Jimmy Carter, the 83-year-old former US president, has been on a "study mission" to our region, visiting Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. On Monday, back in Jerusalem, Carter announced what he'd learned: The Arabs want peace; the problem is Israel.
Carter met with Hamas leaders in Cairo and Damascus and held a joint session with both factions in Damascus. He came out of those sessions convinced that Hamas wants peace.
The former president sounds like a moral relativist, for whom there are no universal truths by which to judge behavior. This is manifested in the juxtapositions he so effortlessly makes. Speaking Monday, he denounced the Palestinians' "despicable terrorism" against Sderot. Yet when Israel tracks down and arrests the "despicable" terrorists, Carter gets equally passionate about the need to release them - 11,600 (Carter's numbers) now in Israeli prisons, "many of them women and children."
To Carter's muddled thinking, Palestinians and Israelis are equally responsible for the conflict. After all, Palestinians launch Kassams into Israeli kindergartens, and Israelis live over the Green Line.
Since Annapolis, Carter claims, there's been no real progress because of "settlements" and "roadblocks" and because Israel has turned Gaza into one big prison. That Jews also have claims in Judea and Samaria, that checkpoints have proven to keep terrorists from blowing up buses and cafes, that every last Israeli soldier and "settler" has been yanked out of Gaza - none of this turned up in Carter's study mission.
But he did conclude that "despair leads some people on both sides to resort to violence."
Carter professes to understand why Israel is "reluctant" to negotiate with Hamas. The organization refuses to renounce violence, has "yet" to recognize Israel and doesn't accept the 1993 Oslo Accords. But Carter forgives all this. He "understands" that Hamas feels "some violence is necessary" to keep the Palestinian issue alive, and that when the organization is sidelined, the "cycle of violence" is exacerbated.
Carter spent seven hours with Hamas leaders during which they told him they would accept Israel's existence if it withdrew to the 1949 Armistice Lines; if any deal reached between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and PA President Mahmoud Abbas was approved in a Palestinian referendum; and if Hamas had the prerogative to disagree with the referendum results.
To sum up Carter's assessment: Hamas wants peace. It is ready now for a cease-fire - even one that doesn't immediately include the West Bank. It also supports the Arab League peace plan that could flood Israel with millions of refugees - a scheme no Israeli government could accept.
That Hamas carried out an attack against the Kerem Shalom border crossing on Saturday, wounding 13 soldiers - while its leaders were telling Carter they supposedly wanted peace - is irrelevant, Carter insists, because the mission had been planned "months in advance."
WE ARE grateful to Carter for raising the issue of Gilad Schalit with his interlocutors. The former president promises that Hamas will now allow the kidnapped soldier to write a second letter to his parents. At the same time, he should know that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have routine access to the Red Cross and can write to their loved ones even without presidential intervention.
Carter, of all people, ought also to know how far Israel is prepared to go for peace. It ceded every inch of the Sinai to Anwar Sadat. But the Egyptian leader first demonstrated that he genuinely sought an accommodation with Israel.
When King Hussein embraced Yitzhak Rabin, a peace treaty resulted 100 days later.
One could imagine a situation in which Israel would talk with Hamas. After all, when Yasser Arafat claimed to be ready to end the "armed struggle," Israelis desperately tried to reach an accord with him. A Hamas that is prepared for real compromise will always find Israel ready.
Shortly after meeting with Carter, though, a Hamas spokesman declared that the Islamists remained committed to "resistance" and opposed Egyptian cease-fire proposals.
Carter's "study mission" failed to uncover the obvious: Hamas is a toxic opponent of peace. Too bad that in the twilight of his public life, Carter has undermined the relative moderates among the Palestinians and become an apologist for violent religious fanatics.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Hamas's Apologist
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, April 18, 2008
The price of freedom
Never in the ebb and flow of its long, rich and complicated history has the Jewish people experienced greater national, political and personal freedoms than it enjoys now. There are no ghetto walls. We are Jews by choice and we identify with the Jewish past, share in the Jewish present and look toward a common future.
The more we know about Jewish civilization, the greater our literacy, the less the open door of 21st-century modernity beckons us to abandon the values of our forefathers and foremothers.
With numerous and diverse avenues of Jewish expression to be explored, this may be the most exciting period in modern Jewish history.
Half of all US and UK Jews marry out. That is a fact. But many of these couples and their children can still be part of our community if they, and we, make wise decisions.
Yet, paradoxically, while Jews worldwide have never had more personal liberty, the well-being and security of the Third Jewish Commonwealth has never been under greater threat.
THESE ARE the thoughts that concern us as we approach the evening of April 19 - corresponding to the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan - to celebrate Pessah, "the season of our freedom."
By tradition the festival commemorates God's deliverance of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage. Thus the Exodus became the founding narrative of Jewish peoplehood and the centerpiece of Israel's sacred history. In ancient times this deliverance was marked by the eating of the Paschal lamb sacrificed in Jerusalem's Holy Temple.
Today, our attachment to this ancient spring festival remains imprinted on our collective psyche. Across the world, Jewish people will participate in ceremonial Seder meals centered around the Haggada's Four Questions. While the more pious among us will scrupulously observe the minutiae of the festival's rules, it behooves all Jews to focus on the meaning - and cost - of freedom, liberty and self-determination.
In the renascent Jewish homeland, which marks its 60th independence day next month, Israelis are grappling with how to cherish tradition while respecting the individual's right to freely disregard (sometimes foolishly) what should be treasured.
Consider the latest quarrel in Jerusalem over the sale of hametz during Pessah. A very few stores sell bread, which the law allows so as long as they don't ostentatiously display it in public. This strikes us as a reasonable compromise. So why interfere with it?
When issues of personal freedom, religion and collective values are at stake, coercion is not only counterproductive, it is often also unnecessary. Seventy percent of Israelis won't go near bread during the festival; 60% would like to see stores closed on Shabbat. That's because the values and mores of Jewish civilization appeal to traditional and secular Jews even when the motivation is not necessarily halachic.
And yet this age of great personal freedom will not have achieved its full potential until non-Orthodox and secular Jews - to paraphrase popular theologian Dennis Prager - start taking Judaism as seriously as do the Orthodox.
MOREOVER, given the threats the Jewish global collective faces, stemming mainly from the menace of Islamist extremism, Jews had better stop dissipating their energies and resources in internal bickering.
Iran is hurrying to build nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. It may take another year or two, but the mullahs don't see the international community standing in their way. This week's meeting of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, in Shanghai on the Iranian issue reiterated that message. (The failed agenda was to coax Iran - which has rejected every economic, diplomatic and security offer thus far, including civilian nuclear cooperation - into reopening negotiations.)
As Iranian leaders employ disinformation, obduracy and guile to keep the world powers spinning their wheels, we hear Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisting that Iran's efforts will, at the end of the day, fail.
The mullahs take their extremist Islam very seriously. It is the bedrock of their perverted vision of world domination. In this "season of our freedom" we need to recommit to our own Jewish and humane values. And if we cherish our freedom, we need to recognize that it comes at a price.
The more we know about Jewish civilization, the greater our literacy, the less the open door of 21st-century modernity beckons us to abandon the values of our forefathers and foremothers.
With numerous and diverse avenues of Jewish expression to be explored, this may be the most exciting period in modern Jewish history.
Half of all US and UK Jews marry out. That is a fact. But many of these couples and their children can still be part of our community if they, and we, make wise decisions.
Yet, paradoxically, while Jews worldwide have never had more personal liberty, the well-being and security of the Third Jewish Commonwealth has never been under greater threat.
THESE ARE the thoughts that concern us as we approach the evening of April 19 - corresponding to the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan - to celebrate Pessah, "the season of our freedom."
By tradition the festival commemorates God's deliverance of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage. Thus the Exodus became the founding narrative of Jewish peoplehood and the centerpiece of Israel's sacred history. In ancient times this deliverance was marked by the eating of the Paschal lamb sacrificed in Jerusalem's Holy Temple.
Today, our attachment to this ancient spring festival remains imprinted on our collective psyche. Across the world, Jewish people will participate in ceremonial Seder meals centered around the Haggada's Four Questions. While the more pious among us will scrupulously observe the minutiae of the festival's rules, it behooves all Jews to focus on the meaning - and cost - of freedom, liberty and self-determination.
In the renascent Jewish homeland, which marks its 60th independence day next month, Israelis are grappling with how to cherish tradition while respecting the individual's right to freely disregard (sometimes foolishly) what should be treasured.
Consider the latest quarrel in Jerusalem over the sale of hametz during Pessah. A very few stores sell bread, which the law allows so as long as they don't ostentatiously display it in public. This strikes us as a reasonable compromise. So why interfere with it?
When issues of personal freedom, religion and collective values are at stake, coercion is not only counterproductive, it is often also unnecessary. Seventy percent of Israelis won't go near bread during the festival; 60% would like to see stores closed on Shabbat. That's because the values and mores of Jewish civilization appeal to traditional and secular Jews even when the motivation is not necessarily halachic.
And yet this age of great personal freedom will not have achieved its full potential until non-Orthodox and secular Jews - to paraphrase popular theologian Dennis Prager - start taking Judaism as seriously as do the Orthodox.
MOREOVER, given the threats the Jewish global collective faces, stemming mainly from the menace of Islamist extremism, Jews had better stop dissipating their energies and resources in internal bickering.
Iran is hurrying to build nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. It may take another year or two, but the mullahs don't see the international community standing in their way. This week's meeting of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, in Shanghai on the Iranian issue reiterated that message. (The failed agenda was to coax Iran - which has rejected every economic, diplomatic and security offer thus far, including civilian nuclear cooperation - into reopening negotiations.)
As Iranian leaders employ disinformation, obduracy and guile to keep the world powers spinning their wheels, we hear Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisting that Iran's efforts will, at the end of the day, fail.
The mullahs take their extremist Islam very seriously. It is the bedrock of their perverted vision of world domination. In this "season of our freedom" we need to recommit to our own Jewish and humane values. And if we cherish our freedom, we need to recognize that it comes at a price.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The mullah minuet
It was a small news item, easily unnoticed, part of a protracted series of deceptions: "Monday's scheduled meeting in Vienna between Iranian nuclear negotiator Gholamreza Aghazadeh and the UN's nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei has been postponed."
One step back in the minuet.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Foreign Ministry announced that it would "propose a package of solutions" aimed at "convergence" with international proposals offering Iran nuclear technology in return for ending its pursuit of nuclear weapons. One step forward - ostensibly.
This ongoing dance is accelerated by the scheduled meeting of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, set for April 16 in Shanghai. They will talk about Iran's brazen, artful stonewalling of three fairly innocuous UN Security Council resolutions (the latest on March 3) aimed at cajoling the mullahs to abandon their efforts to build nuclear bombs.
No one in Shanghai will suggest an international ban on weapons sales to Iran. There will be no talk of any air or sea embargo. Still, the great powers will probably express "disquiet" over the installation of hundreds, if not thousands, more centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Verifiable data on the centrifuges - how many and how prolific - is unavailable.
What is known is that Iran is moving rapidly to create as much nuclear bomb-making fuel as possible.
Also overshadowing the Shanghai meeting is last week's Jane's Defense dispatch, which shed light on what Iran wants to do once it has nuclear weapons: place warheads on ballistic missiles. Iran will soon possess solid fuel projectiles capable of reaching Europe. Yet the mullahs keep refining their Shahab missile, and it will eventually traverse 10,000 km., putting the US within range.
If previous international discussion about Iran is any guide, Russia will be thinking about all the nuclear technology it sells the mullahs, the profits reaped and the influence leveraged. Vladimir Putin continues to be Teheran's main enabler.
But China will do its part in Shanghai. One of Iran's two biggest oil customers, it is heavily invested in Iran's petroleum industry. Beijing is also Teheran's second-biggest trading partner. China wants Mideast "stability" and is convinced sanctions are bad for business.
Germany, France and Britain will be mindful of the price of oil ($109 a barrel) and the business they do with Iran. Berlin is Iran's number one import partner; Paris not too far behind. London's record is slightly better: Iran is ranked as the UK's seventh-largest export market in the Middle East and North Africa. But that's still a lot of sterling.
A complete quarantine of the world's number-four oil exporter - the kind of action that would make the mullahs sit up and take notice - is simply not on the Shanghai agenda. And why should it be? There is no constituency for the sacrifices entailed. If anything, many EU citizens believe, incredibly, that Israel is a bigger danger to peace than Iran.
THERE ARE too many sticks and not enough carrots, some of the diplomats in Shanghai will claim. But Iran has time and again rejected generous international offers of nuclear fuel and technology in return for abandoning its bomb. Others will say that Iran feels threatened, and that Washington should negotiate directly with it. Yet Washington and Teheran have been speaking directly in Iraq, to no avail. As the UK's Independent reported only yesterday, back-channel talks between well-connected retired US diplomats and Iranian officials have been dragging on fruitlessly for five years.
The pro-accommodation camp also relies on the December 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate, which invoked the narrowest definitions to assert, high in its text, that Iran stopped working on a bomb in 2003, and left lower down the fact that enrichment and all other elements necessary for a weapons program proceed apace.
Some friends of Israel are in despair. Columnist Charles Krauthammer urges Washington to place the Jewish state under its nuclear umbrella, while pundit Zev Chafets, writing in The New York Times, gloomily concludes that the Jews are on their own.
Granted, Iran is Israel's foremost strategic dilemma. But those gathering this week in Shanghai should not delude themselves into believing that the rapacious Islamist regime in Teheran does not also threaten everything they hold dear. Iran already has all of Israel well within its missile range, and still it extends its delivery capabilities.
One step back in the minuet.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Foreign Ministry announced that it would "propose a package of solutions" aimed at "convergence" with international proposals offering Iran nuclear technology in return for ending its pursuit of nuclear weapons. One step forward - ostensibly.
This ongoing dance is accelerated by the scheduled meeting of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, set for April 16 in Shanghai. They will talk about Iran's brazen, artful stonewalling of three fairly innocuous UN Security Council resolutions (the latest on March 3) aimed at cajoling the mullahs to abandon their efforts to build nuclear bombs.
No one in Shanghai will suggest an international ban on weapons sales to Iran. There will be no talk of any air or sea embargo. Still, the great powers will probably express "disquiet" over the installation of hundreds, if not thousands, more centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Verifiable data on the centrifuges - how many and how prolific - is unavailable.
What is known is that Iran is moving rapidly to create as much nuclear bomb-making fuel as possible.
Also overshadowing the Shanghai meeting is last week's Jane's Defense dispatch, which shed light on what Iran wants to do once it has nuclear weapons: place warheads on ballistic missiles. Iran will soon possess solid fuel projectiles capable of reaching Europe. Yet the mullahs keep refining their Shahab missile, and it will eventually traverse 10,000 km., putting the US within range.
If previous international discussion about Iran is any guide, Russia will be thinking about all the nuclear technology it sells the mullahs, the profits reaped and the influence leveraged. Vladimir Putin continues to be Teheran's main enabler.
But China will do its part in Shanghai. One of Iran's two biggest oil customers, it is heavily invested in Iran's petroleum industry. Beijing is also Teheran's second-biggest trading partner. China wants Mideast "stability" and is convinced sanctions are bad for business.
Germany, France and Britain will be mindful of the price of oil ($109 a barrel) and the business they do with Iran. Berlin is Iran's number one import partner; Paris not too far behind. London's record is slightly better: Iran is ranked as the UK's seventh-largest export market in the Middle East and North Africa. But that's still a lot of sterling.
A complete quarantine of the world's number-four oil exporter - the kind of action that would make the mullahs sit up and take notice - is simply not on the Shanghai agenda. And why should it be? There is no constituency for the sacrifices entailed. If anything, many EU citizens believe, incredibly, that Israel is a bigger danger to peace than Iran.
THERE ARE too many sticks and not enough carrots, some of the diplomats in Shanghai will claim. But Iran has time and again rejected generous international offers of nuclear fuel and technology in return for abandoning its bomb. Others will say that Iran feels threatened, and that Washington should negotiate directly with it. Yet Washington and Teheran have been speaking directly in Iraq, to no avail. As the UK's Independent reported only yesterday, back-channel talks between well-connected retired US diplomats and Iranian officials have been dragging on fruitlessly for five years.
The pro-accommodation camp also relies on the December 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate, which invoked the narrowest definitions to assert, high in its text, that Iran stopped working on a bomb in 2003, and left lower down the fact that enrichment and all other elements necessary for a weapons program proceed apace.
Some friends of Israel are in despair. Columnist Charles Krauthammer urges Washington to place the Jewish state under its nuclear umbrella, while pundit Zev Chafets, writing in The New York Times, gloomily concludes that the Jews are on their own.
Granted, Iran is Israel's foremost strategic dilemma. But those gathering this week in Shanghai should not delude themselves into believing that the rapacious Islamist regime in Teheran does not also threaten everything they hold dear. Iran already has all of Israel well within its missile range, and still it extends its delivery capabilities.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Egyptian tremors
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak turns 80 next month. He assumed power 26 years ago, after Islamists assassinated Anwar Sadat for having made peace with Israel.
Egypt's political system remains weak on legitimacy. The liberal opposition, led by the Democratic Front Party, is in disarray. A leading reformist critic of the regime, Ayman Nour, is imprisoned.
Egyptians mostly ignored the April 8 local elections to fill 52,000 places on municipal and village councils. Seventy percent of the seats were earmarked for Mubarak's National Democratic Party because they were "uncontested." Mubarak's son, Gamal, happens to head the NDP.
Recalling the failed policies of the Shah of Iran, Mubarak has defeated the non-Islamist opposition, leaving the Muslim Brotherhood as the only credible voice of reform. This is the same toxic movement, founded in 1928, whose world-view spawned al-Qaida and Hamas. It wants Shari'a law imposed in Egypt and relations with Israel broken off. Prudently, the Brotherhood eschews violent revolution, patiently waiting for power to fall into its hands. Despite Mubarak's machinations, Brotherhood-supported "independent" candidates captured 20% of the 454-seat parliament.
Mubarak has stayed in power by making an implicit contract with Egypt's masses: We provide food, you keep your noses out of politics. That deal is now fraying.
Egypt is a vast country of some 76 million people, of whom 53% are under 24. Hope and economic prospects are in short supply; religion, however, is bountiful. Mosques are everywhere (one for every 745 people). Most women in Cairo, once a cosmopolitan city, now cover their hair.
Globalization, worldwide economic factors, even climate change have all conspired to make the temporal lives of average Egyptians more difficult. In recent weeks, labor and food riots have broken out in the Nile Delta industrial city of Mahallah-Al-Kobra. Two protesters were killed, 100 wounded and over 300 arrested. Opponents organized protests, using text messaging and even Web-based social networks to circumvent the state-controlled media. A nationwide one-day strike had been planned, but was ultimately stymied by the authorities.
Fearing the spread of rioting, Mubarak dispatched Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif to meet with workers at the state-owned weaving factory in Mahallah, which employs 25,000 people, and where the average monthly salary is $34. And to appease the local opposition, Nazif granted it 15 seats in the municipal government.
Six people have died since March waiting on bread lines, either from exhaustion or because frustration led to fighting. A piece of bread costs 5 piasters - about a US penny. Thirty million Egyptians depend on subsidized bread under a scheme that is riddled with corruption. Forty percent of Egyptians live under the $2-a-day poverty line.
As an emergency measure Mubarak ordered the army to start baking bread.
Amr Elshobaki of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies told The Washington Post last week that "The mood of the people is angry. I think it's near collapse, the state."
To address the larger crisis, the regime has halted the export of rice and cement for the next six months and continues to impose price controls on a wide range of commodities. Food is subsidized at a staggering $13.7 billion annually.
Not everyone is suffering. The disparity between rich and poor is immense. Sales of some luxury cars are up 20 percent. The economy has grown 7%. The Cairo and Alexandria stock exchanges are up 40%. Foreign investment has surged to $11 billion. Egypt's international reserves stand at $30 billion; foreign debt is $7.8 billion. Thousands of new companies are established every year. For its part, Washington contributes $1.3 billion in military aid and a paltry $200 million in economic assistance. More constructively, however, annual trade with the US stands at $8 billion.
How well the regime feeds, clothes and employs its population, how swiftly it creates a civil society and system of representative government should be of foremost concern to Israel.
Mubarak is mistaken in emasculating the moderate opposition, misguided in trying to "out-Islam" the Brotherhood by persecuting homosexuals. He is wide off the mark in allowing Egypt's media to demonize Jews and Israel. It took him too long to realize that letting Hamas bleed Israel was ultimately not in Cairo's interest.
But we who have an interest in a stable and flourishing Egypt understand the enormity of the challenges Mubarak faces. May he continue to enjoy good health, and be blessed with better judgment.
Egypt's political system remains weak on legitimacy. The liberal opposition, led by the Democratic Front Party, is in disarray. A leading reformist critic of the regime, Ayman Nour, is imprisoned.
Egyptians mostly ignored the April 8 local elections to fill 52,000 places on municipal and village councils. Seventy percent of the seats were earmarked for Mubarak's National Democratic Party because they were "uncontested." Mubarak's son, Gamal, happens to head the NDP.
Recalling the failed policies of the Shah of Iran, Mubarak has defeated the non-Islamist opposition, leaving the Muslim Brotherhood as the only credible voice of reform. This is the same toxic movement, founded in 1928, whose world-view spawned al-Qaida and Hamas. It wants Shari'a law imposed in Egypt and relations with Israel broken off. Prudently, the Brotherhood eschews violent revolution, patiently waiting for power to fall into its hands. Despite Mubarak's machinations, Brotherhood-supported "independent" candidates captured 20% of the 454-seat parliament.
Mubarak has stayed in power by making an implicit contract with Egypt's masses: We provide food, you keep your noses out of politics. That deal is now fraying.
Egypt is a vast country of some 76 million people, of whom 53% are under 24. Hope and economic prospects are in short supply; religion, however, is bountiful. Mosques are everywhere (one for every 745 people). Most women in Cairo, once a cosmopolitan city, now cover their hair.
Globalization, worldwide economic factors, even climate change have all conspired to make the temporal lives of average Egyptians more difficult. In recent weeks, labor and food riots have broken out in the Nile Delta industrial city of Mahallah-Al-Kobra. Two protesters were killed, 100 wounded and over 300 arrested. Opponents organized protests, using text messaging and even Web-based social networks to circumvent the state-controlled media. A nationwide one-day strike had been planned, but was ultimately stymied by the authorities.
Fearing the spread of rioting, Mubarak dispatched Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif to meet with workers at the state-owned weaving factory in Mahallah, which employs 25,000 people, and where the average monthly salary is $34. And to appease the local opposition, Nazif granted it 15 seats in the municipal government.
Six people have died since March waiting on bread lines, either from exhaustion or because frustration led to fighting. A piece of bread costs 5 piasters - about a US penny. Thirty million Egyptians depend on subsidized bread under a scheme that is riddled with corruption. Forty percent of Egyptians live under the $2-a-day poverty line.
As an emergency measure Mubarak ordered the army to start baking bread.
Amr Elshobaki of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies told The Washington Post last week that "The mood of the people is angry. I think it's near collapse, the state."
To address the larger crisis, the regime has halted the export of rice and cement for the next six months and continues to impose price controls on a wide range of commodities. Food is subsidized at a staggering $13.7 billion annually.
Not everyone is suffering. The disparity between rich and poor is immense. Sales of some luxury cars are up 20 percent. The economy has grown 7%. The Cairo and Alexandria stock exchanges are up 40%. Foreign investment has surged to $11 billion. Egypt's international reserves stand at $30 billion; foreign debt is $7.8 billion. Thousands of new companies are established every year. For its part, Washington contributes $1.3 billion in military aid and a paltry $200 million in economic assistance. More constructively, however, annual trade with the US stands at $8 billion.
How well the regime feeds, clothes and employs its population, how swiftly it creates a civil society and system of representative government should be of foremost concern to Israel.
Mubarak is mistaken in emasculating the moderate opposition, misguided in trying to "out-Islam" the Brotherhood by persecuting homosexuals. He is wide off the mark in allowing Egypt's media to demonize Jews and Israel. It took him too long to realize that letting Hamas bleed Israel was ultimately not in Cairo's interest.
But we who have an interest in a stable and flourishing Egypt understand the enormity of the challenges Mubarak faces. May he continue to enjoy good health, and be blessed with better judgment.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Peace Now at 30
This month marks Peace Now's 30th anniversary. On Tuesday evening supporters will gather in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square to mark the milestone.
The movement embodies the almost instinctive yearning for peace shared by virtually all Israelis. That's why Peace Now has charmed both Israeli and Diaspora Jews for three decades with its un-jaded enthusiasm for a Middle East where Israelis and Palestinians respect each others' aspirations, hear each others' narratives and live side by side in peace and security.
The movement emerged in March 1978 during Israeli-Egyptian peace talks, when 348 IDF reservists signed an open letter to prime minister Menachem Begin urging a more conciliatory Israeli negotiating posture, denouncing Begin's commitment to Judea, Samaria and Gaza as integral parts of Israel and opposing the settlement enterprise.
Since Anwar Sadat was, in effect, negotiating not just for the return of Sinai but also on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs, albeit against their will, Peace Now demanded that Begin cut a deal - any deal.
The founders of Peace Now were an eclectic bunch - liberal reservists, academics and Tel Aviv bohemians. Their aim was to present a Zionist alternative to Gush Emunim. They always knew what they were against - settlements and the "occupation" - but never managed to articulate a viable alternative.
Peace Now isn't oblivious to the strategic value of the West Bank. Its leaders know you can walk from Samaria to the Mediterranean, across Israel's narrow waistline and population hub, without stopping for a drink of water. Yet the group has an overarching devotion to the notion that "true security" can only be achieved with the arrival of "peace."
To attain peace now - notwithstanding what the Palestinians are saying or doing - has always required the group to almost willfully disregard the unpleasant realities of the Arab-Israel conflict. Its emphasis is exclusively on what Israelis should concede, as if our collective craving for peace alone can supernaturally overcome Palestinian intransigence, incitement, internal upheaval and the culture of violence.
Over the years, many but not all of Peace Now's positions have been mainstreamed. Israel is indeed negotiating with the PLO. Most Israelis are reconciled to a Palestinian state, though only in the context of a deal that guarantees them real security. And most accept - unenthusiastically - that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria would have to be uprooted were the Palestinians prepared for peace. But they are not.
PEACE NOW spokesman Yariv Oppenheimer says vaguely that he supports whatever Israeli and Palestinian negotiators can agree upon. But in practice, Peace Now is demanding something different and specific. While claiming it does not want to push Israel back to the indefensible 1949 Armistice Lines, Peace Now nonetheless opposes any construction over the Green Line. It does not support the retention of major settlement blocs such as Gush Etzion, Ma'aleh Adumim and Ariel; it considers east Talpiot, Gilo and Pisgat Ze'ev "occupied territory."
Peace Now also stands squarely outside the consensus by favoring "joint sovereignty" over Jerusalem's Old City. And while it opposes the "implementation" of the Palestinian "right of return," it does not necessarily oppose its affirmation.
Moreover, for a group with so much media clout, Peace Now shows an appalling lack of financial transparency and administrative accountability. Israelis are asked to believe that a finely-tuned machine capable of running airborne surveillance over every nook and cranny of the West Bank operates quite informally, by consensus, under the auspices of university students and aging hippies.
Peace Now is actually funded through an educational NGO called Sha'al, which receives "most" of its funds from American Jews, according to Oppenheimer. But he declines to say what his annual budget is, or how much cash comes from foreign governments and foundations who might be interested in co-opting the Peace Now brand.
Peace Now helps remind us that Jewish civilization attaches the highest value to peace. Yet by remaining ideologically stagnant, holding to positions that experience has shown risk rendering Israel indefensible, and keeping its decision-making methods and funding sources mystifying, the organization places itself on the periphery of Israel's body politic.
The movement embodies the almost instinctive yearning for peace shared by virtually all Israelis. That's why Peace Now has charmed both Israeli and Diaspora Jews for three decades with its un-jaded enthusiasm for a Middle East where Israelis and Palestinians respect each others' aspirations, hear each others' narratives and live side by side in peace and security.
The movement emerged in March 1978 during Israeli-Egyptian peace talks, when 348 IDF reservists signed an open letter to prime minister Menachem Begin urging a more conciliatory Israeli negotiating posture, denouncing Begin's commitment to Judea, Samaria and Gaza as integral parts of Israel and opposing the settlement enterprise.
Since Anwar Sadat was, in effect, negotiating not just for the return of Sinai but also on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs, albeit against their will, Peace Now demanded that Begin cut a deal - any deal.
The founders of Peace Now were an eclectic bunch - liberal reservists, academics and Tel Aviv bohemians. Their aim was to present a Zionist alternative to Gush Emunim. They always knew what they were against - settlements and the "occupation" - but never managed to articulate a viable alternative.
Peace Now isn't oblivious to the strategic value of the West Bank. Its leaders know you can walk from Samaria to the Mediterranean, across Israel's narrow waistline and population hub, without stopping for a drink of water. Yet the group has an overarching devotion to the notion that "true security" can only be achieved with the arrival of "peace."
To attain peace now - notwithstanding what the Palestinians are saying or doing - has always required the group to almost willfully disregard the unpleasant realities of the Arab-Israel conflict. Its emphasis is exclusively on what Israelis should concede, as if our collective craving for peace alone can supernaturally overcome Palestinian intransigence, incitement, internal upheaval and the culture of violence.
Over the years, many but not all of Peace Now's positions have been mainstreamed. Israel is indeed negotiating with the PLO. Most Israelis are reconciled to a Palestinian state, though only in the context of a deal that guarantees them real security. And most accept - unenthusiastically - that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria would have to be uprooted were the Palestinians prepared for peace. But they are not.
PEACE NOW spokesman Yariv Oppenheimer says vaguely that he supports whatever Israeli and Palestinian negotiators can agree upon. But in practice, Peace Now is demanding something different and specific. While claiming it does not want to push Israel back to the indefensible 1949 Armistice Lines, Peace Now nonetheless opposes any construction over the Green Line. It does not support the retention of major settlement blocs such as Gush Etzion, Ma'aleh Adumim and Ariel; it considers east Talpiot, Gilo and Pisgat Ze'ev "occupied territory."
Peace Now also stands squarely outside the consensus by favoring "joint sovereignty" over Jerusalem's Old City. And while it opposes the "implementation" of the Palestinian "right of return," it does not necessarily oppose its affirmation.
Moreover, for a group with so much media clout, Peace Now shows an appalling lack of financial transparency and administrative accountability. Israelis are asked to believe that a finely-tuned machine capable of running airborne surveillance over every nook and cranny of the West Bank operates quite informally, by consensus, under the auspices of university students and aging hippies.
Peace Now is actually funded through an educational NGO called Sha'al, which receives "most" of its funds from American Jews, according to Oppenheimer. But he declines to say what his annual budget is, or how much cash comes from foreign governments and foundations who might be interested in co-opting the Peace Now brand.
Peace Now helps remind us that Jewish civilization attaches the highest value to peace. Yet by remaining ideologically stagnant, holding to positions that experience has shown risk rendering Israel indefensible, and keeping its decision-making methods and funding sources mystifying, the organization places itself on the periphery of Israel's body politic.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
This is a drill
At 10 a.m. Tuesday, the wailing of sirens will be heard throughout Israel - except in the southern communities near Gaza under intermittent Palestinian bombardment.
Israel has begun a week-long civil defense drill. On Sunday the cabinet was briefed by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i, who is commanding the nationwide exercises. Everyone from kindergarten children to senior civil servants will practice the emergency measures to be taken in the event of an actual attack or catastrophic earthquake. These national home front exercises are intended to help authorities evaluate how prepared the country is to face the threat, for instance, of missiles - conventional, biological, chemical or nuclear - smashing into our population centers.
Are rescue services geared up to save casualties from dozens of simultaneously collapsed buildings? Are hospitals capable of treating mega-casualties? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, along with officials of the Home Front Command, National Emergency Authority and emergency services, will spend the better part of the week simulating potential disaster scenarios.
A drill of this magnitude has never been undertaken. Yet we don't need a drill to realize that the Home Front Command Web site (www.oref.org.il), currently limited to Hebrew and English, should do a better job of communicating with Russian, Arabic and Amharic speakers; and that authorities need to clarify their zigzagging policies regarding gas masks. For our part, we citizens must take these exercises seriously - specifically, locating the closest shelter or secure room when the siren sounds.
While this is only a drill, it comes as tensions are high on the northern front over concern that Hizbullah may attempt a massive terrorist operation, ostensibly in retaliation for the mysterious liquidation in Damascus of its top commander, Imad Mughniyeh. Jerusalem has signaled Bashar Assad's regime that it might hold Syria accountable if Hizbullah strikes. That, in turn, probably led Damascus to leak a story to the London-based Al Quds al-Arabi about Syrian reservists mobilizing "in anticipation" of an Israeli attack. Conflicting reports remain over whether and to what extent the Syrian army is in fact massing troops.
Tensions are further exacerbated by reports of authorities continuing to worry that enemy forces may try to down - or hijack - an Israeli airliner. Extraordinary preventative measures are under way. But has Israel's deterrence so deteriorated that terrorists and/or their state benefactors - Syria and Iran - would even consider such a heinous assault? Are they unmindful of the devastating consequences?
Equally troubling are unconfirmed reports that Russia has now joined Iran in providing personnel for Syrian monitoring stations which also feed data to Hizbullah.
Meanwhile, Israel remains alert (in the north and south) against the threat that its soldiers may be kidnapped, or that Hizbullah may send bomb-laden drones to infiltrate Israeli airspace.
As if the situation were not sufficiently fraught, authorities are surely also trying to make sense of the recording by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released last week. Entitled "Rush to Support Our People in Gaza," Zawahiri urges Islamists to strike at Jewish and American interests everywhere. But Noah Shachtman, national security blogger for Wired.com, has called attention to an intriguing aside in Zawahiri's message, namely, what he says about Iran:
"The dispute between America and Iran is... over areas of influence... the situation will be in the interest of the Mujahideen if the war saps both of them. If, however, one of them emerges victorious, its influence will intensify and fierce battles will begin between it and the Mujahideen..."
Zawahiri thus inadvertently reminds us - at a time when it feels as if we're surrounded on all sides - that Sunni-Shi'ite and Arab-Persian cleavages have not been buried. Islamists may cooperate on the tactical level, but the enemy is neither monolithic nor unified.
As Israelis prepare for a disaster we pray will never come, today's sirens cannot help but underscore the threats that surround the Jewish state. Let them, equally, ring out our readiness to defeat any foe.
Israel has begun a week-long civil defense drill. On Sunday the cabinet was briefed by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i, who is commanding the nationwide exercises. Everyone from kindergarten children to senior civil servants will practice the emergency measures to be taken in the event of an actual attack or catastrophic earthquake. These national home front exercises are intended to help authorities evaluate how prepared the country is to face the threat, for instance, of missiles - conventional, biological, chemical or nuclear - smashing into our population centers.
Are rescue services geared up to save casualties from dozens of simultaneously collapsed buildings? Are hospitals capable of treating mega-casualties? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, along with officials of the Home Front Command, National Emergency Authority and emergency services, will spend the better part of the week simulating potential disaster scenarios.
A drill of this magnitude has never been undertaken. Yet we don't need a drill to realize that the Home Front Command Web site (www.oref.org.il), currently limited to Hebrew and English, should do a better job of communicating with Russian, Arabic and Amharic speakers; and that authorities need to clarify their zigzagging policies regarding gas masks. For our part, we citizens must take these exercises seriously - specifically, locating the closest shelter or secure room when the siren sounds.
While this is only a drill, it comes as tensions are high on the northern front over concern that Hizbullah may attempt a massive terrorist operation, ostensibly in retaliation for the mysterious liquidation in Damascus of its top commander, Imad Mughniyeh. Jerusalem has signaled Bashar Assad's regime that it might hold Syria accountable if Hizbullah strikes. That, in turn, probably led Damascus to leak a story to the London-based Al Quds al-Arabi about Syrian reservists mobilizing "in anticipation" of an Israeli attack. Conflicting reports remain over whether and to what extent the Syrian army is in fact massing troops.
Tensions are further exacerbated by reports of authorities continuing to worry that enemy forces may try to down - or hijack - an Israeli airliner. Extraordinary preventative measures are under way. But has Israel's deterrence so deteriorated that terrorists and/or their state benefactors - Syria and Iran - would even consider such a heinous assault? Are they unmindful of the devastating consequences?
Equally troubling are unconfirmed reports that Russia has now joined Iran in providing personnel for Syrian monitoring stations which also feed data to Hizbullah.
Meanwhile, Israel remains alert (in the north and south) against the threat that its soldiers may be kidnapped, or that Hizbullah may send bomb-laden drones to infiltrate Israeli airspace.
As if the situation were not sufficiently fraught, authorities are surely also trying to make sense of the recording by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released last week. Entitled "Rush to Support Our People in Gaza," Zawahiri urges Islamists to strike at Jewish and American interests everywhere. But Noah Shachtman, national security blogger for Wired.com, has called attention to an intriguing aside in Zawahiri's message, namely, what he says about Iran:
"The dispute between America and Iran is... over areas of influence... the situation will be in the interest of the Mujahideen if the war saps both of them. If, however, one of them emerges victorious, its influence will intensify and fierce battles will begin between it and the Mujahideen..."
Zawahiri thus inadvertently reminds us - at a time when it feels as if we're surrounded on all sides - that Sunni-Shi'ite and Arab-Persian cleavages have not been buried. Islamists may cooperate on the tactical level, but the enemy is neither monolithic nor unified.
As Israelis prepare for a disaster we pray will never come, today's sirens cannot help but underscore the threats that surround the Jewish state. Let them, equally, ring out our readiness to defeat any foe.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Axis of the unloved
A BBC poll released this week found that Iran has edged out Israel as the most unpopular country in the world, 54 percent to 52%, with Pakistan coming in a close third.
Welcome to the Axis of the Unloved.
To the question "Which countries have a mainly positive or mainly negative influence in the world?" 52% of respondents identified Israel as having a harmful role, while only 19% thought of the Jewish state in positive terms.
Egyptians and Lebanese have become even more entrenched in their animosity toward Israel. That's not surprising given the unrelenting anti-Zionist "reporting" broadcast 24/7 by Arab satellite stations as well as local Egyptian and Hizbullah media outlets.
Ninety-four percent of Egyptians think of Israel in negative terms (up from 85%), while 87% of Lebanese rate Israel negatively (up from 78%). At the same time, 62% of Egyptians think positively of Iran.
Majorities in Spain (64%) and Japan (55%) disapprove of Israel, the BBC found.
In Africa, 45% of Kenyans view Israel's influence as positive, up from 38%, while Ghanaians are divided: 30% positive versus 32% negative.
It's disconcerting that negative views have apparently increased among Americans (39%, up from 33%); though 43% of Americans have a positive attitude compared to 39% who think of Israel in disapproving terms. This seems to mesh with a poll released by The Israel Project, also this week, in Jerusalem which found that 40% of Americans see Israeli policies as extreme. The Israel Project also found that only 7% of Americans put the Arab-Israel conflict at the top of their agenda. Still, Americans support the creation of a Palestinian state, though most don't see it as ending the conflict. Curiously, Iran's negative rating in the US dropped to 55%, from 63% last year.
On the bright side, majorities with negative views of Israel have fallen in France (52%, down from 66%), Germany (64%, down from 77%), Brazil (57%, down from 72%) and Chile (43%, down from 57%).
WHAT ARE we to make of all this? Public opinion is both influenced by, and commands the attention of politicians and the media. Valid public opinion surveys (not to be confused with statistically suspect Internet click polling) do give us insights into what "the people" are thinking.
But let's remember that most folks don't follow current events closely - or intelligently - enough to develop informed opinions. Not a few are influenced by hateful imams, demagogic ministers and malevolent, manipulative televised images. So even when opinion surveys accurately reflect the views of the masses, policymakers need to take into account the profound ignorance and intolerance which sometimes color public opinion.
Take the case of the March 6 terrorist attack on Mercaz Harav. The fact that 84 percent of Palestinians supported it does not make the slaughter of young yeshiva students acceptable. Abroad, surveys have shown that a majority of African-Americans believe the HIV virus is man-made, a US government conspiracy to decimate the black population. And a significant segment of US blacks hold that Washington is responsible for spreading narcotics in the inner cities. Many Muslim Americans actually believe Arabs were not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
The point is that while what people think cannot be discounted, it is sometimes immensely misguided and must not automatically be allowed to serve as any kind of guide for Israeli actions. At the same time, effective public diplomacy, bringing basic facts to people's attention, really can change people's views.
Influencing opinion rather than being victims of it should be the focus of Israel's public diplomacy efforts. We need to connect with Generations Y and Z - born since 1980 - who get much of their news unfettered and unvetted from FaceBook, MySpace and other social networking sites. And we must address the crying need for an Israel-based 24/7 satellite news channel.
Public opinion is malleable. But we cannot expect people to embrace Israel's cause if we fail to present it to them in a coherent and accessible way.
Welcome to the Axis of the Unloved.
To the question "Which countries have a mainly positive or mainly negative influence in the world?" 52% of respondents identified Israel as having a harmful role, while only 19% thought of the Jewish state in positive terms.
Egyptians and Lebanese have become even more entrenched in their animosity toward Israel. That's not surprising given the unrelenting anti-Zionist "reporting" broadcast 24/7 by Arab satellite stations as well as local Egyptian and Hizbullah media outlets.
Ninety-four percent of Egyptians think of Israel in negative terms (up from 85%), while 87% of Lebanese rate Israel negatively (up from 78%). At the same time, 62% of Egyptians think positively of Iran.
Majorities in Spain (64%) and Japan (55%) disapprove of Israel, the BBC found.
In Africa, 45% of Kenyans view Israel's influence as positive, up from 38%, while Ghanaians are divided: 30% positive versus 32% negative.
It's disconcerting that negative views have apparently increased among Americans (39%, up from 33%); though 43% of Americans have a positive attitude compared to 39% who think of Israel in disapproving terms. This seems to mesh with a poll released by The Israel Project, also this week, in Jerusalem which found that 40% of Americans see Israeli policies as extreme. The Israel Project also found that only 7% of Americans put the Arab-Israel conflict at the top of their agenda. Still, Americans support the creation of a Palestinian state, though most don't see it as ending the conflict. Curiously, Iran's negative rating in the US dropped to 55%, from 63% last year.
On the bright side, majorities with negative views of Israel have fallen in France (52%, down from 66%), Germany (64%, down from 77%), Brazil (57%, down from 72%) and Chile (43%, down from 57%).
WHAT ARE we to make of all this? Public opinion is both influenced by, and commands the attention of politicians and the media. Valid public opinion surveys (not to be confused with statistically suspect Internet click polling) do give us insights into what "the people" are thinking.
But let's remember that most folks don't follow current events closely - or intelligently - enough to develop informed opinions. Not a few are influenced by hateful imams, demagogic ministers and malevolent, manipulative televised images. So even when opinion surveys accurately reflect the views of the masses, policymakers need to take into account the profound ignorance and intolerance which sometimes color public opinion.
Take the case of the March 6 terrorist attack on Mercaz Harav. The fact that 84 percent of Palestinians supported it does not make the slaughter of young yeshiva students acceptable. Abroad, surveys have shown that a majority of African-Americans believe the HIV virus is man-made, a US government conspiracy to decimate the black population. And a significant segment of US blacks hold that Washington is responsible for spreading narcotics in the inner cities. Many Muslim Americans actually believe Arabs were not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
The point is that while what people think cannot be discounted, it is sometimes immensely misguided and must not automatically be allowed to serve as any kind of guide for Israeli actions. At the same time, effective public diplomacy, bringing basic facts to people's attention, really can change people's views.
Influencing opinion rather than being victims of it should be the focus of Israel's public diplomacy efforts. We need to connect with Generations Y and Z - born since 1980 - who get much of their news unfettered and unvetted from FaceBook, MySpace and other social networking sites. And we must address the crying need for an Israel-based 24/7 satellite news channel.
Public opinion is malleable. But we cannot expect people to embrace Israel's cause if we fail to present it to them in a coherent and accessible way.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
A constructive role for the Arab League
Wrapping up its meeting in Damascus on Sunday, the Arab League threatened to "reevaluate" its 2002 peace offer to Israel. The plan is contingent, Secretary-General Amr Moussa warned, on "Israel executing its commitments."
Actually, it is Arab League policy which needs reevaluation. Six years after it was tendered by the Saudi Crown prince, now king, Abdullah, Arab leaders still do not comprehend why Israelis haven't enthusiastically embraced their initiative.
First, some context: The Arab League was founded in 1945, in Cairo. Its primary mission was to obstruct the emergence of a Jewish state anywhere in British-controlled Palestine. In 1946, the Arab League supported the intransigence of Haj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, over more moderate Palestinian Arab voices. It then rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would have created two states - one Arab and one Jewish - living side-by-side in peace.
After the 1948 war, rather than reconcile with Israel, the League spearheaded the creation of UNRWA, effectively perpetuating the statelessness of Palestinian refugees. In 1957 it sealed their fate by rejecting appeals that they be resettled in Arab states, just as Jewish refugees from the Arab countries had been resettled in Israel.
It was with the League's imprimatur that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser created the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1963 - four years before the West Bank and Gaza came under Israeli control. Then, in March 1979, the League suspended Egypt for signing a peace treaty with Israel. Cairo was not readmitted until 1989.
AND THEN, in March 2002, after nearly six decades of unremitting hostility, the League apparently changed direction and adopted the Saudi peace initiative.
But even this giant leap falls short. It demands Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines; acceptance of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital; and a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
On borders, at least on the Palestinian front, it is common knowledge that Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Qurei are, right now, poring over maps, trying to come up with an agreement in principle which would presumably take effect only after the Palestinians stop violence, terrorism and incitement against Israel and both peoples approve of the deal.
Arguably, the biggest obstacle for Israelis in the Saudi plan is that it addresses the plight of Palestinian refugees by invoking General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. Carried out in practice, it would inundate Israel - Jewish population 5.3 million - with 4.5 million stateless Palestinians. Few Israelis view this as anything but a recipe for the demographic destruction of the world's only Jewish state. And yet the idea that an organization unambiguously created to quash the birth of a Jewish state, and long dedicated to that goal, would ever offer even the theoretical opportunity of "normal relations" - albeit on terms no Israeli government could possibly accept - should not be summarily dismissed. And it hasn't been.
In March 2002, then foreign minister Shimon Peres declared Israel was prepared to discuss the plan; not as a diktat, but as a starting point. So it is really up to the Arab League to modify a fundamentally flawed offer by opening up negotiations with Israel. Let Secretary-General Moussa himself come to Jerusalem - where he would be cordially welcomed - to pursue such discussions.
Instead of reaching out, an Arab League in disarray has continued its hard-line, anti-Israel rhetoric. That's easier than bridging internal gaps between Hamas and Fatah, and over Iraq, Lebanon, and Alawite-led Syria's ever-closer melding with the Persian ayatollahs. Moussa had to make the most of a summit boycotted by the kings of Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, as well as by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Salah. Hence his denunciation of invented Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza, and perhaps also PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's incongruent plea for League intervention to save "besieged" Palestinians. Comic relief was provided by Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who helpfully pointed out that Arab leaders hate and conspire against each other.
With Damascus now assuming the Arab League presidency, it's hard to see the organization playing a constructive role in ushering in an era of peace and reconciliation. Still, a good place to begin would be for Arab leaders to address Israel's concerns about their March 2002 proposal.
Actually, it is Arab League policy which needs reevaluation. Six years after it was tendered by the Saudi Crown prince, now king, Abdullah, Arab leaders still do not comprehend why Israelis haven't enthusiastically embraced their initiative.
First, some context: The Arab League was founded in 1945, in Cairo. Its primary mission was to obstruct the emergence of a Jewish state anywhere in British-controlled Palestine. In 1946, the Arab League supported the intransigence of Haj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, over more moderate Palestinian Arab voices. It then rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would have created two states - one Arab and one Jewish - living side-by-side in peace.
After the 1948 war, rather than reconcile with Israel, the League spearheaded the creation of UNRWA, effectively perpetuating the statelessness of Palestinian refugees. In 1957 it sealed their fate by rejecting appeals that they be resettled in Arab states, just as Jewish refugees from the Arab countries had been resettled in Israel.
It was with the League's imprimatur that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser created the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1963 - four years before the West Bank and Gaza came under Israeli control. Then, in March 1979, the League suspended Egypt for signing a peace treaty with Israel. Cairo was not readmitted until 1989.
AND THEN, in March 2002, after nearly six decades of unremitting hostility, the League apparently changed direction and adopted the Saudi peace initiative.
But even this giant leap falls short. It demands Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines; acceptance of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital; and a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
On borders, at least on the Palestinian front, it is common knowledge that Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Qurei are, right now, poring over maps, trying to come up with an agreement in principle which would presumably take effect only after the Palestinians stop violence, terrorism and incitement against Israel and both peoples approve of the deal.
Arguably, the biggest obstacle for Israelis in the Saudi plan is that it addresses the plight of Palestinian refugees by invoking General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. Carried out in practice, it would inundate Israel - Jewish population 5.3 million - with 4.5 million stateless Palestinians. Few Israelis view this as anything but a recipe for the demographic destruction of the world's only Jewish state. And yet the idea that an organization unambiguously created to quash the birth of a Jewish state, and long dedicated to that goal, would ever offer even the theoretical opportunity of "normal relations" - albeit on terms no Israeli government could possibly accept - should not be summarily dismissed. And it hasn't been.
In March 2002, then foreign minister Shimon Peres declared Israel was prepared to discuss the plan; not as a diktat, but as a starting point. So it is really up to the Arab League to modify a fundamentally flawed offer by opening up negotiations with Israel. Let Secretary-General Moussa himself come to Jerusalem - where he would be cordially welcomed - to pursue such discussions.
Instead of reaching out, an Arab League in disarray has continued its hard-line, anti-Israel rhetoric. That's easier than bridging internal gaps between Hamas and Fatah, and over Iraq, Lebanon, and Alawite-led Syria's ever-closer melding with the Persian ayatollahs. Moussa had to make the most of a summit boycotted by the kings of Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, as well as by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Salah. Hence his denunciation of invented Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza, and perhaps also PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's incongruent plea for League intervention to save "besieged" Palestinians. Comic relief was provided by Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who helpfully pointed out that Arab leaders hate and conspire against each other.
With Damascus now assuming the Arab League presidency, it's hard to see the organization playing a constructive role in ushering in an era of peace and reconciliation. Still, a good place to begin would be for Arab leaders to address Israel's concerns about their March 2002 proposal.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Judaism's golden mean
An ultra-Orthodox couple from Beit Shemesh are under arrest for allegedly assaulting at least some of their 12 children. Sadly, that's not earth-shattering news in a country where child abuse seems to be on the rise. That some of the couple's children may have engaged in incest only adds to the grotesque revelations.
Yet what makes this story truly bizarre is that the 54-year-old wife and mother involved also heads a sect of several dozen women who maintain a Taliban-like dress code requiring them to cover their faces and wear multiple layers of clothing.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, in another ultra-Orthodox household, several people are under police investigation for abusing two toddlers. The youngest remains hospitalized and in a coma. The mother allegedly "corrected" the children's behavior by whipping them. Police insinuate she may be part of a sect which adheres to violent child-rearing practices.
Then there was the shocking bombing in Ariel on Purim, which critically wounded 15-year-old Ami Ortiz, the son of Messianic Christian pastor David Ortiz. A court order prevents detailing the direction of the investigation. What does seem apparent is that the perpetrators were Jewish extremists.
Messianics insist that one can remain a loyal Jew while professing faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the Messiah. In fact, this theology is abhorrent to Jews and Judaism. Christians who identify themselves as Jewish have long complained of violent harassment, most recently in Beersheba and Arad. Not a few messianic Jews live among us as "reverse Marranos," frightened to share their true identity for fear of persecution. Plainly, for those who proselytize - a practice insulting in Jewish eyes - such concerns are not misplaced.
Finally, there is the decree of the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, Dov Lior, coming in the wake of the March 7 massacre at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, which claimed the lives of eight students, that it is "forbidden" to rent homes to Arabs or employ Arabs anywhere in Israel. Other religious Zionist rabbis have also supported a ban on Arab labor.
THERE MAY not be a pattern here, but all these are manifestations of religious extremism seemingly tolerated by the community in which they took place.
Take the deviant deportment of the "Taliban mother." Anyone who moves around, as this family reportedly did, among the country's various ultra-Orthodox communities, will almost immediately come into contact with their synagogues, rabbis, communal leaders and teachers. In these communities a fair amount of privacy is willingly sacrificed for a life within the all-embracing collective. Peer pressure is the norm.
That being so, why was there no intervention? After all, had the "Taliban family" made it their practice to drive on Shabbat, their car would quite likely have been stoned by those irate at this desecration of the holy day.
There was at least one attempt by a neighbor to sound the alarm via Internet postings, but did more of the family's genuinely pious neighbors, who may have suspected something was not right, report their qualms? And if not, what happened to the principle that all Jews are responsible for one another?
Or take the attack on the Ortiz family. We've heard Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman condemn the bombing. Likewise, Penina Taylor, of Jews for Judaism, says unequivocally that her anti-missionary group denounces the "atrocity" and prays for "the complete healing of this boy and the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator[s] of this heinous crime." Amen to that.
But we'd like to hear leading rabbis in the haredi and national religious community explicitly denounce all anti-missionary violence - not just the Ortiz attack, but also the ongoing harassment in Arad and Beersheba.
Let them say what we all know: that in a sovereign Jewish state such violence is immoral, illegal and contemptible. Further, and more broadly, let our spiritual leaders declare that fanaticism - whether that embodied in the Taliban of Beit Shemesh, or in blanket prohibitions on all Arab labor - goes beyond the bounds of Judaism.
It was not only Aristotle who preached the desirability of the golden mean. Authentic Judaism, too, has always sought a balance between "too much and too little." Clearly, the lesson needs to be taught anew; and it is up to those we turn to for spiritual succor to teach it.
Yet what makes this story truly bizarre is that the 54-year-old wife and mother involved also heads a sect of several dozen women who maintain a Taliban-like dress code requiring them to cover their faces and wear multiple layers of clothing.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, in another ultra-Orthodox household, several people are under police investigation for abusing two toddlers. The youngest remains hospitalized and in a coma. The mother allegedly "corrected" the children's behavior by whipping them. Police insinuate she may be part of a sect which adheres to violent child-rearing practices.
Then there was the shocking bombing in Ariel on Purim, which critically wounded 15-year-old Ami Ortiz, the son of Messianic Christian pastor David Ortiz. A court order prevents detailing the direction of the investigation. What does seem apparent is that the perpetrators were Jewish extremists.
Messianics insist that one can remain a loyal Jew while professing faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the Messiah. In fact, this theology is abhorrent to Jews and Judaism. Christians who identify themselves as Jewish have long complained of violent harassment, most recently in Beersheba and Arad. Not a few messianic Jews live among us as "reverse Marranos," frightened to share their true identity for fear of persecution. Plainly, for those who proselytize - a practice insulting in Jewish eyes - such concerns are not misplaced.
Finally, there is the decree of the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, Dov Lior, coming in the wake of the March 7 massacre at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, which claimed the lives of eight students, that it is "forbidden" to rent homes to Arabs or employ Arabs anywhere in Israel. Other religious Zionist rabbis have also supported a ban on Arab labor.
THERE MAY not be a pattern here, but all these are manifestations of religious extremism seemingly tolerated by the community in which they took place.
Take the deviant deportment of the "Taliban mother." Anyone who moves around, as this family reportedly did, among the country's various ultra-Orthodox communities, will almost immediately come into contact with their synagogues, rabbis, communal leaders and teachers. In these communities a fair amount of privacy is willingly sacrificed for a life within the all-embracing collective. Peer pressure is the norm.
That being so, why was there no intervention? After all, had the "Taliban family" made it their practice to drive on Shabbat, their car would quite likely have been stoned by those irate at this desecration of the holy day.
There was at least one attempt by a neighbor to sound the alarm via Internet postings, but did more of the family's genuinely pious neighbors, who may have suspected something was not right, report their qualms? And if not, what happened to the principle that all Jews are responsible for one another?
Or take the attack on the Ortiz family. We've heard Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman condemn the bombing. Likewise, Penina Taylor, of Jews for Judaism, says unequivocally that her anti-missionary group denounces the "atrocity" and prays for "the complete healing of this boy and the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator[s] of this heinous crime." Amen to that.
But we'd like to hear leading rabbis in the haredi and national religious community explicitly denounce all anti-missionary violence - not just the Ortiz attack, but also the ongoing harassment in Arad and Beersheba.
Let them say what we all know: that in a sovereign Jewish state such violence is immoral, illegal and contemptible. Further, and more broadly, let our spiritual leaders declare that fanaticism - whether that embodied in the Taliban of Beit Shemesh, or in blanket prohibitions on all Arab labor - goes beyond the bounds of Judaism.
It was not only Aristotle who preached the desirability of the golden mean. Authentic Judaism, too, has always sought a balance between "too much and too little." Clearly, the lesson needs to be taught anew; and it is up to those we turn to for spiritual succor to teach it.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Where the moderates are
Army of Shadows
By Hillel Cohen
Translated by Haim Watzman
University of California Press
344 pages; NIS 159/$29.95
This is a book I purchased because I was tempted by its cover photograph of a Jew visiting an Arab village in 1940, even as I was repelled by the word "collaboration" in its subtitle.
The Jew - the jacket description calls him a "settler" - wearing a Western suit, is sitting slightly higher than the Arab, who is traditionally dressed and wearing a keffiyeh. The Arab has his hand on the visitor's knee. He looks warily at the camera as his guest, whom we see in profile, speaks.
In Army of Shadows - Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, Hillel Cohen of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem tells the absorbing story of the Palestinian Arabs who sought accommodation with the Zionist movement. This book answers the question: Where are the Palestinian moderates?
For more than 90 years, Arab radicals have been at war not only with with Zionism, but simultaneously with any Arab voice - Christian, Muslim, Druse or Beduin - advocating moderation and coexistence with the Zionist enterprise. So, where are the moderates?
They are dead - hacked up with axes, riddled with bullets, slaughtered with knives and exploded by bombs. That's where the Arab moderates are. This book chronicles their story from the start of the British Mandate until the War of Independence.
I GET the impression that Hillel Cohen is sympathetic to the Palestinians' plight - he knows Arabic, has many Arab friends and a long-standing interest in the Arabs of Israel and the Arab "peace camp." Here he tells a poignant tale that is seldom presented in Palestinian history about the many, many, let's call them "moderate" Arabs who recognized that going to war with the Zionist enterprise would end in catastrophe for the Arab side - in a nakba. These Arabs were labeled "traitors" and "collaborators."
Cohen says that "as an Israeli Jew, I have no standing to determine who is a traitor to the Palestinian cause." Well, as an Israeli Jew and a Zionist reading this book, I think the evidence is overwhelming: Arab fanatics are the real traitors to the Palestinian cause; it is they who prevented the creation of a Palestinian state in 1948, and it is they who have been doing everything inhumanly possible to foil the creation of a Palestinian state ever since.
As Cohen tells it, there were two factions in Palestinian Arab society: the fanatics led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem; and the moderates, who included such notable families as the Nashashibis. The latter "believed that the Zionists could not be defeated and that the common good of Palestinian Arabs demanded coexistence with Jews."
The Zionists, yes, collaborated with the moderate Arabs in land purchases, business, trade, intelligence and sometimes also militarily. Cohen's research shows that the Jewish Agency and Hagana paid Arab informants, funded pro-Zionist Arab newspapers (though often insufficiently and erratically) and made an effort (often far too little) to support Arabs who were friends of the Jews. The Zionists correctly intuited that the Arabs of Palestine did not mostly define themselves as "Palestinians," but self-identified by their clan, locale - urban or rural - and as part of the greater Arab or Muslim collective.
The "collaborators," says Cohen, had various motives: sometimes personal gain, but just as often communal interest. Often they merely wanted to do the ethical or humane thing.
Yet the mufti insisted that Palestinian Arabs define their cause in religio-nationalist terms - insisting that only his brand of Palestinian identity was legitimate and that a moderate nationalism which acquiesced in any semblance of Jewish rights to the Land of Israel was treason.
THE REJECTIONISTS spearheaded a continuum of murderous riots, beginning in the 1920s. Even as they were killing Jews, they were also intimidating any Arab tainted by a Jewish link. Fanatics even opposed connecting Arab villages to the Zionists' electrical grid. They opposed establishing self-governing institutions for the Arabs of Palestine and participation in municipal elections. They advocated a boycott of Jewish products and vehemently opposed Jews and Arabs working for or with each other.
Then, as now, the hard-liners controlled the mosques, which they used to incite against the Jews and against Arabs who did business with Jews. Initially, their fatwas merely warned of beatings for disobedience. With time, they would command the murder of moderates. (Christian Arab clerics issued their own anti-Jewish rulings in their elusive quest to win acceptance as loyal Palestinians.)
Cohen reports that "in autumn 1929, for the first time, a Palestinian public figure was murdered for collaborating with the Zionists - Sheikh Musa Hadeib from the village of Duwaimah, head of the farmers' party of Mt. Hebron."
The incitement in the mosques and pro-mufti newspapers intensified and begot a brutality which became part of the fabric of Palestinian society. In 1928, Izz a-Din al-Kassam (among others) organized jihadist cells which attacked Jews, the British and Arab "collaborators."
"Any person who dares negotiate with [Chaim] Weizmann will meet a bitter end," the extremists warned.
In the period covered by the book, hundreds of Palestinian moderates - maybe 1,000 - were murdered. Countless others got the message: Moderation is treason punishable by death.
There was no appeasing the rejectionists. Not even the draconian White Paper, issued just four months before Hitler's invasion of Poland - a British policy turnabout which dealt a near-fatal blow to the Zionist enterprise - went far enough for the fanatics. No step save the complete eradication of the Zionist enterprise would be tolerated.
Yet here is the voice of one moderate speaking to the extremists, as unearthed by Cohen's research: "I am not a traitor... I am not a Zionist... Our national demands are equivalent, but our means differ. Your method will lead you to destruction and to expulsion. A man has a right to criticize, and criticism should not be obstructed... I cannot recognize Haj Amin al-Husseini as the leader of Palestine because his direction has brought no benefit to the country.
Those were the sentiments of Muhammad Tawil from Acre. His words went unheeded by the Palestinian Arabs, and he was ultimately abandoned to his own devices by an ungrateful Jewish Agency leadership.
IN TELLING the story of the "collaborators," Cohen also sheds light on the development of Palestinian nationalism, aspects of the Arab refugee problem, and also why so many Palestinian Arabs simply refused to join the radicals in fighting the Jews during the War of Independence.
Cohen demonstrates how, at some level, the Zionist enterprise and Arabs in Palestine were indeed engaged in a zero-sum competition. Without land there could be no Jewish state, and you don't have to be a bleeding-heart leftist to realize that much injustice was done to the poor Arab fellahin. Yes, in many instances there was dispossession - even if, in a technical sense, it was done legally.
And yet, had the Arab moderates triumphed, all-out catastrophe could have been avoided. A modus vivendi could have been found. Mandatory Palestine - which, after all, was supposed to stretch from the Mediterranean to what is today the Iraqi border - could have accommodated both peoples. The Jews had no alternatives but to resurrect their ancient homeland - and the Zionists recognized this long before 1933, when Hitler came to power, or 1942, when the Nazis were implementing their industrial-scale genocide.
Army of Shadows is an important academic work that is accessible to general readers. It painfully exposes how today's violent, dysfunctional, pathological polity that is "Palestine" came to be.
It is a story of a misbegotten revolution that consumed its own.
You identify yourself as an Israeli and as a Jew. Given that this book is about Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, what - if anything - should we read into your decision not to self-identify also as a Zionist?
Don't read anything into it. Sometimes I identify myself as a Zionist, sometimes not.
Do you agree that had the "collaborators" gained the upper hand in the development of Palestinian nationalism, the past 60 years could have been very different?
Yes, this is part of what I suggest, but of course only as a possibility, not as a firm conclusion. It is very difficult to know what the Zionist response would have been had Arab moderation triumphed. Remember that in 1948, Arab rejectionism served to the advantage of the Zionist movement and was, in some cases, encouraged by it.
By Hillel Cohen
Translated by Haim Watzman
University of California Press
344 pages; NIS 159/$29.95
This is a book I purchased because I was tempted by its cover photograph of a Jew visiting an Arab village in 1940, even as I was repelled by the word "collaboration" in its subtitle.
The Jew - the jacket description calls him a "settler" - wearing a Western suit, is sitting slightly higher than the Arab, who is traditionally dressed and wearing a keffiyeh. The Arab has his hand on the visitor's knee. He looks warily at the camera as his guest, whom we see in profile, speaks.
In Army of Shadows - Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, Hillel Cohen of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem tells the absorbing story of the Palestinian Arabs who sought accommodation with the Zionist movement. This book answers the question: Where are the Palestinian moderates?
For more than 90 years, Arab radicals have been at war not only with with Zionism, but simultaneously with any Arab voice - Christian, Muslim, Druse or Beduin - advocating moderation and coexistence with the Zionist enterprise. So, where are the moderates?
They are dead - hacked up with axes, riddled with bullets, slaughtered with knives and exploded by bombs. That's where the Arab moderates are. This book chronicles their story from the start of the British Mandate until the War of Independence.
I GET the impression that Hillel Cohen is sympathetic to the Palestinians' plight - he knows Arabic, has many Arab friends and a long-standing interest in the Arabs of Israel and the Arab "peace camp." Here he tells a poignant tale that is seldom presented in Palestinian history about the many, many, let's call them "moderate" Arabs who recognized that going to war with the Zionist enterprise would end in catastrophe for the Arab side - in a nakba. These Arabs were labeled "traitors" and "collaborators."
Cohen says that "as an Israeli Jew, I have no standing to determine who is a traitor to the Palestinian cause." Well, as an Israeli Jew and a Zionist reading this book, I think the evidence is overwhelming: Arab fanatics are the real traitors to the Palestinian cause; it is they who prevented the creation of a Palestinian state in 1948, and it is they who have been doing everything inhumanly possible to foil the creation of a Palestinian state ever since.
As Cohen tells it, there were two factions in Palestinian Arab society: the fanatics led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem; and the moderates, who included such notable families as the Nashashibis. The latter "believed that the Zionists could not be defeated and that the common good of Palestinian Arabs demanded coexistence with Jews."
The Zionists, yes, collaborated with the moderate Arabs in land purchases, business, trade, intelligence and sometimes also militarily. Cohen's research shows that the Jewish Agency and Hagana paid Arab informants, funded pro-Zionist Arab newspapers (though often insufficiently and erratically) and made an effort (often far too little) to support Arabs who were friends of the Jews. The Zionists correctly intuited that the Arabs of Palestine did not mostly define themselves as "Palestinians," but self-identified by their clan, locale - urban or rural - and as part of the greater Arab or Muslim collective.
The "collaborators," says Cohen, had various motives: sometimes personal gain, but just as often communal interest. Often they merely wanted to do the ethical or humane thing.
Yet the mufti insisted that Palestinian Arabs define their cause in religio-nationalist terms - insisting that only his brand of Palestinian identity was legitimate and that a moderate nationalism which acquiesced in any semblance of Jewish rights to the Land of Israel was treason.
THE REJECTIONISTS spearheaded a continuum of murderous riots, beginning in the 1920s. Even as they were killing Jews, they were also intimidating any Arab tainted by a Jewish link. Fanatics even opposed connecting Arab villages to the Zionists' electrical grid. They opposed establishing self-governing institutions for the Arabs of Palestine and participation in municipal elections. They advocated a boycott of Jewish products and vehemently opposed Jews and Arabs working for or with each other.
Then, as now, the hard-liners controlled the mosques, which they used to incite against the Jews and against Arabs who did business with Jews. Initially, their fatwas merely warned of beatings for disobedience. With time, they would command the murder of moderates. (Christian Arab clerics issued their own anti-Jewish rulings in their elusive quest to win acceptance as loyal Palestinians.)
Cohen reports that "in autumn 1929, for the first time, a Palestinian public figure was murdered for collaborating with the Zionists - Sheikh Musa Hadeib from the village of Duwaimah, head of the farmers' party of Mt. Hebron."
The incitement in the mosques and pro-mufti newspapers intensified and begot a brutality which became part of the fabric of Palestinian society. In 1928, Izz a-Din al-Kassam (among others) organized jihadist cells which attacked Jews, the British and Arab "collaborators."
"Any person who dares negotiate with [Chaim] Weizmann will meet a bitter end," the extremists warned.
In the period covered by the book, hundreds of Palestinian moderates - maybe 1,000 - were murdered. Countless others got the message: Moderation is treason punishable by death.
There was no appeasing the rejectionists. Not even the draconian White Paper, issued just four months before Hitler's invasion of Poland - a British policy turnabout which dealt a near-fatal blow to the Zionist enterprise - went far enough for the fanatics. No step save the complete eradication of the Zionist enterprise would be tolerated.
Yet here is the voice of one moderate speaking to the extremists, as unearthed by Cohen's research: "I am not a traitor... I am not a Zionist... Our national demands are equivalent, but our means differ. Your method will lead you to destruction and to expulsion. A man has a right to criticize, and criticism should not be obstructed... I cannot recognize Haj Amin al-Husseini as the leader of Palestine because his direction has brought no benefit to the country.
Those were the sentiments of Muhammad Tawil from Acre. His words went unheeded by the Palestinian Arabs, and he was ultimately abandoned to his own devices by an ungrateful Jewish Agency leadership.
IN TELLING the story of the "collaborators," Cohen also sheds light on the development of Palestinian nationalism, aspects of the Arab refugee problem, and also why so many Palestinian Arabs simply refused to join the radicals in fighting the Jews during the War of Independence.
Cohen demonstrates how, at some level, the Zionist enterprise and Arabs in Palestine were indeed engaged in a zero-sum competition. Without land there could be no Jewish state, and you don't have to be a bleeding-heart leftist to realize that much injustice was done to the poor Arab fellahin. Yes, in many instances there was dispossession - even if, in a technical sense, it was done legally.
And yet, had the Arab moderates triumphed, all-out catastrophe could have been avoided. A modus vivendi could have been found. Mandatory Palestine - which, after all, was supposed to stretch from the Mediterranean to what is today the Iraqi border - could have accommodated both peoples. The Jews had no alternatives but to resurrect their ancient homeland - and the Zionists recognized this long before 1933, when Hitler came to power, or 1942, when the Nazis were implementing their industrial-scale genocide.
Army of Shadows is an important academic work that is accessible to general readers. It painfully exposes how today's violent, dysfunctional, pathological polity that is "Palestine" came to be.
It is a story of a misbegotten revolution that consumed its own.
FROM A Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR
The cover photo of your book is intriguing. What's the story of that picture?
I found the photo at Israel's national photo collection, and it caught my eye immediately, mainly because it represents the meeting of two nationalisms and actually two cultures.
What we see is a group of Jews from Zichron Ya'acov visiting a neighboring village. Its name was not mentioned in the photo description, but it was probably Subbarin (demolished in 1948).
We see the physical nearness, together with the cultural gap. For me the scene represents the attempts Zionist settlers made to communicate with the local Arabs, and the apparent difficulties of such meetings.
And since I wrote the book before I found the photo, it tells me how little we can really know about such a meeting, since this kind of encounter was sometimes based on a genuine wish to create good relations, sometimes aimed at exploiting the Arabs, and so on. In other words, the photo illustrates the complexity of the Zionists' attitude toward the Palestinian Arabs, and vice versa.
The cover photo of your book is intriguing. What's the story of that picture?
I found the photo at Israel's national photo collection, and it caught my eye immediately, mainly because it represents the meeting of two nationalisms and actually two cultures.
What we see is a group of Jews from Zichron Ya'acov visiting a neighboring village. Its name was not mentioned in the photo description, but it was probably Subbarin (demolished in 1948).
We see the physical nearness, together with the cultural gap. For me the scene represents the attempts Zionist settlers made to communicate with the local Arabs, and the apparent difficulties of such meetings.
And since I wrote the book before I found the photo, it tells me how little we can really know about such a meeting, since this kind of encounter was sometimes based on a genuine wish to create good relations, sometimes aimed at exploiting the Arabs, and so on. In other words, the photo illustrates the complexity of the Zionists' attitude toward the Palestinian Arabs, and vice versa.
You identify yourself as an Israeli and as a Jew. Given that this book is about Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, what - if anything - should we read into your decision not to self-identify also as a Zionist?
Don't read anything into it. Sometimes I identify myself as a Zionist, sometimes not.
Do you agree that had the "collaborators" gained the upper hand in the development of Palestinian nationalism, the past 60 years could have been very different?
Yes, this is part of what I suggest, but of course only as a possibility, not as a firm conclusion. It is very difficult to know what the Zionist response would have been had Arab moderation triumphed. Remember that in 1948, Arab rejectionism served to the advantage of the Zionist movement and was, in some cases, encouraged by it.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Meir Kahane by Libby Kahane
My militant husband
Rabbi Meir Kahane
His Life and Thought
Volume One: 1932-1975
By Libby Kahane
Urim, NIS 150/ $36
It's hard to think of a 20th-century Jewish figure who inspired so many of my generation to stay Jewish, yet who also generated such visceral loathing among our elders.
Rabbi Meir Kahane as man and phenomenon could never have arisen, much less flourished, had he been born in Melbourne, Johannesburg, London or even Los Angeles. Whatever his gifts and foibles, Kahane could only have sprung to prominence in the tumultuous time and perilous place that was New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the perfect storm
for Diaspora Jewish militancy.
Entire urban Jewish neighborhoods were under siege: synagogues firebombed; cemeteries desecrated; elderly Jews beaten mercilessly. It seemed as if the city's liberal mayor, John V. Lindsay, had traded peace with the volatile Black and Puerto Rican communities offering affirmative action, community power-sharing in the form of decentralization and enhanced welfare services at Jewish expense.
Jews who could flee to the suburbs did so (enabling many to hang onto their liberalism), while those of us trapped in the five boroughs were left to our own devices.
From their suburbs (or Manhattan enclaves) the well-heeled, acculturated leaders of the Jewish establishment were cut off from the concerns of their poor, mostly Orthodox, coreligionists. Prominent Jewish organizations, settlement houses and even so-called Jewish hospitals became devoted to serving the Negro and Puerto Rican communities. There was no money for Jewish education; none for the Jewish poor (who were thought not to exist); and nothing needless to say for defense in the inner-city jungle.
At the other end of the communal spectrum were the Old World rabbis, including those in my Orthodox Lower East Side yeshiva, who were painfully disconnected from the pulsating temptations and lurking dangers that surrounded their charges.
The choice seemed to be: We could hang on to the waning yiddishkeit of the shtetl, embrace by hook or by crook the faux Judaism of the limousine-liberal crowd, or walk away from the whole kit'n kaboodle at the first opportunity.
INTO THIS maelstrom burst Meir Kahane, seemingly offering a third way: engagement in politics, ethnic pride, self-defense, a channel for our adolescent energies and (I thought) a redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish.
For those who think of Kahane exclusively in the Israeli context, as the founder in 1974 of the anti-Arab Kach movement, his contribution to American Jewish continuity can easily be overlooked. I don't know if Meir Kahane saved Soviet Jewry -- though he certainly put the
issue on the front pages of the newspapers -- but he undoubtedly saved thousands of American Jewish youths like me, not only those who joined his Jewish Defense League, but those who benefited collaterally from it. And for that, whatever his failings, I, for one, am in his debt.
IT'S A CLICHE to call a woman "long-suffering," but if anyone deserves that appellation it is Kahane's widow, Libby, who for all the years of her husband's activism stayed out of sight raising their four children, only to lose Meir to an Islamist assassin in 1990, and son Binyamin Ze'ev to a Palestinian Arab terrorist in 2000.
She has now, hesitatingly, entered the limelight by writing the story of her husband's life until 1975. A concluding volume is in the works.
If, as Spanish essayist Jose Ortega Y Gasset argued, "Biography is a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified," this book doesn't qualify. Instead, the author's stated aim was to produce an authoritative study of her husband's "one-man struggle to promote the Torah way of life."
Yet, to her credit, Rabbi Meir Kahane can't be dismissed as pure iconography. Indeed, this important work is not easily pigeonholed.
A deeply private, religious woman, now a grandmother, Libby Kahane is in no position to produce either an impartial assessment of her husband's place in history or a kiss-and-tell bestseller. Instead, the author, who is also a professional librarian, has done much of the archival and chronological heavy lifting that will one day allow a more dispassionate and, with a bit of luck, fair-minded biographer to write the full-scale, balanced and yet illuminating biography Meir Kahane deserves.
KAHANE WAS born into a relatively comfortable family. His father was a pulpit rabbi during the Great Depression. Meir was educated in the yeshiva school system, developing a stutter which he overcame with great effort only in adulthood. He joined Betar in 1946, Bnei Akiva in 1952. Meir told Libby that he quit Betar because he wanted a more Orthodox environment.
At any rate, he met her at a Bnei Akiva gathering in 1954. "After several months, Meir asked me out. I have always felt that Meir and I were fated to marry," she writes.
That's about as personal as this volume gets.
Kahane studied at the illustrious Mirer Yeshiva during the day, graduated Brooklyn College night school and married Libby in 1956. Their dream was to make aliya and for Meir to work for the Foreign Ministry. This option was closed to him, as Libby tells it, because Kahane belatedly discovered that such opportunities went exclusively to Labor Party loyalists.
Along the way, Kahane received his rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, got a master's from NYU in international relations, and a law degree from New York Law School (he failed the bar exam, which many do on the first try, and never tried again).
Afterwards, Kahane went through a series of jobs: newspaper delivery man, pulpit rabbi and budding journalist, sometimes writing under the name of Martin Keene.
The murkiest years in Kahane's life (hardly covered in this book) are those between 1963-1965. He and his college buddy Joseph Churba set up a Washington DC think-tank that never really took off. This was when Kahane sometimes went under the name Michael King and reportedly did not lead the lifestyle one would have expected from a married Orthodox rabbi.
You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to speculate why this clean-shaven, modern Orthodox man ultimately reinvented himself into a religious obsessive.
Around this time, Meir started writing for the Brooklyn-based
Jewish Press, which would be (despite some intermittent friction with publisher Rabbi
Solomon Klass) Kahane's main source of income. The tabloid would also become his bully pulpit. Kahane was extraordinarily prolific, yet Klass never paid him enough to make a decent living.
In 1968, in the context of increased levels of violent Jew-hatred stemming
from New York¹s minority communities, Kahane, with attorney Bert Zweibon and public relations man Mort Dolinsky, founded the Jewish Defense League. Dolinsky soon left to make aliya and became head of the Government Press Office.
Zweibon became JDL's general counsel and Kahane's ostensible number two.
THIS BOOK is replete with detail: names, dates, speeches, columns, travels, ripostes to trial judges, and so on.
We learn that Kahane's first arrest came when he held a sit-in at the NYC Board of Education in
downtown Brooklyn, demanding that the agency terminate two black anti-Semites who had ensconced themselves in a local school board as part of Lindsay's decentralization scheme.
Later, when Black militants threatened to turn up at Temple
Emanuel on Fifth Avenue to demand "reparations" from Jews for supposedly exploiting
black folks, Kahane and his fledgling JDL showed up with baseball bats and lead
pipes to protect Jewish honor.
That incident gained Kahane tons of publicity and gave JDL plenty of traction.
KAHANE SOON diversified JDL's activities to the struggle for Soviet Jewry. He employed his knack for public relations, together with bluff, a whiff of violence and a pinch of intimidation to generate badly needed attention for the movement. From there, it seemed only natural to channel JDL's energies toward defending Israel from US pressure to abandon the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War.
Along the way, he started a variety of front groups, including DIJEL to press for democracy in Jewish organizational life; the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Activist Organizations; and Shuva to foster the mass aliya of US Jewry.
Kahane was both a brilliant theoretician and a master logistician. Yet given how many balls this one-man act had in the air at any one time, he inevitably fell short when it came to following through.
As Kahane's face became well known, followers urged him not to go anywhere
without security. Poignantly, and perhaps more tellingly than intended, Libby Kahane writes that "Meir adamantly refused to have a bodyguard. He had complete trust that G-d would protect him in his efforts to help His people."
Only with hindsight does it strike me that Kahane had become delusional about his role in history and his omnipotence. For all his brilliance, media savvy, boundless energy, micromanagement skills, writing talent and charisma, as the years went on Kahane's views became ever more sensational, his schemes ever more grandiose. There seemed no one he could turn to for a reality check; no one to rein him in.
At the end of the day, Libby Kahane's work is indispensable for the detail it provides. Yet it disappoints in offering few insights into Kahane's complex personality. I hope she allows herself, in the final volume, to get more personal. It must have been a severe blow for him to have been rejected by Menachem Begin and the Jabotinsky movement. Was that what helped push him to ever greater theological and ideological extremism?
These are the things readers really want to know. Meir Kahane was a flame both illuminating and incendiary. This book is only part of his story.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
The catharsis Israel needs
Ehud Olmert must go. But would we be better off under Binyamin Netanyahu?
The Winograd Committee, established to examine the Second Lebanon War, determined that a leader who sends his army into battle is obligated to analyze in depth the nature, timing and chances of success of the campaign: "We saw that the rash decisions to go to war made by the government headed by [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert did not meet these conditions."
Thus spoke the five-member committee in May 2007, when it released its interim findings.
Last month, the committee presented its final report, saying, "We want to stress that we stand behind everything we said in the interim report, and [that] the two parts complement each other."
According to the final report, there were "serious failings and shortcomings in the decision-making process." Let's recall that at the top of the decision-making pyramid was Ehud Olmert.
The premier, said the committee, had one of two choices after Hizbullah attacked: "The first was a short, powerful, strong and unexpected blow on Hizbullah, primarily through 'stand-off' firepower. The second option was to bring about a significant change of the reality in the south of Lebanon with a large [-scale] ground operation, including temporary occupation of Lebanon and 'cleaning' it of Hizbullah military infrastructure."
But, said Winograd: "Israel went to war before it decided which option to select, and without an exit strategy...."
The committee concluded that Israel's chances of victory were stymied by the government's failure to deploy the necessary troops for a ground offensive; that Olmert allowed himself to be "dragged" into a belated attack in the last days of the war; that the government showed "no understanding of the theater of operations, of the IDF's readiness and preparedness, and of the basic principles of using military power to achieve a political and diplomatic goal."
Finally, the committee said that no one gave "serious consideration" to whether it was reasonable to achieve anything tangible in the offensive Olmert launched in the last 60 hours of the war, during which 33 IDF soldiers gave their lives.
NOW, I know some pundits are claiming that this report is not damning of Olmert, and that the heaviest criticism was leveled at the IDF. But I'm not so sure.
In a democracy, the civilian commander-in-chief is responsible for defining the army's mission; mission then defines strategy. Absent a mission, how could the IDF win?
It is true that, for inexplicable reasons, the theater commander was hardly speaking to the commanding officer of the north; that the OC Northern Command was hardly speaking to the chief of staff; that the chief of staff was barely talking to the defense minister, and that the defense minister and prime minister were hardly speaking to one another. That accounts for some of what went wrong.
AS THESE words are being written, security forces are on high alert in expectation that Monday's attack in Dimona - which may have emanated from Gaza - might be the start of a new wave of Palestinian terrorism.
A large chunk of the responsibility for events in Gaza (and for the failure to finish the security barrier in the Hebron area) rests not only with Ehud Olmert, but also with Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He reportedly did very little consulting with the IDF high command or with the security cabinet even as Israel ratcheted up the pressure on Hamas in the Strip.
Once again - as in the Second Lebanon War - we see a failure to consider all possible scenarios, a refusal to consult, and an over-reliance on improvisation.
Plainly, Barak hasn't changed. He's still impulsive and full of himself. He is not the antidote to our leadership problem.
Bottom line? Olmert must go. Yet Barak is not the guy to replace him. And polls show he would not.
IT IS CLEAR that if elections were held today, the Likud would form the next government. So assuming Binyamin Netanyahu did become prime minister, would Israel be better off? Is he today more credible than Olmert?
The harsh reality is not that Bibi has suddenly become more trustworthy, but that Olmert, by comparison, is so untrustworthy. So, yes, Netanyahu is more credible than Olmert.
But Netanyahu has a history of saying one thing and doing another. He cut a deal with the PLO over Hebron in 1997; he was ready to give up 13 percent of the West Bank to Arafat in the 1998 Wye Agreement; he reportedly sent Ron Lauder to try and work out a deal with Syria's Hafez Assad over the Golan Heights.
As finance minister Netanyahu paid for the disengagement from Gaza, only to quit before its implementation. And, more recently, he could not help himself from talking too much on television about Israel's September 2007 bombing of a suspected nuclear site in Syria.
At the end of the day, Bibi's pragmatism - so long as it does not devolve into the kind of self-serving opportunism Olmert has fallen into - might prove an asset. But the Israeli body politic can't afford another leader who says one thing and does another. The effect on public morale would be simply too devastating.
In his Monday night attack against Olmert from the Knesset podium - "Would the captain of the Titanic have been given another command?" - Bibi rose to the occasion.
The opposition leader had been strangely silent lest he ruin his chances of coasting into the premiership. He never really articulated the case against Annapolis. Though he spoke out on Jerusalem, here too he was a bit disingenuous, as the division of Jerusalem - whatever that means - is the least immediate of the threats facing Israel in the charade talks with the hapless Mahmoud Abbas.
Anyway, Netanyahu's rhetorical abilities have never been in question. Now, more is needed: Specifically, the opposition leader should present an unambiguous platform that tells Israelis not just what the Likud opposes, but what it proposes, and how it hopes to achieve its goals.
WHEN YITZHAK Rabin returned to power, he gave us Oslo; when Ariel Sharon came back from the political wilderness, he brought us disengagement.
We all make mistakes. The real question is: At age 58, is Netanyahu able to learn from his? Can he reinvent himself and lead Israel in the treacherous times ahead? I hope so. Because Ehud Olmert really must go.
In the long term, a key answer to our systemic problems would be electoral reform and a restructuring of the political system. But more immediately, Israel needs a catharsis; and, for better or worse, Binyamin Netanyahu is the only candidate that can offer it.
The Winograd Committee, established to examine the Second Lebanon War, determined that a leader who sends his army into battle is obligated to analyze in depth the nature, timing and chances of success of the campaign: "We saw that the rash decisions to go to war made by the government headed by [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert did not meet these conditions."
Thus spoke the five-member committee in May 2007, when it released its interim findings.
Last month, the committee presented its final report, saying, "We want to stress that we stand behind everything we said in the interim report, and [that] the two parts complement each other."
According to the final report, there were "serious failings and shortcomings in the decision-making process." Let's recall that at the top of the decision-making pyramid was Ehud Olmert.
The premier, said the committee, had one of two choices after Hizbullah attacked: "The first was a short, powerful, strong and unexpected blow on Hizbullah, primarily through 'stand-off' firepower. The second option was to bring about a significant change of the reality in the south of Lebanon with a large [-scale] ground operation, including temporary occupation of Lebanon and 'cleaning' it of Hizbullah military infrastructure."
But, said Winograd: "Israel went to war before it decided which option to select, and without an exit strategy...."
The committee concluded that Israel's chances of victory were stymied by the government's failure to deploy the necessary troops for a ground offensive; that Olmert allowed himself to be "dragged" into a belated attack in the last days of the war; that the government showed "no understanding of the theater of operations, of the IDF's readiness and preparedness, and of the basic principles of using military power to achieve a political and diplomatic goal."
Finally, the committee said that no one gave "serious consideration" to whether it was reasonable to achieve anything tangible in the offensive Olmert launched in the last 60 hours of the war, during which 33 IDF soldiers gave their lives.
NOW, I know some pundits are claiming that this report is not damning of Olmert, and that the heaviest criticism was leveled at the IDF. But I'm not so sure.
In a democracy, the civilian commander-in-chief is responsible for defining the army's mission; mission then defines strategy. Absent a mission, how could the IDF win?
It is true that, for inexplicable reasons, the theater commander was hardly speaking to the commanding officer of the north; that the OC Northern Command was hardly speaking to the chief of staff; that the chief of staff was barely talking to the defense minister, and that the defense minister and prime minister were hardly speaking to one another. That accounts for some of what went wrong.
AS THESE words are being written, security forces are on high alert in expectation that Monday's attack in Dimona - which may have emanated from Gaza - might be the start of a new wave of Palestinian terrorism.
A large chunk of the responsibility for events in Gaza (and for the failure to finish the security barrier in the Hebron area) rests not only with Ehud Olmert, but also with Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He reportedly did very little consulting with the IDF high command or with the security cabinet even as Israel ratcheted up the pressure on Hamas in the Strip.
Once again - as in the Second Lebanon War - we see a failure to consider all possible scenarios, a refusal to consult, and an over-reliance on improvisation.
Plainly, Barak hasn't changed. He's still impulsive and full of himself. He is not the antidote to our leadership problem.
Bottom line? Olmert must go. Yet Barak is not the guy to replace him. And polls show he would not.
IT IS CLEAR that if elections were held today, the Likud would form the next government. So assuming Binyamin Netanyahu did become prime minister, would Israel be better off? Is he today more credible than Olmert?
The harsh reality is not that Bibi has suddenly become more trustworthy, but that Olmert, by comparison, is so untrustworthy. So, yes, Netanyahu is more credible than Olmert.
But Netanyahu has a history of saying one thing and doing another. He cut a deal with the PLO over Hebron in 1997; he was ready to give up 13 percent of the West Bank to Arafat in the 1998 Wye Agreement; he reportedly sent Ron Lauder to try and work out a deal with Syria's Hafez Assad over the Golan Heights.
As finance minister Netanyahu paid for the disengagement from Gaza, only to quit before its implementation. And, more recently, he could not help himself from talking too much on television about Israel's September 2007 bombing of a suspected nuclear site in Syria.
At the end of the day, Bibi's pragmatism - so long as it does not devolve into the kind of self-serving opportunism Olmert has fallen into - might prove an asset. But the Israeli body politic can't afford another leader who says one thing and does another. The effect on public morale would be simply too devastating.
In his Monday night attack against Olmert from the Knesset podium - "Would the captain of the Titanic have been given another command?" - Bibi rose to the occasion.
The opposition leader had been strangely silent lest he ruin his chances of coasting into the premiership. He never really articulated the case against Annapolis. Though he spoke out on Jerusalem, here too he was a bit disingenuous, as the division of Jerusalem - whatever that means - is the least immediate of the threats facing Israel in the charade talks with the hapless Mahmoud Abbas.
Anyway, Netanyahu's rhetorical abilities have never been in question. Now, more is needed: Specifically, the opposition leader should present an unambiguous platform that tells Israelis not just what the Likud opposes, but what it proposes, and how it hopes to achieve its goals.
WHEN YITZHAK Rabin returned to power, he gave us Oslo; when Ariel Sharon came back from the political wilderness, he brought us disengagement.
We all make mistakes. The real question is: At age 58, is Netanyahu able to learn from his? Can he reinvent himself and lead Israel in the treacherous times ahead? I hope so. Because Ehud Olmert really must go.
In the long term, a key answer to our systemic problems would be electoral reform and a restructuring of the political system. But more immediately, Israel needs a catharsis; and, for better or worse, Binyamin Netanyahu is the only candidate that can offer it.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Gaza - Three Possible Scenarios
Last Thursday, Hamas demolished the Philadelphi Corridor --
but not the perception that Israel is still in charge
To this day, it's been hard for Israel to rid itself of the Gaza Strip and its 1.3 million Palestinian Arab inhabitants.
Prime Minister Menachem Begin tried to convince Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to take Gaza in 1979, when Israel turned over the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
No thanks, said Sadat, though Egypt had occupied the Strip from 1948 until the 1967 Six Day War.
Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was another attempt to solve our Gaza problem. The Palestinian Authority, under EU tutelage, was supposed to handle border control at Rafah. But the Europeans and "moderate" Palestinians abandoned their posts in the wake of Hamas's violent takeover of the Strip in the summer of 2007 (which, you'll recall, followed its earlier, electoral victory over Fatah in 2006).
All this undercut a pillar of Israel's disengagement strategy: to be done with Gaza. Jerusalem could not really disengage under an onslaught of flying bombs aimed at the Negev - even if every last Israeli citizen had been evacuated and the IDF had pulled out.
Those of us who supported disengagement must now admit that it created more problems for Israeli security and diplomacy than it solved.
AS FAR as I know, no pundit or intelligence agency forecast what happened on January 23. There was no advance warning that the Philadelphi Corridor would essentially disappear. At this writing, the division between Hamas-controlled Palestinian Arab Gaza and Egyptian Sinai has vanished. Or as a BBC correspondent put it: "There are so many Palestinians in Rafah that it is almost as if the town had been annexed by Gaza."
What had been a background headache for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his security chief Omar Suleiman is now a full-blown migraine.
Moreover, it now transpires that Hamas didn't just engineer the recent "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza, but also plotted demolishing the Philadelphi Corridor fence separating Egyptian from Palestinian Rafah.
For his part, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been shown (once again) to be a hapless bystander with little influence over what happens on the Palestinian street.
In the wake of Thursday's events, there are more questions than answers.
Among the people wondering what happens next are the clans who made their living transporting contraband and weapons via the tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor. Will they still have a business? How will they adapt to the new situation? What impact will the fall of the Philadelphi Corridor have on rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas? Will the Sinai-Negev border now become a new flashpoint?
And, conversely, does the corridor's collapse end the talk of Gaza being "a big prison" and of Israel's "occupation" continuing? Or will the media take the line adopted on Thursday by the Guardian that the crisis continues, and it's Israel's fault?
A ROSY SCENARIO argues that Gaza is at last no longer Israel's problem; it's the clear responsibility of Egypt and Hamas. Ranking Israeli officials told The New York Times that the events in Gaza may be "a blessing in disguise... some people in the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister's Office are very happy with this. They are saying, 'At last, the disengagement is beginning to work.'"
In other words, now that the border is open, Hamas must begin worrying about the delivery of essential services and the population's welfare, something that would necessitate a genuine cease-fire with Israel and the end to cross-border attacks.
A gloomier scenario would argue that the fall of the Philadelphi Corridor may have dire consequences for the Mubarak regime itself; that the Islamist triumph and Cairo's sclerotic management of the developing crisis will embolden the Muslim Brotherhood, which, for all we pundits know, is right now making quiet inroads into the Egyptian military.
Further, on the internal Palestinian front, Hamas will seek to leverage its Gaza accomplishment by manipulating Abbas to end what's left of the EU and US embargo.
The Abbas approach of dealing with Israel - call it outward accommodation, the phased plan, whatever - has less credibility on the Palestinian street than ever.
The Fatah chief will either further adapt his policies to Hamas, or quit to make way for a newly released Marwan Barghouti.
MY HUNCH is that in the near-term, Egypt will try to pick up the pieces. It will attempt to control traffic between the Sinai and Egypt proper; it will bring Hamas and Fatah together, with the Islamists as the senior partners and the nationalists as conduits to the civilized world. Israeli decision makers, after due deliberation, will probably opt not to send the IDF back into Gaza to rebuild and take charge of the Philadelphi Corridor.
Fruitless negotiations on a "shelf agreement" between Israel and the PA will naturally continue because the Bush administration needs this illusion of momentum, the EU thinks the talks can actually produce something tangible, and Ehud Olmert has every incentive (if he survives the Winograd Commission's report later this week) to play along.
Hamas will reduce attacks on Israel even as it lays the groundwork to continue the struggle. It will, meantime, concentrate on rebuilding its network in the West Bank.
All this makes the post-Annapolis negotiations aimed at a theoretical, paper agreement (which, Israelis are told, will be implemented only if the Palestinians change their violent ways) an even more dangerous exercise in futility: Concessions to Abbas may yet be reaped by the Islamists who stand poised to take over Palestinian society.
Even if the Rafah barrier is reconstituted, how the bitter lemons of Hamas's latest achievement can be turned into lemonade is beyond me.
but not the perception that Israel is still in charge
To this day, it's been hard for Israel to rid itself of the Gaza Strip and its 1.3 million Palestinian Arab inhabitants.
Prime Minister Menachem Begin tried to convince Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to take Gaza in 1979, when Israel turned over the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
No thanks, said Sadat, though Egypt had occupied the Strip from 1948 until the 1967 Six Day War.
Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was another attempt to solve our Gaza problem. The Palestinian Authority, under EU tutelage, was supposed to handle border control at Rafah. But the Europeans and "moderate" Palestinians abandoned their posts in the wake of Hamas's violent takeover of the Strip in the summer of 2007 (which, you'll recall, followed its earlier, electoral victory over Fatah in 2006).
All this undercut a pillar of Israel's disengagement strategy: to be done with Gaza. Jerusalem could not really disengage under an onslaught of flying bombs aimed at the Negev - even if every last Israeli citizen had been evacuated and the IDF had pulled out.
Those of us who supported disengagement must now admit that it created more problems for Israeli security and diplomacy than it solved.
AS FAR as I know, no pundit or intelligence agency forecast what happened on January 23. There was no advance warning that the Philadelphi Corridor would essentially disappear. At this writing, the division between Hamas-controlled Palestinian Arab Gaza and Egyptian Sinai has vanished. Or as a BBC correspondent put it: "There are so many Palestinians in Rafah that it is almost as if the town had been annexed by Gaza."
What had been a background headache for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his security chief Omar Suleiman is now a full-blown migraine.
Moreover, it now transpires that Hamas didn't just engineer the recent "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza, but also plotted demolishing the Philadelphi Corridor fence separating Egyptian from Palestinian Rafah.
For his part, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been shown (once again) to be a hapless bystander with little influence over what happens on the Palestinian street.
In the wake of Thursday's events, there are more questions than answers.
Among the people wondering what happens next are the clans who made their living transporting contraband and weapons via the tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor. Will they still have a business? How will they adapt to the new situation? What impact will the fall of the Philadelphi Corridor have on rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas? Will the Sinai-Negev border now become a new flashpoint?
And, conversely, does the corridor's collapse end the talk of Gaza being "a big prison" and of Israel's "occupation" continuing? Or will the media take the line adopted on Thursday by the Guardian that the crisis continues, and it's Israel's fault?
A ROSY SCENARIO argues that Gaza is at last no longer Israel's problem; it's the clear responsibility of Egypt and Hamas. Ranking Israeli officials told The New York Times that the events in Gaza may be "a blessing in disguise... some people in the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister's Office are very happy with this. They are saying, 'At last, the disengagement is beginning to work.'"
In other words, now that the border is open, Hamas must begin worrying about the delivery of essential services and the population's welfare, something that would necessitate a genuine cease-fire with Israel and the end to cross-border attacks.
A gloomier scenario would argue that the fall of the Philadelphi Corridor may have dire consequences for the Mubarak regime itself; that the Islamist triumph and Cairo's sclerotic management of the developing crisis will embolden the Muslim Brotherhood, which, for all we pundits know, is right now making quiet inroads into the Egyptian military.
Further, on the internal Palestinian front, Hamas will seek to leverage its Gaza accomplishment by manipulating Abbas to end what's left of the EU and US embargo.
The Abbas approach of dealing with Israel - call it outward accommodation, the phased plan, whatever - has less credibility on the Palestinian street than ever.
The Fatah chief will either further adapt his policies to Hamas, or quit to make way for a newly released Marwan Barghouti.
MY HUNCH is that in the near-term, Egypt will try to pick up the pieces. It will attempt to control traffic between the Sinai and Egypt proper; it will bring Hamas and Fatah together, with the Islamists as the senior partners and the nationalists as conduits to the civilized world. Israeli decision makers, after due deliberation, will probably opt not to send the IDF back into Gaza to rebuild and take charge of the Philadelphi Corridor.
Fruitless negotiations on a "shelf agreement" between Israel and the PA will naturally continue because the Bush administration needs this illusion of momentum, the EU thinks the talks can actually produce something tangible, and Ehud Olmert has every incentive (if he survives the Winograd Commission's report later this week) to play along.
Hamas will reduce attacks on Israel even as it lays the groundwork to continue the struggle. It will, meantime, concentrate on rebuilding its network in the West Bank.
All this makes the post-Annapolis negotiations aimed at a theoretical, paper agreement (which, Israelis are told, will be implemented only if the Palestinians change their violent ways) an even more dangerous exercise in futility: Concessions to Abbas may yet be reaped by the Islamists who stand poised to take over Palestinian society.
Even if the Rafah barrier is reconstituted, how the bitter lemons of Hamas's latest achievement can be turned into lemonade is beyond me.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Cairo diary
It was with some trepidation that Lisa and I set off from Jerusalem for a 4-day mini-vacation to Cairo. Tensions between Egypt and Israel had spiked over the ongoing crisis in Gaza and the Egyptians had all but declared Israel’s Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, persona non grata.
On the other hand, it was hard to imagine relations warming anytime soon and who knows how things will play out once Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, 79, leaves the scene.
If we wanted to see the pyramids, visit the bazaars and eat authentic koshari now was the time to make a move.
El-Al flies to Cairo International Airport on Sunday and Thursday nights. Since we didn’t want to spend Shabbat in Egypt we took the Sunday flight which gave us four full days before our journey home late on Thursday.
Can you "do" Cairo in only four days?
Absolutely. In fact, we took it at a leisurely pace.
And still we made it to significant mosques, bazaars, the pyramids, the Egyptian museum, and a performance of whirling dervishes.
As we got to Ben-Gurion, we were curious about who else would be flying to Cairo besides us. Since the the Aksa Intifada exploded in September 2000, no Israeli citizen in our acquaintance had made the journey.
Most of the other passengers on the one-hour flight whom we presumed to be Jewish were transferring in Cairo. Also on board were Israeli Arabs and Christian pilgrims – tradition has it that Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus fled to Egypt in order to escape Herod’s “massacre of the innocents.”
And there were several Israeli “businessman-types” whom we imagined to be arms merchants on their way to some African hotspot.
We opted to travel on our US and British rather than Israeli passports and on arriving in Cairo purchased visas ($15 each) at the easy-to-miss foreign currency booth just before passport control.
We’d arranged through the Hilton Nile Hotel for a car and – what turned out to be a “fixer” – to meet us ($30 plus tips) just as we got off the plane.
It was reassuring to be greeted in this foreign port of call by a pleasant, well-dressed man holding a placard with our names on it. He helped us with our landing cards and withdrew to the other side of passport control where he later helped us retrieve our luggage.
Our fixer then escorted us, through no-go areas, past armed security men, to where hundreds of white-clad pilgrims, loaded down with immense parcels, had just returned from the haj in Mecca.
Outside the terminal we found ourselves thrust into a raucous scene.
There were cars, luggage wagons, and people jostling to inch their way out of the compound. In the parking lot, our fixer handed us over to a hotel chauffeur for the 30-minute drive to the Hilton which is located on the shores of the Nile.
Our first – and lasting impression – as we got closer to Cairo proper was of the unrelenting honking of car horns, the near absence of traffic lights, the madcap ways of Cairo drivers, and the ubiquitous, though ineffective, presence of traffic police and an assortment of security personnel everywhere one looked.
At the Nile Hilton compound, our car was cursorily checked by security men and a bomb-sniffing dog. At the entrance, we were ushered through a metal detector and into the serenity of the Hilton lobby.
It was an orderly oasis in an otherwise frenzied metropolis. A classical music ensemble played Mozart in a corner.
AFTER A good nights sleep in our comfortable, spacious 1970s-style room which included a large balcony overlooking Tahrir Square, the Egyptian Museum and the Arab League building, we headed upstairs for a buffet breakfast.
There was plenty of food we felt comfortable enjoying – eggs, vegetables, yogurt, humus, babaghanoush, cheeses, bread, coffee and tea.
We drank bottled water but used the hotel’s tap water for showering and brushing our teeth without any problems.
Though the hotel knew we were from Israel, service throughout our stay was prompt and solicitous. We asked that a tea-kettle and cups be brought to our room and within minutes they were provided.
FIRST THING Monday morning, our plan was to head straight for the Pyramids at Giza, some 45 minutes away.
We had organized a guide recommended through a local Israeli contact. But when it turned out she was indisposed and wouldn’t be able to join us until the following day, we put off the pyramids and headed instead, on our own by taxi, to the Mosque of al-Azhar, a key center of Islamic learning (founded in 970 CE), and located near the glitzy, bustling Khan al-Khalili bazaar, in a section called Islamic Cairo.
The taxis we encountered proved that there is life after mechanical death.
Their interiors tended to be skeletal; knobs and casings having been stripped away or atrophied sometime during the middle kingdom; windshield wipers? – a wasteful accessory.
Many drivers (not just of taxis) preferred to “save their battery” by not to using headlights after dark.
The appalling air-pollution, with cars belching fumes and burning oil, made us long for the blue skies and pristine mountain air of Jerusalem.
Just crossing the street in Cairo is a challenge. With few traffic lights, cavalier attitudes toward the occasional red light, and traffic police as abundant as they are indolent, we relied heavily on shadowing “human shields” – local denizens who are expert at dodging traffic coming from every which way – to get to a sidewalk.
MOST MOSQUES welcome visitors. All you do is tip the custodian to watch your shoes.
We were already familiar with the amplified call to prayer (five times a day) which has long been part of our Jerusalem experience. Muezzins call the faithful to worship from the minarets towers (which in Israel are often illuminated by green lighting at night).
Inside, all mosques have a mihrab, a sort of alcove, which indicates the direction of Mecca. Mosques are distinguished by their tiling, design, lamps, method of construction. But compared to cathedrals, mosques (like synagogues) are relative simple affairs.
We managed to visit the famous Azhar mosque and a half-dozen others including the Abbasid-era mud-brick Mosque of Ibn Tulun (879 CE), and the Mosque of Amr ibn al-Aas (640 CE) which was the first place of organized Islamic worship in Egypt.
That’s also where I bought a string of prayer beads (to help the faithful recall the 99 names of Allah).
Our favorite market was the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. It’s far larger and more varied than Jerusalem’s Old City shuk. You’ll find spices, water pipes, jewelry, trinkets, and places to grab a snack including a pancake café and Arab-style tea room.
We didn’t actually buy anything despite the best efforts of the hawking merchants. Mostly we enjoyed stealing away from the narrow touristy alleyways, to where fewer trinkets and more staples (chicken, meat, and vegetables) were being sold.
ON TUESDAY, the moment we’d been waiting for had arrived.
Together with our guide Iman and a van driver, we’re off the see the pyramids.
We’d imagined that we’d have to traverse a sandy desert until, at last, we’d spy these great wonders. Not so.
Cairo’s huge metropolis (16 million people) leads directly, once you cross the Nile, into Giza whose crumbling buildings and squalid appearance also define large tracts of Cairo proper.
It was only on the way home that we saw Western-style middle-class apartment blocks in the suburbs near the airport.
At any rate, nothing – not the hordes of tourists, not the vehicles clogging the access roads, not the locals trying to sell us everything from camel rides to kaffiyehs, not the huge number of security men – nothing ultimately could detract from the sight of these awesome, monumental tombs built 5,000 years ago.
These immense structures emblemize a civilization that predates the Biblical stories of the Israelite patriarchs and matriarchs.
We explore the terrain, walking (and driving) around the pyramids, visiting the “solar boat” museum containing an actual, reconstructed, full-size Egyptian boat which had been used to transport royal corpses for burial, and we later gawk at the iconic Sphinx which guards the Giza plateau.
Then it is back to Old Cairo for a visit to the heavily-guarded Ben Ezra Synagogue, Egypt’s oldest, and now a museum.
Ben Ezra is also famous for its treasure-drove of sacred texts discovered in its geniza by Solomon Schechter in 1896.
Iman also shows us the nearby Church of St. Sergius, the oldest Coptic Church in Cairo.
ON WEDNESDAY, we dodge the traffic of modern Cairo to walk from our hotel to the Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue, where services are held only if enough foreigners happen to be in town.
Most of Wednesday is devoted to a visit to the cold and jammed corridors of the Egyptian Museum.
The museum is a throwback to an earlier era.
Precious little is protected by climate controlled casings. The lighting is poor. The floors are densely packed with artifacts, strewn warehouse-like. Many of the exhibits are unmarked and poorly described. Only some objects have code numbers matching an old handbook loaned to us by a cousin who’d been here decades earlier.
We allowed about three hours for strolling around.
Our favorite exhibit was the lavish Tutankhamun gallery which is set off within the museum building. Also worth searching for is the wood-carved statue of Ka-Aper.
Like at the pyramids, we just kept reminding ourselves that we were in the presence of objects that were practically as old as history itself.
It had probably been a mistake not to have paid an additional entrance fee for the Royal Mummy Room. But after hours inside we were starting to suffer museum fatigue and were glad to have chalked-off another tourist milestone.
AN UNQUALIFIED highlight of our Cairo visit came Wednesday night when we took a taxi to the Al-Ghouri Complex in Islamic Cairo to see a performance of Whirling Dervishes.
These are Sufi Muslim mystics who use musical instruments and, ecstatic, trance-inducing whirling to achieve a closer connection with God.
Security was tight because of long-simmering tensions between the mystics and Islamists. But we were gratified that the audience included locals as well as tourists.
ON THURSDAY, our final day in Cairo, we asked Iman to come back and show us a neighborhood where “regular” people live.
She took us back to Islamic Cairo where the medieval walled city of Cairo once stood.
It had rained the night before and that had overwhelmed the city’s decaying sewer system.
We trudged through the muddied streets (there being no sidewalks to speak of) and watched as Cairones cleared the areas in front of their shops and stalls.
This walk, and one we had earlier taken in Old Cairo on our own, reinforced the impression that many people live in squalid, crowded, rundown conditions, but that basic foods were plentiful and, apparently, affordable.
There was plenty of fresh meat and chicken to be had though some people looked too poor afford it.
A loaf of bread, subsidized by the government, costs about 5 pennies (US) -- though corruption means that the cheap bread is hard to come by.
Presumably, of the 80 million Egyptians, people living in the capital are among the better off. The average annual income in Egypt is $1,250, but some 45 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day; and a staggering 14 million are in dire poverty even by Egyptian standards.
THE CAIRENES we met were generally friendly and curious, though no one was affable out of sheer bonhomie.
People were insistent (a tad in-your-face), but never hostile or threatening.
“Do you want taxi?” we’d often be asked -- even if not necessarily by someone who had a taxi. Everyone wanted to be a fixer.
“Welcome, where from?” was the unvarying greeting.
“England,” we’d reply – knowing that acknowledging we were from Israel would be unwise.
“Happy New Year, Merry Christmas,” the reply came (it was the Muslim New Year as well as the Coptic Christmas during our visit).
*********************
JEWISH CAIRO – On one of our walks , we came upon the derelict Ben-Maimon synagogue. There are 12 shuls still standing in Cairo, seven are in the custody of the antiquities authorities, but there is obviously no budget to renovate and maintain most of them.
At any given time there are fewer than 100 Jews in Cairo.
Locals estimate that there are perhaps 40 indigenous Egyptian Jews most of whom are elderly widows. The putative head of the community is Carmen Weinstein (whom we did not meet). Her main goal, according to press reports, is to preserve and rehabilitate Cairo’s Jewish communal assets without raising the ire of the authorities who do not want to pay reparations for confiscated or nationalized Jewish property.
Across from our hotel, we passed street vendors selling Arabic editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kompf alongside the daily papers and various magazines. There must be a market, probably fed by the Egyptian media’s nasty depictions of Jews and Israel.
So wearing a kipa or letting strangers know you are Jewish or an Israeli is plainly not a good idea.
Still, Egyptians adamantly protest that they are not anti-Jewish, only stridently anti-Israel (despite the peace treaty) because of what they say is Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian Arabs and the “occupation.”
The only book shop we found that carried English-language books about the Arab-Israel conflict not knee-jerk hostile toward Israel was also the overall best source of English-language material we came upon: the book store on the campus of the American University of Cairo.
SOUVENIRS – If like us you don’t much fancy bazaar haggling, it might be worth your while to track down the brilliant gift shop run by Maryse and Ismail Borhan at 17 Ahmed Ibn Touloun Square, just opposite the Tulun Mosque and down the block from another gem, the Gayer-Anderson Museum, which is a complex of homes restored by a British officers in the 1930s.
FOOD - We had no trouble with food in Cairo. In addition to our hotel breakfast, we enjoyed Koshari, a dish comprised of pasta, rice, lentils, tomato sauce, fried onions and (for Elliot) some hot sauce.
We also ate falafel (made of fava beans and parsley) as opposed the Israeli falafel made of chickpeas.
We particularly enjoyed a meal at L’Aubergine, in the Zamalek area, which while not strictly vegetarian, has a good veggie menu and is geared to expats and visitors.
It’s no hassle ordering wine or beer in Western-friendly restaurants (except on Muslim holidays).
On the other hand, it was hard to imagine relations warming anytime soon and who knows how things will play out once Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, 79, leaves the scene.
If we wanted to see the pyramids, visit the bazaars and eat authentic koshari now was the time to make a move.
El-Al flies to Cairo International Airport on Sunday and Thursday nights. Since we didn’t want to spend Shabbat in Egypt we took the Sunday flight which gave us four full days before our journey home late on Thursday.
Can you "do" Cairo in only four days?
Absolutely. In fact, we took it at a leisurely pace.
And still we made it to significant mosques, bazaars, the pyramids, the Egyptian museum, and a performance of whirling dervishes.
As we got to Ben-Gurion, we were curious about who else would be flying to Cairo besides us. Since the the Aksa Intifada exploded in September 2000, no Israeli citizen in our acquaintance had made the journey.
Most of the other passengers on the one-hour flight whom we presumed to be Jewish were transferring in Cairo. Also on board were Israeli Arabs and Christian pilgrims – tradition has it that Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus fled to Egypt in order to escape Herod’s “massacre of the innocents.”
And there were several Israeli “businessman-types” whom we imagined to be arms merchants on their way to some African hotspot.
We opted to travel on our US and British rather than Israeli passports and on arriving in Cairo purchased visas ($15 each) at the easy-to-miss foreign currency booth just before passport control.
We’d arranged through the Hilton Nile Hotel for a car and – what turned out to be a “fixer” – to meet us ($30 plus tips) just as we got off the plane.
It was reassuring to be greeted in this foreign port of call by a pleasant, well-dressed man holding a placard with our names on it. He helped us with our landing cards and withdrew to the other side of passport control where he later helped us retrieve our luggage.
Our fixer then escorted us, through no-go areas, past armed security men, to where hundreds of white-clad pilgrims, loaded down with immense parcels, had just returned from the haj in Mecca.
Outside the terminal we found ourselves thrust into a raucous scene.
There were cars, luggage wagons, and people jostling to inch their way out of the compound. In the parking lot, our fixer handed us over to a hotel chauffeur for the 30-minute drive to the Hilton which is located on the shores of the Nile.
Our first – and lasting impression – as we got closer to Cairo proper was of the unrelenting honking of car horns, the near absence of traffic lights, the madcap ways of Cairo drivers, and the ubiquitous, though ineffective, presence of traffic police and an assortment of security personnel everywhere one looked.
At the Nile Hilton compound, our car was cursorily checked by security men and a bomb-sniffing dog. At the entrance, we were ushered through a metal detector and into the serenity of the Hilton lobby.
It was an orderly oasis in an otherwise frenzied metropolis. A classical music ensemble played Mozart in a corner.
AFTER A good nights sleep in our comfortable, spacious 1970s-style room which included a large balcony overlooking Tahrir Square, the Egyptian Museum and the Arab League building, we headed upstairs for a buffet breakfast.
There was plenty of food we felt comfortable enjoying – eggs, vegetables, yogurt, humus, babaghanoush, cheeses, bread, coffee and tea.
We drank bottled water but used the hotel’s tap water for showering and brushing our teeth without any problems.
Though the hotel knew we were from Israel, service throughout our stay was prompt and solicitous. We asked that a tea-kettle and cups be brought to our room and within minutes they were provided.
FIRST THING Monday morning, our plan was to head straight for the Pyramids at Giza, some 45 minutes away.
We had organized a guide recommended through a local Israeli contact. But when it turned out she was indisposed and wouldn’t be able to join us until the following day, we put off the pyramids and headed instead, on our own by taxi, to the Mosque of al-Azhar, a key center of Islamic learning (founded in 970 CE), and located near the glitzy, bustling Khan al-Khalili bazaar, in a section called Islamic Cairo.
The taxis we encountered proved that there is life after mechanical death.
Their interiors tended to be skeletal; knobs and casings having been stripped away or atrophied sometime during the middle kingdom; windshield wipers? – a wasteful accessory.
Many drivers (not just of taxis) preferred to “save their battery” by not to using headlights after dark.
The appalling air-pollution, with cars belching fumes and burning oil, made us long for the blue skies and pristine mountain air of Jerusalem.
Just crossing the street in Cairo is a challenge. With few traffic lights, cavalier attitudes toward the occasional red light, and traffic police as abundant as they are indolent, we relied heavily on shadowing “human shields” – local denizens who are expert at dodging traffic coming from every which way – to get to a sidewalk.
MOST MOSQUES welcome visitors. All you do is tip the custodian to watch your shoes.
We were already familiar with the amplified call to prayer (five times a day) which has long been part of our Jerusalem experience. Muezzins call the faithful to worship from the minarets towers (which in Israel are often illuminated by green lighting at night).
Inside, all mosques have a mihrab, a sort of alcove, which indicates the direction of Mecca. Mosques are distinguished by their tiling, design, lamps, method of construction. But compared to cathedrals, mosques (like synagogues) are relative simple affairs.
We managed to visit the famous Azhar mosque and a half-dozen others including the Abbasid-era mud-brick Mosque of Ibn Tulun (879 CE), and the Mosque of Amr ibn al-Aas (640 CE) which was the first place of organized Islamic worship in Egypt.
That’s also where I bought a string of prayer beads (to help the faithful recall the 99 names of Allah).
Our favorite market was the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. It’s far larger and more varied than Jerusalem’s Old City shuk. You’ll find spices, water pipes, jewelry, trinkets, and places to grab a snack including a pancake café and Arab-style tea room.
We didn’t actually buy anything despite the best efforts of the hawking merchants. Mostly we enjoyed stealing away from the narrow touristy alleyways, to where fewer trinkets and more staples (chicken, meat, and vegetables) were being sold.
ON TUESDAY, the moment we’d been waiting for had arrived.
Together with our guide Iman and a van driver, we’re off the see the pyramids.
We’d imagined that we’d have to traverse a sandy desert until, at last, we’d spy these great wonders. Not so.
Cairo’s huge metropolis (16 million people) leads directly, once you cross the Nile, into Giza whose crumbling buildings and squalid appearance also define large tracts of Cairo proper.
It was only on the way home that we saw Western-style middle-class apartment blocks in the suburbs near the airport.
At any rate, nothing – not the hordes of tourists, not the vehicles clogging the access roads, not the locals trying to sell us everything from camel rides to kaffiyehs, not the huge number of security men – nothing ultimately could detract from the sight of these awesome, monumental tombs built 5,000 years ago.
These immense structures emblemize a civilization that predates the Biblical stories of the Israelite patriarchs and matriarchs.
We explore the terrain, walking (and driving) around the pyramids, visiting the “solar boat” museum containing an actual, reconstructed, full-size Egyptian boat which had been used to transport royal corpses for burial, and we later gawk at the iconic Sphinx which guards the Giza plateau.
Then it is back to Old Cairo for a visit to the heavily-guarded Ben Ezra Synagogue, Egypt’s oldest, and now a museum.
Ben Ezra is also famous for its treasure-drove of sacred texts discovered in its geniza by Solomon Schechter in 1896.
Iman also shows us the nearby Church of St. Sergius, the oldest Coptic Church in Cairo.
ON WEDNESDAY, we dodge the traffic of modern Cairo to walk from our hotel to the Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue, where services are held only if enough foreigners happen to be in town.
Most of Wednesday is devoted to a visit to the cold and jammed corridors of the Egyptian Museum.
The museum is a throwback to an earlier era.
Precious little is protected by climate controlled casings. The lighting is poor. The floors are densely packed with artifacts, strewn warehouse-like. Many of the exhibits are unmarked and poorly described. Only some objects have code numbers matching an old handbook loaned to us by a cousin who’d been here decades earlier.
We allowed about three hours for strolling around.
Our favorite exhibit was the lavish Tutankhamun gallery which is set off within the museum building. Also worth searching for is the wood-carved statue of Ka-Aper.
Like at the pyramids, we just kept reminding ourselves that we were in the presence of objects that were practically as old as history itself.
It had probably been a mistake not to have paid an additional entrance fee for the Royal Mummy Room. But after hours inside we were starting to suffer museum fatigue and were glad to have chalked-off another tourist milestone.
AN UNQUALIFIED highlight of our Cairo visit came Wednesday night when we took a taxi to the Al-Ghouri Complex in Islamic Cairo to see a performance of Whirling Dervishes.
These are Sufi Muslim mystics who use musical instruments and, ecstatic, trance-inducing whirling to achieve a closer connection with God.
Security was tight because of long-simmering tensions between the mystics and Islamists. But we were gratified that the audience included locals as well as tourists.
ON THURSDAY, our final day in Cairo, we asked Iman to come back and show us a neighborhood where “regular” people live.
She took us back to Islamic Cairo where the medieval walled city of Cairo once stood.
It had rained the night before and that had overwhelmed the city’s decaying sewer system.
We trudged through the muddied streets (there being no sidewalks to speak of) and watched as Cairones cleared the areas in front of their shops and stalls.
This walk, and one we had earlier taken in Old Cairo on our own, reinforced the impression that many people live in squalid, crowded, rundown conditions, but that basic foods were plentiful and, apparently, affordable.
There was plenty of fresh meat and chicken to be had though some people looked too poor afford it.
A loaf of bread, subsidized by the government, costs about 5 pennies (US) -- though corruption means that the cheap bread is hard to come by.
Presumably, of the 80 million Egyptians, people living in the capital are among the better off. The average annual income in Egypt is $1,250, but some 45 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day; and a staggering 14 million are in dire poverty even by Egyptian standards.
THE CAIRENES we met were generally friendly and curious, though no one was affable out of sheer bonhomie.
People were insistent (a tad in-your-face), but never hostile or threatening.
“Do you want taxi?” we’d often be asked -- even if not necessarily by someone who had a taxi. Everyone wanted to be a fixer.
“Welcome, where from?” was the unvarying greeting.
“England,” we’d reply – knowing that acknowledging we were from Israel would be unwise.
“Happy New Year, Merry Christmas,” the reply came (it was the Muslim New Year as well as the Coptic Christmas during our visit).
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JEWISH CAIRO – On one of our walks , we came upon the derelict Ben-Maimon synagogue. There are 12 shuls still standing in Cairo, seven are in the custody of the antiquities authorities, but there is obviously no budget to renovate and maintain most of them.
At any given time there are fewer than 100 Jews in Cairo.
When I put on my tefillin in the morning, I was keenly aware that I might be the only Jew davening in all of Egypt. But the portion of the week was “Bo” – and come to Pharaoh we did.
Locals estimate that there are perhaps 40 indigenous Egyptian Jews most of whom are elderly widows. The putative head of the community is Carmen Weinstein (whom we did not meet). Her main goal, according to press reports, is to preserve and rehabilitate Cairo’s Jewish communal assets without raising the ire of the authorities who do not want to pay reparations for confiscated or nationalized Jewish property.
Across from our hotel, we passed street vendors selling Arabic editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kompf alongside the daily papers and various magazines. There must be a market, probably fed by the Egyptian media’s nasty depictions of Jews and Israel.
So wearing a kipa or letting strangers know you are Jewish or an Israeli is plainly not a good idea.
Still, Egyptians adamantly protest that they are not anti-Jewish, only stridently anti-Israel (despite the peace treaty) because of what they say is Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian Arabs and the “occupation.”
The only book shop we found that carried English-language books about the Arab-Israel conflict not knee-jerk hostile toward Israel was also the overall best source of English-language material we came upon: the book store on the campus of the American University of Cairo.
SOUVENIRS – If like us you don’t much fancy bazaar haggling, it might be worth your while to track down the brilliant gift shop run by Maryse and Ismail Borhan at 17 Ahmed Ibn Touloun Square, just opposite the Tulun Mosque and down the block from another gem, the Gayer-Anderson Museum, which is a complex of homes restored by a British officers in the 1930s.
FOOD - We had no trouble with food in Cairo. In addition to our hotel breakfast, we enjoyed Koshari, a dish comprised of pasta, rice, lentils, tomato sauce, fried onions and (for Elliot) some hot sauce.
We also ate falafel (made of fava beans and parsley) as opposed the Israeli falafel made of chickpeas.
We particularly enjoyed a meal at L’Aubergine, in the Zamalek area, which while not strictly vegetarian, has a good veggie menu and is geared to expats and visitors.
It’s no hassle ordering wine or beer in Western-friendly restaurants (except on Muslim holidays).
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
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