is an Orphan." His wager failed. It will go down in history as Netanyahu's Oslo. Like Oslo, if the stars had been perfectly aligned it might have delivered de-facto peace for a generation. It is too bad Bibi’s gambit has proven a colossal mistake. 

Zooming in further: Netanyahu's appointment in May 2020 of the utterly incompetent Amir Ohana as Public Security Minister (he has paltry security experience compared to more talented alternatives) set off a series of unintended consequences that undermined the public's faith in law enforcement during the COVID-19 epidemic. 

Ohana and Netanyahu then selected Kobi Shabtai, a not-ready-for-prime-time policeman, to become Israel's top cop. His primary qualification for the job is that he is not unsympathetic to the prime minister's legal (i.e., criminal) predicament. 

The Ohana-Shabtai team first brought us Meron, and now this.

Last night, Arab mobs driven by primeval religious fervor again ran murderously amok. These are Arab citizens of Israel, so the dilemma of containing their violence without resorting to live fire is real. Now Netanyahu is planning to empower the IDF to operate against the Arab insurrection inside the Green Line. An army is not a police department. If the IDF is fielded, it will not be to give out parking tickets.

No Arab Knesset member or sheik or imam seems to have any influence over the Arab youths who are on the rampage. They've tried. Some Arab analysts say the violence has been egged on by powerful Arab criminal syndicates that hold sway in many Arab townships and cities. The analysts point out that Israel allowed a criminal infrastructure to take root so long as it was only Arabs killing Arabs (and they were with abandon). Now the chickens have come home to roost.

Whether instigated or lobotomized, a violent genie has been released from the Seventh Circle of Hell intent on "defending" the hemispherical golden shrine known as the Dome of the Rock and the nearby Al Aksa mosque situated on the Temple Mount inside Jerusalem's Old City meters from the Western Wall.

And if you're wondering, no – Israel does not constrict Muslim worship at these shrines. However, we do not allow them to be used as staging areas for attacks against the Western Wall. To my knowledge, Islamic prayer does not call for rocks or bullets in any of its five daily services.

Historically, false Muslim Palestinian Arab claims that the Haram esh-Sharif or the Temple Mount compound is in danger have been exploited to set off anti-Zionist violence since the 1920s. These tempests sporadically erupt when burning politics mixes with scorching air over blistering terrain. To paraphrase Robert Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan), "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

As for this particular eruption – why now? The answer is Sheikh Jarrah.

All of us are paying the price because a group of ultra-nationalist-orthodox true believers and their misguided financial patrons in the US (none of whom consider themselves fanatics) wanted to swing their dicks around (beg your pardon, ladies). Here is my earlier take on Sheik Jarrah https://onjewishcivilization.com/2021/05/07/sheikh-jarrah-because-we-can/ 

We were stupid. They are lying. There is no government policy to drive Arabs out of their homes or out of Jerusalem. Nearly 40 percent of the population is Arab. The city’s current mayor is trying to rectify the municipality’s laissez faire attitude about service delivery in the Arab sector. Yet it would help if the Jerusalem Arabs exercised their right to vote instead of boycotting as both the PLO and Hamas demand.

In ordinary times coexistence – sometimes cordial, other times grudging – prevails not just in Jerusalem and the West Bank but throughout Israel. It was a glimmer of hope, sometimes strongly felt sometimes less so. And, frankly, there’s no viable alternative. In fact, adding to the convergence of factors that has hurled us toward calamity, Hamas may have been worried that Knesset Member Mansour Abbas, a Hebrew University educated dentist and head of the United Arab List would lead his Islamist party into, or support from the outside, the next government. He was being courted by both Netanyahu and the anti-Netanyahu camp. Hamas needed to torpedo that because it undermined the narrative that Arabs who did not flee during the 1948 War of Independence were living under “occupation.”

But there’s no sugarcoating it – Sheikh Jarrah was the spark. The Arabs rioted atop the Temple Mount last Friday night under the mistaken conviction that Sheikh Jarrah was somehow the final bulwark before the Shrine itself was breached. That elicited a fathomable but imprudent police response. If the police had professional guidance, they might have found a better way to handle the violent onslaught. In the event, they lobbed stun grenades at Arabs who were throwing rocks (and worse) from inside the Shrine.

Let me pause to remind you that the Palestinian Muslims who manage the Shrine take the position that any Jewish presence in the compound is pollution and a desecration. It is a religious chauvinism that cosmopolitan Europeans and progressive Americans conveniently dismiss with a bat of an eye.

The Israeli Police response ignited uncontrollable rioting that spread throughout Israel and presented Hamas with an opportunity it was incapable of resisting – or maybe helped orchestrate from the get-go.

In any event, toward the end of Ramadan, it all blew up on Jerusalem Day shortly after Netanyahu dithered about whether it was a good idea to allow Jewish young people to have a celebratory march around Jerusalem's Old City walls.

Further darkening our skies, in response to runaway and asymmetrical Arab violence, Jewish louts festering on the underside of our own society – whether in benighted football fan clubs or on hilltops where apocalyptic antinomian mindsets prevail and instigated by their duly elected Knesset representatives and God-inspirited clerics – took the law into their own vigilante hands.

They smashed Arab-owned shop windows, tried to lynch random Arab passersby, and taunted frantic and aggrieved worshippers outside their mosques.

In other words, these Jews signaled that they had no faith in the legitimate institutions of the Zionist state – if that is not post-Zionism, then what is?

Netanyahu gave the Haredim autonomy, and we saw the lamentable results during COVID. He gave the Arabs autonomy when he took a hands-off approach to "honor killings" and runaway criminal behavior within the Arab sector. He allowed Hamas to build its arsenal as long as it didn't shoot at us. In the short term, all this bought quiet. 

I am not finished….

On the military front, the IDF cannot stop Hamas from launching rockets on our cities and settlements. Unless we were to play by Assad Rules, doing so is militarily impossible. Now, Gulf Arabs wonder if their bet on us as a "strong horse" against Iran was smart after all.

Presently, a ground incursion into Gaza looks like it might be on the offing. Maybe that is what Hamas wants. We go in. They capture one of our boys (or hold on to a fresh body), and we are in another Gilad Shalit nightmare. Paradoxically, some of the Palestine-Gaza leaders now running the show were released by Netanyahu in a 2011 prisoner exchange.

We Israelis enabled Netanyahu’s bad bet on Gaza. It was quiet in most of the country. We turned away from our fellow Israelis who lived along the border with Palestine-Gaza and suffered the “occasional” booby-trapped explosive balloon, mortar, or rocket attack.   

The Sheikh Jarrah intifada has allowed Hamas to make political strides at the expense of Arab Knesset members and the PLO in Ramallah. To the untutored it looks as if there are no Green Line/Israeli Palestinians or West Bank Palestinians or Gaza Palestinians or Diaspora Palestinians. There is only one Palestinian people with Hamas as its champion. By forcing the demilitarized PLO out of any political role in east Jerusalem, by forbidding Jerusalem Arabs to send in postal ballots in the now canceled Palestinian Authority elections Israel created a political vacuum filled by Hamas.

Moreover, do not discount the fact that the PLO in Judea and Samaria has not turned its guns on the IDF. Better to have a modus operandi with a faction that dreams of our phased destruction than with the Islamic Resistance Movement which is lobbing thousands of rockets at us. If we take Iran at its word why do we not take Hamas at its word?

As we approach Shabbat and the Shavuot holiday, the Biden administration has blocked a one-sided Security Council resolution sponsored by the Europeans. Thank you, Mr. President. But instead of appreciating their efforts, Netanyahu's churlish UN diplomat said it was not enough because the State Department made some noises to which no one was paying attention.

Now, worryingly, the president, the German Chancellor, and other European leaders all say that "Israel has a right to defend itself."  Whenever I hear that sort of Diplo-speak I know there’s a “but” coming down the line.

If you pray, pray the IDF has time to defang Hamas.

 

Erev Shavuot Addendum

 

The New York Times has an expose today (16 May) fed to it by an Israeli foreign-funded NGO operative. It turns out that on Israel Memorial Day Eve 13 April, which coincided with the first day of the violence-prone Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israeli officials blocked Islamist clerics atop the Temple Mount from blasting loudspeakers from “four medieval minarets” during a Jewish memorial service below.  The President of Israel was speaking, and authorities did not want his remarks to be drowned out.

Perhaps in an alternative universe the Times might carry a story headlined: “Muslim Clerics Lower Volume of Loudspeakers Out Sensitivity to Jewish Mourners.”

In this universe, we Israeli Jews engage in lots of soul-searching. And I do it in my blog above. It is crucial to keep an open mind ... just not so open that your brain falls out.

Besides the Loudspeaker Expose, on Saturday, the Times and several other unfriendly-to-Israel media outlets expressed chagrin that the IDF spokesman may have fed them disinformation on Israeli troop movements -- which they duly disseminated -- only to discover that it might have been part of an Israeli ploy to expose the whereabouts of enemy forces

I know this is hard for the Woke Community to get their head around, but Marquess of Queensberry rules are not honored anywhere in the Middle East. Israel will not be the first to introduce Marquess of Queensberry rules to the region.

The US can pack up and leave Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam and abandon its former allies to fend for themselves. You gotta do what you gotta do. I get that.

And we gotta do what we gotta do.

Look at it this way:  If we hitched our survival to the whims of The New York Times editorial board the result would be that Jewish Americans might have to add extensions to their Holocaust museums and memorials – alas, another Six Million Jews gone. Tsk. Tek.

They’d recall, tearing up, that as the Zionists went down they recited Mahatma Gandhi's catechism: "An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind."

Jewish America would be so very proud of the example Israel set.

Yet committed Jewish peoplehood we Israelis prefer to defend our homeland. The price we pay is the UN Security Council -- with the People's Republic of China in the president's chair -- will denounce us as human rights violators. The Times and the Woke Community will get to enjoy the moral high ground from the slopes of Manhattan’s West Side. Our image as the neighborhood bully of the Middle East will be reinforced.

It is a price most Israelis are willing to pay.

 

Sheikh Jarrah because we can

It’s 2021. The swamps have been drained, roads and airports secured. Strategically – imperatively – Israel controls the territory between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan (excluding the Gaza Strip held by Hamas).

The conflict that began over 100 years ago between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian Arabs remains a zero-sum game. This is something outside observers and global media do not fathom. No Arab leader – including the octogenarian denizen of Ramallah’s Mukataa – accepts the legitimacy of a Jewish state anywhere in the Land of Israel.

The root cause of the conflict is unresolvable. Two camps have a claim to the same Land. I believe that the Zionist claim is the stronger one. No one has to convince me that we are right and they are wrong. No one will convince me that we are all right and they are all wrong.

I do not discount persistent Arab claims. They have engaged in bloodlust and innumerable self-defeating maneuvers blinded by their misplaced righteousness and sense of victimization.

So, we need to operate on that basis.

Faced with a comparable dangerous conflict between Taiwan and China over the future of the island, Beijing’s late leader Deng Xiaoping decreed that all-out war was ill-advised and that it should be left to a future wiser generation to resolve the struggle somehow.

This is also good advice in the case of the Land of Israel/Palestine.

The Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Green Line have their accommodationists prepared for practical reasons to make a truce with us and honor it. Some of these leaders are nationalists, and others are Islamists.

A truce is clearly in everyone’s interest and could be within reach. There would be violations because when an extremist cuts a deal, some uber-extremists will see an opportunity to fill the vacuum. There is always someone more dedicated to the will of Allah and, let’s face, on our side, someone more unaffectedly devoted to Eretz Israel.

But most of us on both sides do not want to be mobilized 24/7 in violent ideological skirmishing. There are groceries to buy, mortgages to pay, a kitchen floor to wash down, and laundry to fold. Children need to be taken to the dentist and elderly parents to medical appointments.

My Trump-supporting non-religious cousin in Brooklyn thinks “Israel should have thrown out the Arabs like Rabbi Kahane said years ago. It is simple. It’s not complicated!” His is an anger-fueled judgment that makes sense from 6,000 miles away because at that distance, humanity, ethics, and Jewish values are blurred. Commonsense vaporizes. Of course, if you are an Israeli religiopolitical fanatic, proximity to the Arabs is no less morally blinding, and the cognitive dissonance between what your clerics are teaching you and what you see out the window must be disorientating.

This brings me to Sheikh Jarrah a neighborhood located not far from the Mandelbaum Gate, the pre-1967 checkpoint between the Israeli and Jordanian sectors of Jerusalem. These days motorists headed to the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus use the district to circumvent traffic congestion on the main thoroughfare where the light rail also runs.

After Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Arabs fled west Jerusalem capital of the reborn Jewish state, and Jews were forced out of the Old City and the eastern sectors of the city as Jordanian occupation forces moved in. On the west side of Jerusalem, Jewish people moved into former Arab houses. On the east side of Jerusalem, Arabs moved into houses that formerly belonged to Jews.

Not just private homes. Several stately office buildings in central Jerusalem had been Arab-owned.

After Israel liberated eastern Jerusalem (including Sheikh Jarrah) in 1967, some former Jewish homeowners began litigation to reclaim their properties. Arabs abroad who owned property in west Jerusalem had no parallel legal recourse.

Israeli courts have upheld the claims made by the estates of several original Jewish owners. Arabs living for decades in these Sheikh Jarrah properties are to be evicted.

Let’s be frank. The Jewish claims are inspired by Hardel alt-right extremists funded by gormless middle-class American and British Orthodox Jews. The dogmatists dream of a country cleansed of Arabs, Jewish leftists (and who is not a leftist in their eyes?), homosexuals, and cosmopolitans. The zealots scan the hills of Jerusalem and envision erecting a Third Temple that would kickstart the messianic era.

Any day now the Israeli Supreme Court will decide the fate of the contested homes in Sheikh Jarrah. I hope the justices rule against the Jewish claims whatever their technical legal merit. For it is unfair to allow Jews to reclaim homes and Land while forbidding Arabs to make similar claims on the Israeli side of the Green Line.

But mainly because displacing the Arabs in Sheikh Jarrah (where there is already a longstanding barbed wire Jewish encampment) does not enhance Israeli security or sovereignty. Forcing more Jews into Sheikh Jarrah is unwise. It exacerbates tensions. It pushes away the possibility of a lasting truce. It tarnishes what is left of our brand overseas.

I think the rule of thumb should be that just because we Zionists can do something – legally or because we have the power – doesn’t mean we necessarily should. Not dancing around the Old City during Ramadan. Not forcing Muslims from hanging out on the steps outside the Damascus Gate. Just because we can rub the enemy’s nose in the ground doesn’t mean we should.

With sovereignty comes heavy ethical and moral responsibilities and a need for political self-abnegation.

The Palestinian Arab enemy is implacable. And more and more, some of us are taking on the trappings and mindset of their religiopolitical fanaticism.

The Zionist enterprise remains brittle notwithstanding our strategic control over the Land. If our Third Commonwealth were to fall, it will not be because we did not build enough settlements in the Land of Israel but because any semblance of internal consensus crumbled. Over the long haul, the tribes of Israel divided against each other cannot stand. Sheikh Jarrah further divides us.

I do not intuit a Jewish consensus to incite a religious war against the Sunni Palestinian Arabs as Ramadan comes to a close (May 12), as we mark the reunification of Jerusalem (May 9-10), as they register our very existence as their nakba catastrophe (on May 15) and as we head into Shavuot on May 16.

Relatively small but vocal fanatical Jewish forces are propelling us toward a pointless cataclysm. Their Arab enablers — with Mohammad Deif in the vanguard — are only too happy to oblige.

Meron - Where a Lifestyle Demands Risk Taking - and When Soul-Searching is not an Option

 

Just as the oblivious are oblivious to being oblivious, fanatics are oblivious to their fanaticism. People who live within subcultures where extreme zeal is the norm view mainstream society as abnormal. Excessive and unreasonable religiosity appears ordinary if you swim in a subculture unmoored from enlightenment and reason.  

Where is the boundary between the religious pilgrim and religious fanatic?  Between the religiously observant (which I consider myself) and the fanatic? 

Some Hindus voluntarily let themselves be trampled by specially decorated cows as a sign of piety. Most Hindus don't.  Muslim pilgrims have been stampeded on the haj in Mecca. Hundreds of Buddhists have also been killed on pilgrimages.

All opiates the masses turn to have some inherent danger. Sports fanatics have also been stampeded to death. So have disco, rock concert, and nightclub revelers.

These thoughts race through my mind as  I try to process the events overnight (Thursday-Friday, April 30) at Mt. Meron, where at least 44 believers were crushed to death and dozens more hospitalized as they pushed their way toward a shrine.

Traditionally – or superstitiously – take your pick, many of the ultra-faithful spend the Lag B’Omer festival at the gravesite of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a Mishnaic sage for his hillula (yahrzeit).

Rebbe’s and clerics with clout control who lights the massive bonfires, who gets close.

It all has something to do with the mystical Book of Zohar, a devastating ancient plague that ended on Lab B’Omer, and the conclusion of the counting of days between the Passover and Shavuot festivals.

Yet, the reasons for the mega-pilgrimage need not detain us since embellishments and evolving legends are organic to things religious as sects and seers infuse further meaning into an existing ritual.

Besides anthropologists, who goes to the Meron pilgrimage?  

Individuals on the ultra-religious and politically fanatic spectrum. Not just the nutters of (militantly anti-Zionist) Toldot Aharon and their ilk, and not just  (Hardal) MK Itamar Ben-Gvir and his ilk, but also your garden variety adolescent boys and young men (and women) channeling passion via religious zeal. Seekers. Believers. Chabad messianics. Ex-cons. Good people, most. The lost and the bored. People suffering ennui looking to be part of something significant and meaningful.

If this had been a tragedy that befell non-Haredim their clerics would be implying that the loss of life was avoidable if only – and this is a partial list in progress – the dead had not had sex with their menstruating wives, the boys had not masturbated, the females had dressed modestly, everyone had checked their mezuzahs, and scrupulously observed the sabbath in an ultra-Orthodox manner… for as we know such flaws led to the Holocaust and IDF helicopter accidents. 

In the instance of Meron, we can rule out Reform Judaism as a reason (which some rabbis say led to the Shoah).

Why would people want to crowd together at a time when the COVID epidemic is still a real threat? Why would they shlep their young children to such a place? Especially since getting back in time for Shabbat would be a problem. 

For the same reason, they continually behaved immaturely during the height of the COVID-19 plague: because the survival of their subculture demands risk-taking. Insularity from the mainstream necessitates the ongoing, daily, collective life of the sect. 

Collateral deaths are the price to pay for the lifestyle they have chosen.

In the days ahead, the long beards and their apologists will blame the police (whose instructions the fanatics routinely disregard and cops they effortlessly slur as Nazis). They will blame the government (though Prime Minister Netanyahu is deep in their pocket). Or the Egged bus service. 

However, very few will do any meaningful soul-searching. Few will question their lifestyle. 

It never ends. On May 9-10, a different subdivision of Jewish zealots will seek to clash with Muslim religious fanatics on the Temple Mount. Fanaticism fuels itself.

What makes last night's calamity so painfully throbbing is that it encapsulates so much of what is broken in the State of Israel in 2021 – disregard of law and order, indifference toward Derech Eretz, selfishness, religious smugness, political drift, and a spiritual vacuum at the national level.

בָּרוּךְ דַּיַּן הָאֱמֶת

 

 

 

Why now? Why are Arabs rioting in Jerusalem? Ten Points to Ponder

There are at least 10 reasons that I can think of (in random order) to explain what's happening in Jerusalem,

1.   As one Arab community organizer explained on Reshet Bet Sunday, Arab youths are bored. They have few facilities for sports or supervised recreation.

2. Social media lionizes terrible behavior.  Part of what set off the latest rioting was that Arab youths have been exploiting TikTok. They’ve filmed each other slapping or roughing up ultra-Orthodox Jewish passerby on the light rail or near Jerusalem’s Old City walls and posted the outrageous images.

The ultra-Orthodox and Arabs share the “seam” area that, until 1967, divided the city. Jordan had occupied eastern  Jerusalem and the West Bank. The TikTok attacks were unprovoked and (so far as I can gather) have drawn no condemnation from the Palestinian political or clerical echelon.

3.    In March, during Purim, drunk and disorderly anti-Zionist Haredim attacked an Arab van driver who got stuck in the neighborhood while the ultra-Orthodox demonstrating against the Israeli government. Fearing for his life, the driver accelerated and accidentally ran over and killed a Jewish bystander.

Connected to the above, some Haredim (and Lehava-affiliated Hardelnikim) see themselves as biologically and spiritually superior to everyone not like them.

 4.     During the month of Ramadan – which began Monday, 12 April and ends on the evening of Wednesday, May 12 – people fast all daylight while working as usual.  The faithful don’t get much sleep because they’re eating, celebrating, watching TV, and praying while it is still dark. So, when daylight comes again, nerves are frayed. In many places around the world, Ramadan is marked by intramural violence or violence against non-Muslims.

5.     Testosterone – Arab youths (and their Hardel + ultra-Orthodox counterparts) have no sanctioned outlet for sexual energy.

 6.     Damascus Gate Steps - Rather than create an inviting Ramadan outdoor festival space on the promenade outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate (the one Muslims tend to use to reach the Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock esplanade), the police forcibly forbade people from congregating.

One reason given is COVID restrictions, yet obviously, no distancing is or can be enforced on the Temple Mount. So, the Arabs understandably see the Damascus Gate step policy as humiliating. It is undoubtedly inconsistent. Some years hanging out on the steps is allowed, and some not.

7.     Palestinian Elections set for May 22  – various factions from Fatah to Hamas are keen to exploit any possibility of anti-Israelism to assert their bona fides.

The PLO demands that Arabs in metropolitan Jerusalem (including those who have Israeli blue ID cards) be allowed to vote in the Palestinian elections. 

My view is that Arabs who live in former Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem should be allowed to vote in Palestinian Authority elections just as they did in the 2005 PA presidential and 2006 Palestinian Authority legislative elections.

With an eye on the Smotrich-Ben Givir party, he needs to form a government, Netanyahu has let PA president and octogenarian-in-chief Mahmoud Abbas twist in the wind. He is not saying anything publicly about whether Israel will allow Jerusalem Arabs to vote. 

Abbas hints that if they can’t vote, he will put off the election. Rather convenient for him. It is an election his side is likely to lose to Hamas.

Hamas threatens that if the election is put off it will blame Israel (and maybe Abbas too) and launch more rockets from Gaza. For now, it says the rockets it is launching are in solidarity with Jerusalem Arabs.

8.     Netanyahu needs a crisis.

The PM’s usual modus operandi is to let a crisis fester before saying or doing anything.  He and his minion-ministers let days go by and said nothing about revolting anti-Arab violence. Obliquely, only on Saturday night did Bibi call on all sides to stand down.

Iran-Syria - His people leaked details about recent IDF attacks against Iran. The gloating may have led the mullahs to press Hamas to heat things up.

Dissing Jordan - Jordan does not influence the Jerusalem Arab street. Still, it does have some sway with the clerics who run the mosques on the Temple Mount.  On March 10/11 Netanyahu forced Jordan’s Prince Hussein bin Abdullah to cancel a scheduled visit to the Temple Mount. Supposedly the kerfuffle was over a disagreement over how many armed guards the prince could take up with him. Bibi also made Jordan beg for desperately needed water (which we are, I am pretty sure, obliged to provide under the peace treaty).

9.     Things really really got out of hand Thursday night when the police allowed hundreds of Lehava alt-right Jewish louts (and anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox hangers-on) to march provocatively into the Arab neighborhoods.

Some of these Jewish hoodlums also attacked Arab cleaners and restaurant workers in western Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s mayor had asked the police to ban the Jewish thugs from marching. However, he was told that legally the rally could not be preempted. Trust me. Had Bibi messaged the police to find a way to block the Lehava provocateurs, cops would have. But the mayhem fed the crisis. 

An aside: The anti-Zionist Edah HaChareidis rabbis have now instructed their randy youths not to participate in any further demonstrations or anti-Arab violence.

10.   100 Years of Conflict - The events over the past days, even if God forbid they cascade into a Third Intifada must be seen as another episode in a conflict that has spanned 100 year-plus. 

 It all started when we hit them back.