The opium of the Arabs

Stunted development


As American officials from Middle East envoy George Mitchell to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and from National Security Adviser James Jones to Dennis Ross, who's responsible for Mideast policy at the National Security Council, visit our region this week, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has just published its fifth report on conditions in the Arab world.

The UNDP tells us that many Arabs are shockingly poor; millions survive on less than $2 a day. Though 60 percent of the world's proven oil reserves are in the Middle East, the report's authors reveal that "Arab countries are actually less industrialized today than was the case four decades ago..."

We know from other sources that national identity is weak. It's been decades since the last colonial power quit the region, yet most Arabs still primarily identify themselves not as citizens of the country in which they live but as Arabs or Muslims. The Palestinian Arabs may be in a different category since their identity has been shaped by their confrontation with the Zionist enterprise.

Although the Arab fertility rate is declining (as more women obtain an education), young people with little hope of upward mobility today comprise a huge chunk of the Middle East population. Half of all Egyptians, for instance, are under 24. This helps explain why many turn to religious fundamentalism for solace.

In its coverage of the report, London's The Economist notes that most Arabs live under basically authoritarian regimes. The magazine, which is not known for its Zionist sympathies, points out that about the only genuinely free elections in the Arab world have been held under "occupation" - in the Palestinian Authority and Iraq. Still, insists The Economist, just as other parts of the Muslim world have transitioned to democracy so too can the Arabs. Perhaps. The magazine is right to say that democracy is more than just holding free elections; it also requires the inculcation of values such as tolerance and a respect for minority rights.

THE UNDP report was largely ignored by the state-controlled Arab media despite containing de rigueur criticism of Israel. The Arabs, and many Arabists in the West, have long embraced the neo-Marxist line that Middle East development has been stymied by outsiders - the oil companies, Western imperialists, Cold War warriors and, unsurprisingly, by the existence of a Jewish state in the region.

The Economist buys into some of this: "The job of the Arab moderates was made all the harder by Israel's recent wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Shocking television footage transformed both of these local fights into moments of pan-Arab and even pan-Muslim rage." The implication being that if only Israel had swallowed two separate cross border attacks in which Israeli soldiers were killed or taken hostage, the world would be a more peaceful place.

Still, with refreshing diversity, The Economist cites Mona Eltahawy, a New York-based Egyptian pundit, who explains that Israel is "the opium of the Arabs." "Resistance" to Israel's existence, she implies, provides Arabs with a convenient excuse for putting off political and economic development.

To the opiate analogy one might add that "settlements" have become like crack cocaine - a habitual pretext used by Mahmoud Abbas and others for not negotiating an end to the conflict. In truth, the settlement issue would become moot once negotiators agreed on final borders.

IT IS to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands that we owe a debt of gratitude for bankrolling the website, Menassat. It's ostensibly intended to promote press freedom and development among the Arabs and recently offered insight into Arab elite thinking on the UNDP report.

Writing from Beirut, Saseen Kawzally quoted approvingly Columbia University's Joseph Massad in damming the report for adopting "the rhetoric and terminology used by the US and Israel." Massad further criticized the English-language version of the report for, supposedly, casting a modicum of blame for the Gaza fighting on Hamas.

But it is Kawzally's indignation at the UNDP report for relegating the "occupation" to eighth place in a list of factors inhibiting Arab development that we find especially instructive. Thank you, taxpayers of The Netherlands. Your money is being used to perpetuate Israel as the opium of the Arabs.

Does ultra-Orthodox garb protect a Jew from sinning?

When righteous stumble

'For these defendants, corruption was a way of life," said New Jersey District Attorney Ralph Marra, speaking of rabbis and politicians ensnared in a $3 million money-laundering scandal.

For the rest of us, it was painful and embarrassing to watch Rabbi Saul Kassin, 87, the venerable leader of the Syrian Jewish community of metropolitan New York, being led away by federal agents.

Images of the arrested ultra-Orthodox Jews being escorted to a waiting bus generated headlines in the American press that said it all: "Is nothing sacred!" (The New York Daily News); "Walk of shame" (Newark Star Ledger); and "Kosher nostra & dirty Jersey" (The New York Post). The paper led its story with: "Everything was on sale - from politicians to kidneys."

ONE OF the reasons ultra-Orthodox Jews wear dark suits, wide-brimmed hats and ritual fringes hanging outside their trousers is as a self-reminder that the Holy One above is a constant presence. Dark colors remind the pious that life should not be taken frivolously - that its purpose is not to revel in the pleasures of the here and now, but to prepare a place for the soul in the eternal world to come. Haredi garb is intended to instill "fear of heaven."

Among the ultra-Orthodox - Hassidic, Lithuanian and Sephardi - distinctive dress is intended to make it difficult to sin publicly or privately. You can never blend in or forget who you are.

It would be unimaginable for a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews to be captured on camera robbing a bank or mugging an elderly pensioner who had just cashed a social security check; or beating a drug dealer senseless for selling heroin on a street corner they had staked claim to.

Plainly, however, haredi garb is not a foolproof protection against immorality.

Lately, the Jewish world has been roiled by the bad behavior of people who are identifiably Jewish. Sometimes it is not a matter of clothing.

Bernard Madoff, for instance, was described as an Orthodox Jew, not because of how he dressed but presumably because of his synagogue affiliation and the fact that he served on the boards of major Orthodox educational institutions. But the magnitude of Madoff's crimes was such that his garb was beside the point; his Jewishness was anyway in the public domain.

From the streets of Jerusalem to the streets of New Jersey, the media have lately been spotlighting what seems like an epidemic of ultra-Orthodox Jews behaving badly. In fact, the number of haredim who riotously attack police officers in Jerusalem or engage in money laundering in New Jersey is minuscule. And it would be stating the obvious to point out that the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews are law-abiding; many live simple, unadorned lives, genuinely focusing their energies on the study of Torah and the fulfillment of the mitzvot, down to their minutiae.

Yet were ultra-Orthodoxy a brand, one might argue that the "franchise" has taken a public-relations hit over the years. Fair or not, the stock of the entire ultra-Orthodox world declines when outwardly pious Jews turn out to be slumlords, child-molesters or wife-abusers, proprietors of nursing homes that neglect their residents, dealers in human organs, money-launderers, or those who have no compunction about hurling bricks through the windshields of cars on Shabbat.

REPENTANCE is an essential tenet of the Jewish way of life. So there needs to be some genuine soul-searching in the haredi world on two levels. Since it is now pretty much demonstrated that distinctive garb doesn't inoculate against unlawful behavior, what would?

And since these crimes also intimate a weakening of faith and an obsession with materialism, what steps can the faithful take to strengthen the tenets of their belief?

And what does this mean for the rest of us? It does not mean that those affiliated with other streams of Judaism, or the unaffiliated secular, can afford to be smug. Human beings are fallible.

Instead, it reinforces the idea that Judaism strives for a golden mean which combines fidelity to tradition with morality; ritual with responsibilities to our fellow human beings - and, it should go without saying, an obligation to adhere to the laws of the land.

Politics & Manipulation -- Obama & Netanyahu

Shabbat shalom to all --
elliot


A 'crisis' manipulated

Diplomacy involves an element of political manipulation - sometimes even psychological warfare. We're now witnessing this in the US-Israel relationship.

The Obama administration has made a strategic decision to pressure Israel pointedly, relentlessly and publicly, while, for now at least, asking little of the Palestinians. The diversionary issue employed in this campaign is housing construction over the Green Line.

Washington cannot realistically think that Israel is going to knuckle under and stop building within strategic settlement blocs, or in post-'67 Jerusalem. So it appears that the administration is engaging in confrontation for the sake of confrontation. The object? To gain credibility with the Arab world in the belief it will give them an incentive to make peace.

It's the same failed approach pursued by practically every administration since 1967 - only on hyper-drive. And this time, it's characterized by manipulatively overplaying the chasm in the US-Israel relationship.

Thus US Defense Secretary Robert Gates ostentatiously warns against an Israeli military strike on Iran's nuclear bomb-making facilities on the grounds that it would undermine American interests. Yet, as the clock ticks, Washington still hasn't quite figured out how to "engage" the mullahs and talk them out of building a bomb.

The manipulation comes in various forms: word from the State Department that talk of a cut in US aid to Israel over the settlement controversy is "premature;" stories leaked to Israeli pundits sympathetic to the administration's line - for example, that George Mitchell will be packing binding timetables requiring Israeli concessions when next he arrives in our region. Or claims that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama are headed for a "collision."

To heighten the sense of crisis, one newspaper here sympathetic to the administration's approach claims that the IDF is poised to evacuate all unauthorized West Bank outposts in one 24-hour blitz. The story is erroneous.

Further leaks claim that the Americans are planning an international peace conference which will find Israel isolated, facing the "moderate" Arab world, an unsympathetic Europe and an irritated administration. We're told that tensions between Washington and Jerusalem are so bad that the White House will send a "friendly face" (Dennis Ross) to accompany other ostensibly less sympathetic US officials.

IN RESPONSE, Israel engages in its own, clumsy manipulation.

Responding to implicit threats of a cut in military aid, the IDF is said to be "brainstorming" for the day when it will tell Washington what it can do with its $3 billion, because Israel will purchase what it needs to survive from Vladimir Putin's Russia.

And when our new ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, held his first overview meeting at the State Department, it was Israeli officials who leaked the false story that he had been "summoned" to hear US protests over Jewish housing construction in east Jerusalem.

The Netanyahu government is wrong to think that exacerbating the perception of a crisis in US-Israel relations is the wisest method of setting "red lines" for future negotiations with the Palestinians. There must be better ways to point out that the Shepherd Hotel is located in the geographically vital Sheikh Jarrah section of the capital, a couple of bus stops from Hebrew University. Nor is playing up bilateral tensions a smart way to encourage the pro-Israel community, already signaling uneasiness over White House tactics, to speak out.

IT'S TOO bad that the Obama administration, which came to Washington promising change, is going down the old, demonstrably counter-productive road of its predecessors. It too fundamentally misreads the source of Arab reluctance to make peace with Israel.

Washington acts as if both sides want the same thing: coexistence. But the Arabs still reject the right of a Jewish state to live anywhere in their midst; still favor demographically inundating Israel with Palestinian refugees and millions of their descendents; and still insist Israel pull back to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines.

Under these circumstances, the administration's one-sided pressure on Israel, and its tepid response to Netanyahu's historic Bar-Ilan speech, entrenches Arab intransigence.

It's an even bigger shame that the administration is expending so much energy on an approach that actually reduces the prospects of a breakthrough - and that in so doing, it is employing manipulative tactics that make mainstream Israelis even more fearful of taking risks for peace.

How the UN helps prolong the Arab-Israel conflict

Dump the CEIRPP


Over the years, the United Nations has done its fair share to prolong and exacerbate the Arab-Israel conflict. The explanation for this lies not with the world body conceptually, and certainly not with the ethos of its founders. But the UN can't but reflect the values shared by the bulk of its members, the efforts of an enlightened minority notwithstanding.

With the arguable exception of General Assembly Resolution 181, which in 1947 called for the establishment of independent Jewish and Arab states - and which the Arabs rejected out of hand - just about every subsequent UN/GA stand on the conflict has been to Israel's detriment. The most recent pertinent GA resolution, for instance, ES-10/18 of January 2009, basically regurgitated the Palestinian position on Operation Cast Lead, codifying it in international law.

There are now 192 member-states in the UN, most of which maintain diplomatic relations with both the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel. In practice, however, the PLO has a built-in majority for just about any resolution it champions. Start with the 22-member Arab League and add (though allow for some overlap) the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, then throw in "non-aligned" countries such as North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. The result is that one would be hard pressed to come up with a single instance in which the General Assembly sided with Israel against the Arabs.

Not once has the GA unequivocally reprimanded the PLO or Hamas for engaging in airline-hijackings, bus bombings and other forms of anti-civilian warfare. Israel, in contrast, is censured at every opportunity.

THE international body sank to its moral nadir on November 10, 1975, when the General Assembly passed the odious Resolution 3379, by a vote of 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions, labeling the national liberation movement of the Jewish people - Zionism - as a form of "racism." The fact that the resolution was revoked in 1991 by no means entirely removes the ethical stain with which the world body remains tarnished.

But perhaps the single most damaging step the organization took to institutionalize its bias against the Jewish state came with the creation in 1975 of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP).

Unlike the Kurds, Roma, Copts, Uyghur, Tibetans, and others peoples' who plead for international support, only the Palestinian Arabs have a permanent UN-funded body which does nothing but agitate on their behalf.

As part of a revolving door of injustice, each year the GA meets to "discuss" the "Question of Palestine" and each year it passes the recommendations of the CEIRPP. The biases of the committee have metastasized throughout the UN system owing to its ability to poison attitudes toward Israel from within.

It is the CEIRPP which came up with the charade known as the "International Solidarity Day with the Palestinian People," held annually on November 29, and which sponsors an array of meetings, seminars and conferences targeting Israel.

The committee - which convenes again today and tomorrow in Geneva - is comprised of Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Cyprus, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey and Ukraine.

It will not question the Palestinian decision to reject former prime minister Ehud Olmert's magnanimous 2008 peace offer. It will not tell the Palestinians that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's seminal Bar-Ilan speech offers a way forward toward. It will not tell the Palestinians to end their boycott of the peace negotiations. The CEIRPP will never call on Hamas to recognize Israel, end terror and accept previous Palestinian commitments - as demanded by the Quartet.

Of course, the committee will do none of these things - because its raison d'etre is not peace but the vilification of Israel.

That is why this newspaper endorses a campaign initiated by the New York-based the Anti-Defamation League urging UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to dismantle the committee on the grounds that it is the "single most prolific source of material bearing the official imprimatur of the UN which maligns and debases the Jewish state."

The CEIRPP is also an obstacle to peace - it needs to go.

London Jewish School Crisis

The JFS lesson

The decision earlier this month by a British appeals court, holding that the admissions policy of the country's largest Jewish school was illegal, underscores a schism within the Jewish world over identity, conversion and the nature of our civilization.

The school, JFS, was chartered in 1732 under Orthodox auspices but had long maintained an enlightened approach toward all segments of the community. The litigation came about because JFS now admits only converts who meet the standards of the haredi-oriented London Beth Din, which is out of touch with the majority of Britain's 260,000 Jewish people.

It's doubtful that most of JFS's 1,900 students lead Orthodox lifestyles, though the court decision does not affect those students already at the school.

The case at hand resulted from the school's refusal to admit a new boy whose mother had been converted by the Liberal stream. His parents divorced; she left the fold, and the boy is being brought up by his halachically Jewish father. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's office refused to certify the child as Jewish - a necessary step for JFS admission - because his mother did not have an Orthodox conversion. The father challenged the rejection in court.

He was supported by the Lightman family, whose children were also barred from JFS. Kate Lightman was converted by an Orthodox Bet Din in Israel and does lead an Orthodox life. She was married by an Orthodox rabbi in New York to a kohen - a member of the priestly class which brought animal sacrifices during Temple times. A strict constructionist interpretation of Halacha would, arguably, bar a kohen from marrying a convert. Hence Sacks held that Lightman's conversion was insincere and that the couple's children were not Jewish; and thus ineligible to attend JFS.

In a third case, unrelated to the litigation, JFS barred the children of Helen Sagal, though she too was converted by an Orthodox Beit Din in Israel, on the grounds that the family no longer leads an Orthodox lifestyle.

THE COURT of Appeal found that using ethnicity or race of the mother as the criterion for entry rather than faith, however defined, breached the Race Relations Act. Without taking sides on the JFS case, the Board of Deputies opposes this decision because of its ramifications for all Jewish schools.

JFS tried to appeal the case to the House of Lords, but the court denied permission. The school is likely to pursue a direct petition to the Lords, but this could take time, and there is no guarantee of victory even if the case is heard.

As Simon Rocker of The Jewish Chronicle reported, JFS will now have to rewrite its entry rules; instead of being based on the lineage of an applicant's mother, admission will be based on religious observance - such as synagogue attendance.

But as Prof. Geoffrey Alderman points out, the school has painted itself into a corner. If it produces narrow Orthodox criteria to measure observance, it will transform itself into a haredi institution; and if they are very broad, what's the point?

Yet is JFS even capable of setting middle-of-the-road faith criteria? How will it respond to families that are observant but affiliated, say, with the Conservative or Reform movements?

It's a pity that a school which played so pivotal a role in British Jewish life now finds itself in the clutches of haredi obduracy. Fortunately, a new cross-denominational school is scheduled to open in 2010.

THE JFS controversy is a larger dilemma in microcosm. Those who favor greater insularity and artificially enforced homogeneity, who insist uncompromisingly that they alone are privy to God's purpose, will continue to advocate for a Judaism that is unwelcoming.

The Jewish majority in the Diaspora as well as in Israel - running the gamut from neo-Orthodox to progressive, yet also embracing the affiliated secular - need to develop sensible answers, rooted in Jewish law and tradition, to the issues of identity and conversion.

In so doing they will be hammering home the point that Judaism is a thriving and evolving civilization rooted in sacred history, religious ritual, a shared past and the sense of a common destiny.

It is not synonymous with haredism.