It was fitting that Benny Begin, son of the late Likud-party prime minister Menachem Begin, should have been the cabinet minister representing Israel's government at the annual memorial service on Monday for Labor-party icon Yigal Allon. On the Zionist political spectrum, the Begins are stalwarts of the Right, whereas Allon was decidedly a man of the Left. Yet the inheritors of their respective legacies share a sense of clarity about Jewish rights in Israel, a desire for genuine accommodation with the Arabs, and an emphatic insistence on defensible borders.
Allon was born in 1918 in the Lower Galilee and died 30 years ago. A leading figure in the Haganah—the pre-state self-defense underground operated by the left-wing Zionist establishment—he was a founder of its Palmah special-operations unit. The experience made him a lifelong proponent of preemptive military action.
During the 1948 War of Independence, Allon, by now a general, participated in many fateful campaigns, including the liberation of the Negev. Although he left the armed forces in 1950, he continued to be widely viewed as Israel's foremost strategic thinker. Allon never forgave David Ben-Gurion for not having ordered the IDF to capture the Old City and the West Bank during the war. The 1949 armistice lines, he said, failed to provide Israel with strategic depth.
After Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day war, Allon helped form a social-democratic movement that would evolve into today's Labor party. He supported settlement-building where militarily justified while opposing construction near Arab population centers. In 1968 he facilitated the Jewish return to Hebron on both security and religious-cultural grounds. At the same time, he warned that failure either to annex or to disengage from most of the Arab-populated territories would transform Israel into a colonial power.
Allon addressed Israel's topographic and demographic dilemmas in what became known as the Allon Plan. It proposed setting the country's border with Jordan at the Jordan River, fostering a belt of Israeli settlements in a 12-mile strip of land along the Jordan Valley rift, and handing over the rest of the West Bank with its Arab-population centers to Jordan. The plan was never adopted, but Allon's argument that the West Bank needed to be demilitarized, and that Israel ought to control access from the east, is today an essential plank in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's support for a two-state solution.
-- March 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Allon's Legacy
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.
Easter 2010
Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17.
The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Passover is also the background for the events portrayed in the synoptic Gospels leading up to the passion of Christ crucified.
At the First Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), however, the Church resolutely decoupled Judaism from Christianity, severing the connection between the fourteenth of Nisan and Easter. "It is unbecoming," said the Emperor Constantine, "that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people." Easter became a date on the solar calendar, with Jesus' resurrection being celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox.
To this day there is no denying that, for many Jews, Easter recalls dreadful memories. The holiday is the source of the Church's "teaching of contempt," the damning of all Jews for the supposed crime of deicide. The cry of "Christ-killers" would pursue Jews from medieval European ghettos to the 20th-century United States. Easter is also associated with the notorious libel that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to fulfill their Passover rituals. Many of Eastern Europe's worst pogroms, including the 1903 Kishinev massacre, were launched during Easter. Indeed, no Christian holiday did more than Easter to inspire the development of modern political Zionism as an answer to Europe's insoluble "Jewish problem."
In post-Holocaust Europe, that message of collective Jewish guilt became progressively toned down, with traces still remaining in the Passion Play performed in Germany every ten years since 1634. Instead, the Jewish state of Israel has come to be identified as, in effect, "this odious people" among the nations, an object of fierce political denunciation often couched in the discredited but still-toxic religious tropes of old. In 2002, an Athens newspaper depicted the PLO chief Yasir Arafat as Jesus being crucified by the Jews; today some pro-Palestinian groups falsely claim that the Jewish state arbitrarily forbids Christians from worshipping freely at Easter.
And yet, at a time when both the Jewish and the Christian traditions face a common danger in extremist Islam, it is worth stressing that contemporary Israel has no firmer friends in the world than evangelical Christians, who recall Jesus as an observant Jew and understand his resurrection not as a post-modern metaphor but as the Gospel truth. In democratic societies, even as they agree to disagree about matters of ultimate truth, believing Jews and Christians continue to have much to talk about, and to defend.
- April 2010
The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Passover is also the background for the events portrayed in the synoptic Gospels leading up to the passion of Christ crucified.
At the First Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), however, the Church resolutely decoupled Judaism from Christianity, severing the connection between the fourteenth of Nisan and Easter. "It is unbecoming," said the Emperor Constantine, "that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people." Easter became a date on the solar calendar, with Jesus' resurrection being celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox.
To this day there is no denying that, for many Jews, Easter recalls dreadful memories. The holiday is the source of the Church's "teaching of contempt," the damning of all Jews for the supposed crime of deicide. The cry of "Christ-killers" would pursue Jews from medieval European ghettos to the 20th-century United States. Easter is also associated with the notorious libel that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to fulfill their Passover rituals. Many of Eastern Europe's worst pogroms, including the 1903 Kishinev massacre, were launched during Easter. Indeed, no Christian holiday did more than Easter to inspire the development of modern political Zionism as an answer to Europe's insoluble "Jewish problem."
In post-Holocaust Europe, that message of collective Jewish guilt became progressively toned down, with traces still remaining in the Passion Play performed in Germany every ten years since 1634. Instead, the Jewish state of Israel has come to be identified as, in effect, "this odious people" among the nations, an object of fierce political denunciation often couched in the discredited but still-toxic religious tropes of old. In 2002, an Athens newspaper depicted the PLO chief Yasir Arafat as Jesus being crucified by the Jews; today some pro-Palestinian groups falsely claim that the Jewish state arbitrarily forbids Christians from worshipping freely at Easter.
And yet, at a time when both the Jewish and the Christian traditions face a common danger in extremist Islam, it is worth stressing that contemporary Israel has no firmer friends in the world than evangelical Christians, who recall Jesus as an observant Jew and understand his resurrection not as a post-modern metaphor but as the Gospel truth. In democratic societies, even as they agree to disagree about matters of ultimate truth, believing Jews and Christians continue to have much to talk about, and to defend.
- April 2010
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.
World Jewish Congress
n a show of solidarity with Israel, leaders of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) will be gathering in Jerusalem at the end of the month. Not to be confused with the American Jewish Congress, of which it was originally an outgrowth, or the World Zionist Congress, founded by Theodor Herzl, the WJC is an umbrella group of Diaspora organizations (including the European Jewish Congress, the Latin American Jewish Congress, and others) that defines itself somewhat grandly as "the diplomatic arm of the Jewish people." If you haven't heard of it, there's a reason.
Six Jewish notables have led the WJC since its August 1936 founding in Geneva, Switzerland by 280 delegates from 32 countries. They were led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, then the president of the American Jewish Congress, and Nahum Goldmann: two men who saw themselves as champions of ordinary Jews against a condescending Jewish oligarchy. During the Holocaust, the WJC struggled—in vain—to pressure Allied officials into helping European Jews in Hitler's clutches.
When Wise died in 1949, Goldmann took full charge, running the WJC until 1977. A "statesman without a state," Goldmann negotiated the 1952 agreement obligating West Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust victims. A lifelong contrarian, Goldmann was an ambivalent Zionist at best, and after 1967 he became an outspoken critic of Israel's retention of Judea and Samaria. By 1973, he was rumored to be funding Jewish radicals advocating unconditional recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Philip Klutznick, an American millionaire who basically shared Goldmann's worldview, briefly bridged the gap at WJC until the 1979 arrival of Canadian billionaire Edgar M. Bronfman, who would run it until 2007. Bronfman, too, dissented from Israeli policies, though more discreetly. On other fronts, he led a 1986 campaign against Austria's ceremonial president Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary-general, over his Nazi past, and in 2000 embarked on a drive to pressure museums to identify and return Nazi-looted art works that had been the property of Holocaust victims. He also played a role in lobbying the Vatican to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
By 2005, the WJC had become incapacitated by allegations of financial irregularities involving its top professional. Bronfman finally sacked the executive in 2007, and over the ensuing three years, with Ronald S. Lauder now at the helm, the stain on the organization has largely dissipated.
Rather than dissenting from Israeli policies, Lauder is appreciated in Jerusalem for his warm support of the Netanyahu government's diplomacy. Lauder also published a stern open letter criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship—a foray into political suasion that, for some, only highlighted how seldom the WJC is heard from.
Goldmann may have imagined that the WJC would operate as a democratic Jewish institution, but that is hardly how he ran it; as for serving as a counter to the Jewish oligarchy, without wealthy individuals to bankroll its existence, the WJC would have disappeared long ago. Whether any organization can act or claim to act as the diplomatic arm of a fractious Diaspora has always been debatable—which, together with its lack of political acumen, may be why the WJC hardly figures on the communal radar. The question of the moment is whether its recent, heartening concern for securing the national homelan
-- August 2010
Six Jewish notables have led the WJC since its August 1936 founding in Geneva, Switzerland by 280 delegates from 32 countries. They were led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, then the president of the American Jewish Congress, and Nahum Goldmann: two men who saw themselves as champions of ordinary Jews against a condescending Jewish oligarchy. During the Holocaust, the WJC struggled—in vain—to pressure Allied officials into helping European Jews in Hitler's clutches.
When Wise died in 1949, Goldmann took full charge, running the WJC until 1977. A "statesman without a state," Goldmann negotiated the 1952 agreement obligating West Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust victims. A lifelong contrarian, Goldmann was an ambivalent Zionist at best, and after 1967 he became an outspoken critic of Israel's retention of Judea and Samaria. By 1973, he was rumored to be funding Jewish radicals advocating unconditional recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Philip Klutznick, an American millionaire who basically shared Goldmann's worldview, briefly bridged the gap at WJC until the 1979 arrival of Canadian billionaire Edgar M. Bronfman, who would run it until 2007. Bronfman, too, dissented from Israeli policies, though more discreetly. On other fronts, he led a 1986 campaign against Austria's ceremonial president Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary-general, over his Nazi past, and in 2000 embarked on a drive to pressure museums to identify and return Nazi-looted art works that had been the property of Holocaust victims. He also played a role in lobbying the Vatican to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
By 2005, the WJC had become incapacitated by allegations of financial irregularities involving its top professional. Bronfman finally sacked the executive in 2007, and over the ensuing three years, with Ronald S. Lauder now at the helm, the stain on the organization has largely dissipated.
Rather than dissenting from Israeli policies, Lauder is appreciated in Jerusalem for his warm support of the Netanyahu government's diplomacy. Lauder also published a stern open letter criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship—a foray into political suasion that, for some, only highlighted how seldom the WJC is heard from.
Goldmann may have imagined that the WJC would operate as a democratic Jewish institution, but that is hardly how he ran it; as for serving as a counter to the Jewish oligarchy, without wealthy individuals to bankroll its existence, the WJC would have disappeared long ago. Whether any organization can act or claim to act as the diplomatic arm of a fractious Diaspora has always been debatable—which, together with its lack of political acumen, may be why the WJC hardly figures on the communal radar. The question of the moment is whether its recent, heartening concern for securing the national homelan
-- August 2010
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.
The Impresario of Zionism
Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism, was born in Budapest 150 years ago next Sunday, May 2. He died at age forty-four in Vienna, four-and-a-half decades before the establishment of the state of Israel. Herzl came into maturity with no particular Jewish learning, no Hebrew, and scant ties to his community. Yet with his top hat, white gloves, and tails, this broadminded Central European journalist with a utopian streak came to be the foremost revolutionary of the modern Jewish world.
The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled on writing for the theater and journalism, where he excelled. Politically, the pivotal moment for him came in 1894 when he was covering the Dreyfus trial in presumably enlightened France. There and then he concluded that the only answer to European anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state, warning that, as far as hatred of Jews was concerned, "much worse is to come." To the chagrin of many rabbis, socialists, and assimilationists, his personal magnetism drew masses of Jews to the Zionist cause, while his sense of destiny gave him the confidence to seek support from Ottoman rulers, the Vatican, and Jewish grandees.
Herzl was not the first theoretician of political Zionism, or the first to think sensibly about the steps needed to create a third Jewish commonwealth. His unparalleled contribution was to put Zionism on both the Jewish and the international agenda. As the movement's leading prophet, he waged a fanatically intensive yet tactically shrewd campaign that virtually willed the state into being.
In 1897, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl recorded in his diary: "In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in fifty, everybody will agree." Unlike a Washington, Gandhi, or Mandela, Israel's founding father did not live to see his dream come to fruition; but he foresaw correctly.
-- April 2010
The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled on writing for the theater and journalism, where he excelled. Politically, the pivotal moment for him came in 1894 when he was covering the Dreyfus trial in presumably enlightened France. There and then he concluded that the only answer to European anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state, warning that, as far as hatred of Jews was concerned, "much worse is to come." To the chagrin of many rabbis, socialists, and assimilationists, his personal magnetism drew masses of Jews to the Zionist cause, while his sense of destiny gave him the confidence to seek support from Ottoman rulers, the Vatican, and Jewish grandees.
Herzl was not the first theoretician of political Zionism, or the first to think sensibly about the steps needed to create a third Jewish commonwealth. His unparalleled contribution was to put Zionism on both the Jewish and the international agenda. As the movement's leading prophet, he waged a fanatically intensive yet tactically shrewd campaign that virtually willed the state into being.
In 1897, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl recorded in his diary: "In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in fifty, everybody will agree." Unlike a Washington, Gandhi, or Mandela, Israel's founding father did not live to see his dream come to fruition; but he foresaw correctly.
-- April 2010
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.
High Season
Everywhere one goes, Jerusalem is crowded with visitors. Hotels are near capacity. The streets are jam-packed with tour buses. So far this year, 2.2 million tourists have visited the country. August was one of the best months ever, but tens of thousands more have now arrived for the Sukkot holiday, among them 7,000 evangelicals from 100 countries to celebrate the Christian Feast of Tabernacles. Hanukkah and Christmas promise still more
Of course, sojourning to the Holy Land is nothing new, having been practiced from time immemorial by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In ancient times, Diaspora Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. During the era of the Crusades, Benjamin of Tudela, journeying thither and yon from Spain, chronicled Palestine's remnant Jewish civilization. Judah al-Harizi reported in 1218 that the Muslims had bettered conditions for the local Jews. The travelogues of Evliya Çelebi, a Muslim Turk, recount the 1584 exodus of Safed's Jews after incessant Arab and Druse assaults. Throughout the centuries, numbers of Jewish visitors would stay on to settle in the land, while others, preeminently Theodor Herzl in 1898, would go back to organize the systematic return of the Jewish people to their homeland.
Many visitors to 21st-century Israel come out of religious conviction. Of this year's arrivals, about half are on a repeat visit. The single biggest source of tourists is the United States: some 538,000 Americans came last year, almost a quarter of the total. And yet 60 percent of U.S. Jews have yet to visit Israel—in contrast to their British coreligionists, of whom 95 percent have visited at least once. Somewhat brightening the American picture, over 230,000 young people, mainly from the U.S., have come on subsidized Birthright programs in the last ten years.
Whatever the impetus, and whatever their origins, once in the country tourists can't help being struck by the contrasts contained in its 10,000 square miles: about the same area as the state of New Jersey. In a matter of hours one can drive from snowcapped Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights to the Negev desert in the south. One can even hike the nine or so miles from the Mediterranean coast and cross the 1949 armistice lines into the West Bank. From atop a mountain ridge in Samaria one can scan metropolitan Tel Aviv, where the bulk of Israel's population is concentrated.
Such experiences yield keen geostrategic insights. But they are hardly the only attraction: untold numbers come for the rewards of sun, sea, and recreation. All told, it is little wonder that one in every twelve jobs in Israel is tourism-related, or that the industry is expected in 2010 to contribute 7.2 percent of the country's GDP.
Precisely because tourism has such enormous political, economic, and psychological ramifications, it is a sector long targeted by Israel's enemies. In 1972, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine murdered 26 people, including sixteen Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, at the country's airport. In 2000, following an excellent year for tourism, the Palestinian Arab leadership unleashed its second intifada, hitting cafes, restaurants, public transportation, even a Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel. The onslaught led to a dramatic drop in visitors; in June 2001, after a gruesome Tel Aviv nightclub bombing, the American Reform movement canceled its Israel youth programming. Those who continued to come during those dark days were disproportionately religious Jews and Christians.
Israel's detractors in the West have also invested heavily in boycotts aimed at dissuading academics, musicians, athletes, and ordinary people from visiting. Incredibly, the British Advertising Standards Authority was persuaded to ban Israel's ministry of tourism from depicting Jerusalem's Western Wall and Temple Mount in its UK advertisements. Even so, however, and despite everything, millions of travelers continue to come, thumbing their noses at the international campaign to defame and isolate the Jewish state, and dramatically avowing their confidence in its future.
-- September 2010
Of course, sojourning to the Holy Land is nothing new, having been practiced from time immemorial by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In ancient times, Diaspora Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. During the era of the Crusades, Benjamin of Tudela, journeying thither and yon from Spain, chronicled Palestine's remnant Jewish civilization. Judah al-Harizi reported in 1218 that the Muslims had bettered conditions for the local Jews. The travelogues of Evliya Çelebi, a Muslim Turk, recount the 1584 exodus of Safed's Jews after incessant Arab and Druse assaults. Throughout the centuries, numbers of Jewish visitors would stay on to settle in the land, while others, preeminently Theodor Herzl in 1898, would go back to organize the systematic return of the Jewish people to their homeland.
Many visitors to 21st-century Israel come out of religious conviction. Of this year's arrivals, about half are on a repeat visit. The single biggest source of tourists is the United States: some 538,000 Americans came last year, almost a quarter of the total. And yet 60 percent of U.S. Jews have yet to visit Israel—in contrast to their British coreligionists, of whom 95 percent have visited at least once. Somewhat brightening the American picture, over 230,000 young people, mainly from the U.S., have come on subsidized Birthright programs in the last ten years.
Whatever the impetus, and whatever their origins, once in the country tourists can't help being struck by the contrasts contained in its 10,000 square miles: about the same area as the state of New Jersey. In a matter of hours one can drive from snowcapped Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights to the Negev desert in the south. One can even hike the nine or so miles from the Mediterranean coast and cross the 1949 armistice lines into the West Bank. From atop a mountain ridge in Samaria one can scan metropolitan Tel Aviv, where the bulk of Israel's population is concentrated.
Such experiences yield keen geostrategic insights. But they are hardly the only attraction: untold numbers come for the rewards of sun, sea, and recreation. All told, it is little wonder that one in every twelve jobs in Israel is tourism-related, or that the industry is expected in 2010 to contribute 7.2 percent of the country's GDP.
Precisely because tourism has such enormous political, economic, and psychological ramifications, it is a sector long targeted by Israel's enemies. In 1972, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine murdered 26 people, including sixteen Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, at the country's airport. In 2000, following an excellent year for tourism, the Palestinian Arab leadership unleashed its second intifada, hitting cafes, restaurants, public transportation, even a Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel. The onslaught led to a dramatic drop in visitors; in June 2001, after a gruesome Tel Aviv nightclub bombing, the American Reform movement canceled its Israel youth programming. Those who continued to come during those dark days were disproportionately religious Jews and Christians.
Israel's detractors in the West have also invested heavily in boycotts aimed at dissuading academics, musicians, athletes, and ordinary people from visiting. Incredibly, the British Advertising Standards Authority was persuaded to ban Israel's ministry of tourism from depicting Jerusalem's Western Wall and Temple Mount in its UK advertisements. Even so, however, and despite everything, millions of travelers continue to come, thumbing their noses at the international campaign to defame and isolate the Jewish state, and dramatically avowing their confidence in its future.
-- September 2010
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.
Jabotinsky
Dedicated to the memory of Shmuel Katz
The 70th yahrzeit of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was marked on July 11, at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. There was nary a mention of it in the Israeli media—an extraordinary omission given that Jabotinsky was not only a founder of the Haganah and the supreme commander of the Irgun but also a towering Zionist theoretician and leader.
Jabotinsky was born and raised in cosmopolitan Odessa, then a vibrant hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Drawn to journalism, he became an accomplished feuilletonist. His life took a fateful turn in 1903, when, fearing the pogroms sweeping Russia would reach his city, he pulled together a Jewish self-defense group. In the same year, he attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, which rejected an anguished Theodor Herzl’s plea to consider settling for an autonomous Jewish sanctuary in East Africa.
During World War I, while the Zionist establishment cautiously maintained its neutrality, Jabotinsky became the driving force behind the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the Allies. In the early 1920s, as the British mandatory authorities in Palestine capitulated regularly to Arab pressure, he organized defensive measures against Arab rioting, an activity for which he was at first imprisoned by the British and later amnestied and deported.
Jabotinsky was unwavering in his insistence that Zionism’s immediate and uncompromising goal had to be Herzl's original vision of an actual Jewish state. A rupture over the establishment's accommodationist approach toward Britain was inevitable. In 1925 he founded the Revisionist Zionist Organization, and ten years later led it out of the Congress. On Tisha b'Av 1938, he delivered a chillingly prophetic speech in Warsaw imploring the Jews of Poland to "see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction"—and to escape while they still could.
Two years later, at the age of fifty-nine, Jabotinsky died suddenly in upstate New York after inspecting an honor guard of his Betar youth movement. In Tel Aviv, the Labor newspaper Davar, which had opposed his every political move, graciously editorialized: "Jabotinsky has died. That gifted violin has been shattered." The reference was to his formidable powers as a polemicist and spellbinding speaker, capable of holding an audience in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, or German.
Jabotinsky's first biographer, Joseph B. Schechtman, described him as a "rebel, statesman, fighter, and prophet." To Shmuel Katz, his definitive biographer, "Jabo" was simply a "lone wolf." His emphasis on ethnic pride and regard for military discipline made liberals uncomfortable and led enemies to slur him as a fascist, an odd charge against a passionate 19th-century liberal and advocate of women's rights. Like others, Jabotinsky may not have fully fathomed nascent Arab nationalism; but he abhorred the idea that Arab and Jew could not live together peaceably.
Jabotinsky's multilingual journalism and literary output are keys, in their own way, to understanding his character and his take on life in general and Jewish life (and the Jewish imagination) in particular. Throughout his hectic political career, he somehow managed to write novels, poems, stories, patriotic songs, essays, and a regular column in New York's Yiddish-language Morning Journal. In reviewing an English translation of one of his novels, Hillel Halkin found a portrait of the author himself in a character inclined by nature to free-spiritedness but committed to a life of duty and self-sacrifice.
Do Jabotinsky's uncompromising views, including on the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel, enjoy a 21st-century constituency in the Jewish state? Not in the Likud, which claims his political legacy, and not in the mostly Orthodox-led settlement movement, which has its own heroes. Even in death, it seems, Jabo remains a lone wolf
-- July 2010
The 70th yahrzeit of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was marked on July 11, at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. There was nary a mention of it in the Israeli media—an extraordinary omission given that Jabotinsky was not only a founder of the Haganah and the supreme commander of the Irgun but also a towering Zionist theoretician and leader.
Jabotinsky was born and raised in cosmopolitan Odessa, then a vibrant hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Drawn to journalism, he became an accomplished feuilletonist. His life took a fateful turn in 1903, when, fearing the pogroms sweeping Russia would reach his city, he pulled together a Jewish self-defense group. In the same year, he attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, which rejected an anguished Theodor Herzl’s plea to consider settling for an autonomous Jewish sanctuary in East Africa.
During World War I, while the Zionist establishment cautiously maintained its neutrality, Jabotinsky became the driving force behind the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the Allies. In the early 1920s, as the British mandatory authorities in Palestine capitulated regularly to Arab pressure, he organized defensive measures against Arab rioting, an activity for which he was at first imprisoned by the British and later amnestied and deported.
Jabotinsky was unwavering in his insistence that Zionism’s immediate and uncompromising goal had to be Herzl's original vision of an actual Jewish state. A rupture over the establishment's accommodationist approach toward Britain was inevitable. In 1925 he founded the Revisionist Zionist Organization, and ten years later led it out of the Congress. On Tisha b'Av 1938, he delivered a chillingly prophetic speech in Warsaw imploring the Jews of Poland to "see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction"—and to escape while they still could.
Two years later, at the age of fifty-nine, Jabotinsky died suddenly in upstate New York after inspecting an honor guard of his Betar youth movement. In Tel Aviv, the Labor newspaper Davar, which had opposed his every political move, graciously editorialized: "Jabotinsky has died. That gifted violin has been shattered." The reference was to his formidable powers as a polemicist and spellbinding speaker, capable of holding an audience in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, or German.
Jabotinsky's first biographer, Joseph B. Schechtman, described him as a "rebel, statesman, fighter, and prophet." To Shmuel Katz, his definitive biographer, "Jabo" was simply a "lone wolf." His emphasis on ethnic pride and regard for military discipline made liberals uncomfortable and led enemies to slur him as a fascist, an odd charge against a passionate 19th-century liberal and advocate of women's rights. Like others, Jabotinsky may not have fully fathomed nascent Arab nationalism; but he abhorred the idea that Arab and Jew could not live together peaceably.
Jabotinsky's multilingual journalism and literary output are keys, in their own way, to understanding his character and his take on life in general and Jewish life (and the Jewish imagination) in particular. Throughout his hectic political career, he somehow managed to write novels, poems, stories, patriotic songs, essays, and a regular column in New York's Yiddish-language Morning Journal. In reviewing an English translation of one of his novels, Hillel Halkin found a portrait of the author himself in a character inclined by nature to free-spiritedness but committed to a life of duty and self-sacrifice.
Do Jabotinsky's uncompromising views, including on the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel, enjoy a 21st-century constituency in the Jewish state? Not in the Likud, which claims his political legacy, and not in the mostly Orthodox-led settlement movement, which has its own heroes. Even in death, it seems, Jabo remains a lone wolf
-- July 2010
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.
The Obama - Israel "Crisis"
What comes to mind when you think about great moments of crisis in U.S. foreign policy? The Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis, Iran's seizure of American hostages? Or, perhaps, Israel's decision to build residential housing in northeast Jerusalem?
Whether current tensions with Washington do constitute a crisis, and whether yesterday's crisis talks between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lead to a reduction or intensification of those tensions, will become apparent soon enough. But whatever the outcome, it is a fact that strains between Washington and Jerusalem have been part of the "special relationship" ever since President Harry S Truman granted Israel de-facto recognition in 1948.
Let us count the ways. After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Eisenhower administration forced Israel to withdraw from captured territories despite Egypt's continued belligerency. The opening of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the early 1960s contributed to strife with the Kennedy administration. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a supportive Johnson administration nevertheless issued Washington's first condemnation of Israeli settlement activity.
The beat goes on. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, the Nixon administration set forth the Rogers Plan, which sought to force Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 armistice lines. At one fractious point, the Ford administration ordered a complete reassessment of U.S.-Israel relations. Jimmy Carter was continually at odds with Menachem Begin, blaming him for every setback in the Camp David peace talks with Anwar Sadat.
Relations were no less bumpy when Ronald Reagan sold advanced electronic-surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; withheld weapons from Israel in punishment for its airstrike against Iraq's nuclear reactor and then again over the 1982 Lebanon war; demanded a settlement freeze; and granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO. Things hardly improved with the arrival of George H.W. Bush, whose administration refused loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jewish refugees until Israel agreed to a settlement freeze. Secretary of State James Baker scornfully told Israeli leaders to telephone if and when they were interested in peace.
Bill Clinton's years, dominated by the fallout from the 1993 Oslo Accords, were similarly marked by relentless pressure on Netanyahu (in his first term) to be more forthcoming to Yasir Arafat. Finally, in 2003, over Ariel Sharon's protestations, George W. Bush proclaimed a "Road Map" toward a Palestinian state in the midst of horrific Palestinian violence.
In the light of this recitation, does today's crisis with the Obama administration take on a less worrisome aspect, as simply another stage in an ongoing but finally harmless pattern? Not necessarily. For one thing, as with similar episodes in the past, this one can strengthen the perennial expectation among Arab foes of Israel that Washington will, ultimately, force Jerusalem to capitulate to their maximalist demands. For another, should the current administration seize this opportunity to attempt to impose its own "peace plan," that could indeed precipitate a real, genuine crisis.
-- March 2010
Whether current tensions with Washington do constitute a crisis, and whether yesterday's crisis talks between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lead to a reduction or intensification of those tensions, will become apparent soon enough. But whatever the outcome, it is a fact that strains between Washington and Jerusalem have been part of the "special relationship" ever since President Harry S Truman granted Israel de-facto recognition in 1948.
Let us count the ways. After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Eisenhower administration forced Israel to withdraw from captured territories despite Egypt's continued belligerency. The opening of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the early 1960s contributed to strife with the Kennedy administration. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a supportive Johnson administration nevertheless issued Washington's first condemnation of Israeli settlement activity.
The beat goes on. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, the Nixon administration set forth the Rogers Plan, which sought to force Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 armistice lines. At one fractious point, the Ford administration ordered a complete reassessment of U.S.-Israel relations. Jimmy Carter was continually at odds with Menachem Begin, blaming him for every setback in the Camp David peace talks with Anwar Sadat.
Relations were no less bumpy when Ronald Reagan sold advanced electronic-surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; withheld weapons from Israel in punishment for its airstrike against Iraq's nuclear reactor and then again over the 1982 Lebanon war; demanded a settlement freeze; and granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO. Things hardly improved with the arrival of George H.W. Bush, whose administration refused loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jewish refugees until Israel agreed to a settlement freeze. Secretary of State James Baker scornfully told Israeli leaders to telephone if and when they were interested in peace.
Bill Clinton's years, dominated by the fallout from the 1993 Oslo Accords, were similarly marked by relentless pressure on Netanyahu (in his first term) to be more forthcoming to Yasir Arafat. Finally, in 2003, over Ariel Sharon's protestations, George W. Bush proclaimed a "Road Map" toward a Palestinian state in the midst of horrific Palestinian violence.
In the light of this recitation, does today's crisis with the Obama administration take on a less worrisome aspect, as simply another stage in an ongoing but finally harmless pattern? Not necessarily. For one thing, as with similar episodes in the past, this one can strengthen the perennial expectation among Arab foes of Israel that Washington will, ultimately, force Jerusalem to capitulate to their maximalist demands. For another, should the current administration seize this opportunity to attempt to impose its own "peace plan," that could indeed precipitate a real, genuine crisis.
-- March 2010
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.
Ramadan 2010
Three near-certainties accompany the Muslim holy month of Ramadan: in Islamic countries, the stock market climbs; in Jerusalem, the already amplified pre-dawn adhān, or call to prayer, becomes even more piercing than usual; and there is a steep rise in Muslim bloodletting.
At around the time Jews will be celebrating Rosh Hashanah, more than a billion Muslims will mark the conclusion of Ramadan with festive Eid al-Fitr meals. For the past month, observant Muslims have abstained from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset to commemorate the handing down of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. The faithful are entreated to curb wicked intentions, practice humility, and pray for forgiveness.
No doubt, for many of the faithful, Ramadan is a period of quiet reflection and spiritual serenity. For many others, however, especially in places where large numbers of Muslims cross paths with Hindus, Christians, or Jews, it is an occasion for barbarity. It is said that the gates of hell are closed during Ramadan, funneling martyrs to heaven with ease.
In Kashmir, Muslim violence against Indian security forces regularly spikes during Ramadan. Elsewhere, killing a Christian during Ramadan is deemed especially meritorious: a Syrian Catholic abducted in Mosul, north of Baghdad, was murdered this year even though the kidnappers' ransom demands had been met. All up and down Iraq, suicide bombers, roadside bombs, and snipers have taken an ungodly toll of innocent lives. In Somalia, Islamist suicide bombers killed 31 people at a Mogadishu hotel. In Lebanon, Sunnis killed Shiites and Shiites killed Sunnis in disputes over turf.
Thousands of miles away, in southern Thailand where Muslims are in the majority, Islamists set off a deadly explosive device killing, among others, a two-year-old boy. Again the reason given was Ramadan, a period in which, the Chinese news agency Xinhua notes matter-of-factly, "violence in the region always flares up." In Chechnya, bands of men attacked women in the street for not wearing headscarves. Scores of foreign troops battling the Taliban in Afghanistan have been killed, as have many civilians targeted as they shopped for food to break the fast.
Practicing Muslims are now a visible element of daily life in Europe and the Americas, and Ramadan is no longer on the margins of Western consciousness. This year, many British and U.S. news outlets provided coverage of the start of the month-long fast; others helpfully offered special features ranging from news of pertinent iPhone applications to discussions about the propriety of Muslim women visiting hair salons during the month.
Spokesmen for other faiths, trying to look beyond the miasma of violence, have conscientiously focused on the season's spiritual aspects. The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue sent greetings in 31 languages, attributing Ramadan-related violence—obliquely termed a "manipulation of religion"—to ignorance, poverty, and injustice. In India, The Hindu published an article by a Muslim author extolling the festival, while from the U.S. a respected Hindu leader sent Ramadan greetings to Muslims worldwide.
In Israel, Christians and Jews distributed food baskets to 250 needy Muslim families in the town of Lod, while in Acre the town's chief rabbi joined an Iftar banquet tendered to promote respect for non-Jewish holidays in the Jewish state. Israeli soldiers who come into contact with Palestinian Arabs have been given sensitivity training and instructed not to eat in front of fasting Muslims. Israeli authorities have gone to great lengths to facilitate access for West Bank Muslims to their shrines atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
But no amount of ecumenical goodwill can change the fact that Ramadan is a blood-soaked period. What can be done about that? Only the Muslim faithful themselves can challenge Islamists bent on brutality. There is a glimmer of hope that this is beginning to happen, but it will take a thorough political and theological reformation before the bloodletting is taken out of Ramadan.
-- September 2010
At around the time Jews will be celebrating Rosh Hashanah, more than a billion Muslims will mark the conclusion of Ramadan with festive Eid al-Fitr meals. For the past month, observant Muslims have abstained from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset to commemorate the handing down of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. The faithful are entreated to curb wicked intentions, practice humility, and pray for forgiveness.
No doubt, for many of the faithful, Ramadan is a period of quiet reflection and spiritual serenity. For many others, however, especially in places where large numbers of Muslims cross paths with Hindus, Christians, or Jews, it is an occasion for barbarity. It is said that the gates of hell are closed during Ramadan, funneling martyrs to heaven with ease.
In Kashmir, Muslim violence against Indian security forces regularly spikes during Ramadan. Elsewhere, killing a Christian during Ramadan is deemed especially meritorious: a Syrian Catholic abducted in Mosul, north of Baghdad, was murdered this year even though the kidnappers' ransom demands had been met. All up and down Iraq, suicide bombers, roadside bombs, and snipers have taken an ungodly toll of innocent lives. In Somalia, Islamist suicide bombers killed 31 people at a Mogadishu hotel. In Lebanon, Sunnis killed Shiites and Shiites killed Sunnis in disputes over turf.
Thousands of miles away, in southern Thailand where Muslims are in the majority, Islamists set off a deadly explosive device killing, among others, a two-year-old boy. Again the reason given was Ramadan, a period in which, the Chinese news agency Xinhua notes matter-of-factly, "violence in the region always flares up." In Chechnya, bands of men attacked women in the street for not wearing headscarves. Scores of foreign troops battling the Taliban in Afghanistan have been killed, as have many civilians targeted as they shopped for food to break the fast.
Practicing Muslims are now a visible element of daily life in Europe and the Americas, and Ramadan is no longer on the margins of Western consciousness. This year, many British and U.S. news outlets provided coverage of the start of the month-long fast; others helpfully offered special features ranging from news of pertinent iPhone applications to discussions about the propriety of Muslim women visiting hair salons during the month.
Spokesmen for other faiths, trying to look beyond the miasma of violence, have conscientiously focused on the season's spiritual aspects. The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue sent greetings in 31 languages, attributing Ramadan-related violence—obliquely termed a "manipulation of religion"—to ignorance, poverty, and injustice. In India, The Hindu published an article by a Muslim author extolling the festival, while from the U.S. a respected Hindu leader sent Ramadan greetings to Muslims worldwide.
In Israel, Christians and Jews distributed food baskets to 250 needy Muslim families in the town of Lod, while in Acre the town's chief rabbi joined an Iftar banquet tendered to promote respect for non-Jewish holidays in the Jewish state. Israeli soldiers who come into contact with Palestinian Arabs have been given sensitivity training and instructed not to eat in front of fasting Muslims. Israeli authorities have gone to great lengths to facilitate access for West Bank Muslims to their shrines atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
But no amount of ecumenical goodwill can change the fact that Ramadan is a blood-soaked period. What can be done about that? Only the Muslim faithful themselves can challenge Islamists bent on brutality. There is a glimmer of hope that this is beginning to happen, but it will take a thorough political and theological reformation before the bloodletting is taken out of Ramadan.
-- September 2010
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.
"Israeli Apartheid Week"
We have come a long way since the 1967 Six-Day War. Before that watershed event, Diaspora Jewish life was not noticeably animated by a vigorous commitment to Israel's cause. But the country's spectacular victory in war, in tandem with the energies released by the burgeoning mobilization to free Soviet Jewry, as well as with larger societal trends favoring ethnic assertion of all kinds, served to deepen and solidify the connection between the Diaspora and the Zionist enterprise. In America, pro-Israelism became the defining characteristic of Jewish life.
Over the ensuing decades, however, the stubborn refusal of the Arab-Muslim war to abate, and the decisive turn of the United Nations and the international Left against the Jewish state, have led to a palpable wavering in elite Jewish opinion—and, today, signs of an actual pulling-away. This is manifested at the extreme in the open involvement of a minuscule but vocal number of Jews and Israelis in the Arab cause. More worrying is the articulation of feelings of "exhaustion" on the part of some Jewish liberals and the silent but palpable disengagement of many others from Israel's cause.
Since most American Jews have never visited Israel, it is perhaps no wonder that they are at a loss to defend its strategic policies against daily barrages of criticism. Already a decade ago, a survey by the sociologist Steven M. Cohen found that relatively few American Jews felt "extremely attached" to Israel. Today, the extent of disaffection may be gauged in a symptomatic proposal for launching a "Birthright Diaspora" program to vie with Birthright Israel for the allegiance of young Jewish adults (including Israelis).
The hate-fest known as "Israeli Apartheid Week," now taking place in cities around the globe, is bound to affect the morale of Diaspora Jews, if in different ways. Some may be induced to lower their pro-Israel profile, others to dissociate themselves from the Jewish state and its policies, still others to affirm their solidarity ever more resolutely.
A mirror phenomenon can be detected among some Israelis who, isolated and resentful, have either misplaced their sense of connectedness to the Jewish people at large or seem positively determined to cut the thread binding them to what one writer derides as Israel's "symbiotic relationship" with the Diaspora. Since we are no longer one, if we ever were, why pretend to an interest in the perpetuation of Jewish life abroad? Why promote, in the manner of Tel Aviv's Beit Hatfutsot museum, the idea of a "global Jewish people"?
Such are a few of the contending currents of the present situation—a situation that planners of "Israel Apartheid Week" and similar excrescences must hope will issue in an ever greater splintering of the Jewish collective. As against the massed anti-Israel forces, one can but posit an oddly cheering fact: the more they rail, the more they testify to the bedrock persistence of the oneness they strain to obliterate. Acknowledged, unacknowledged, or repudiated, Zion was, is, and will likely remain at the core of Jewish civilization.
-- March 2010
Over the ensuing decades, however, the stubborn refusal of the Arab-Muslim war to abate, and the decisive turn of the United Nations and the international Left against the Jewish state, have led to a palpable wavering in elite Jewish opinion—and, today, signs of an actual pulling-away. This is manifested at the extreme in the open involvement of a minuscule but vocal number of Jews and Israelis in the Arab cause. More worrying is the articulation of feelings of "exhaustion" on the part of some Jewish liberals and the silent but palpable disengagement of many others from Israel's cause.
Since most American Jews have never visited Israel, it is perhaps no wonder that they are at a loss to defend its strategic policies against daily barrages of criticism. Already a decade ago, a survey by the sociologist Steven M. Cohen found that relatively few American Jews felt "extremely attached" to Israel. Today, the extent of disaffection may be gauged in a symptomatic proposal for launching a "Birthright Diaspora" program to vie with Birthright Israel for the allegiance of young Jewish adults (including Israelis).
The hate-fest known as "Israeli Apartheid Week," now taking place in cities around the globe, is bound to affect the morale of Diaspora Jews, if in different ways. Some may be induced to lower their pro-Israel profile, others to dissociate themselves from the Jewish state and its policies, still others to affirm their solidarity ever more resolutely.
A mirror phenomenon can be detected among some Israelis who, isolated and resentful, have either misplaced their sense of connectedness to the Jewish people at large or seem positively determined to cut the thread binding them to what one writer derides as Israel's "symbiotic relationship" with the Diaspora. Since we are no longer one, if we ever were, why pretend to an interest in the perpetuation of Jewish life abroad? Why promote, in the manner of Tel Aviv's Beit Hatfutsot museum, the idea of a "global Jewish people"?
Such are a few of the contending currents of the present situation—a situation that planners of "Israel Apartheid Week" and similar excrescences must hope will issue in an ever greater splintering of the Jewish collective. As against the massed anti-Israel forces, one can but posit an oddly cheering fact: the more they rail, the more they testify to the bedrock persistence of the oneness they strain to obliterate. Acknowledged, unacknowledged, or repudiated, Zion was, is, and will likely remain at the core of Jewish civilization.
-- March 2010
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.
India & Israel
Celebrating its Independence Day on August 15, the nation of India marked 63 years since the end of British rule in the sub-continent. In light of the two countries' more or less contemporaneous struggle for self-determination in the immediate aftermath of World War II, one might have thought that India would establish close ties with the newly born state of Israel straightaway. It did not happen.
Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India saw itself as a leader of the "non-aligned" bloc, and Israel as part of the West. Notwithstanding its conflict with Pakistan, its overwhelmingly Muslim neighbor, New Delhi also sought to establish itself on good terms with the Arab and Islamic world. To that end, it wholeheartedly adopted the Arab line at the UN and mapped out third-world strategy with Egypt's Gamal Nasser.
When it came to Jewish history and Zionist aspirations, India's founding elites labored under profound misapprehensions. In late 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht, Mohandas Gandhi wrote that he had no sympathy for the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. His advice to desperate and despairing European Jews was to face the Nazis with passivity; to the Jews in Palestine, he counseled an effort to convert Arab pogromists into friends.
India did finally recognize Israel in 1950, allowing Jerusalem to maintain a consular presence in Mumbai (then Bombay). But not until 1992 were full diplomatic relations established. By then, the Soviet empire had collapsed; Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was working feverishly on an Islamic bomb; and Egypt had long since made its peace with Israel.
In the years since then, the two countries have gradually drawn closer. Israelis are unabashedly smitten with India: about 35,000 of them, including many youngsters just out of army service, visit the country each year. Annual trade, which started at $200 million, has by now reached $3.5 billion, and this year India surpassed Europe as Israel's number-two export market (after the U.S.). Israel sells India minerals, fertilizer, chemicals, electronics, and, most significantly, military equipmemt.
Since the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, security ties have also strengthened. Reportedly, the two countries are jointly developing a medium-range air-defense system. The Indian navy has visited Haifa port, and India has launched commercial satellites into orbit for Israel.
But then there is Iran, on which Delhi and Jerusalem are at cross-purposes. Iran is India's second biggest oil supplier, and India—competing with China in a race to dominate the world's economy—is heavily invested in Iran's energy sector. India-Iran trade has reportedly tripled in the past five years. Geopolitics plays a role as well: India imagines Iran can be persuaded to dampen Islamist extremism in the sub-continent and curb Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan.
And there are also the cold facts of demography. True, Israel's population of seven million includes 70,000 Indian Jews—but India is a vast, multiethnic country of a billion people, and its Muslim minority, 13 percent of the population, numbers 153 million, exceeding the combined populations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Second only to Iran, India has the largest non-Arab Shi'ite population in the world. It is notable that Indian Muslims have no history of involvement in terrorism, and their religious authorities abjure political violence. Nor is India as a whole troubled by indigenous anti-Jewish sentiment. Still, the country's elites are thoroughly exposed to the prevailing global fault-finding of Israel and the concomitant rise in global anti-Semitism.
So the Israel-India relationship, while mutually vital, is delicate. Jerusalem would emphatically prefer New Delhi to stop enabling Iran, even as it must appreciate that India will calibrate its relationships according to its interests as it sees them. Under the circumstances, the question is what it would take to convince Indians that appeasing the imperialist mullahs in Tehran will in fact undermine India's long-term welfare and national interests.
-- August 2010
Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India saw itself as a leader of the "non-aligned" bloc, and Israel as part of the West. Notwithstanding its conflict with Pakistan, its overwhelmingly Muslim neighbor, New Delhi also sought to establish itself on good terms with the Arab and Islamic world. To that end, it wholeheartedly adopted the Arab line at the UN and mapped out third-world strategy with Egypt's Gamal Nasser.
When it came to Jewish history and Zionist aspirations, India's founding elites labored under profound misapprehensions. In late 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht, Mohandas Gandhi wrote that he had no sympathy for the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. His advice to desperate and despairing European Jews was to face the Nazis with passivity; to the Jews in Palestine, he counseled an effort to convert Arab pogromists into friends.
India did finally recognize Israel in 1950, allowing Jerusalem to maintain a consular presence in Mumbai (then Bombay). But not until 1992 were full diplomatic relations established. By then, the Soviet empire had collapsed; Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was working feverishly on an Islamic bomb; and Egypt had long since made its peace with Israel.
In the years since then, the two countries have gradually drawn closer. Israelis are unabashedly smitten with India: about 35,000 of them, including many youngsters just out of army service, visit the country each year. Annual trade, which started at $200 million, has by now reached $3.5 billion, and this year India surpassed Europe as Israel's number-two export market (after the U.S.). Israel sells India minerals, fertilizer, chemicals, electronics, and, most significantly, military equipmemt.
Since the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, security ties have also strengthened. Reportedly, the two countries are jointly developing a medium-range air-defense system. The Indian navy has visited Haifa port, and India has launched commercial satellites into orbit for Israel.
But then there is Iran, on which Delhi and Jerusalem are at cross-purposes. Iran is India's second biggest oil supplier, and India—competing with China in a race to dominate the world's economy—is heavily invested in Iran's energy sector. India-Iran trade has reportedly tripled in the past five years. Geopolitics plays a role as well: India imagines Iran can be persuaded to dampen Islamist extremism in the sub-continent and curb Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan.
And there are also the cold facts of demography. True, Israel's population of seven million includes 70,000 Indian Jews—but India is a vast, multiethnic country of a billion people, and its Muslim minority, 13 percent of the population, numbers 153 million, exceeding the combined populations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Second only to Iran, India has the largest non-Arab Shi'ite population in the world. It is notable that Indian Muslims have no history of involvement in terrorism, and their religious authorities abjure political violence. Nor is India as a whole troubled by indigenous anti-Jewish sentiment. Still, the country's elites are thoroughly exposed to the prevailing global fault-finding of Israel and the concomitant rise in global anti-Semitism.
So the Israel-India relationship, while mutually vital, is delicate. Jerusalem would emphatically prefer New Delhi to stop enabling Iran, even as it must appreciate that India will calibrate its relationships according to its interests as it sees them. Under the circumstances, the question is what it would take to convince Indians that appeasing the imperialist mullahs in Tehran will in fact undermine India's long-term welfare and national interests.
-- August 2010
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.
A Zionist Citadel
Zionist citadel -
This week the 73rd annual meeting of the board of governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem takes place in Israel's capital. Opened in 1925 on Mount Scopus in northeast Jerusalem, in the presence of British grandees Lord Balfour and Lord Allenby and the Zionist leadership headed by Chaim Weizmann, the fate of the university has been intertwined with that of the Yishuv and the nascent State of Israel. The school wrestled with the challenges of institution-building, offered a platform for the fierce competition of ideas, and developed the country's human potential, while encouraging Jewish-Arab coexistence. The demands the university confronted were a microcosm of the larger struggle for Jewish national survival in the face of wars, terror, boycott and de-legitimization.
With the end of the First World War and the arrival of the British Mandate, Weizmann helped to spearhead the creation of a "university of the Jewish people" whose library would become the Jewish National Library. In 1918, twelve foundation stones on land purchased from the estate of Sir John Gray-Hill were laid. Albert Einstein, delivering his opening remarks in Hebrew, gave the first formal university lecture – on the theory of relativity – in 1923. Judah Magnes became the institution's chancellor awarding the first degree in 1931. The university's teaching hospital, thanks to the munificence of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization, was to become a preeminent medical center.
In April 1948, Arab gunmen slaughtered a convoy of medical and university personnel making their way through east Jerusalem to Mount Scopus. When the 1948 War of Independence was over, Mt. Scopus remained an Israeli enclave though too dangerous to access. Classes were instead scattered throughout west Jerusalem, while Einstein and others appealed for donors to build an alternative site -- eventually inaugurated at Givat Ram in 1953. Only with the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem was Mount Scopus redeveloped into a flourishing campus.
In a Jerusalem whose population is growing increasingly non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox and Arab, the university today is a bastion of liberal Zionism. One illustration: In partnership with Hadassah and the Israel Defense Forces, HU now offers a distinctive six-year fast-track track physicians-training program in "military medicine." Nevertheless, the conduct of a number of graduates and faculty, with their compulsive anti-Zionism and obsessive embrace of the Palestinian Arab cause, has tended to capture the headlines. After years of indulgence, such whinging is no longer going unanswered.
Day-to-day, however, the "crisis" that most concerns the university's president, Menahem Ben-Sasson, is financial. Government support has been reduced by $8 million; HU is saddled by burdensome pension obligations; it foots a NIS 30 million security bill (nine students and staff were murdered in a 2002 bombing of a campus cafeteria by Palestinian terrorists); the global economic downturn resulted in a $17 million drop in foreign donations. Negotiated salary cuts and summer furloughs notwithstanding, HU ended its 2008/2009 fiscal year with a $30 million deficit.
All is not bleak. The task of strengthening the "university of the Jewish people" is now more equitably shared by a board that is divided, roughly, into one-hundred Israeli and one-hundred Diaspora governors. The university is doing well in garnering grants for its researchers: $45m from Israeli sources; $12m from US granting agencies; $8m from German sources and so on, last year. Its Amirim program identifies and nourishes undergraduates with outstanding potential. [There is healthy intellectual cross-pollination with other world-class institutions. For example, a doctoral student in music and another in Talmud are now studying at Princeton University in an exchange program sponsored by the Tikvah Fund.] The university is vigorously seeking to reverse Israel's brain drain, enticing back scholars and thereby further boosting the university's ability to capture research grants. And since undergraduates do not arrive on campus after IDF service with a sufficiently broad educational background, the university recently instituted a scheme to provide them with a solid grounding in the liberal arts.
Like the state it preceded into existence, Hebrew University finds itself in the throes of crisis. Yet a balanced assessment would note reasons for optimism: international stature, tens of thousands of enrolled students, illustrious faculty, alumni that include six recent Nobel Prize laureates, custodianship of Einstein's literary legacy, and an abiding role in fostering the Zionist enterprise.
This week the 73rd annual meeting of the board of governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem takes place in Israel's capital. Opened in 1925 on Mount Scopus in northeast Jerusalem, in the presence of British grandees Lord Balfour and Lord Allenby and the Zionist leadership headed by Chaim Weizmann, the fate of the university has been intertwined with that of the Yishuv and the nascent State of Israel. The school wrestled with the challenges of institution-building, offered a platform for the fierce competition of ideas, and developed the country's human potential, while encouraging Jewish-Arab coexistence. The demands the university confronted were a microcosm of the larger struggle for Jewish national survival in the face of wars, terror, boycott and de-legitimization.
With the end of the First World War and the arrival of the British Mandate, Weizmann helped to spearhead the creation of a "university of the Jewish people" whose library would become the Jewish National Library. In 1918, twelve foundation stones on land purchased from the estate of Sir John Gray-Hill were laid. Albert Einstein, delivering his opening remarks in Hebrew, gave the first formal university lecture – on the theory of relativity – in 1923. Judah Magnes became the institution's chancellor awarding the first degree in 1931. The university's teaching hospital, thanks to the munificence of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization, was to become a preeminent medical center.
In April 1948, Arab gunmen slaughtered a convoy of medical and university personnel making their way through east Jerusalem to Mount Scopus. When the 1948 War of Independence was over, Mt. Scopus remained an Israeli enclave though too dangerous to access. Classes were instead scattered throughout west Jerusalem, while Einstein and others appealed for donors to build an alternative site -- eventually inaugurated at Givat Ram in 1953. Only with the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem was Mount Scopus redeveloped into a flourishing campus.
In a Jerusalem whose population is growing increasingly non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox and Arab, the university today is a bastion of liberal Zionism. One illustration: In partnership with Hadassah and the Israel Defense Forces, HU now offers a distinctive six-year fast-track track physicians-training program in "military medicine." Nevertheless, the conduct of a number of graduates and faculty, with their compulsive anti-Zionism and obsessive embrace of the Palestinian Arab cause, has tended to capture the headlines. After years of indulgence, such whinging is no longer going unanswered.
Day-to-day, however, the "crisis" that most concerns the university's president, Menahem Ben-Sasson, is financial. Government support has been reduced by $8 million; HU is saddled by burdensome pension obligations; it foots a NIS 30 million security bill (nine students and staff were murdered in a 2002 bombing of a campus cafeteria by Palestinian terrorists); the global economic downturn resulted in a $17 million drop in foreign donations. Negotiated salary cuts and summer furloughs notwithstanding, HU ended its 2008/2009 fiscal year with a $30 million deficit.
All is not bleak. The task of strengthening the "university of the Jewish people" is now more equitably shared by a board that is divided, roughly, into one-hundred Israeli and one-hundred Diaspora governors. The university is doing well in garnering grants for its researchers: $45m from Israeli sources; $12m from US granting agencies; $8m from German sources and so on, last year. Its Amirim program identifies and nourishes undergraduates with outstanding potential. [There is healthy intellectual cross-pollination with other world-class institutions. For example, a doctoral student in music and another in Talmud are now studying at Princeton University in an exchange program sponsored by the Tikvah Fund.] The university is vigorously seeking to reverse Israel's brain drain, enticing back scholars and thereby further boosting the university's ability to capture research grants. And since undergraduates do not arrive on campus after IDF service with a sufficiently broad educational background, the university recently instituted a scheme to provide them with a solid grounding in the liberal arts.
Like the state it preceded into existence, Hebrew University finds itself in the throes of crisis. Yet a balanced assessment would note reasons for optimism: international stature, tens of thousands of enrolled students, illustrious faculty, alumni that include six recent Nobel Prize laureates, custodianship of Einstein's literary legacy, and an abiding role in fostering the Zionist enterprise.
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.
Arab Moderates: Help, or Hindrance?
At the re-launching of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, attention will be focused on Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu. But Egypt's ailing president, Hosni Mubarak, will also be in attendance, as will Jordan's King Abdullah II. To maintain their bona fides as Arab moderates, the two men helped cajole Abbas to resume face-to-face negotiations with Israel. So did other Arab states in the U.S. orbit, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates.
Their support was needed: left to his own devices, the politically enfeebled Abbas would no doubt have preferred to stay put. He and his team are already threatening to walk out when Israel's moratorium on settlement-building expires on September 26. At home, Abbas's participation in Washington is opposed by the leaders of all factions of his own organization, the PLO; Hamas's Khaled Mashaal has declared the talks "illegitimate" and not binding on the Palestinian polity; and ten other Syrian-backed rejectionist groups have similarly condemned the talks.
Thus, even if, for argument's sake, Abbas sincerely wants to break the cycle of self-destructive rejectionism characteristic of Palestinian Arab politics for the past century, he will need truly unequivocal backing from Mubarak, Abdullah, and the rest. But would Cairo and Amman take the lead? If history is any guide, the answer is no.
On his way back from a round of negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Yasir Arafat went straight to seek the support of Mubarak. Yet far from encouraging compromise with Israel, Mubarak adamantly opposed it. For his part, Abdullah, who had come to the throne the previous year, kept his head down. Today, the situation is, if anything, even less conducive to supporting peace with Israel.
In Egypt, Mubarak's party has just nominated the eighty-two-year-old ruler for a sixth presidential term, should he want it. (Rumors are rife that he might step aside in favor of his son Gamal.) Meanwhile, ordinary Egyptians are embittered by the regime's miserable economic performance and cynical about prospects of political reform. But when it comes to Israel, opinion hardens: Mubarak, who patented the "cold peace" paradigm, is criticized as being too soft. The blackouts plaguing the countryside in this summer's withering heat have accelerated demands that Egypt stop exporting natural gas to Israel.
Abdullah's position is possibly even more complicated, because much of Jordan's population is Palestinian Arab. The king's attendance in Washington this week has been denounced by Jordan's Trade Unions Council as a betrayal of the Palestinians. Jordanian chemists have refused to invite their Israeli colleagues to an international conference scheduled for the fall in Amman. The government, under intense pressure over a troubled economy, faces an Islamist-inspired boycott of parliamentary elections slated for November.
Abdullah, Mubarak, and Abbas may get points from the Obama administration just for showing up alongside Netanyahu. The Gulf Arabs won't even do that much. Timid though they have been in their peacemaking rhetoric, they are roundly condemned for it at home.
In the long run, this playing for time by the so-called Arab moderates is unsustainable: it agitates rejectionists while offering nothing tangible to Israelis who want a deal. The Arab states were instrumental in creating, perpetuating, and exacerbating the Palestinian problem. If anyone has a moral obligation to solve it, they do. A good place to begin would be to make it explicit to Abbas that they will back him unreservedly should he decide to negotiate with Israel in good faith.
-- August 2010
Their support was needed: left to his own devices, the politically enfeebled Abbas would no doubt have preferred to stay put. He and his team are already threatening to walk out when Israel's moratorium on settlement-building expires on September 26. At home, Abbas's participation in Washington is opposed by the leaders of all factions of his own organization, the PLO; Hamas's Khaled Mashaal has declared the talks "illegitimate" and not binding on the Palestinian polity; and ten other Syrian-backed rejectionist groups have similarly condemned the talks.
Thus, even if, for argument's sake, Abbas sincerely wants to break the cycle of self-destructive rejectionism characteristic of Palestinian Arab politics for the past century, he will need truly unequivocal backing from Mubarak, Abdullah, and the rest. But would Cairo and Amman take the lead? If history is any guide, the answer is no.
On his way back from a round of negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Yasir Arafat went straight to seek the support of Mubarak. Yet far from encouraging compromise with Israel, Mubarak adamantly opposed it. For his part, Abdullah, who had come to the throne the previous year, kept his head down. Today, the situation is, if anything, even less conducive to supporting peace with Israel.
In Egypt, Mubarak's party has just nominated the eighty-two-year-old ruler for a sixth presidential term, should he want it. (Rumors are rife that he might step aside in favor of his son Gamal.) Meanwhile, ordinary Egyptians are embittered by the regime's miserable economic performance and cynical about prospects of political reform. But when it comes to Israel, opinion hardens: Mubarak, who patented the "cold peace" paradigm, is criticized as being too soft. The blackouts plaguing the countryside in this summer's withering heat have accelerated demands that Egypt stop exporting natural gas to Israel.
Abdullah's position is possibly even more complicated, because much of Jordan's population is Palestinian Arab. The king's attendance in Washington this week has been denounced by Jordan's Trade Unions Council as a betrayal of the Palestinians. Jordanian chemists have refused to invite their Israeli colleagues to an international conference scheduled for the fall in Amman. The government, under intense pressure over a troubled economy, faces an Islamist-inspired boycott of parliamentary elections slated for November.
Abdullah, Mubarak, and Abbas may get points from the Obama administration just for showing up alongside Netanyahu. The Gulf Arabs won't even do that much. Timid though they have been in their peacemaking rhetoric, they are roundly condemned for it at home.
In the long run, this playing for time by the so-called Arab moderates is unsustainable: it agitates rejectionists while offering nothing tangible to Israelis who want a deal. The Arab states were instrumental in creating, perpetuating, and exacerbating the Palestinian problem. If anyone has a moral obligation to solve it, they do. A good place to begin would be to make it explicit to Abbas that they will back him unreservedly should he decide to negotiate with Israel in good faith.
-- August 2010
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.
On Eagles' Wings
The story of Israel's determination to survive is inextricably linked to the military aircraft deployed to defend its skies and take the battle to the enemy. A new chapter is now opening with the decision by Defense Minister Ehud Barak to approve, pending cabinet ratification, the purchase from the United States of twenty F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft at a base price of $96 million each. The manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, promises the new jet will be capable of penetrating the most sophisticated air defenses. Unfortunately, the plane is only now going into production and won't reach the Israel Air Force for at least five years—too late to play a role in any immediate solution to the Iranian nuclear threat.
The various eras of Israel's politico-military history can be limned through its planes. During the 1948-49 War of Independence, the front-line aircraft was the Sakeen, manufactured in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, procured in disassembled form, and brought to the country in defiance of an international arms embargo. Complemented by an odd assortment of other planes and heroic pilots (many from abroad), the Sakeen helped Israel achieve control over its own skies by the end of the war.
In the early 1950s, as the Soviet Empire turned sadistically anti-Semitic, Jerusalem had to look elsewhere for weaponry. Unable to establish a much-desired strategic relationship with Washington, it turned to the world market for military-surplus aircraft. These included the British-manufactured Spitfire and the American-made Mustang. Israel's first military jet, the British Meteor, was bought openly in 1953. All these saw the country through the 1956 Sinai campaign.
When realpolitik brought France and Israel into an early-1960s alliance, Jerusalem finally had a reliable flow of arms—most crucially, starting in 1962, the Mirage jet, which proved indispensable to victory in the 1967 war. But the French connection ended abruptly several days before the war when Charles de Gaulle declared a weapons embargo. Fortunately, it was then that the Johnson administration established the U.S. as Israel's main arms supplier, selling it, among other things, F-4 Phantom fighter bombers and A-4 Skyhawk ground-attack aircraft.
The American bond, initiated in earnest with the Kennedy administration's sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, became an authentic "special relationship" rooted in shared values and mutual security interests. Israel fought the 1973 Yom Kippur War largely with U.S.-supplied equipment. By the 1980s, the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon fighter-bomber, along with the E-2 Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning system, had joined the arsenal.
Indeed, the sale of military aircraft came to be a barometer for the general health of the Washington-Jerusalem relationship. A frosty Carter administration, piqued over Israeli policies in Lebanon and the West Bank, rejected a request to co-produce the F-16 and prevented Israel from selling its Kfir jet (built with U.S. components) to Ecuador. The use of F-16s and F-15s in Israel's 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak elicited threats of an arms embargo from the Reagan administration.
Israel Aerospace Industries, established to lessen the country's dependency on outside sources, would become a world-class manufacturer and exporter of weaponry. But in 1987 Israel made the fateful decision not to proceed with production of its own multirole Lavi fighter—a choice that Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, continues to maintain was short-sighted: had the Lavi been perfected, he asserts, it would today have obviated the need to purchase the F-35. Other critics of the new F-35 purchase worry that it will beggar the defense budget; some even argue that now should be the moment for Israel to make the quantum leap to unmanned strategic aircraft.
While Israel produces its own AWACS planes, plus a variety of aerial drones, its efforts at self-sufficiency are constrained by its small size, limited resources, and ultimate reliance on Washington. With its population exposed to an unprecedented ballistic-missile threat, Jerusalem has needed to collaborate with the U.S. on perfecting the Arrow defense system and to deploy U.S.-made Hawk and Patriot surface-to-air missiles. Nor could the soon-to-be-deployed Iron Dome, designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars, have been manufactured without U.S. support.
Clearly, in all these cases the U.S. has benefited greatly from the lessons of Israel's experience in wartime. But whatever the merits of the current decision to go with the F-35, this latest prospective sale also illuminates Israel's continuing, vital, and enduring—albeit dependent—relationship with the United States.
-- August 2010
The various eras of Israel's politico-military history can be limned through its planes. During the 1948-49 War of Independence, the front-line aircraft was the Sakeen, manufactured in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, procured in disassembled form, and brought to the country in defiance of an international arms embargo. Complemented by an odd assortment of other planes and heroic pilots (many from abroad), the Sakeen helped Israel achieve control over its own skies by the end of the war.
In the early 1950s, as the Soviet Empire turned sadistically anti-Semitic, Jerusalem had to look elsewhere for weaponry. Unable to establish a much-desired strategic relationship with Washington, it turned to the world market for military-surplus aircraft. These included the British-manufactured Spitfire and the American-made Mustang. Israel's first military jet, the British Meteor, was bought openly in 1953. All these saw the country through the 1956 Sinai campaign.
When realpolitik brought France and Israel into an early-1960s alliance, Jerusalem finally had a reliable flow of arms—most crucially, starting in 1962, the Mirage jet, which proved indispensable to victory in the 1967 war. But the French connection ended abruptly several days before the war when Charles de Gaulle declared a weapons embargo. Fortunately, it was then that the Johnson administration established the U.S. as Israel's main arms supplier, selling it, among other things, F-4 Phantom fighter bombers and A-4 Skyhawk ground-attack aircraft.
The American bond, initiated in earnest with the Kennedy administration's sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, became an authentic "special relationship" rooted in shared values and mutual security interests. Israel fought the 1973 Yom Kippur War largely with U.S.-supplied equipment. By the 1980s, the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon fighter-bomber, along with the E-2 Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning system, had joined the arsenal.
Indeed, the sale of military aircraft came to be a barometer for the general health of the Washington-Jerusalem relationship. A frosty Carter administration, piqued over Israeli policies in Lebanon and the West Bank, rejected a request to co-produce the F-16 and prevented Israel from selling its Kfir jet (built with U.S. components) to Ecuador. The use of F-16s and F-15s in Israel's 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak elicited threats of an arms embargo from the Reagan administration.
Israel Aerospace Industries, established to lessen the country's dependency on outside sources, would become a world-class manufacturer and exporter of weaponry. But in 1987 Israel made the fateful decision not to proceed with production of its own multirole Lavi fighter—a choice that Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, continues to maintain was short-sighted: had the Lavi been perfected, he asserts, it would today have obviated the need to purchase the F-35. Other critics of the new F-35 purchase worry that it will beggar the defense budget; some even argue that now should be the moment for Israel to make the quantum leap to unmanned strategic aircraft.
While Israel produces its own AWACS planes, plus a variety of aerial drones, its efforts at self-sufficiency are constrained by its small size, limited resources, and ultimate reliance on Washington. With its population exposed to an unprecedented ballistic-missile threat, Jerusalem has needed to collaborate with the U.S. on perfecting the Arrow defense system and to deploy U.S.-made Hawk and Patriot surface-to-air missiles. Nor could the soon-to-be-deployed Iron Dome, designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars, have been manufactured without U.S. support.
Clearly, in all these cases the U.S. has benefited greatly from the lessons of Israel's experience in wartime. But whatever the merits of the current decision to go with the F-35, this latest prospective sale also illuminates Israel's continuing, vital, and enduring—albeit dependent—relationship with the United States.
-- August 2010
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.
World Zionist Congress
The 36th congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) opens in Jerusalem today, bringing together hundreds of delegates drawn from political parties in Israel's Knesset as well as from Zionist and Jewish organizations in the Diaspora. On the agenda are subjects ranging from the condition of Zionism in Israeli society and worldwide, to settlement in Judea and Samaria, to Israel-Diaspora relations. Unfortunately, no matter how stimulating the speeches may be, no one anticipates any fateful decisions or even any serious grappling with existential questions.
This is a far cry from, for example, the sixth congress in 1903, Theodor Herzl's last, which wrestled with whether, in the face of spiraling anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, Jews should settle for a homeland anywhere at all rather than holding out for the land of Israel. Or take the momentous twelfth congress, held in an atmosphere of comparative optimism with the end of World War I and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration; there, the assembled Zionists debated their relations with the Arabs.
Then there was the seventeenth congress of 1931, which took place in the shadow of continuing Arab violence and ended in organizational rupture over demands by Vladimir Jabotinsky that the movement openly declare its aim to be the creation of a Jewish state. Exactly two decades later, three years after the birth of Israel, the congress met for the first time in Tel Aviv, where delegates sought to map out the relationship between movement and state.
By contrast, the prosaic issue confronting today's congress involves the possibly baleful influence of the WZO's newest constituent, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party—undoubtedly nationalist, but with no philosophical connection to Zionism—on religious pluralism inside the movement.
Some will ask whether vestigial bodies like the WZO—and the Jewish Agency, for that matter—serve any real purpose. Both are funded largely by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Israeli government. Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, is seeking to revitalize that organization by means of a new mission: actively fostering Jewish identity and unity between the Diaspora and Israel. As for the WZO, its main role is to provide patronage and funds to constituent organizations, the best of which promote youth movements, educational programs, and scholarships, dispatching emissaries to Diaspora communities and advancing the cause of aliyah.
All the while, Zionism today is under unremitting intellectual and political assault around the world, and it is excruciatingly obvious that the case for Zion has to be made anew—as if the fate of the entire enterprise hangs in the balance. If the World Zionist Organization is not up to the task, who is?
-- June 2010
This is a far cry from, for example, the sixth congress in 1903, Theodor Herzl's last, which wrestled with whether, in the face of spiraling anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, Jews should settle for a homeland anywhere at all rather than holding out for the land of Israel. Or take the momentous twelfth congress, held in an atmosphere of comparative optimism with the end of World War I and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration; there, the assembled Zionists debated their relations with the Arabs.
Then there was the seventeenth congress of 1931, which took place in the shadow of continuing Arab violence and ended in organizational rupture over demands by Vladimir Jabotinsky that the movement openly declare its aim to be the creation of a Jewish state. Exactly two decades later, three years after the birth of Israel, the congress met for the first time in Tel Aviv, where delegates sought to map out the relationship between movement and state.
By contrast, the prosaic issue confronting today's congress involves the possibly baleful influence of the WZO's newest constituent, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party—undoubtedly nationalist, but with no philosophical connection to Zionism—on religious pluralism inside the movement.
Some will ask whether vestigial bodies like the WZO—and the Jewish Agency, for that matter—serve any real purpose. Both are funded largely by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Israeli government. Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, is seeking to revitalize that organization by means of a new mission: actively fostering Jewish identity and unity between the Diaspora and Israel. As for the WZO, its main role is to provide patronage and funds to constituent organizations, the best of which promote youth movements, educational programs, and scholarships, dispatching emissaries to Diaspora communities and advancing the cause of aliyah.
All the while, Zionism today is under unremitting intellectual and political assault around the world, and it is excruciatingly obvious that the case for Zion has to be made anew—as if the fate of the entire enterprise hangs in the balance. If the World Zionist Organization is not up to the task, who is?
-- June 2010
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.
Meeting Efraim Karsh
Author of Palestine Betrayed,
Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.
This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.
The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.
Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.
In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough.
Who "betrayed" Palestine?
Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.
You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?
A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.
What were the obligations of Great Britain under the Mandate for Palestine?
The League of Nations instructed the British to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine as envisaged by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
How did Britain fulfill these obligations?
Almost from the beginning the British authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab efforts to avert the implementation of the Mandate. Finally, in July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward. The Peel Commission, appointed by London, concluded that Arabs and Jews couldn't peacefully coexist in a single state and recommended repudiating the terms of the Mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with what was then called Transjordan, and a truncated Jewish state.
But hadn't the British "twice promised" Palestine, first to the Arabs and then to the Jews?
Certainly not. In his correspondence with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, which led to the Great Arab Revolt during World War I, Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner for Egypt, specifically excluded Palestine from the prospective Arab empire promised to Hussein. This was acknowledged by the sharif in their exchanges and also by his son Faisal, the future founding monarch of Iraq, shortly after the war.
You bring to light a World War II conversation about atomic weapons between Nazi-SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the mufti Hajj Amin Husseini.
Yes. Arriving in Berlin in November 1941, and promptly awarded an audience with Hitler, the mufti spent the rest of the war in the service of the Third Reich, broadcasting Nazi propaganda and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the German killing machine. Himmler and the mufti spent hours ruminating on the absolute evil of the Jews. It was during one of these conversations, sometime in the summer of 1943, that Himmler gleefully told Hajj Amin of the Nazi "final solution," which by that time had led to the extermination of some three million Jews. He also confided the great progress made in developing a nuclear weapon that in Himmler's opinion would win the war for Germany. The mufti would never forget this conversation, boasting decades later in his memoirs that "there were no more than ten officials in the German Reich who were privy to this secret."
Arab historians and others now say that Israel's victory in the 1948-49 War of Independence was preordained, given the weakness of the Arabs.
Hardly. By April 1948, after four months of fighting against the mufti's men as well as an irregular pan-Arab force-dubbed the Arab Liberation Army-that had penetrated Palestine from outside, the Jewish position had become precarious. It was only after the Jews launched their first large offensive in early April, aimed at breaching the siege of Jerusalem, that the Palestinian Arab war effort began to unravel rapidly, culminating in total collapse and mass exodus by mid-May.
Then Israel proclaimed its independence.
Yes-and immediately the country was invaded by the regular armies of the neighboring Arab states. The previous succession of Jewish victories was checked, the nascent state was thrown back on the defensive, and the fight became a struggle for its very survival. Ultimately, the newly-established Israeli army managed to turn the tables, at the exorbitant human cost of one percent of the new state's population.
At the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948, the Irgun, a pre-state paramilitary force, is said to have massacred hundreds upon hundreds of innocent and unarmed men, women, and children.
According to a reliable report a day after the event, some 100 Arabs, including women and children, were killed in the fighting for the village. This figure is confirmed by Arif al-Arif, the doyen of Palestinian Arab historians, in his seminal Arabic-language study of the nakba (disaster), as Palestinians refer to the events of 1948-49. Al-Arif stipulates heavy fighting on both sides, claiming that the villagers killed more than 100 Jewish fighters (the actual figure was four dead and 32 wounded). Of the 110 Arab fatalities, he alleges that only seven were killed in action while the rest were peaceful civilians murdered in their homes. By contrast, an intelligence report issued three days after the event by the Haganah, the main Jewish fighting force, underscored the operational incompetence and disarray of the attacking Irgunists as well as their lack of discipline, manifested among other ways in acts of plunder, but makes no mention of a massacre.
In Palestine Betrayed you come to essentially the same conclusion as does Benny Morris in his recent book 1948: namely, that the only party systematically interested in "transfer" or "expulsion" in this period was the Arabs.
Morris does seem to have tacitly disowned his early writings, not least by acknowledging that the underlying cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict was and is the adamant Arab and Muslim refusal to accept the idea of Jewish statehood in any part of Palestine. Millions of Arabs, Jews, and foreign observers of the Middle East fully recognized these facts as early as 1948; at that time, the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society were nowhere described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. Regrettably, this historical truth has been erased from public memory.
But in the case of the town of Lydda, the Haganah did drive out Arab residents.
The Lydda expulsion of July 1948 was the only instance where a substantial urban population was driven out during the course of the war. It stemmed not from a pre-existing plan but from a string of unexpected developments. Only when Israeli forces encountered stiffer resistance than expected was the decision made to "encourage" the population's departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east. The aim was to avoid leaving a hostile armed base at the rear of the Israeli advance and, by clogging the main roads, to forestall a possible counterattack by the Arab Legion.
This is not to deny that Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinian Arabs. But these were exceptions that occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations-notably the need to deprive the enemy of strategic sites where no Jewish forces were available to hold them.
You write that, in any case, hundreds of thousands of Arabs had fled Palestine while the British were still in place-that is, prior to Israeli independence.
That is correct. And this tells us that even if the Zionists had instigated a plot to expel the Palestinian Arabs-which they most certainly did not-Britain's extensive military presence in the country would have precluded the slightest possibility of a systematic "ethnic cleansing."
What then was the catalyst for their flight?
The fear, disorientation, and economic privation that accompany all armed hostilities. But to these must be added, crucially, the local Palestinians' despair of their own leadership, the role taken by that leadership in actively forcing widespread evacuations, and perhaps above all the lack of communal cohesion or of the willingness, especially at the highest levels, to subordinate personal interest to the general good.
You cite documents by Jewish figures in Haifa actually pleading with the city's Arab leaders not to flee.
They did not listen to such pleas, no doubt because remaining would have amounted to a tacit acquiescence in Jewish statehood.
The UN says there are 4.7 million Palestine refugees today. How many Arabs actually fled Palestine?
By the time of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, some 300,000-340,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled their homes. By the end of the war several months later, the numbers had swollen to 583,000-609,000 refugees.
Why didn't Israel welcome them back afterward?
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet on September 12, 1948 that if direct talks with the Arabs should culminate in a real peace, the refugees would return. On the other hand, "Should [postwar arrangements] fall short of peace with the Arabs, we will not allow their return."
You contend that Palestinian Arabs, if left to their own devices, would have chosen coexistence.
Therein lay the great tragedy of the 1920-48 era. Despite constant terror and intimidation, including the killing by Arab fanatics of moderates within their own community, peaceful coexistence with Jews was far more prevalent than were eruptions of violence, and the violence was the work of a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.
It was the Arab leadership that rejected Jewish statehood even in a small part of Palestine-not from concern for the national rights of the Palestinian Arabs, but from the desire to fend off a perceived encroachment on the pan-Arab patrimony.
So the Arab war goal was not to create a Palestinian state?
It was common knowledge at the time that the pan-Arab invasion was more of a geopolitical scramble for Palestine than an attempt to secure the Palestinians' national rights. After 1948-49, neither Egypt nor Transjordan moved to establish an independent Palestinian entity in Gaza and the West Bank; this reflected the wider perception of the Palestine problem as a corollary of the pan-Arab agenda rather than as a distinct or urgent issue in its own right.
Abdel Rahman Azzam, the first head of the Arab League, once mused that it took centuries for the Arabs to reconcile themselves to having lost Spain; he wasn't sure they could ever adjust to losing any part of Palestine.
Unfortunately, the prospect of such an adjustment still seems far from auspicious. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state provided the Palestinians recognized Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's negotiator, reacted to this by warning that Netanyahu "will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him."
And so, more than six decades after the mufti condemned his people to statelessness, his reckless policies live on and are continually reenacted. Only when today's Arab leaders end this legacy of intransigence can the Palestinians hope to put their self-inflicted nakba behind them.
###
Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.
This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.
The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.
Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.
In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough.
Who "betrayed" Palestine?
Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.
You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?
A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.
What were the obligations of Great Britain under the Mandate for Palestine?
The League of Nations instructed the British to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine as envisaged by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
How did Britain fulfill these obligations?
Almost from the beginning the British authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab efforts to avert the implementation of the Mandate. Finally, in July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward. The Peel Commission, appointed by London, concluded that Arabs and Jews couldn't peacefully coexist in a single state and recommended repudiating the terms of the Mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with what was then called Transjordan, and a truncated Jewish state.
But hadn't the British "twice promised" Palestine, first to the Arabs and then to the Jews?
Certainly not. In his correspondence with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, which led to the Great Arab Revolt during World War I, Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner for Egypt, specifically excluded Palestine from the prospective Arab empire promised to Hussein. This was acknowledged by the sharif in their exchanges and also by his son Faisal, the future founding monarch of Iraq, shortly after the war.
You bring to light a World War II conversation about atomic weapons between Nazi-SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the mufti Hajj Amin Husseini.
Yes. Arriving in Berlin in November 1941, and promptly awarded an audience with Hitler, the mufti spent the rest of the war in the service of the Third Reich, broadcasting Nazi propaganda and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the German killing machine. Himmler and the mufti spent hours ruminating on the absolute evil of the Jews. It was during one of these conversations, sometime in the summer of 1943, that Himmler gleefully told Hajj Amin of the Nazi "final solution," which by that time had led to the extermination of some three million Jews. He also confided the great progress made in developing a nuclear weapon that in Himmler's opinion would win the war for Germany. The mufti would never forget this conversation, boasting decades later in his memoirs that "there were no more than ten officials in the German Reich who were privy to this secret."
Arab historians and others now say that Israel's victory in the 1948-49 War of Independence was preordained, given the weakness of the Arabs.
Hardly. By April 1948, after four months of fighting against the mufti's men as well as an irregular pan-Arab force-dubbed the Arab Liberation Army-that had penetrated Palestine from outside, the Jewish position had become precarious. It was only after the Jews launched their first large offensive in early April, aimed at breaching the siege of Jerusalem, that the Palestinian Arab war effort began to unravel rapidly, culminating in total collapse and mass exodus by mid-May.
Then Israel proclaimed its independence.
Yes-and immediately the country was invaded by the regular armies of the neighboring Arab states. The previous succession of Jewish victories was checked, the nascent state was thrown back on the defensive, and the fight became a struggle for its very survival. Ultimately, the newly-established Israeli army managed to turn the tables, at the exorbitant human cost of one percent of the new state's population.
At the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948, the Irgun, a pre-state paramilitary force, is said to have massacred hundreds upon hundreds of innocent and unarmed men, women, and children.
According to a reliable report a day after the event, some 100 Arabs, including women and children, were killed in the fighting for the village. This figure is confirmed by Arif al-Arif, the doyen of Palestinian Arab historians, in his seminal Arabic-language study of the nakba (disaster), as Palestinians refer to the events of 1948-49. Al-Arif stipulates heavy fighting on both sides, claiming that the villagers killed more than 100 Jewish fighters (the actual figure was four dead and 32 wounded). Of the 110 Arab fatalities, he alleges that only seven were killed in action while the rest were peaceful civilians murdered in their homes. By contrast, an intelligence report issued three days after the event by the Haganah, the main Jewish fighting force, underscored the operational incompetence and disarray of the attacking Irgunists as well as their lack of discipline, manifested among other ways in acts of plunder, but makes no mention of a massacre.
In Palestine Betrayed you come to essentially the same conclusion as does Benny Morris in his recent book 1948: namely, that the only party systematically interested in "transfer" or "expulsion" in this period was the Arabs.
Morris does seem to have tacitly disowned his early writings, not least by acknowledging that the underlying cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict was and is the adamant Arab and Muslim refusal to accept the idea of Jewish statehood in any part of Palestine. Millions of Arabs, Jews, and foreign observers of the Middle East fully recognized these facts as early as 1948; at that time, the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society were nowhere described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. Regrettably, this historical truth has been erased from public memory.
But in the case of the town of Lydda, the Haganah did drive out Arab residents.
The Lydda expulsion of July 1948 was the only instance where a substantial urban population was driven out during the course of the war. It stemmed not from a pre-existing plan but from a string of unexpected developments. Only when Israeli forces encountered stiffer resistance than expected was the decision made to "encourage" the population's departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east. The aim was to avoid leaving a hostile armed base at the rear of the Israeli advance and, by clogging the main roads, to forestall a possible counterattack by the Arab Legion.
This is not to deny that Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinian Arabs. But these were exceptions that occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations-notably the need to deprive the enemy of strategic sites where no Jewish forces were available to hold them.
You write that, in any case, hundreds of thousands of Arabs had fled Palestine while the British were still in place-that is, prior to Israeli independence.
That is correct. And this tells us that even if the Zionists had instigated a plot to expel the Palestinian Arabs-which they most certainly did not-Britain's extensive military presence in the country would have precluded the slightest possibility of a systematic "ethnic cleansing."
What then was the catalyst for their flight?
The fear, disorientation, and economic privation that accompany all armed hostilities. But to these must be added, crucially, the local Palestinians' despair of their own leadership, the role taken by that leadership in actively forcing widespread evacuations, and perhaps above all the lack of communal cohesion or of the willingness, especially at the highest levels, to subordinate personal interest to the general good.
You cite documents by Jewish figures in Haifa actually pleading with the city's Arab leaders not to flee.
They did not listen to such pleas, no doubt because remaining would have amounted to a tacit acquiescence in Jewish statehood.
The UN says there are 4.7 million Palestine refugees today. How many Arabs actually fled Palestine?
By the time of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, some 300,000-340,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled their homes. By the end of the war several months later, the numbers had swollen to 583,000-609,000 refugees.
Why didn't Israel welcome them back afterward?
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet on September 12, 1948 that if direct talks with the Arabs should culminate in a real peace, the refugees would return. On the other hand, "Should [postwar arrangements] fall short of peace with the Arabs, we will not allow their return."
You contend that Palestinian Arabs, if left to their own devices, would have chosen coexistence.
Therein lay the great tragedy of the 1920-48 era. Despite constant terror and intimidation, including the killing by Arab fanatics of moderates within their own community, peaceful coexistence with Jews was far more prevalent than were eruptions of violence, and the violence was the work of a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.
It was the Arab leadership that rejected Jewish statehood even in a small part of Palestine-not from concern for the national rights of the Palestinian Arabs, but from the desire to fend off a perceived encroachment on the pan-Arab patrimony.
So the Arab war goal was not to create a Palestinian state?
It was common knowledge at the time that the pan-Arab invasion was more of a geopolitical scramble for Palestine than an attempt to secure the Palestinians' national rights. After 1948-49, neither Egypt nor Transjordan moved to establish an independent Palestinian entity in Gaza and the West Bank; this reflected the wider perception of the Palestine problem as a corollary of the pan-Arab agenda rather than as a distinct or urgent issue in its own right.
Abdel Rahman Azzam, the first head of the Arab League, once mused that it took centuries for the Arabs to reconcile themselves to having lost Spain; he wasn't sure they could ever adjust to losing any part of Palestine.
Unfortunately, the prospect of such an adjustment still seems far from auspicious. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state provided the Palestinians recognized Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's negotiator, reacted to this by warning that Netanyahu "will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him."
And so, more than six decades after the mufti condemned his people to statelessness, his reckless policies live on and are continually reenacted. Only when today's Arab leaders end this legacy of intransigence can the Palestinians hope to put their self-inflicted nakba behind them.
###
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.
UNIFIL: Peacekeepers or Enablers?
The response of the civilized world to events in southern Lebanon—where Hizballah, in preparation for its next act of aggression, is reportedly digging tunnels at the border with northern Israel—is doubly revealing. It says much about the non-enforcement of international law in an area dominated by Islamist irregular forces. And it is a reliable indicator of what might happen if, in the event of an agreement between the Palestinian leadership and Israel, international peacekeepers were to be stationed in the West Bank and Gaza.
The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has been an ineffective presence in south Lebanon dating back to 1978, when the area was subjugated by Palestinian gunmen. But in 2006 the force's mandate was enlarged under Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War, to include monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Hizballah and supporting a 15,000-strong contingent of Lebanese troops south of the Litani River. The resolution, which has no real enforcement mechanism, also calls for the disarming of "all militias" (read: Hizballah) and an end to arms smuggling (meaning from Syria and Iran to Hizballah). But the militia is booming, and the smuggling is unabated.
Meanwhile, only 6,000 Lebanese troops have been deployed; anticipating trouble with Hizballah, they have been known to refuse to accompany UNIFIL in carrying out maneuvers that could rile the terrorist militia. After a recent incident in which weapons of French peacekeepers were seized, a UNIFIL officer was wounded, and an armored vehicle was vandalized by "villagers," Beirut promised to send 5,000 more soldiers to the south and France has reportedly offered to bolster its presence. But the UN has yet to respond to France's offer, and all it could muster in response to the "villagers'" depredations against its forces was a limp Security Council plea, addressed to no one in particular, for ensuring the "safety and freedom of movement of the peacekeepers."
"We are fully aware of the problems [UN] military operations in civilian areas may cause," said UNIFIL commander Alberto Asarta Cuevas at a meeting with village chiefs to urge greater "dialogue" with his peacekeepers. No doubt. With any number of private homes serving as Hizballah arms depots, or sitting astride bunkers and command centers, unrestricted UNIFIL access would clearly have the potential to cause friction.
The Israeli army recently declassified intelligence it has gathered concerning Hizballah's deployment in southern Lebanon and handed its findings to the UN. According to the IDF's copious documentation, Hizballah has positioned weapons caches less than 200 feet from schools and hospitals, embedded some 20,000 militia members inside 160 villages, and camouflaged 40,000 short-, medium- and long-range missiles—the last being capable of striking Tel Aviv. In the village of Khiam, located twelve miles from the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, there are no fewer than ten weapons-storage facilities. Also operating in the area, unhindered by UNIFIL, are Iranian military advisers.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon responded to the IDF's revelations with a stern rebuke—of Israel. He holds Jerusalem to blame for raising "the specter of a miscalculation by either party leading to a resumption of hostilities, with potentially devastating consequences for Lebanon and the region."
In fact, the IDF may have had a much more specific aim in mind, and Ban Ki-Moon may have guessed it. By publicizing some of what it knows about Hizballah's deployment of forces amid the civilian population in south Lebanon, Israel may intend to signal that, in any future round of fighting, non-combatant casualties will be the legal and moral responsibility of Hizballah—and, ultimately, of UNIFIL itself, the body charged with preventing the very situation it has permitted to develop.
Beyond the case of southern Lebanon, the utter lack of any international will to disarm Hizballah, or to penalize Syria and Iran for unlawfully arming it, delivers a stark lesson to Israelis about the folly of delegating their country's security, particularly in the West Bank, to peacekeepers under the aegis of the United Nations, NATO, or any other international body
-- July 2010
The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has been an ineffective presence in south Lebanon dating back to 1978, when the area was subjugated by Palestinian gunmen. But in 2006 the force's mandate was enlarged under Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War, to include monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Hizballah and supporting a 15,000-strong contingent of Lebanese troops south of the Litani River. The resolution, which has no real enforcement mechanism, also calls for the disarming of "all militias" (read: Hizballah) and an end to arms smuggling (meaning from Syria and Iran to Hizballah). But the militia is booming, and the smuggling is unabated.
Meanwhile, only 6,000 Lebanese troops have been deployed; anticipating trouble with Hizballah, they have been known to refuse to accompany UNIFIL in carrying out maneuvers that could rile the terrorist militia. After a recent incident in which weapons of French peacekeepers were seized, a UNIFIL officer was wounded, and an armored vehicle was vandalized by "villagers," Beirut promised to send 5,000 more soldiers to the south and France has reportedly offered to bolster its presence. But the UN has yet to respond to France's offer, and all it could muster in response to the "villagers'" depredations against its forces was a limp Security Council plea, addressed to no one in particular, for ensuring the "safety and freedom of movement of the peacekeepers."
"We are fully aware of the problems [UN] military operations in civilian areas may cause," said UNIFIL commander Alberto Asarta Cuevas at a meeting with village chiefs to urge greater "dialogue" with his peacekeepers. No doubt. With any number of private homes serving as Hizballah arms depots, or sitting astride bunkers and command centers, unrestricted UNIFIL access would clearly have the potential to cause friction.
The Israeli army recently declassified intelligence it has gathered concerning Hizballah's deployment in southern Lebanon and handed its findings to the UN. According to the IDF's copious documentation, Hizballah has positioned weapons caches less than 200 feet from schools and hospitals, embedded some 20,000 militia members inside 160 villages, and camouflaged 40,000 short-, medium- and long-range missiles—the last being capable of striking Tel Aviv. In the village of Khiam, located twelve miles from the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, there are no fewer than ten weapons-storage facilities. Also operating in the area, unhindered by UNIFIL, are Iranian military advisers.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon responded to the IDF's revelations with a stern rebuke—of Israel. He holds Jerusalem to blame for raising "the specter of a miscalculation by either party leading to a resumption of hostilities, with potentially devastating consequences for Lebanon and the region."
In fact, the IDF may have had a much more specific aim in mind, and Ban Ki-Moon may have guessed it. By publicizing some of what it knows about Hizballah's deployment of forces amid the civilian population in south Lebanon, Israel may intend to signal that, in any future round of fighting, non-combatant casualties will be the legal and moral responsibility of Hizballah—and, ultimately, of UNIFIL itself, the body charged with preventing the very situation it has permitted to develop.
Beyond the case of southern Lebanon, the utter lack of any international will to disarm Hizballah, or to penalize Syria and Iran for unlawfully arming it, delivers a stark lesson to Israelis about the folly of delegating their country's security, particularly in the West Bank, to peacekeepers under the aegis of the United Nations, NATO, or any other international body
-- July 2010
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.
Christianity in the Middle East
Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Cyprus on Sunday was marred by events that cast their own, baleful light on the purpose of his mission: to unveil a Vatican position paper on the deteriorating condition of Christianity in the Middle East. Hours before his arrival, one of the document's authors, Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar of Anatolia, was murdered by his "mentally unstable" driver. Padovese had only recently met with Turkish authorities to discuss the problems of that country's tiny Christian minority—and had previously extended Christian forgiveness to a Muslim youth who in 2006 murdered a Catholic priest. Three more Turkish Christians were murdered in their Bible publishing house in 2007.
The draft document, "The Catholic Church in the Middle East," exemplifies the tightrope walked by the Vatican with regard to the ever-worsening circumstance of Christianity in the region. Worried about the dwindling indigenous communities of Christian Arabs and about newly arriving Christian workers from Asia, but with an eye to Islamic sensibilities, the paper artfully cites Israel's "occupation of Palestinian territories" as harming Christian Arabs no less than their Muslim compatriots. In its Italian-language version, as the New York Times points out, the document goes further, explicitly warning against the use of the Bible "to justify the political injustice imposed on the Palestinians." In this same connection the Church also thoroughly dissociates itself from "certain Christian fundamentalist theologies"—in other words, Christian Zionism with its unstinting support of Israel.
But the heart of the document—cushioned by its de-rigueur genuflecting to the Palestinian cause—is the assertion that "Oftentimes, relations between Christians and Muslims are difficult, principally because Muslims make no distinction between religion and politics, thereby relegating Christians to the precarious position of being considered non-citizens." "Too often," it hastens to add, Muslims mistakenly identify Christianity with the West—even though "modernity" also poses risks to Christians. Finally, the Church warns against active Christian proselytizing among Muslims.
Early in his papacy, at Regensburg in Germany, Benedict quoted an "erudite Byzantine emperor" talking with "startling brusqueness" about Islamic religious violence. If his intention then was to engage Muslims in vigorous but reasoned polemical disputation, it failed; many of his hoped-for interlocutors reacted with rage, some by killing Christians and burning churches. Four years later, the tone of "The Catholic Church in the Middle East" suggests an abandonment of any claims to religious rights and justice in favor of a plea for Muslim forbearance.
-- June 2010
The draft document, "The Catholic Church in the Middle East," exemplifies the tightrope walked by the Vatican with regard to the ever-worsening circumstance of Christianity in the region. Worried about the dwindling indigenous communities of Christian Arabs and about newly arriving Christian workers from Asia, but with an eye to Islamic sensibilities, the paper artfully cites Israel's "occupation of Palestinian territories" as harming Christian Arabs no less than their Muslim compatriots. In its Italian-language version, as the New York Times points out, the document goes further, explicitly warning against the use of the Bible "to justify the political injustice imposed on the Palestinians." In this same connection the Church also thoroughly dissociates itself from "certain Christian fundamentalist theologies"—in other words, Christian Zionism with its unstinting support of Israel.
But the heart of the document—cushioned by its de-rigueur genuflecting to the Palestinian cause—is the assertion that "Oftentimes, relations between Christians and Muslims are difficult, principally because Muslims make no distinction between religion and politics, thereby relegating Christians to the precarious position of being considered non-citizens." "Too often," it hastens to add, Muslims mistakenly identify Christianity with the West—even though "modernity" also poses risks to Christians. Finally, the Church warns against active Christian proselytizing among Muslims.
Early in his papacy, at Regensburg in Germany, Benedict quoted an "erudite Byzantine emperor" talking with "startling brusqueness" about Islamic religious violence. If his intention then was to engage Muslims in vigorous but reasoned polemical disputation, it failed; many of his hoped-for interlocutors reacted with rage, some by killing Christians and burning churches. Four years later, the tone of "The Catholic Church in the Middle East" suggests an abandonment of any claims to religious rights and justice in favor of a plea for Muslim forbearance.
-- June 2010
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.
American Jewish Congress: The End?
Shrunken and wizened, the American Jewish Congress lies on its evident death bed, debilitated by a loss of raison d'être as much as by Bernard Madoff's financial depredations. Under the circumstances, reflections on the spotty record of its approach to Jewish life, or on waste and duplication in the alphabet soup of the Jewish organizational world, may forgivably give way to a longer-term look at a once-proud agency's origins and purposes.
The AJCongress was established in 1918, largely by "downtown" East European Jews out to challenge "uptown" German Reform Jews and their flagship agency, the American Jewish Committee, founded twelve years earlier. The downtowners, no underachievers themselves, were irked by the AJCommittee's elitism and its antipathy toward Zionism. The idea for a more representative umbrella group, which began to germinate as early as 1915, gained momentum in response to the AJCommittee's unenthusiastic reaction to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
After World War I, the new "congress" lobbied the Versailles conference on behalf of Europe's remaining Jewish communities. While some uptowners, led by Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, were urging President Woodrow Wilson not to support the Balfour Declaration, the downtowners pressured from the opposite direction.
The congress was supposed to disband after Versailles, but in 1928 an ad-hoc coalition of Orthodox, Zionist, and fraternal groups reassembled under Stephen Wise and ultimately reconstituted themselves as an independent membership organization. Unlike the AJCommittee, which worked behind the scenes, the new AJCongress engaged in direct action. In the 1930s it organized boycotts of goods from Nazi Germany. In 1942, convinced that reports of Hitler's genocide were true, it held a mass rally at New York's Madison Square Garden—although Wise also acquiesced in FDR's ruling that the rescue of European Jewry would have to wait until the fighting ended.
In the postwar era, the AJCongress co-founded the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and established a niche for itself with its 1960s campaign against the Arab economic boycott of Israel. But its main passions centered on domestic American affairs, where, faithful to the left-liberal agenda, it positioned itself as the Jewish community's progressive lawyer: challenging restrictive clubs, litigating for the rigid separation of church and state, backing special legal dispensations for American blacks, and opposing the Vietnam war.
In the late 60s and 70s the AJCongress came under sharp criticism for its conspicuous failure to speak out against roiling black anti-Semitism and for its opposition to Jewish parochial schools. In response, AJCongress leaders claimed that some Jews preferred day-school education for their children "not because they loved God but because they were afraid of the Negro." In time they would re-think such reckless aspersions, somewhat modifying the agency's position in the process.
By now, in any case, much of the Jewish communal agenda had become dominated by Israel. Like other liberal establishment figures, AJCongress leaders were aghast and befuddled at the 1977 election of Menachem Begin as Israel's prime minister. Arthur Hertzberg, the group's president, sought to sever support for the Jewish state from support of its government, especially when it came to settlements in the Israel-administered territories. Joachim Prinz, a former president and staunch Begin foe, prophesied that the community's obsession with Israel would damage its own spiritual well-being. Henry Siegman, the agency's executive director during the crucial period 1978–1994, went on to become one of Israel's harshest critics.
Always junior to the Anti-Defamation League and AJCommittee, the AJCongress survived on communal money, its own fundraising, and the "memberships" of tourists visiting Israel through its travel service. In its heyday, it boasted 300 chapters and published a fortnightly newsletter and the quarterly Judaism. But by the 1990s the agency was moribund. Both its leaders and its base had moved on, as new organizations on either end of the political spectrum—and, in the liberal center, its old nemesis the AJCommittee—were rendering it redundant or irrelevant.
All the more reason, then, to recall the once-revolutionary contributions made by this organization in behalf of Zionism, a more representative Jewish leadership, and the willingness forthrightly to pursue Jewish interests in the public square.
-- July 2010
The AJCongress was established in 1918, largely by "downtown" East European Jews out to challenge "uptown" German Reform Jews and their flagship agency, the American Jewish Committee, founded twelve years earlier. The downtowners, no underachievers themselves, were irked by the AJCommittee's elitism and its antipathy toward Zionism. The idea for a more representative umbrella group, which began to germinate as early as 1915, gained momentum in response to the AJCommittee's unenthusiastic reaction to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
After World War I, the new "congress" lobbied the Versailles conference on behalf of Europe's remaining Jewish communities. While some uptowners, led by Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, were urging President Woodrow Wilson not to support the Balfour Declaration, the downtowners pressured from the opposite direction.
The congress was supposed to disband after Versailles, but in 1928 an ad-hoc coalition of Orthodox, Zionist, and fraternal groups reassembled under Stephen Wise and ultimately reconstituted themselves as an independent membership organization. Unlike the AJCommittee, which worked behind the scenes, the new AJCongress engaged in direct action. In the 1930s it organized boycotts of goods from Nazi Germany. In 1942, convinced that reports of Hitler's genocide were true, it held a mass rally at New York's Madison Square Garden—although Wise also acquiesced in FDR's ruling that the rescue of European Jewry would have to wait until the fighting ended.
In the postwar era, the AJCongress co-founded the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and established a niche for itself with its 1960s campaign against the Arab economic boycott of Israel. But its main passions centered on domestic American affairs, where, faithful to the left-liberal agenda, it positioned itself as the Jewish community's progressive lawyer: challenging restrictive clubs, litigating for the rigid separation of church and state, backing special legal dispensations for American blacks, and opposing the Vietnam war.
In the late 60s and 70s the AJCongress came under sharp criticism for its conspicuous failure to speak out against roiling black anti-Semitism and for its opposition to Jewish parochial schools. In response, AJCongress leaders claimed that some Jews preferred day-school education for their children "not because they loved God but because they were afraid of the Negro." In time they would re-think such reckless aspersions, somewhat modifying the agency's position in the process.
By now, in any case, much of the Jewish communal agenda had become dominated by Israel. Like other liberal establishment figures, AJCongress leaders were aghast and befuddled at the 1977 election of Menachem Begin as Israel's prime minister. Arthur Hertzberg, the group's president, sought to sever support for the Jewish state from support of its government, especially when it came to settlements in the Israel-administered territories. Joachim Prinz, a former president and staunch Begin foe, prophesied that the community's obsession with Israel would damage its own spiritual well-being. Henry Siegman, the agency's executive director during the crucial period 1978–1994, went on to become one of Israel's harshest critics.
Always junior to the Anti-Defamation League and AJCommittee, the AJCongress survived on communal money, its own fundraising, and the "memberships" of tourists visiting Israel through its travel service. In its heyday, it boasted 300 chapters and published a fortnightly newsletter and the quarterly Judaism. But by the 1990s the agency was moribund. Both its leaders and its base had moved on, as new organizations on either end of the political spectrum—and, in the liberal center, its old nemesis the AJCommittee—were rendering it redundant or irrelevant.
All the more reason, then, to recall the once-revolutionary contributions made by this organization in behalf of Zionism, a more representative Jewish leadership, and the willingness forthrightly to pursue Jewish interests in the public square.
-- July 2010
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.
Understanding AIPAC
Against a background of sharp disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem, the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee winds down today.
On Monday, the 7,500 delegates—Jews, Christians, African Americans, as well as European and Canadian activists—heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare that the United States would tell Israel the "truth" when "difficult but necessary choices" had to be made. Today, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama. Delegates from all 50 states planned to spend Tuesday on Capitol Hill speaking with their respective Senators and Members of Congress.
But what is AIPAC, and what does it mean to be pro-Israel at a time when many American Jews are said to be discomfited by actions of the Israeli government and tensions with Washington?
Its name notwithstanding, AIPAC is not a political-action committee created to give money to friendly politicians. Nor is it a foreign lobby. Founded in the 1950's, AIPAC aimed at becoming America's premier, bipartisan, homegrown pro-Israel pressure group. The group's incumbent president is usually a communal leader, Republican or Democrat, with strong ties to the administration then in power. Its current head, Lee Rosenberg from Illinois, was among Obama's staunchest Jewish supporters during the 2008 campaign.
But AIPAC has also become a lightning rod for the animus of those who essentially oppose all Israeli security policies while insisting they favor the country's "right to exist." In The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (1987), the journalist Edward Tivnan charged AIPAC with unprecedented influence over Congress. In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), the "realist" academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt updated and amplified Tivnan's critique, positing that an all-powerful lobby was "silencing any debate at all" on the Middle East, rendering impossible the proper pursuit of American interests, and, through its blind support of Israel's West Bank policies, helping to foment anti-American terrorism.
In reality, AIPAC's leadership includes both supporters and opponents of Israel's West Bank policies. What the organization embraces is a pro-Israel model that leaves to Israelis themselves decisions of existential consequence, reached through the consensus of the country's body politic. AIPAC thus emphatically favors a two-state solution; insists on direct talks between Arabs and Israelis; holds the Palestinians to be the recalcitrant party; and robustly rejects any outside imposition of a "solution."
Is this any different from the model embraced by the overwhelming majority of the American people, and confirmed in survey after survey of national opinion?
-- March 2010
On Monday, the 7,500 delegates—Jews, Christians, African Americans, as well as European and Canadian activists—heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare that the United States would tell Israel the "truth" when "difficult but necessary choices" had to be made. Today, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama. Delegates from all 50 states planned to spend Tuesday on Capitol Hill speaking with their respective Senators and Members of Congress.
But what is AIPAC, and what does it mean to be pro-Israel at a time when many American Jews are said to be discomfited by actions of the Israeli government and tensions with Washington?
Its name notwithstanding, AIPAC is not a political-action committee created to give money to friendly politicians. Nor is it a foreign lobby. Founded in the 1950's, AIPAC aimed at becoming America's premier, bipartisan, homegrown pro-Israel pressure group. The group's incumbent president is usually a communal leader, Republican or Democrat, with strong ties to the administration then in power. Its current head, Lee Rosenberg from Illinois, was among Obama's staunchest Jewish supporters during the 2008 campaign.
But AIPAC has also become a lightning rod for the animus of those who essentially oppose all Israeli security policies while insisting they favor the country's "right to exist." In The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (1987), the journalist Edward Tivnan charged AIPAC with unprecedented influence over Congress. In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), the "realist" academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt updated and amplified Tivnan's critique, positing that an all-powerful lobby was "silencing any debate at all" on the Middle East, rendering impossible the proper pursuit of American interests, and, through its blind support of Israel's West Bank policies, helping to foment anti-American terrorism.
In reality, AIPAC's leadership includes both supporters and opponents of Israel's West Bank policies. What the organization embraces is a pro-Israel model that leaves to Israelis themselves decisions of existential consequence, reached through the consensus of the country's body politic. AIPAC thus emphatically favors a two-state solution; insists on direct talks between Arabs and Israelis; holds the Palestinians to be the recalcitrant party; and robustly rejects any outside imposition of a "solution."
Is this any different from the model embraced by the overwhelming majority of the American people, and confirmed in survey after survey of national opinion?
-- March 2010
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.
Russia & Israel
Nineteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist empire, Russia has reconstituted its role as a significant player in the Middle East and Islamic world. What does it want? Mainly, influence, stability, and the opportunity to make a great deal of money selling weapons. While not driven by ideology, as in the cold war, these goals are mostly out of sync with Israel's.
Cases in point: Moscow has announced that the nuclear-power plant it has been intermittently constructing and fueling outside the city of Bushehr in Iran will go into operation by the end of the summer. After a meeting in Damascus between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Syrian President Bashar Assad, it emerged that Russia would sign a major arms deal (apparently underwritten by Iran) to supply Syria with MIG-29 fighter planes and cruise missiles. Disregarding the stated policy of the "Quartet on the Middle East," of which his country is a member, Medvedev also conferred with Hamas head Khaled Mashaal. During a subsequent meeting in Ankara with President Tayyip Erdogan, he said that no party—meaning Hamas—should be excluded from the diplomatic process.
On the other side of the ledger, relations between Jerusalem and Moscow may be better today than at any time since the late 1940s. As distinct from the cold-war era, Israeli leaders nowadays deal directly with the Kremlin. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a hushed visit last year to Moscow to talk about Iran. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has hoped to nudge the two countries closer by emphasizing cultural affinities, symbolized by the presence in Israel of a million Russian-speaking immigrants. While asserting that he would never weaken Israel's bonds with Washington to curry favor in Moscow, Lieberman has also said that in today's multipolar world, Jerusalem needs to cultivate relations with other powers. President Shimon Peres, in Moscow to help mark the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, presumably reiterated what Israel hopes to get from Russia: a limit on the kinds of weapons it sells in the region; help, rather than hindrance, in the effort to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb; pressure on Syria to adhere to its contractual obligations not to transfer Russian-manufactured weapons to Hizballah.
Where to draw the balance?
There has been some collaboration between Russia and Israel's armaments industry, but Jerusalem's commitments to Washington greatly constrain any enlargement of such ventures. Although Russia shares with Israel an interest in combating Islamic terrorism, it insists that the Islamic uprisings in the Caucasus are a criminal matter and emphatically rejects any connection between them and the larger confrontation between jihadist Islam and the West. It may even be that Moscow's fairly consistent diplomatic support of Iran's mullahs (despite the occasional spat) is a quid pro quo for their refraining from fomenting Islamist terror within Russia's borders.
And this is not to mention other factors, including Moscow's renewed rivalry with the U.S.; the persistence of its traditionally autocratic form of government; its long history of antipathy to Jews; and the plethora of economic incentives awaiting it in the Muslim and Arab worlds. In short, warmer as Russia-Israel relations have become in some respects, there is a sharp limit to how good they can get.
-- June 2010
Cases in point: Moscow has announced that the nuclear-power plant it has been intermittently constructing and fueling outside the city of Bushehr in Iran will go into operation by the end of the summer. After a meeting in Damascus between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Syrian President Bashar Assad, it emerged that Russia would sign a major arms deal (apparently underwritten by Iran) to supply Syria with MIG-29 fighter planes and cruise missiles. Disregarding the stated policy of the "Quartet on the Middle East," of which his country is a member, Medvedev also conferred with Hamas head Khaled Mashaal. During a subsequent meeting in Ankara with President Tayyip Erdogan, he said that no party—meaning Hamas—should be excluded from the diplomatic process.
On the other side of the ledger, relations between Jerusalem and Moscow may be better today than at any time since the late 1940s. As distinct from the cold-war era, Israeli leaders nowadays deal directly with the Kremlin. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a hushed visit last year to Moscow to talk about Iran. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has hoped to nudge the two countries closer by emphasizing cultural affinities, symbolized by the presence in Israel of a million Russian-speaking immigrants. While asserting that he would never weaken Israel's bonds with Washington to curry favor in Moscow, Lieberman has also said that in today's multipolar world, Jerusalem needs to cultivate relations with other powers. President Shimon Peres, in Moscow to help mark the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, presumably reiterated what Israel hopes to get from Russia: a limit on the kinds of weapons it sells in the region; help, rather than hindrance, in the effort to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb; pressure on Syria to adhere to its contractual obligations not to transfer Russian-manufactured weapons to Hizballah.
Where to draw the balance?
There has been some collaboration between Russia and Israel's armaments industry, but Jerusalem's commitments to Washington greatly constrain any enlargement of such ventures. Although Russia shares with Israel an interest in combating Islamic terrorism, it insists that the Islamic uprisings in the Caucasus are a criminal matter and emphatically rejects any connection between them and the larger confrontation between jihadist Islam and the West. It may even be that Moscow's fairly consistent diplomatic support of Iran's mullahs (despite the occasional spat) is a quid pro quo for their refraining from fomenting Islamist terror within Russia's borders.
And this is not to mention other factors, including Moscow's renewed rivalry with the U.S.; the persistence of its traditionally autocratic form of government; its long history of antipathy to Jews; and the plethora of economic incentives awaiting it in the Muslim and Arab worlds. In short, warmer as Russia-Israel relations have become in some respects, there is a sharp limit to how good they can get.
-- June 2010
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.
Meeting Irving Finkel
On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds
A British Museum scholar offers a Darwinian explanation for Judaism's survival.
On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.
Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.
Finkel outlined his thesis in a late-February talk at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem entitled "New Light on the Babylonian Exile." He is in the midst of writing a book on the subject, and an American literary agent stands ready to help place it.
Barefoot, with his flowing white beard and long white hair offset by a tee-shirt and black jeans—which is how I found him when we sat down for this interview—Finkel looks more like an ancient Hebrew prophet than a buttoned-down London librarian.
Your job has an interesting designation.
Yes, people think an Assistant Keeper must work for the zoo. It's actually a 19th-century title.
What languages do you work in?
I read the ancient languages of Iraq: Sumerian and Babylonian in cuneiform script. They are written on clay tablets that were uncovered in British Museum excavations in the 1800's. We have roughly 130,000 fragments, some as small as your miniature tape recorder. The clay came from the river banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. They were perfect for making clear inscriptions. Miraculously, they survive in the ground unless deliberately destroyed.
What we have in our collection is a potpourri of fascinating material like the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as what amount to grocery lists.
How did you get interested in cuneiform?
Well, I always wanted to work at the British Museum and to study a difficult language. My plan was to study Egyptian hieroglyphics at the University of Birmingham, but the professor upped and died after just a day of classes. It was suggested that I switch tracks.
Just how many scholars alive today can do what you do?
All the people who can read cuneiform can fit into this living room.
When was cuneiform used?
Between 3200 B.C.E and the 2nd century C.E. In the meantime, the Semitic alphabet came into being in Canaan around 1000 B.C.E., and for a millennium the two forms existed side by side.
Only a handful of people, people in power, could read or write in cuneiform, while the Semitic alphabet was easier to learn and could be written in ink on leather and wood.
There is a misconception that cuneiform—and hieroglyphics—are primitive forms of communications. In fact, they preserve sophisticated languages capable of complex ideas, imagery, and even irony.
Have you ever visited Iraq?
I'm afraid that "Finkel" is too Jewish a name. Under Saddam Hussein and even before, visitors had to prove they were not Jewish in order to visit.
When were the ancient Judeans in Babylon?
It started during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar in the early-6th century B.C.E. To hear the Bible tell it, everything regarding Nebuchadnezzar centered on the Jews. But from Nebuchadnezzar's vantage point, Judea was a minor though bothersome state strategically placed between Mesopotamia and Egypt. In 597 B.C.E, well before the Temple's destruction, he looted gold from the Temple and took King Jehoiakin captive to Babylon.
And when the Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. and the city razed and the people sent to Babylon, what made their exile so different from the expulsion of the Northern Kingdom's population by the Assyrians a century and a half earlier?
The Assyrians deported the Israelites en masse, and the tribes then disappeared from history. But Nebuchadnezzar took mainly the intelligentsia, with the intention of acculturating them—of getting them to be "Babylonianized"—so that, once reeducated, they might be reinstated back home. All this is detailed in the first chapter of the Book of Daniel.
How did that go?
I've tried to visualize what happened with these displaced Judeans. Some were, let's say, ultra-Orthodox, fiercely loyal to tradition; some were proto-Zionists who starting in 538 would return to Israel under the decree of Cyrus. There were also those who became so acculturated that they would stick around forever, all the way until the rise of the modern Ba'ath party. And there were those who would marry out and disappear.
You might be describing New York or London.
That's right. I start with the idea that, fundamentally, people are no different today from what they were in ancient times. The human mind is the same, and so is the range of human intelligence and behavior.
My own approach is not to adumbrate the study of ancient religion in a way that makes it seem irretrievable and remote, but to think of it as the same as contemporary religions but with some differences. Humanity is unchanging.
Where does that lead you with regard to Jewish life?
The Judeans had been ripped out of their surroundings and dumped in a huge, complex, bewildering urban capital: the greatest city in the Near East. This people, the Judeans, were at a point of transition. They had a unique monotheistic tradition in which nobody could see God. All the other ancient gods could be seen; once an effigy was created, the god came to inhabit the space created for him. By contrast, not only was the God of the displaced Judeans invisible, He was unforgiving and He was interested only in men.
That last bit helps explain the pattern of wobbly monotheism reflected in the biblical narrative. Women were not served functionally by the austere male deity, and were therefore attracted to house gods. I believe the whole trouble confronted by the biblical prophets had to do with women—for instance, Jezebel's bringing in the cult of Baal. The sense we get from the prophets is of sexual betrayal, the betrayed party being God.
The exile challenged the Judeans to refine their ideas about their single God. Thinking of God as an elusive abstraction did not serve to maintain cohesion. To complicate matters further, there were local theologians in Babylon who were also arguing for one god: their patron deity was Marduk, and they held that all the other gods were but manifestations of his powers. We have cuneiform records encapsulating this dispute among Babylonian theologians.
As a single god, Marduk contributed to the insecurity of Jewish belief. The great fear was that the Judean flock would succumb to idol worship or to marrying out, or both. If that happened, the population would disappear just like the Northern Israelites in Assyria. This threat engendered the need for the biblical text to be finished, in order to solidify the Judeans' belief in their superior understanding of monotheism. What was needed was a theology.
So the "Jews" did something to prevent a replay of the Assyrian outcome. What they did was to produce the Bible, a work that practically screams out that it was written by humans.
Remember, the Judeans arrived already literate. They had with them the chronicles of their kings; trunk-loads of scrolls. They wove these into a narrative, while the missing bits—meaning, from the start of humanity until the point where their historical records began—they took from the local tradition and bent to fit ethical Jewish ideas.
You're referring to parallels between the Bible's flood story and the Epic of Gilgamesh?
No, not parallels. The flood story in Genesis basically overlaps with the Babylonian story. The two are interdependent, cut from the same cloth. What I mean is that the Judean intelligentsia knew Babylon's folk tales, but gave them a Jewish twist. The same holds for the similarity between the baby-in-the-bulrushes story of Moses and the story of the Assyrian king Sargon, whose mother also placed him in a reed basket.
And the rest of the Judean sources?
The whole narrative of scripture was simple and lucid: begat, begat, begat. It's like a phone book. The idea was to connect your beautiful and eligible daughter to a genealogy intended to maintain cohesion and identity.
Nothing was composed in Babylonia; they already had the foundation. But existing scripture was crafted to demonstrate that God is present. He moves the chess pieces. You get a canonization of religious identity. Monotheism is streamlined.
So Judaism as we know it was born in Babylon as a direct consequence of the exile. This experience created the Jewish people, and eventually also set the pattern for Christianity and Islam.
You are describing the evolutionary development of Jewish civilization.
What I am offering is a form of Darwinism that transforms disparate phenomena into a continuum. I am saying that the exile was responsible for Judaism. That the Judeans behaved in the way we would have expected them to behave, based on what we know about how Jews in New York or London behaved upon their arrival millennia later.
Even the intellectual approach of the Talmud is a product of the larger Babylonian culture, reflecting three generations of learning during the period of exile. The rabbinic method of taking innocuous sentences and getting them to demonstrate just about anything reflects a specific heritage of learning. We find similar intellectual exercises in Babylonian cuneiform that illuminate otherwise obscure statements. There are linguistic similarities; there is the idea of the alphabet having numerical value (gematria); there is the idea that statements can have double meanings, leading to a particular form of textual analysis. In cuneiform, each syllable has multiple meanings, so there has to be a mechanism for explanation. Thus the Judean scholars molded Babylonian concepts to the needs of their own tradition.
How do your ideas fit with those of other scholars on this period?
Frankly, I have distilled my thesis simply on the strength of my own knowledge of the Bible coupled with a lifetime acquaintance with the cuneiform sources that are relevant to the whole issue. In writing my book, I have decided simply to present my argument as a logical and lucid explanation that accommodates the diverse issues that make up the whole problem. Consequently I have turned my back on the mountains of existing writing and theorizing on different aspects of the phenomenon. As far as I know, no one has proposed this larger idea before, and I have no interest in defending it or contrasting it with other schools of thought or argument; to me it is simply correct.
-- Feb 2010
A British Museum scholar offers a Darwinian explanation for Judaism's survival.
On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.
Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.
Finkel outlined his thesis in a late-February talk at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem entitled "New Light on the Babylonian Exile." He is in the midst of writing a book on the subject, and an American literary agent stands ready to help place it.
Barefoot, with his flowing white beard and long white hair offset by a tee-shirt and black jeans—which is how I found him when we sat down for this interview—Finkel looks more like an ancient Hebrew prophet than a buttoned-down London librarian.
Your job has an interesting designation.
Yes, people think an Assistant Keeper must work for the zoo. It's actually a 19th-century title.
What languages do you work in?
I read the ancient languages of Iraq: Sumerian and Babylonian in cuneiform script. They are written on clay tablets that were uncovered in British Museum excavations in the 1800's. We have roughly 130,000 fragments, some as small as your miniature tape recorder. The clay came from the river banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. They were perfect for making clear inscriptions. Miraculously, they survive in the ground unless deliberately destroyed.
What we have in our collection is a potpourri of fascinating material like the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as what amount to grocery lists.
How did you get interested in cuneiform?
Well, I always wanted to work at the British Museum and to study a difficult language. My plan was to study Egyptian hieroglyphics at the University of Birmingham, but the professor upped and died after just a day of classes. It was suggested that I switch tracks.
Just how many scholars alive today can do what you do?
All the people who can read cuneiform can fit into this living room.
When was cuneiform used?
Between 3200 B.C.E and the 2nd century C.E. In the meantime, the Semitic alphabet came into being in Canaan around 1000 B.C.E., and for a millennium the two forms existed side by side.
Only a handful of people, people in power, could read or write in cuneiform, while the Semitic alphabet was easier to learn and could be written in ink on leather and wood.
There is a misconception that cuneiform—and hieroglyphics—are primitive forms of communications. In fact, they preserve sophisticated languages capable of complex ideas, imagery, and even irony.
Have you ever visited Iraq?
I'm afraid that "Finkel" is too Jewish a name. Under Saddam Hussein and even before, visitors had to prove they were not Jewish in order to visit.
When were the ancient Judeans in Babylon?
It started during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar in the early-6th century B.C.E. To hear the Bible tell it, everything regarding Nebuchadnezzar centered on the Jews. But from Nebuchadnezzar's vantage point, Judea was a minor though bothersome state strategically placed between Mesopotamia and Egypt. In 597 B.C.E, well before the Temple's destruction, he looted gold from the Temple and took King Jehoiakin captive to Babylon.
And when the Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. and the city razed and the people sent to Babylon, what made their exile so different from the expulsion of the Northern Kingdom's population by the Assyrians a century and a half earlier?
The Assyrians deported the Israelites en masse, and the tribes then disappeared from history. But Nebuchadnezzar took mainly the intelligentsia, with the intention of acculturating them—of getting them to be "Babylonianized"—so that, once reeducated, they might be reinstated back home. All this is detailed in the first chapter of the Book of Daniel.
How did that go?
I've tried to visualize what happened with these displaced Judeans. Some were, let's say, ultra-Orthodox, fiercely loyal to tradition; some were proto-Zionists who starting in 538 would return to Israel under the decree of Cyrus. There were also those who became so acculturated that they would stick around forever, all the way until the rise of the modern Ba'ath party. And there were those who would marry out and disappear.
You might be describing New York or London.
That's right. I start with the idea that, fundamentally, people are no different today from what they were in ancient times. The human mind is the same, and so is the range of human intelligence and behavior.
My own approach is not to adumbrate the study of ancient religion in a way that makes it seem irretrievable and remote, but to think of it as the same as contemporary religions but with some differences. Humanity is unchanging.
Where does that lead you with regard to Jewish life?
The Judeans had been ripped out of their surroundings and dumped in a huge, complex, bewildering urban capital: the greatest city in the Near East. This people, the Judeans, were at a point of transition. They had a unique monotheistic tradition in which nobody could see God. All the other ancient gods could be seen; once an effigy was created, the god came to inhabit the space created for him. By contrast, not only was the God of the displaced Judeans invisible, He was unforgiving and He was interested only in men.
That last bit helps explain the pattern of wobbly monotheism reflected in the biblical narrative. Women were not served functionally by the austere male deity, and were therefore attracted to house gods. I believe the whole trouble confronted by the biblical prophets had to do with women—for instance, Jezebel's bringing in the cult of Baal. The sense we get from the prophets is of sexual betrayal, the betrayed party being God.
The exile challenged the Judeans to refine their ideas about their single God. Thinking of God as an elusive abstraction did not serve to maintain cohesion. To complicate matters further, there were local theologians in Babylon who were also arguing for one god: their patron deity was Marduk, and they held that all the other gods were but manifestations of his powers. We have cuneiform records encapsulating this dispute among Babylonian theologians.
As a single god, Marduk contributed to the insecurity of Jewish belief. The great fear was that the Judean flock would succumb to idol worship or to marrying out, or both. If that happened, the population would disappear just like the Northern Israelites in Assyria. This threat engendered the need for the biblical text to be finished, in order to solidify the Judeans' belief in their superior understanding of monotheism. What was needed was a theology.
So the "Jews" did something to prevent a replay of the Assyrian outcome. What they did was to produce the Bible, a work that practically screams out that it was written by humans.
Remember, the Judeans arrived already literate. They had with them the chronicles of their kings; trunk-loads of scrolls. They wove these into a narrative, while the missing bits—meaning, from the start of humanity until the point where their historical records began—they took from the local tradition and bent to fit ethical Jewish ideas.
You're referring to parallels between the Bible's flood story and the Epic of Gilgamesh?
No, not parallels. The flood story in Genesis basically overlaps with the Babylonian story. The two are interdependent, cut from the same cloth. What I mean is that the Judean intelligentsia knew Babylon's folk tales, but gave them a Jewish twist. The same holds for the similarity between the baby-in-the-bulrushes story of Moses and the story of the Assyrian king Sargon, whose mother also placed him in a reed basket.
And the rest of the Judean sources?
The whole narrative of scripture was simple and lucid: begat, begat, begat. It's like a phone book. The idea was to connect your beautiful and eligible daughter to a genealogy intended to maintain cohesion and identity.
Nothing was composed in Babylonia; they already had the foundation. But existing scripture was crafted to demonstrate that God is present. He moves the chess pieces. You get a canonization of religious identity. Monotheism is streamlined.
So Judaism as we know it was born in Babylon as a direct consequence of the exile. This experience created the Jewish people, and eventually also set the pattern for Christianity and Islam.
You are describing the evolutionary development of Jewish civilization.
What I am offering is a form of Darwinism that transforms disparate phenomena into a continuum. I am saying that the exile was responsible for Judaism. That the Judeans behaved in the way we would have expected them to behave, based on what we know about how Jews in New York or London behaved upon their arrival millennia later.
Even the intellectual approach of the Talmud is a product of the larger Babylonian culture, reflecting three generations of learning during the period of exile. The rabbinic method of taking innocuous sentences and getting them to demonstrate just about anything reflects a specific heritage of learning. We find similar intellectual exercises in Babylonian cuneiform that illuminate otherwise obscure statements. There are linguistic similarities; there is the idea of the alphabet having numerical value (gematria); there is the idea that statements can have double meanings, leading to a particular form of textual analysis. In cuneiform, each syllable has multiple meanings, so there has to be a mechanism for explanation. Thus the Judean scholars molded Babylonian concepts to the needs of their own tradition.
How do your ideas fit with those of other scholars on this period?
Frankly, I have distilled my thesis simply on the strength of my own knowledge of the Bible coupled with a lifetime acquaintance with the cuneiform sources that are relevant to the whole issue. In writing my book, I have decided simply to present my argument as a logical and lucid explanation that accommodates the diverse issues that make up the whole problem. Consequently I have turned my back on the mountains of existing writing and theorizing on different aspects of the phenomenon. As far as I know, no one has proposed this larger idea before, and I have no interest in defending it or contrasting it with other schools of thought or argument; to me it is simply correct.
-- Feb 2010
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.
Zionism Derangement Syndrome
A smoldering resentment, bordering on political paranoia, is palpable in sectors of Israel's Left these days. Everywhere, it seems, powerful enemies are conspiring to undermine the centers of cultural influence that leftists have long regarded as their own property, and as beyond criticism. Their response bears a resemblance to the left-wing American affliction that the columnist Charles Krauthammer memorably labeled "Bush Derangement Syndrome."
One recent challenge to Left hegemony is a proposed law now winding its way through the Knesset's legislative process. The bill, prompted in part by an independent report on certain Israeli pressure groups, including Peace Now and B'Tselem, would require political-advocacy organizations to reveal how much money they receive from foreign powers. On the face of it, this seems unexceptionable enough: in the U.S., the Foreign Agents Registration Act has long stipulated that persons paid to act in a political capacity by a foreign principal must declare their relationship; the proposed Israeli law, by contrast, would merely require the reporting of donations from foreign states and state-funded foundations.
Another challenge comes from a new grass-roots student effort called Im Tirtzu. The organization, which insists its political platform is centrist, has declared its intention of urging Diaspora Jewish donors to reconsider their support of Israeli universities whose humanities and social-science departments are bastions of anti-Zionist teachings and whose tenured faculty work to propel the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. The group will also urge students to avoid academic departments that silence or intimidate those voicing Zionist convictions.
Finally, a meticulously documented and scathing 141-page report, "Post-Zionism in Academia," released by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a conservative think tank, has found that nearly all social-science and humanities departments at Israeli universities are dominated by faculty advocating radical positions anathema to the country's mainstream. The situation is said to be particularly egregious at Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities, where, according to the report, most curricular readings in sociology are "post-Zionist"—really anti-Zionist—in orientation.
To each of these initiatives, the Left's panicked response has been not to question or rebut facts and arguments but to cry outrage and to accuse the critics of engaging in attempted censorship and intimidation—in, to use the much-favored scare word, "McCarthyism." Thus, the New Israel Fund, borrowing in its own way from the late Wisconsin demagogue's playbook, has denounced Im Tirtzu as "ultra-nationalist" and "extremist"—and, in a final sign of the student organization's turpitude, as a recipient of money from evangelical Christians. The president of Ben-Gurion University has branded Im Tirtzu for engaging in a "witch hunt"; Haifa University's president has protested that it is the one politicizing academia; and Yossi Sarid, former chair of the Meretz party, has lambasted the group as a "gang of hoodlums." Says the president of Tel Aviv University, dismissively, "It's impossible to divide the world into Zionists and anti-Zionists."
The president might have been channeling the editors of Haaretz, the influential newspaper that has devoted the fullest coverage and highest dudgeon to the unfolding events. There is indeed a genuinely Zionist Left in Israel, though its strength is waning, but the paper's editors have veered unpredictably between supporting this tendency and voicing an empathically anti-Zionist line—thereby contributing to the definitional muddle seemingly endorsed by the president of Tel Aviv University. In its own heated blast at Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies, Haaretz referred to their principals as "political commissars," to their work as "shameful," and to their aims as "spreading fear . . . and undermining freedom of expression." As for respecting the views of Israel's mainstream public, the paper wrinkled up its editorial nose at so patently "illegitimate [an] ethnocratic distinction."
What next? As the rather unhinged nature of these reactions suggest, Israel's Left is beginning to fear that its uncontested hold over major centers of the country's elite culture may be as vulnerable as its hold over political power has proved to be. One thing to watch will be the behavior of the remaining Zionists on the Left, and in particular whether, like Haaretz, they will wish to continue providing intellectual cover for a cadre of overtly anti-Zionist radicals. Another is the behavior of Diaspora donors, and in particular how much they really care that Israeli universities have been nurturing a political culture inhospitable to the Zionist enterprise.
As for those now challenging the Left's hegemony in academia and elsewhere, their own challenge will be how best to resurrect the Zionist ethos whose destruction they have accurately diagnosed and faithfully reported.
One recent challenge to Left hegemony is a proposed law now winding its way through the Knesset's legislative process. The bill, prompted in part by an independent report on certain Israeli pressure groups, including Peace Now and B'Tselem, would require political-advocacy organizations to reveal how much money they receive from foreign powers. On the face of it, this seems unexceptionable enough: in the U.S., the Foreign Agents Registration Act has long stipulated that persons paid to act in a political capacity by a foreign principal must declare their relationship; the proposed Israeli law, by contrast, would merely require the reporting of donations from foreign states and state-funded foundations.
Another challenge comes from a new grass-roots student effort called Im Tirtzu. The organization, which insists its political platform is centrist, has declared its intention of urging Diaspora Jewish donors to reconsider their support of Israeli universities whose humanities and social-science departments are bastions of anti-Zionist teachings and whose tenured faculty work to propel the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. The group will also urge students to avoid academic departments that silence or intimidate those voicing Zionist convictions.
Finally, a meticulously documented and scathing 141-page report, "Post-Zionism in Academia," released by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a conservative think tank, has found that nearly all social-science and humanities departments at Israeli universities are dominated by faculty advocating radical positions anathema to the country's mainstream. The situation is said to be particularly egregious at Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities, where, according to the report, most curricular readings in sociology are "post-Zionist"—really anti-Zionist—in orientation.
To each of these initiatives, the Left's panicked response has been not to question or rebut facts and arguments but to cry outrage and to accuse the critics of engaging in attempted censorship and intimidation—in, to use the much-favored scare word, "McCarthyism." Thus, the New Israel Fund, borrowing in its own way from the late Wisconsin demagogue's playbook, has denounced Im Tirtzu as "ultra-nationalist" and "extremist"—and, in a final sign of the student organization's turpitude, as a recipient of money from evangelical Christians. The president of Ben-Gurion University has branded Im Tirtzu for engaging in a "witch hunt"; Haifa University's president has protested that it is the one politicizing academia; and Yossi Sarid, former chair of the Meretz party, has lambasted the group as a "gang of hoodlums." Says the president of Tel Aviv University, dismissively, "It's impossible to divide the world into Zionists and anti-Zionists."
The president might have been channeling the editors of Haaretz, the influential newspaper that has devoted the fullest coverage and highest dudgeon to the unfolding events. There is indeed a genuinely Zionist Left in Israel, though its strength is waning, but the paper's editors have veered unpredictably between supporting this tendency and voicing an empathically anti-Zionist line—thereby contributing to the definitional muddle seemingly endorsed by the president of Tel Aviv University. In its own heated blast at Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies, Haaretz referred to their principals as "political commissars," to their work as "shameful," and to their aims as "spreading fear . . . and undermining freedom of expression." As for respecting the views of Israel's mainstream public, the paper wrinkled up its editorial nose at so patently "illegitimate [an] ethnocratic distinction."
What next? As the rather unhinged nature of these reactions suggest, Israel's Left is beginning to fear that its uncontested hold over major centers of the country's elite culture may be as vulnerable as its hold over political power has proved to be. One thing to watch will be the behavior of the remaining Zionists on the Left, and in particular whether, like Haaretz, they will wish to continue providing intellectual cover for a cadre of overtly anti-Zionist radicals. Another is the behavior of Diaspora donors, and in particular how much they really care that Israeli universities have been nurturing a political culture inhospitable to the Zionist enterprise.
As for those now challenging the Left's hegemony in academia and elsewhere, their own challenge will be how best to resurrect the Zionist ethos whose destruction they have accurately diagnosed and faithfully reported.
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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