As Arabs from the Mashriq to the Maghreb – one end of the Arab world to the other – contemplate where the six month-long upheavals that began with the Arab Spring are fated to deliver them those with longer memories may recall the dramatic summer 50 years ago when an earlier experiment at reshaping the political contours of Arab governance came unraveled: The 1961 breakup of the United Arab Republic (UAR) as the union of Syria and Egypt was known.
Declared in February 1958, the unification came in response to Syrian lobbying of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser for a fusion and was popularly backed in both countries. The ideal of pan- Arab unity was all the rage and the hope was that other states beginning with Iraq would join.
Pan-Arabism was seen as a workaround for the lack of legitimacy that affected most Arab leaders as well as the political systems they oversaw. But Nasser, by dint of his personality and charisma, had enjoyed an almost mystical sense of God-given grace which Muslims term Baraka. However, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Jordan perceived the pan-Arab model as a threat to their own religious-based claims for legitimacy; and even a new Iraqi government, purportedly favorable to pan-Arabism, found reasons not to join.
In short order, the experiment came undone. Nasser's idea of unity was for him to be the political and economic overlord of the UAR. Promises to protect private property fell by the wayside; as did pledges of bread and liberty. Syrian landowners resented Cairo's land reform policies; Syrian military officers bristled at taking orders from Egyptians; the business class took umbrage at nationalizations schemes, and the inherent inefficiencies of Nasser-style central economic planning soon became apparent.
The Syrian's broke away. Nasser prudently decided not to force the issue ("Arabs should not shed the blood of Arabs") and by August-September 1961 the union had been junked. A magnanimous Nasser allowed the Cairo-based Arab League to readmit Syria as an independent member. Still, the idea of Pan-Arabism survived for decades. In 1958, the monarchies of Jordan and Iraq attempted federation; later Egypt and Syria tried again, once with Libya and another time with Iraq; North Yemen twice sought to federate with Egypt (1958 and 1963); in 1961, Iraq sought to "merge" with Kuwait claiming the sheikdom as a province of its own; there was talk of merging Libya and Egypt (1973); Tunisia and Libya (1974) and a confederation of the West Bank and Jordan.
With neither Arab nationalism nor pan-Arabism having provided an authentic way forward, the quandary of political legitimacy remains unresolved. Some, including The Economist, are sanguine that the Arab Spring will ultimately deliver democratization and solve the problem. Yet for that to happen today's messy popular struggle for liberty will somehow need to be transformed into a concerted effort for genuine democratization in which regimes emerge that are capable of supporting modernity-embracing representative government and providing institutional protections for minority viewpoints.
But from the vantage point of 50 years since the breakdown of the UAR and its promise of legitimacy through pan-Arabism, the failure of Arab nationalist movements such as the Ba'ath in Syria and Iraq and now the ascendency of national-based Islamist parties (themselves fragmented over tactics and strategy) the prospect of democratization panning out seems improbable. Which raises the distinct possibility that the Arabs might entirely abandon the Western nation-state model as an artificial construct of colonial mapmakers unsuitable for Moslem civilization, opting instead for the pan-Islamist alternative.
Certainly, the state of the Arab state is hardly encouraging. Despite a brave front put up by the Arab League – inviting South Sudan to join after it broke away from Khartoum, for instance – Arab countries are foundering. To cite only the most obvious examples: Lebanon is a failed state under Hezbollah domination. In Libya and Yemen chaos has called attention to the intrinsic weakness of those states as viable political entities; the fragility of Bahrain has been exposed; in Egypt and Tunisia elections have had to be postponed out of sensible concerns that doing otherwise would result in a "democratic" victory for Islamist forces out to reshape the national character of those states; the Syrian regime may be in its death throes; Jordan's monarch is facing unprecedented challenges.
Obfuscating this reality, the Arab League has demanded the UN grant "Palestine" full membership even as the two contending Palestinian Arab regimes remain incapable of even the pretense of union.
If the nation-state paradigm in the Arab world is supplanted by the pan-Islamist alternative the challenge to the international order would be immense, as Charles T. Hill has pointed out in his recent monograph Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism. For Islamists reject the state system embodied in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which had resolved that religious differences ought no longer to justify international wars. They moreover reject the boundaries, responsibilities, indeed the very premises upon which international order is anchored.
If the thesis that the state model in the Arab world is today facing its most critical test, than Western policymakers can have no higher interest than to ensure that the Arab Spring does lead to democratic reformation, that the Arabs become convinced that the state is compatible with Islam, and that Islam join other religions in what Hill calls the "debate over how far religion should go beyond private practice to display itself in the public square."
Failure would have consequences for both the Arabs and Western civilization too devastating to contemplate.
###
Monday, July 18, 2011
The state of the Arab state - Legitimacy - The Arab Spring & the Lesson of the collapse of the UAR 50 Years Ago
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
WHAT'S HOLDING UP COMPLETION OF ISRAEL'S SECURITY BARRIER?
The Good Fence
Just about anything that makes Israel more secure is opposed by its enemies and their enablers, as well as by its fair-weather friends in the international arena and by dissident elements within the Jewish community. A case in point is Israel's West Bank security barrier.
Yet what is most striking is that nine years after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the construction of the life-saving fence, critical swaths of the proposed 760 kilometer barricade have yet to be completed.
Why? Because finishing the fence would force Israel's polity to make tough decisions that it would rather postpone about de facto boundaries; because details about its precise route, in a very few locations, are being challenged in the Israeli courts, but mostly because of habitual budgetary and bureaucratic foot-dragging.
Paradoxically, the success of the fence has removed much of the incentive – public pressure on politicians -- to complete it.
And yet gaps in the barrier made it easy for West Bank Palestinians to stab Christine Logan to death in the Jerusalem forest late last year and to wound two Israelis in a downtown Beersheba axe-wielding attack last month [June].
The original concept of a security fence had many boosters from former Knesset member Haim Ramon, and former national security adviser Uzi Dayan to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Reacting to Palestinian Arab violence in 1992, Rabin argued that a barrier running where it was most effective -- and not necessarily along the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines – needed to separate West Bank Palestinians from Israeli population centers. Later, Ehud Barak as premier also picked up the scheme.
But the real impetus came in the wake of the second intifada unleashed by Yasir Arafat in September 2000. Dozens of Palestinian suicide bombings claimed scores of Israeli lives. Between 2000 and 2005, the height of the Palestinians' blood-soaked frenzy, a staggering 26,000 terror attacks were launched against Israelis including 144 by suicide bombers; over 1,000 Israelis were murdered, 6,000 wounded. In one hideous June 2001 instance, a suicide bomber slaughtered 21 teenagers on a Friday night at the Dolphinarium dance club in Tel Aviv.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came under intense grass-roots pressure to finally build the fence that would protect Israelis from the Palestinian onslaught. But Sharon worried that not enough thought had been given to what putting up such a fortification might signal about Israel's ancestral and geo-strategic claims to the land on the other side. He wanted time to overcome Palestinian terror through conventional military means.
Ordinary Israelis, however, did not want to wait any longer. When local authorities began taking matters into their own hands by building makeshift fences Sharon reluctantly reversed himself. The barrier's first continuous segment, opposite the northern West Bank, was completed at the end of July 2003; residents of the capital could also see signs of a protective "envelope" rising around Jerusalem. Finally, in 2005 the cabinet formally approved the route of the barrier as proposed by Sharon. It was a pricy decision; approximately $2 million per kilometer, but with Israel's economy stagnating under merciless Palestinian battering there was little alternative.
The fence alone would not have defeated the intifada, though demoralized terror leaders admitted that it appreciably complicated their "resistance" efforts. By March 2002 Sharon had ordered Operation Defense Shield which reversed the IDF's withdrawal from much of the West Bank that had taken place under the 1993 Oslo Accords. This campaign and other security measures together with the barrier essentially defanged Palestinian offensive capabilities in the West Bank.
An unforeseen positive consequence of the security barrier -- actually a multifaceted defense system that in very few places is a concrete wall (along highways to protect against Palestinian snipers) and elsewhere is mostly a combination of trenches, metal fencing and electronic sensors -- has been that it has made it possible to dramatically reduce the number of IDF checkpoints within the West Bank to less than 50.
Clearly, as the Gaza barrier demonstrates, gunmen can lob rockets over or -- as in the Gilad Schalit case -- tunnel beneath any barrier. In 2003, two British nationals managed to legally exit Gaza to bomb "Mike's Place" in Tel Aviv; and in 2005 terrorists launched a deadly attack at the Karni Truck Crossing. But since the Gaza perimeter was secured in 1999 no terror attacks have emanated from the Strip.
The West Bank fence has already proven to be a life-saver. In 2010, there were "only" seven fatalities attributable to Palestinian terror emanating in the West Bank. Even the still-incomplete security fence has made harder for enemy operatives to deliver car bombs or suicide bombers into Israeli population centers.
No doubt because of this success, the fence has served as a lightning-rod for Israel's radical de-legitimizers who have nonsensically labeled is an "apartheid" wall. As part of their lawfare campaign against Israel, Palestinians turned to the International Court at The Hague which predictably ruled -- exactly four years ago this month [July] -- that the barrier was "illegal."
Characteristic of those who have coalesced around this issue is the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) which, in keeping with its nuanced stance on suicide bombing, helps organize "direct-action" -- a euphemism for weekly riots -- at the fence. ISM, which professes to be Palestinian-led, was founded by Brooklyn-born Adam Shapiro and his wife Huwaida Arraf (an American citizen).
In contrast, "pro-peace" J-Street takes a more disingenuous line holding that if a barrier is necessary it should be constructed on the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice Lines. In fact, over 80% of the route is within three miles of the Green Line. But given topography and demographics placing the barrier wholly on those lines – rather than where it can be most effective -- would be strategically self-defeating.
Israel's Supreme Court has upheld the legality of the barrier and where the fence veers east the court has at times ruled in favor of Palestinian claimants with regard to its precise route most notably in the Bil'in- Modi'in area.
The barrier was foisted on Israel by Palestinian aggression so its political implications cannot be entirely discounted. The current line demarcates the minimal depth necessary to separate as many Israeli civilians as possible from Palestinian attacks. Only some 8.5 percent of the barrier is situated east of the old porous armistice lines. Sharon had intended to retain geo-strategically vital territory – consensus settlement blocs -- on the Israeli side of the fence. And in Jerusalem the fence is being erected along the municipal boundaries so as not to divide the capital. That still leaves too many Israelis on the "wrong side" of the fence feeling isolated and worried that its placement is a precursor to the abandonment of Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria.
Whatever its location, the fence is a blight symbolizing a "victory" for Palestinian obduracy. But placing it ineffectually along the old seam line would only add insult to injury especially as even the comparatively moderate Palestinian Authority does accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Yet it is not foreign opposition but Israeli political lethargy that emphatically has been holding up completion of the barrier. Marc Luria, a founding member of Security Fence for Israel pointed out that Israel's Defense Ministry budget does not contain a line item for the barrier so funds are constantly redirected elsewhere. He argued that neglect of Israel's barrier along the Lebanese border emboldened Hezbollah to launch the attack that ignited the 2006 Second Lebanon War. In the south, Luria said, despite the deteriorating situation in Egypt, improved relations between Cairo and Hamas-controlled Gaza, the influx of thousands African asylum seekers into Israel, and notwithstanding the government's decision to construct a Negev-Sinai barrier – "Little has been done and progress is painfully slow."
So while the good news is that about 90 percent of the West Bank fence has been completed, without pressure from ordinary Israelis it will take another gory wave of Palestinian violence to prompt Israel's government to complete the crucial 10% gap (about 100 kilometers). Meanwhile, Israelis who live in Jerusalem, the Negev, Ariel, Gush Etzion and the Tzur Hadassah- Bet Shemesh corridor can only hope the Palestinian leadership decides not to launch a third intifada in the fall.
Good fences make good neighbors. Bad neighbors make good fences imperative.
Just about anything that makes Israel more secure is opposed by its enemies and their enablers, as well as by its fair-weather friends in the international arena and by dissident elements within the Jewish community. A case in point is Israel's West Bank security barrier.
Yet what is most striking is that nine years after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the construction of the life-saving fence, critical swaths of the proposed 760 kilometer barricade have yet to be completed.
Why? Because finishing the fence would force Israel's polity to make tough decisions that it would rather postpone about de facto boundaries; because details about its precise route, in a very few locations, are being challenged in the Israeli courts, but mostly because of habitual budgetary and bureaucratic foot-dragging.
Paradoxically, the success of the fence has removed much of the incentive – public pressure on politicians -- to complete it.
And yet gaps in the barrier made it easy for West Bank Palestinians to stab Christine Logan to death in the Jerusalem forest late last year and to wound two Israelis in a downtown Beersheba axe-wielding attack last month [June].
The original concept of a security fence had many boosters from former Knesset member Haim Ramon, and former national security adviser Uzi Dayan to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Reacting to Palestinian Arab violence in 1992, Rabin argued that a barrier running where it was most effective -- and not necessarily along the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines – needed to separate West Bank Palestinians from Israeli population centers. Later, Ehud Barak as premier also picked up the scheme.
But the real impetus came in the wake of the second intifada unleashed by Yasir Arafat in September 2000. Dozens of Palestinian suicide bombings claimed scores of Israeli lives. Between 2000 and 2005, the height of the Palestinians' blood-soaked frenzy, a staggering 26,000 terror attacks were launched against Israelis including 144 by suicide bombers; over 1,000 Israelis were murdered, 6,000 wounded. In one hideous June 2001 instance, a suicide bomber slaughtered 21 teenagers on a Friday night at the Dolphinarium dance club in Tel Aviv.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came under intense grass-roots pressure to finally build the fence that would protect Israelis from the Palestinian onslaught. But Sharon worried that not enough thought had been given to what putting up such a fortification might signal about Israel's ancestral and geo-strategic claims to the land on the other side. He wanted time to overcome Palestinian terror through conventional military means.
Ordinary Israelis, however, did not want to wait any longer. When local authorities began taking matters into their own hands by building makeshift fences Sharon reluctantly reversed himself. The barrier's first continuous segment, opposite the northern West Bank, was completed at the end of July 2003; residents of the capital could also see signs of a protective "envelope" rising around Jerusalem. Finally, in 2005 the cabinet formally approved the route of the barrier as proposed by Sharon. It was a pricy decision; approximately $2 million per kilometer, but with Israel's economy stagnating under merciless Palestinian battering there was little alternative.
The fence alone would not have defeated the intifada, though demoralized terror leaders admitted that it appreciably complicated their "resistance" efforts. By March 2002 Sharon had ordered Operation Defense Shield which reversed the IDF's withdrawal from much of the West Bank that had taken place under the 1993 Oslo Accords. This campaign and other security measures together with the barrier essentially defanged Palestinian offensive capabilities in the West Bank.
An unforeseen positive consequence of the security barrier -- actually a multifaceted defense system that in very few places is a concrete wall (along highways to protect against Palestinian snipers) and elsewhere is mostly a combination of trenches, metal fencing and electronic sensors -- has been that it has made it possible to dramatically reduce the number of IDF checkpoints within the West Bank to less than 50.
Clearly, as the Gaza barrier demonstrates, gunmen can lob rockets over or -- as in the Gilad Schalit case -- tunnel beneath any barrier. In 2003, two British nationals managed to legally exit Gaza to bomb "Mike's Place" in Tel Aviv; and in 2005 terrorists launched a deadly attack at the Karni Truck Crossing. But since the Gaza perimeter was secured in 1999 no terror attacks have emanated from the Strip.
The West Bank fence has already proven to be a life-saver. In 2010, there were "only" seven fatalities attributable to Palestinian terror emanating in the West Bank. Even the still-incomplete security fence has made harder for enemy operatives to deliver car bombs or suicide bombers into Israeli population centers.
No doubt because of this success, the fence has served as a lightning-rod for Israel's radical de-legitimizers who have nonsensically labeled is an "apartheid" wall. As part of their lawfare campaign against Israel, Palestinians turned to the International Court at The Hague which predictably ruled -- exactly four years ago this month [July] -- that the barrier was "illegal."
Characteristic of those who have coalesced around this issue is the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) which, in keeping with its nuanced stance on suicide bombing, helps organize "direct-action" -- a euphemism for weekly riots -- at the fence. ISM, which professes to be Palestinian-led, was founded by Brooklyn-born Adam Shapiro and his wife Huwaida Arraf (an American citizen).
In contrast, "pro-peace" J-Street takes a more disingenuous line holding that if a barrier is necessary it should be constructed on the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice Lines. In fact, over 80% of the route is within three miles of the Green Line. But given topography and demographics placing the barrier wholly on those lines – rather than where it can be most effective -- would be strategically self-defeating.
Israel's Supreme Court has upheld the legality of the barrier and where the fence veers east the court has at times ruled in favor of Palestinian claimants with regard to its precise route most notably in the Bil'in- Modi'in area.
The barrier was foisted on Israel by Palestinian aggression so its political implications cannot be entirely discounted. The current line demarcates the minimal depth necessary to separate as many Israeli civilians as possible from Palestinian attacks. Only some 8.5 percent of the barrier is situated east of the old porous armistice lines. Sharon had intended to retain geo-strategically vital territory – consensus settlement blocs -- on the Israeli side of the fence. And in Jerusalem the fence is being erected along the municipal boundaries so as not to divide the capital. That still leaves too many Israelis on the "wrong side" of the fence feeling isolated and worried that its placement is a precursor to the abandonment of Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria.
Whatever its location, the fence is a blight symbolizing a "victory" for Palestinian obduracy. But placing it ineffectually along the old seam line would only add insult to injury especially as even the comparatively moderate Palestinian Authority does accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Yet it is not foreign opposition but Israeli political lethargy that emphatically has been holding up completion of the barrier. Marc Luria, a founding member of Security Fence for Israel pointed out that Israel's Defense Ministry budget does not contain a line item for the barrier so funds are constantly redirected elsewhere. He argued that neglect of Israel's barrier along the Lebanese border emboldened Hezbollah to launch the attack that ignited the 2006 Second Lebanon War. In the south, Luria said, despite the deteriorating situation in Egypt, improved relations between Cairo and Hamas-controlled Gaza, the influx of thousands African asylum seekers into Israel, and notwithstanding the government's decision to construct a Negev-Sinai barrier – "Little has been done and progress is painfully slow."
So while the good news is that about 90 percent of the West Bank fence has been completed, without pressure from ordinary Israelis it will take another gory wave of Palestinian violence to prompt Israel's government to complete the crucial 10% gap (about 100 kilometers). Meanwhile, Israelis who live in Jerusalem, the Negev, Ariel, Gush Etzion and the Tzur Hadassah- Bet Shemesh corridor can only hope the Palestinian leadership decides not to launch a third intifada in the fall.
Good fences make good neighbors. Bad neighbors make good fences imperative.
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.
Rabbi Louis Jacobs Reluctant Renegade
Unlike the Conservative movement in the United States which broke away from Reform Judaism to pursue a more religiously centrist and Zionist middle course, the British Masorti branch was born as a secession movement from Orthodoxy, inspired by the writings of theologian Louis Jacobs whose fifth yahrzeit is being marked this month [July 1; 8 Tamuz].
Jacobs was practically "tenure track" to becoming Britain's Chief Rabbi, a post that was and remains under the auspices of the (Orthodox) United Synagogue. Jacobs' ascent was stymied in the early 1960s over his heterodox views about the divine origins of the Pentateuch. At the time of his death in 2006, at age 85 in London, he had been the mostly unwitting founder of Britain's fledgling Masorti movement.
He would have preferred a reformation of modern Orthodoxy.
An only child, described as an "illui, a prodigy and a Gaon," Jacobs was born in Manchester, educated at the Gateshead Talmudic Academy, and once ordained held various pulpits before becoming a lecturer at Jews' College (today the London School of Jewish Studies) where he trained rabbinical students. As his reputation soared, his writings, beginning with We Have Reason to Believe (1957), drew critical notice for their deviation from Orthodox norms. Jacobs softly embraced the idea that the Torah was not literally dictated by God and recorded verbatim by Moses at Mt. Sinai; that a "human element" was involved in its composition. In 1961, Jacobs' advancement to college principal, considered a stepping stone for the chief's office, was blocked by then-Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie.
That was the beginning of what came to be known as the Jacobs Affair. He was labeled a heretic (apikoras) by the Orthodox establishment, though he had his supporters in the pews. Not a few rank-and-file United Synagogue members were non-practicing Orthodox. Regardless of levels of observance, still more shared Jacobs' progressive theological bent and were not scandalized by historical biblical criticism notwithstanding its conclusion that the Five Books of Moses was not the work of one author. The Jewish Chronicle newspaper – where for many years he wrote the "Ask the Rabbi" column -- championed his elevation at Jews' College and kept the affair in the spotlight.
In 1963, the grandees at London's New West End Synagogue invited Jacobs to become their "minister." Brodie said no and the stage was set for a final schism. By chance, the congregation was anyway set to relocate, and the building was quietly purchased by Jacobs' admirers and he was given the pulpit. Thus was born the New London Synagogue in the St. John's Wood neighborhood of London, today the flagship of nine Masorti synagogues in the country.
Truth be told, Jacobs failed to exploit his popularity to create an alternative to the United Synagogue. He was foremost a scholar -- not a rebel -- and devoted himself to his writings. These showed him to be a traditionalist who rejected fundamentalism; a believer who sought a middle course between what he saw as Orthodoxy's anthropomorphism of God, and the "de-personalization" of the Deity propagated by the progressives. He believed that "we hear the authentic voice of God speaking to us through the pages of the Bible…and its truth is in no way affected in that we can only hear that voice through the medium of human beings…"
He held Revelation to be real. Still, he thought the creed of Torah Min Ha-Shamayyin (literally from the heavens) needed to be synthesized – not abandoned – so that it could remain tenable to moderns. The problem wasn't "Torah" or "Heaven" but how to understand "from." Even when it came to the After-life Jacobs sought to steer a middle course, opposing atheistic denial while preferring a Judaism that was anchored in worldliness.
In Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1999) he described his approach as "liberal supernaturalism," that is, adhering to traditional ritual practice and belief in revelation, yet open to what secular learning has to teach on the historicity of the bible. On this point Jacobs parted company with modern Orthodoxy. His research had revealed that normative Judaism was the product of rabbis' astutely adjusting Jewish law to the ages. That meant there was no basis in believing rabbinic rulings needed to be understood as sacred or that they emanated as Oral Law at Mt Sinai. That is why in Tree of Life (1984) he had earlier promoted "a non-fundamentalist Halakah" that interpreted law as "a living corpus" which had evolved according to the needs of the age.
While Jacobs was foremost a critic of the house from which he came, in Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1999) he described his aversion to Reform Judaism as "partly emotional and partly aesthetic" – it lacked neshama. A Talmudist, he found Reform's attitude toward that great work condescending. He also expressed "unease" at modeling Britain's Masorti movement on the American Conservative model because, as noted, theirs was above all a reaction to Reform and his retort was to Orthodoxy. In Beyond Reasonable Doubt he summed up his dilemma with a story about a professor friend who could daven with the Orthodox but not talk to them; talk to the Reform but not daven with them; and so by default was most at home with observant Conservatives.
Of course, we can only guess at what Jacobs and his friend would have to say about the unremitting left-wing theological drift of U.S. Conservatives which has made the stream increasingly hard to differentiate from Reform.
As for Jacobs' lasting impact? On the ground the results are modest. As his chief eulogizer, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg noted, "He never wanted to establish a new movement." According to a 2011 report by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 73 percent of British Jewish households (population 300,000) register a synagogue affiliation: 66% belong to United Synagogue or still more rigorously Orthodox streams; most of the remainder belongs to the Liberal and Reform branches; a miniscule 2.7% are Masorti. The best that can be said is that Jacobs' movement has almost doubled its total membership over the past 10 years, and that synagogues like Wittenberg's New North London are vibrant and bustling.
Having been ruled an apikoras, Jacobs was excluded, including by the current Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, from receiving honors on those occasions when he attended Orthodox services. Yet in 2005, readers of the Chronicle voted him as "the greatest British Jew of all time." Jonathan Romain, a Reform rabbi, captured the popular sentiment in his eulogy: "Louis Jacobs was often described as the greatest chief rabbi that British Jewry never had."
Jacobs was practically "tenure track" to becoming Britain's Chief Rabbi, a post that was and remains under the auspices of the (Orthodox) United Synagogue. Jacobs' ascent was stymied in the early 1960s over his heterodox views about the divine origins of the Pentateuch. At the time of his death in 2006, at age 85 in London, he had been the mostly unwitting founder of Britain's fledgling Masorti movement.
He would have preferred a reformation of modern Orthodoxy.
An only child, described as an "illui, a prodigy and a Gaon," Jacobs was born in Manchester, educated at the Gateshead Talmudic Academy, and once ordained held various pulpits before becoming a lecturer at Jews' College (today the London School of Jewish Studies) where he trained rabbinical students. As his reputation soared, his writings, beginning with We Have Reason to Believe (1957), drew critical notice for their deviation from Orthodox norms. Jacobs softly embraced the idea that the Torah was not literally dictated by God and recorded verbatim by Moses at Mt. Sinai; that a "human element" was involved in its composition. In 1961, Jacobs' advancement to college principal, considered a stepping stone for the chief's office, was blocked by then-Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie.
That was the beginning of what came to be known as the Jacobs Affair. He was labeled a heretic (apikoras) by the Orthodox establishment, though he had his supporters in the pews. Not a few rank-and-file United Synagogue members were non-practicing Orthodox. Regardless of levels of observance, still more shared Jacobs' progressive theological bent and were not scandalized by historical biblical criticism notwithstanding its conclusion that the Five Books of Moses was not the work of one author. The Jewish Chronicle newspaper – where for many years he wrote the "Ask the Rabbi" column -- championed his elevation at Jews' College and kept the affair in the spotlight.
In 1963, the grandees at London's New West End Synagogue invited Jacobs to become their "minister." Brodie said no and the stage was set for a final schism. By chance, the congregation was anyway set to relocate, and the building was quietly purchased by Jacobs' admirers and he was given the pulpit. Thus was born the New London Synagogue in the St. John's Wood neighborhood of London, today the flagship of nine Masorti synagogues in the country.
Truth be told, Jacobs failed to exploit his popularity to create an alternative to the United Synagogue. He was foremost a scholar -- not a rebel -- and devoted himself to his writings. These showed him to be a traditionalist who rejected fundamentalism; a believer who sought a middle course between what he saw as Orthodoxy's anthropomorphism of God, and the "de-personalization" of the Deity propagated by the progressives. He believed that "we hear the authentic voice of God speaking to us through the pages of the Bible…and its truth is in no way affected in that we can only hear that voice through the medium of human beings…"
He held Revelation to be real. Still, he thought the creed of Torah Min Ha-Shamayyin (literally from the heavens) needed to be synthesized – not abandoned – so that it could remain tenable to moderns. The problem wasn't "Torah" or "Heaven" but how to understand "from." Even when it came to the After-life Jacobs sought to steer a middle course, opposing atheistic denial while preferring a Judaism that was anchored in worldliness.
In Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1999) he described his approach as "liberal supernaturalism," that is, adhering to traditional ritual practice and belief in revelation, yet open to what secular learning has to teach on the historicity of the bible. On this point Jacobs parted company with modern Orthodoxy. His research had revealed that normative Judaism was the product of rabbis' astutely adjusting Jewish law to the ages. That meant there was no basis in believing rabbinic rulings needed to be understood as sacred or that they emanated as Oral Law at Mt Sinai. That is why in Tree of Life (1984) he had earlier promoted "a non-fundamentalist Halakah" that interpreted law as "a living corpus" which had evolved according to the needs of the age.
While Jacobs was foremost a critic of the house from which he came, in Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1999) he described his aversion to Reform Judaism as "partly emotional and partly aesthetic" – it lacked neshama. A Talmudist, he found Reform's attitude toward that great work condescending. He also expressed "unease" at modeling Britain's Masorti movement on the American Conservative model because, as noted, theirs was above all a reaction to Reform and his retort was to Orthodoxy. In Beyond Reasonable Doubt he summed up his dilemma with a story about a professor friend who could daven with the Orthodox but not talk to them; talk to the Reform but not daven with them; and so by default was most at home with observant Conservatives.
Of course, we can only guess at what Jacobs and his friend would have to say about the unremitting left-wing theological drift of U.S. Conservatives which has made the stream increasingly hard to differentiate from Reform.
As for Jacobs' lasting impact? On the ground the results are modest. As his chief eulogizer, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg noted, "He never wanted to establish a new movement." According to a 2011 report by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 73 percent of British Jewish households (population 300,000) register a synagogue affiliation: 66% belong to United Synagogue or still more rigorously Orthodox streams; most of the remainder belongs to the Liberal and Reform branches; a miniscule 2.7% are Masorti. The best that can be said is that Jacobs' movement has almost doubled its total membership over the past 10 years, and that synagogues like Wittenberg's New North London are vibrant and bustling.
Having been ruled an apikoras, Jacobs was excluded, including by the current Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, from receiving honors on those occasions when he attended Orthodox services. Yet in 2005, readers of the Chronicle voted him as "the greatest British Jew of all time." Jonathan Romain, a Reform rabbi, captured the popular sentiment in his eulogy: "Louis Jacobs was often described as the greatest chief rabbi that British Jewry never had."
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Sunday & the 5-day workweek in Israel
Enjoy Your Weekend
With July 4th behind them, Americans can look forward to closing out the summer season with Labor Day on September 5th. All told, they will enjoy ten national holidays; New Yorkers get an additional three days off. Across the Atlantic, Britons will have nine "bank holiday" days in 2012; Germans 11; French 10 and Italians 12. And of course, in each of these countries, people have the leisure of weekends from the close of business on Friday until Monday morning.
In Israel, however, Sunday is the start of the work week. On the face of it, Israelis otherwise enjoy an almost equally bountiful number of off days: eight. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that all but one of these are religious holidays -- Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and so on – the singular exception being Independence Day.
Ask new immigrants to Israel from Western countries, particularly those who are observant, and they are likely to confess that the absence of Sundays – and having only one non-religious bank holiday – has made for a difficult cultural adjustment.
But Israelis are not obliged to work on Fridays, so isn't that like having a Sunday? Not really. For one, it's a regular school day. Banks are open; so is the post office; building goes on at construction sites and sanitation workers are collecting garbage. There are no reliable figures for how many Israelis have Fridays off, but even for those fortunate enough to have the day to themselves, Fridays can still feel frenetic with sidurim (chores) like supermarket shopping, running errands, and preparing for Shabbat before the shops close early.
For those who take Shabbat in earnest the "day of rest" can take on its own hectic quality with morning and afternoon synagogue services, family meals and lots of socializing. While observant Jews do not travel, secular Israelis without automobiles must make do with taxis or stay close to home because in most places there is little in the way of public transportation; most shops, restaurants and places of entertainment are closed.
Not surprisingly, many Anglo-Israelis along with immigrants from the former Soviet Union, would gladly work part of Fridays, just as they did in the "Old Country," in order to get a breather on Sunday. Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky has long campaigned to make Sunday a day of leisure. His thought is that sharing Sundays off would reduce social and religious tensions and create opportunities for positive interaction between observant and secular Israelis.
Likud Party powerbroker, Silvan Shalom, the vice premier and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's arch political rival has also long been committed to the 5-day workweek with Sundays off. Shalom has argued that Israel needs to be in synch with the global economy. Why have Tel Aviv's stock market closed when everyone else's is trading (on Friday) and open (on Sunday) when world markets are closed? His plan would have Israelis work until noon on Fridays and make up the difference with slightly longer hours Monday through Thursday. There would be a five-day school week with longer hours. The result would be a calmer more harmonious country, Shalom promises.
Now, two Likud Knesset members, Ze'ev Elkin, and Yariv Levin, have introduced legislation along the lines proposed by Shalom. Their angle is that changing demographics – increasing numbers of religiously observant Israelis – has provided a fresh economic incentive for a Sunday that would encourage this sector to spend money on cultural activities, sporting events and at the malls.
Many but plainly not all native-born Israelis would be willing to go along with the idea. Israel's secular majority prefers not working on Shabbat. On the other hand, younger secular people feel as though they already have a normal two-day weekend and have no great desire to exchange Friday for Sunday. Some worry they might lose benefits they now enjoy on Saturday (sporting events, culture, and limited shopping) in exchange for Sundays off. They've anyway found workarounds to mandated Shabbat closings. Many Tel Aviv nightspots are open; 12 percent of Israelis choose to work on Shabbat, and 44% enjoy limited shopping.
While some in the national religious sector have long favored the Sunday option, others are more wary. They like the idea of having a day off to do some of the same things their secular family and friends do, but worry that they will not have enough time, after working a shortened Friday, to prepare for Shabbat or travel to distant family before sundown. Others are dubious that having Sundays off will actually reduce desecration of the Sabbath. And the more insular ultra-Orthodox are vehemently opposed to Sundays on the grounds that it is a Christian rest day. Last but not least, Moslem citizens (some 16% of the population) are also less than keen to have to work on Fridays since it is the only day when believers are obligated to offer midday prayers communally in a mosque.
The economic impact of making the switch will likely carry the greatest weight. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz worries that a 5-day work week, with Sunday off, would result in Fridays being fretted away, especially in the short days of the winter months. In effect, Israel would be transitioning unthinkingly to a four-day workweek. Better to transform, officially, Fridays as the start of a two-day weekend, says Steinitz. On the other hand, the country's hoteliers support the Sunday scheme, as does the Manufacturers Association, Chamber of Commerce and teachers unions. Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer has not come out publicly on the issue but is reportedly sympathetic. The same is said of Histadrut Labor Federation chief Ofer Eini.
Following the old adage "when in doubt form a committee," Netanyahu has appointed Eugene Kandel, head of his National Economic Council to chair a panel that is to look into the matter.
No one doubts that frazzled Israelis could use the down time of a real Sunday. Who would not savor sunset on Shabbat knowing that they had the next day off? But creating a real Sunday weekend would require radical cultural adaptations, major revamping of the school calendar and tortuous amending of the nation's labor laws.
The "peace process" seems like an easier undertaking.
###
With July 4th behind them, Americans can look forward to closing out the summer season with Labor Day on September 5th. All told, they will enjoy ten national holidays; New Yorkers get an additional three days off. Across the Atlantic, Britons will have nine "bank holiday" days in 2012; Germans 11; French 10 and Italians 12. And of course, in each of these countries, people have the leisure of weekends from the close of business on Friday until Monday morning.
In Israel, however, Sunday is the start of the work week. On the face of it, Israelis otherwise enjoy an almost equally bountiful number of off days: eight. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that all but one of these are religious holidays -- Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and so on – the singular exception being Independence Day.
Ask new immigrants to Israel from Western countries, particularly those who are observant, and they are likely to confess that the absence of Sundays – and having only one non-religious bank holiday – has made for a difficult cultural adjustment.
But Israelis are not obliged to work on Fridays, so isn't that like having a Sunday? Not really. For one, it's a regular school day. Banks are open; so is the post office; building goes on at construction sites and sanitation workers are collecting garbage. There are no reliable figures for how many Israelis have Fridays off, but even for those fortunate enough to have the day to themselves, Fridays can still feel frenetic with sidurim (chores) like supermarket shopping, running errands, and preparing for Shabbat before the shops close early.
For those who take Shabbat in earnest the "day of rest" can take on its own hectic quality with morning and afternoon synagogue services, family meals and lots of socializing. While observant Jews do not travel, secular Israelis without automobiles must make do with taxis or stay close to home because in most places there is little in the way of public transportation; most shops, restaurants and places of entertainment are closed.
Not surprisingly, many Anglo-Israelis along with immigrants from the former Soviet Union, would gladly work part of Fridays, just as they did in the "Old Country," in order to get a breather on Sunday. Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky has long campaigned to make Sunday a day of leisure. His thought is that sharing Sundays off would reduce social and religious tensions and create opportunities for positive interaction between observant and secular Israelis.
Likud Party powerbroker, Silvan Shalom, the vice premier and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's arch political rival has also long been committed to the 5-day workweek with Sundays off. Shalom has argued that Israel needs to be in synch with the global economy. Why have Tel Aviv's stock market closed when everyone else's is trading (on Friday) and open (on Sunday) when world markets are closed? His plan would have Israelis work until noon on Fridays and make up the difference with slightly longer hours Monday through Thursday. There would be a five-day school week with longer hours. The result would be a calmer more harmonious country, Shalom promises.
Now, two Likud Knesset members, Ze'ev Elkin, and Yariv Levin, have introduced legislation along the lines proposed by Shalom. Their angle is that changing demographics – increasing numbers of religiously observant Israelis – has provided a fresh economic incentive for a Sunday that would encourage this sector to spend money on cultural activities, sporting events and at the malls.
Many but plainly not all native-born Israelis would be willing to go along with the idea. Israel's secular majority prefers not working on Shabbat. On the other hand, younger secular people feel as though they already have a normal two-day weekend and have no great desire to exchange Friday for Sunday. Some worry they might lose benefits they now enjoy on Saturday (sporting events, culture, and limited shopping) in exchange for Sundays off. They've anyway found workarounds to mandated Shabbat closings. Many Tel Aviv nightspots are open; 12 percent of Israelis choose to work on Shabbat, and 44% enjoy limited shopping.
While some in the national religious sector have long favored the Sunday option, others are more wary. They like the idea of having a day off to do some of the same things their secular family and friends do, but worry that they will not have enough time, after working a shortened Friday, to prepare for Shabbat or travel to distant family before sundown. Others are dubious that having Sundays off will actually reduce desecration of the Sabbath. And the more insular ultra-Orthodox are vehemently opposed to Sundays on the grounds that it is a Christian rest day. Last but not least, Moslem citizens (some 16% of the population) are also less than keen to have to work on Fridays since it is the only day when believers are obligated to offer midday prayers communally in a mosque.
The economic impact of making the switch will likely carry the greatest weight. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz worries that a 5-day work week, with Sunday off, would result in Fridays being fretted away, especially in the short days of the winter months. In effect, Israel would be transitioning unthinkingly to a four-day workweek. Better to transform, officially, Fridays as the start of a two-day weekend, says Steinitz. On the other hand, the country's hoteliers support the Sunday scheme, as does the Manufacturers Association, Chamber of Commerce and teachers unions. Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer has not come out publicly on the issue but is reportedly sympathetic. The same is said of Histadrut Labor Federation chief Ofer Eini.
Following the old adage "when in doubt form a committee," Netanyahu has appointed Eugene Kandel, head of his National Economic Council to chair a panel that is to look into the matter.
No one doubts that frazzled Israelis could use the down time of a real Sunday. Who would not savor sunset on Shabbat knowing that they had the next day off? But creating a real Sunday weekend would require radical cultural adaptations, major revamping of the school calendar and tortuous amending of the nation's labor laws.
The "peace process" seems like an easier undertaking.
###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, July 04, 2011
Israel Army Radio Galatz
Radio Waves
Radio in Israel is as ubiquitous as hummus, falafel and politics. During their morning and evening commutes, motorists as well as bus passengers (captive to the listening tastes of their drivers) are likely to be hearing one of seven Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA) affiliated stations or one of two Army Radio outlets. The airwaves are further cluttered (or enriched, depending on one's viewpoint) by almost two dozen other stations catering to varied tastes from Tel Aviv chic to ethnic Mizrahi. This diverse menu of regional, musical, programmatic and language options does not include Arutz-7, whose broadcasts of news, talk and religious music, aimed primarily at residents of Judea and Samaria, have been restricted by government regulators to the Internet.
IBA public broadcasting is supported by a mandatory license fee bolstered by commercial advertising; Army Radio is funded out of the Defense Ministry budget though also complemented by ads. While both networks have come in for criticism over their perceived liberal bias the complaints against Army Radio seem – as we shall see – more egregious.
In May, Israel's cabinet extended Army Radio's right to sell advertising without which it would have been forced to gut its broadcast schedule. Only, however, after Defense Minister Ehud Barak was directed to come up with the beginnings of an oversight plan and to find a new station director. For now, there is no public oversight whatsoever. In fact, the only leverage elected officials presently have over Army Radio is to threaten its right to sell commercial airtime.
Army Radio (known by the Hebrew acronym GALATZ which stands for Galei Tzahal or "IDF waves") was founded in 1951 aimed at conscripts and reservists. The schedule was expanded and a much wider audience sought after the 1967 Six Day War. Broadcasting primarily from Jaffa, the station (like its IBA counterpart) begins its broadcast day with a nod to Jewish civilizational values: IBA starts with a superbly done vintage recording of "Here O, Israel" (Deuteronomy Chapter 6:4-9) while Army Radio currently opens with a three-minute reading from Ethics of Our Fathers.
GALATZ maintains its own independent news operation – it is by no means the voice of the army – in addition to offering current events, economics, music and cultural programming, it is also a platform for Open University academic lectures.
But it is mostly known for its three back-to-back A.M. programs, Boker Tov Israel, Nachon L'HaBoker, hosted by Niv Raskin and Ma Bo'er? with Razi Barkei. Together, they help to reinforce or frame the political and news agenda for the day. These on-air personalities, as well as noontime magazine host Yael Dayan and evening drive time anchor Yaron Wilinski are all civilians though field reporters, technicians, some producers and most off-hours news readers are uniformed recruits. Indeed, many of Israel's best known media personalities got their professional start at Army Radio.
GALGALATZ, GALATZ's enormously popular sister station, was established in 1993. Targeted at a younger, trendier, audience -- soldiers SMS requests for the latest Western and Hebrew pop music -- the station is also known for streaming traffic reports and public service announcements promoting safe driving.
As for its liberal slant, GALATZ is arguably no worse than any other Israeli radio or television outlet except for the fact that it is, after all, "the home of the soldiers" which might imply bipartisanship. However, according to Dror Eydar, a columnist for the centrist tabloid Israel HaYom, the bias is endemic; manifested by the choice of topics debated, questions asked, semantics employed and interviewees invited.
Even news bulletins are occasionally slanted. For instance, in February 2011, the headlines on two different mornings led with criticisms leveled against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman – as if the views of this inveterate Netanyahu critic were somehow remarkable. Nor has it been uncommon for Army Radio to invite, day-after-day, the same panel of advocacy journalists from Haaretz to provide their analysis of the news. Recently, when the European-funded pressure group "Peace Now" hawked as scandalous a government decision to construct apartments beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines, though well inside metropolitan Jerusalem, GALATZ presenter Micah Friedman framed the issue thusly: “Will the American government soon have a thousand and four hundred new reasons for tension with Israel?” One quantitative study that examined Army Radio bias found that for every right-wing voice aired, there were 1.3 left-wing voices; for every minute allocated right-wing ideas, leftist ideas were allocated 1.37 minutes.
It's not just right-wingers who are uncomfortable with Army Radio's partisanship. Amit Segal, an Army Radio "graduate" now with Channel 2 commercial television news, wondered how GALATZ became so out of touch with the Israeli consensus. And Yediot Aharonot's Nahum Barnea, doyen of liberal tabloid columnists, while lauding the station's "quality programming" in a recent (July 1) Friday piece, argued that GALATZ's connection to the army seemed "anachronistic." You don't have to be a rightist, Barnea granted, to concede that providing Hamas spokesman with freedom of expression in the midst of the Gaza war was "problematic." If nothing else, Barnea concluded, broadcasting enemy views "confuses" IDF soldiers on the battlefield. He also took GALATZ to task for cultivating a journalistic culture that left recruits assigned to the station largely cut-off from the reality under which the rest of the army operates.
Barnea's criticism demolished the notion that discontent with Army Radio is a right-wing affair, but his solution -- delinking the station from the defense establishment – would not necessarily result in a more politically balanced broadcast band. Instead, why not insist that public broadcasting aim for bipartisanship? A properly regulated GALATZ could yet promote societal cohesion, give voice to mainstream Israeli values, while taking care to provide expression for minority views at both ends of the political spectrum.
###
Radio in Israel is as ubiquitous as hummus, falafel and politics. During their morning and evening commutes, motorists as well as bus passengers (captive to the listening tastes of their drivers) are likely to be hearing one of seven Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA) affiliated stations or one of two Army Radio outlets. The airwaves are further cluttered (or enriched, depending on one's viewpoint) by almost two dozen other stations catering to varied tastes from Tel Aviv chic to ethnic Mizrahi. This diverse menu of regional, musical, programmatic and language options does not include Arutz-7, whose broadcasts of news, talk and religious music, aimed primarily at residents of Judea and Samaria, have been restricted by government regulators to the Internet.
IBA public broadcasting is supported by a mandatory license fee bolstered by commercial advertising; Army Radio is funded out of the Defense Ministry budget though also complemented by ads. While both networks have come in for criticism over their perceived liberal bias the complaints against Army Radio seem – as we shall see – more egregious.
In May, Israel's cabinet extended Army Radio's right to sell advertising without which it would have been forced to gut its broadcast schedule. Only, however, after Defense Minister Ehud Barak was directed to come up with the beginnings of an oversight plan and to find a new station director. For now, there is no public oversight whatsoever. In fact, the only leverage elected officials presently have over Army Radio is to threaten its right to sell commercial airtime.
Army Radio (known by the Hebrew acronym GALATZ which stands for Galei Tzahal or "IDF waves") was founded in 1951 aimed at conscripts and reservists. The schedule was expanded and a much wider audience sought after the 1967 Six Day War. Broadcasting primarily from Jaffa, the station (like its IBA counterpart) begins its broadcast day with a nod to Jewish civilizational values: IBA starts with a superbly done vintage recording of "Here O, Israel" (Deuteronomy Chapter 6:4-9) while Army Radio currently opens with a three-minute reading from Ethics of Our Fathers.
GALATZ maintains its own independent news operation – it is by no means the voice of the army – in addition to offering current events, economics, music and cultural programming, it is also a platform for Open University academic lectures.
But it is mostly known for its three back-to-back A.M. programs, Boker Tov Israel, Nachon L'HaBoker, hosted by Niv Raskin and Ma Bo'er? with Razi Barkei. Together, they help to reinforce or frame the political and news agenda for the day. These on-air personalities, as well as noontime magazine host Yael Dayan and evening drive time anchor Yaron Wilinski are all civilians though field reporters, technicians, some producers and most off-hours news readers are uniformed recruits. Indeed, many of Israel's best known media personalities got their professional start at Army Radio.
GALGALATZ, GALATZ's enormously popular sister station, was established in 1993. Targeted at a younger, trendier, audience -- soldiers SMS requests for the latest Western and Hebrew pop music -- the station is also known for streaming traffic reports and public service announcements promoting safe driving.
As for its liberal slant, GALATZ is arguably no worse than any other Israeli radio or television outlet except for the fact that it is, after all, "the home of the soldiers" which might imply bipartisanship. However, according to Dror Eydar, a columnist for the centrist tabloid Israel HaYom, the bias is endemic; manifested by the choice of topics debated, questions asked, semantics employed and interviewees invited.
Even news bulletins are occasionally slanted. For instance, in February 2011, the headlines on two different mornings led with criticisms leveled against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman – as if the views of this inveterate Netanyahu critic were somehow remarkable. Nor has it been uncommon for Army Radio to invite, day-after-day, the same panel of advocacy journalists from Haaretz to provide their analysis of the news. Recently, when the European-funded pressure group "Peace Now" hawked as scandalous a government decision to construct apartments beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines, though well inside metropolitan Jerusalem, GALATZ presenter Micah Friedman framed the issue thusly: “Will the American government soon have a thousand and four hundred new reasons for tension with Israel?” One quantitative study that examined Army Radio bias found that for every right-wing voice aired, there were 1.3 left-wing voices; for every minute allocated right-wing ideas, leftist ideas were allocated 1.37 minutes.
It's not just right-wingers who are uncomfortable with Army Radio's partisanship. Amit Segal, an Army Radio "graduate" now with Channel 2 commercial television news, wondered how GALATZ became so out of touch with the Israeli consensus. And Yediot Aharonot's Nahum Barnea, doyen of liberal tabloid columnists, while lauding the station's "quality programming" in a recent (July 1) Friday piece, argued that GALATZ's connection to the army seemed "anachronistic." You don't have to be a rightist, Barnea granted, to concede that providing Hamas spokesman with freedom of expression in the midst of the Gaza war was "problematic." If nothing else, Barnea concluded, broadcasting enemy views "confuses" IDF soldiers on the battlefield. He also took GALATZ to task for cultivating a journalistic culture that left recruits assigned to the station largely cut-off from the reality under which the rest of the army operates.
Barnea's criticism demolished the notion that discontent with Army Radio is a right-wing affair, but his solution -- delinking the station from the defense establishment – would not necessarily result in a more politically balanced broadcast band. Instead, why not insist that public broadcasting aim for bipartisanship? A properly regulated GALATZ could yet promote societal cohesion, give voice to mainstream Israeli values, while taking care to provide expression for minority views at both ends of the political spectrum.
###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Altalena, Irgun and Ben-Gurion --
Ships, their comings and goings, have lately been a fixation over at Israel's flagship left-wing (sporadically post-Zionist) Haaretz newspaper. Adding a new twist to what it means to be "embedded" with the enemy, one of the paper's stable of advocacy journalists, Amira Hass, has been writing adoringly about hooking-up with a pro-Palestinian flotilla that intends to smash Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
No less earnestly, the paper's front pages have been devoted to beating back challenges to the left's narrative about how the Irgun arms ship Altalena came to be sunk off the coast of Tel-Aviv 63 years ago this month (June 21, 1948) on orders from David Ben-Gurion. Haaretz has been incensed, too, by an Israel Defense Ministry reference to the fallen Irgun members as having been "murdered."
Now, historian Jerold S. Auerbach, author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009) has further undermined the leftist canon with Brothers At War, a succinct, emotive, and levelheaded summation of the Altalena tragedy.
Auerbach frames his Altalena account in terms of what he sees as Israel's ongoing identity struggle – "Jewish state, secular state, democratic state, democratic Jewish state, state of the Jewish people" – and the constraints this lack of clarity places on the legitimacy of massively consequential government decisions.
He asserts that this conundrum actually has ancient origins traceable to Josephus whose laments about the "seditious temper" of the Jewish people erroneously framed history's understanding of Rome's victory over the Jews for the past 2,000 years. In modern times, this dilemma manifested itself in the Altalena; in the 1952 Knesset clash over whether to accept German government reparations for the Holocaust; in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and has yet to find resolution notwithstanding the dreadful assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
It persists still over whether left-wing IDF reservists should be required to serve over the Green Line and whether right-wing Orthodox conscripts ought to be required, contrary to the wishes of their rabbis, to obey orders to dismantle unsanctioned West Bank outposts.
Put another way: Is the bigger threat to the Jewish commonwealth zealous Jews who reject disputed governmental decisions on divisive issues or the chronic failure of successive Israeli governments to foster consensus positions?
Where to begin the telling of Altalena calamity? Auerbach reasonably starts by differentiating the two Zionist camps; one led by Ben-Gurion which controlled Zionist officialdom and was inspired by a Jewish national renewal rooted in notions of socialist utopia; the other motivated by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and carried forth by his disciple Menachem Begin whose vision was one of a society based on middle-class entrepreneurial values. Long before the Altalena, Auerbach points out, there was a record of bad blood between the two camps exacerbated by the mysterious murder of Chaim Arlosoroff, bitter disputes over whether and how to confront the heartless British policy of closing the gates of Palestine prior to and during the Holocaust and over how best to respond to Arab brutality against Palestinian Jewry in the years before Israel's independence.
The Altalena (Jabotinsky's pen name) was purchased in America by Irgun operatives and, ultimately, loaded at Marseilles, France with desperately needed weapons and munitions along with a "melting pot" of 940 recruits for the nascent Hebrew fighting force in Palestine. As far as its American Jewish captain knew, his mission had the "acquiescence of the Israeli government."
Begin had indeed been negotiating directly with Ben-Gurion's man, Israel Galili, over how to disburse the ships weapons and troops. The Altalena's mission was unfortunately tracked from the start by various intelligence agencies and its secrecy blatantly exposed in a BBC news broadcast.
A series of disastrous miscommunications, logistical blunders and lack of internal Irgun discipline led to the ship's arrival seemingly at the wrong place and at the wrong time while the Begin-Galili talks were still in progress. In fact, Auerbach writes, Galili informed Begin on June 16: "We [i.e. Ben-Gurion] agree to the arrival of the vessel. As quickly as possible." And in his diary entry that day Ben-Gurion wrote: "Tomorrow or the next day their ship is due to arrive." So it was Ben-Gurion himself who ordered the ship to land at Kfar Vitkin (near Netanya) to avoid UN aerial surveillance.
As the Begin-Galili talks proceeded, some of the weapons and almost all of the personnel on board were unloaded near Netanya. By then, Ben-Gurion had allowed himself to be convinced that Begin was planning a putsch against his authority even as the Irgun leader – perhaps naively – felt certain the weapons negotiations would succeed in the fullness of time. But there was no time. Ben-Gurion edgily ordered the Haganah (now the IDF) to start shooting. Six Irgun men and two soldiers were killed before the ship fled Netanya south and ran aground off the Tel Aviv coast not far from Palmach headquarters!
Ben-Gurion insisted on unconditional surrender or else. Yitzhak Rabin, age 26, was appointed on the spot to command the beach fighting. When the Altalena crew hesitated perhaps because of poor communications with Irgun headquarters, Palmach commanders ordered an all out attack on the ship. Even though the crew raised a white flag, Rabin's snipers continued to pick off targets bobbing in the waters. Begin, who had earlier boarded the ship expecting a deal with Galili, barely escaped with his life. The ship went down along with 300 Bren guns, 500 anti-tank guns, 1,000 grenades and millions of bullets that could have been used during the War of Independence.
Auerbach's conclusion, citing historian Ehud Sprinzak, was that there had been no "mutiny on the right" no intention to defy the legitimate authority of the land and certainly no intention by Begin to challenge Ben-Gurion militarily with a putsch. Begin had only wanted enough men and guns earmarked to carry on the fight for Jerusalem's Old City (which Ben-Gurion had abandoned) and thought he had Galili's tacit approval.
Begin abhorred the idea of a Jewish civil war and ultimately, swallowing his pride, ordered his Irgun men into the IDF on September 20, 1948. It was Ben-Gurion's "quasi-totalitarian" personality that led the socialist leader to "a reprehensible abuse of state power," as Begin later plausibly asserted.
Auerbach's sensitive re-telling of this tragic chapter in Israel's early history concludes with the unhappy, though sadly correct, assertion that Israel's "problem of legitimacy" remains unresolved.
How can Israeli decision makers emphatically steer clear of future Altalena's in implementing wrenching policies that have monumental consequences for the country's survival and character? Auerbach argues simply that they can't. In connection with dismantling settlements, my reading is that he believes the right to disobey orders is scared.
Yet surely for most Israelis, in the unlikely event that a Palestinian leadership emerges ready to make genuine peace, the legitimacy of the deal could be appreciably bolstered and the moral justification of violent disobedience diminished by some combination of Knesset vote plus national referendum.
###
No less earnestly, the paper's front pages have been devoted to beating back challenges to the left's narrative about how the Irgun arms ship Altalena came to be sunk off the coast of Tel-Aviv 63 years ago this month (June 21, 1948) on orders from David Ben-Gurion. Haaretz has been incensed, too, by an Israel Defense Ministry reference to the fallen Irgun members as having been "murdered."
Now, historian Jerold S. Auerbach, author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009) has further undermined the leftist canon with Brothers At War, a succinct, emotive, and levelheaded summation of the Altalena tragedy.
Auerbach frames his Altalena account in terms of what he sees as Israel's ongoing identity struggle – "Jewish state, secular state, democratic state, democratic Jewish state, state of the Jewish people" – and the constraints this lack of clarity places on the legitimacy of massively consequential government decisions.
He asserts that this conundrum actually has ancient origins traceable to Josephus whose laments about the "seditious temper" of the Jewish people erroneously framed history's understanding of Rome's victory over the Jews for the past 2,000 years. In modern times, this dilemma manifested itself in the Altalena; in the 1952 Knesset clash over whether to accept German government reparations for the Holocaust; in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and has yet to find resolution notwithstanding the dreadful assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
It persists still over whether left-wing IDF reservists should be required to serve over the Green Line and whether right-wing Orthodox conscripts ought to be required, contrary to the wishes of their rabbis, to obey orders to dismantle unsanctioned West Bank outposts.
Put another way: Is the bigger threat to the Jewish commonwealth zealous Jews who reject disputed governmental decisions on divisive issues or the chronic failure of successive Israeli governments to foster consensus positions?
Where to begin the telling of Altalena calamity? Auerbach reasonably starts by differentiating the two Zionist camps; one led by Ben-Gurion which controlled Zionist officialdom and was inspired by a Jewish national renewal rooted in notions of socialist utopia; the other motivated by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and carried forth by his disciple Menachem Begin whose vision was one of a society based on middle-class entrepreneurial values. Long before the Altalena, Auerbach points out, there was a record of bad blood between the two camps exacerbated by the mysterious murder of Chaim Arlosoroff, bitter disputes over whether and how to confront the heartless British policy of closing the gates of Palestine prior to and during the Holocaust and over how best to respond to Arab brutality against Palestinian Jewry in the years before Israel's independence.
The Altalena (Jabotinsky's pen name) was purchased in America by Irgun operatives and, ultimately, loaded at Marseilles, France with desperately needed weapons and munitions along with a "melting pot" of 940 recruits for the nascent Hebrew fighting force in Palestine. As far as its American Jewish captain knew, his mission had the "acquiescence of the Israeli government."
Begin had indeed been negotiating directly with Ben-Gurion's man, Israel Galili, over how to disburse the ships weapons and troops. The Altalena's mission was unfortunately tracked from the start by various intelligence agencies and its secrecy blatantly exposed in a BBC news broadcast.
A series of disastrous miscommunications, logistical blunders and lack of internal Irgun discipline led to the ship's arrival seemingly at the wrong place and at the wrong time while the Begin-Galili talks were still in progress. In fact, Auerbach writes, Galili informed Begin on June 16: "We [i.e. Ben-Gurion] agree to the arrival of the vessel. As quickly as possible." And in his diary entry that day Ben-Gurion wrote: "Tomorrow or the next day their ship is due to arrive." So it was Ben-Gurion himself who ordered the ship to land at Kfar Vitkin (near Netanya) to avoid UN aerial surveillance.
As the Begin-Galili talks proceeded, some of the weapons and almost all of the personnel on board were unloaded near Netanya. By then, Ben-Gurion had allowed himself to be convinced that Begin was planning a putsch against his authority even as the Irgun leader – perhaps naively – felt certain the weapons negotiations would succeed in the fullness of time. But there was no time. Ben-Gurion edgily ordered the Haganah (now the IDF) to start shooting. Six Irgun men and two soldiers were killed before the ship fled Netanya south and ran aground off the Tel Aviv coast not far from Palmach headquarters!
Ben-Gurion insisted on unconditional surrender or else. Yitzhak Rabin, age 26, was appointed on the spot to command the beach fighting. When the Altalena crew hesitated perhaps because of poor communications with Irgun headquarters, Palmach commanders ordered an all out attack on the ship. Even though the crew raised a white flag, Rabin's snipers continued to pick off targets bobbing in the waters. Begin, who had earlier boarded the ship expecting a deal with Galili, barely escaped with his life. The ship went down along with 300 Bren guns, 500 anti-tank guns, 1,000 grenades and millions of bullets that could have been used during the War of Independence.
Auerbach's conclusion, citing historian Ehud Sprinzak, was that there had been no "mutiny on the right" no intention to defy the legitimate authority of the land and certainly no intention by Begin to challenge Ben-Gurion militarily with a putsch. Begin had only wanted enough men and guns earmarked to carry on the fight for Jerusalem's Old City (which Ben-Gurion had abandoned) and thought he had Galili's tacit approval.
Begin abhorred the idea of a Jewish civil war and ultimately, swallowing his pride, ordered his Irgun men into the IDF on September 20, 1948. It was Ben-Gurion's "quasi-totalitarian" personality that led the socialist leader to "a reprehensible abuse of state power," as Begin later plausibly asserted.
Auerbach's sensitive re-telling of this tragic chapter in Israel's early history concludes with the unhappy, though sadly correct, assertion that Israel's "problem of legitimacy" remains unresolved.
How can Israeli decision makers emphatically steer clear of future Altalena's in implementing wrenching policies that have monumental consequences for the country's survival and character? Auerbach argues simply that they can't. In connection with dismantling settlements, my reading is that he believes the right to disobey orders is scared.
Yet surely for most Israelis, in the unlikely event that a Palestinian leadership emerges ready to make genuine peace, the legitimacy of the deal could be appreciably bolstered and the moral justification of violent disobedience diminished by some combination of Knesset vote plus national referendum.
###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Druse (Druze) in the Arab-Israel Context
A Druse physician from the Golan Heights, who works at an Israeli hospital, was one of 24 members of his community arrested for pummeling IDF troops with rocks during so-called Naksa Day protests. Just a few miles south in Daliyat El-Carmel, located on the slopes of Mt. Carmel, the Israeli Druse community is planning a memorial museum that will tell the stories of the 400 Druse soldiers who fell in defense of the State of Israel. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the Druse leadership has become an essential constituent in the Hezbollah-dominated government.
Just where do Druse loyalties lay?
An understanding of their history can help answer that question. The Druse are a breakaway stream of the Ismaili strain of Shi'ite Islam, followers of an ascetic Egyptian ruler named Al-Hakim (996-1021) in whom they see manifestations of the divine. (Al-Hakim was a descendant of Muhammad's son-in-law Ali revered by the Shi'ites.) Influenced in part by Greek ideas, Al-Hakim's persecuted followers broke away from orthodox Islam and eventually coalesced in the mountainous regions of Lebanon, Syria and Israel awaiting his messianic return and salvation (reincarnation being fundamental to their dogma).
Druse keep their religious practices mostly mysterious. Unlike Muslims, Druse Arabs do not observe Ramadan nor make pilgrimages to Mecca and do not proselytize. They venerate Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses as a main prophet. Marrying-out is considered an unforgivable breach of communal solidarity. Indeed, strong ethnic identity, martial skills and mutual aid are part of the Druse canon. Today, there are perhaps 2.5 million Druse living mostly in Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel with smaller communities dispersed as far away as North America and Australia.
In predominantly Sunni Syria, the Druse are mostly concentrated in the southwest abutting Jordan and between Aleppo and Antioch in the north-west. They comprise perhaps four percent of the population. After the First World War with the arrival of the French, the Druse were encouraged to maintain their own autonomous region. Druse attitudes toward the French were conflicted though the community ultimately embraced emergent Arab nationalism.
Syrian independence in 1946 was accompanied by long decades of political convulsions. During the early 1950s for instance, Adib ibn Hasan Shishakli, the military dictator, pursued a Syrian nationalist line yet violently persecuted the Druse whom he perceived as a threat. Shishakli's overthrow paved the way for yet more turmoil during which factions within the Ba'ath Party competed violently for control.
By the time Hafez al-Assad (Basher's father) took power in 1970, the Druse had been purged from positions of influence in the party, army and security services. However, the Assad dynasty, itself rooted in the Alawite minority, relied on the Druse, and true to form, the Druse displayed remarkable loyalty to the regime. In recent years Bashar may have become more distant from them, perhaps because he wanted to draw closer to the Sunni majority, according to Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University. Druse fidelity has begun to crack only as anti-Assad demonstrations have gained inexorable momentum and security forces have targeted the Druse. Kedar speculates that if Syria does disintegrate, the Druse could seek to restore their earlier autonomy.
Watching from the other side of the border, Israeli Druse parliamentarian, Deputy Galilee and Negev Development Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud) has tried to muster Jerusalem's support for some kind of intervention on behalf of the Syrian opposition only to be rebuffed. Lately, he's turned to the Turkish authorities asking to be allowed to lead an Israeli aid mission to the Turkish-Syrian border.
On the Golan Heights, a very small number of Druse accepted Israeli citizenship when the Knesset applied Israeli law to the territory in 1981, while most remained loyal to the Assad regime. On the whole, though some Druse have been arrested for spying for Syria, most have simply sought not to fall afoul of either Jerusalem or Damascus knowing that control of the Heights could flip in any peace deal. Israel has been generally sensitive to the Druse predicament. In mid-February, for instance, 12,000 tons of apples grown by Druse farmers near Majdal Shams were exported to Syria despite the de facto state of war between the two countries. At the start of the anti-government protests in Syria, some Golan residents demonstrated in support of Assad. But as the demonstrations gained traction more Golan Druse have turned against Assad and expressed solidarity for the opposition.
The Druse need to coldly calibrate their alliances is nowhere more pronounced than in the failed state of Lebanon. There's been no verifiable census there in decades, but there are believed to be hundreds of thousands of Druse in Lebanon with a stronghold in the Chouf Mountains. After his father Kamal was assassinated (in all likelihood by the Assads), Druse leader Walid Jumblat actually drew closer to Syria. Over the years he has switched sides intermittently most recently in March 2010. Nowadays he backs Lebanon's new hegemon, the Shi'ite Islamist movement Hezbollah, clients of the Assad dynasty though ultimately beholden to Iran.
Emphasizing his Arab credentials, Jumblat has aligned the Druse with Arab "leftists" -- essentially nationalist secularists – through his Progressive Socialist Party. His anti-Israel rhetoric has been unwavering. The Druse have been sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs, permanent "refugees" in Lebanon, and have advocated for them being granted the right to own property. This has not guaranteed the Druse immunity from attack by uncompromising Palestinian Islamists.
All the same, earlier this month Jumblat lauded the Golan Druse who collaborated in Syrian-inspired Palestinian efforts to storm across the Golan boundary with Israel. He has long urged his coreligionists in Israel not to serve in the IDF. Yet as the Assad regime wobbles, possibly weakening Hezbollah, the Lebanese Druse are becoming more assertive. A Druse member of the Hezbollah-dominated new cabinet recently resigned to protest the dearth of patronage posts allocated to his community.
Which brings us back to the 127,000-strong, overwhelmingly loyal, Druse citizens of Israel. Their young men have long been conscripted into the army where many have served with distinction. A Druse journalist, Rafik Halabi, was news director for Israel's Channel 1 during the 1990s. By 2001 a Druse had been named to Israel's cabinet (by Ariel Sharon). Patronage delivered by the Likud to the Druse town of Daliat el-Carmel has encouraged many locals to join the party. However, the acculturation process has not been effortless. Since many Druse schools teach the sciences in Arabic, Israel’s education ministry has been trying to encourage a shift to Hebrew so that graduates can better integrate into Israeli higher education. The Netanyahu has (belatedly) budgeted substantial sums for the socio-economic developing of the community. Efforts are also underway to prepare Druse young people for jobs in Israel's hi-tech sector.
This is not to suggest that Israel could not do much more to reward Druse loyalty or demonstrate greater cultural sensitivity. Earlier this year, the government defused simmering tensions by reaching a compensation deal with Druse landowners whose properties had been confiscated for a planned natural gas pipeline.
The seemingly Machiavellian character of Druse loyalties reflects what it means to be a minority people in a mostly intolerant Muslim Middle East. Just as the Druse have found it strategically prudent to concentrate mostly on high ground away from urban areas, their political strategy toward outside powers has been one of "adaptability and fluidity" according to the University of Haifa's Gabriel Ben-Dor. The Druse prefer to be loyal to the country in which they reside. At the same time, their survival depends on a knack for aligning with what Lee Smith has called the Strong Horse, offering an artful political barometer for gauging the ever-shifting balance of power in the region.
Just where do Druse loyalties lay?
An understanding of their history can help answer that question. The Druse are a breakaway stream of the Ismaili strain of Shi'ite Islam, followers of an ascetic Egyptian ruler named Al-Hakim (996-1021) in whom they see manifestations of the divine. (Al-Hakim was a descendant of Muhammad's son-in-law Ali revered by the Shi'ites.) Influenced in part by Greek ideas, Al-Hakim's persecuted followers broke away from orthodox Islam and eventually coalesced in the mountainous regions of Lebanon, Syria and Israel awaiting his messianic return and salvation (reincarnation being fundamental to their dogma).
Druse keep their religious practices mostly mysterious. Unlike Muslims, Druse Arabs do not observe Ramadan nor make pilgrimages to Mecca and do not proselytize. They venerate Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses as a main prophet. Marrying-out is considered an unforgivable breach of communal solidarity. Indeed, strong ethnic identity, martial skills and mutual aid are part of the Druse canon. Today, there are perhaps 2.5 million Druse living mostly in Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel with smaller communities dispersed as far away as North America and Australia.
In predominantly Sunni Syria, the Druse are mostly concentrated in the southwest abutting Jordan and between Aleppo and Antioch in the north-west. They comprise perhaps four percent of the population. After the First World War with the arrival of the French, the Druse were encouraged to maintain their own autonomous region. Druse attitudes toward the French were conflicted though the community ultimately embraced emergent Arab nationalism.
Syrian independence in 1946 was accompanied by long decades of political convulsions. During the early 1950s for instance, Adib ibn Hasan Shishakli, the military dictator, pursued a Syrian nationalist line yet violently persecuted the Druse whom he perceived as a threat. Shishakli's overthrow paved the way for yet more turmoil during which factions within the Ba'ath Party competed violently for control.
By the time Hafez al-Assad (Basher's father) took power in 1970, the Druse had been purged from positions of influence in the party, army and security services. However, the Assad dynasty, itself rooted in the Alawite minority, relied on the Druse, and true to form, the Druse displayed remarkable loyalty to the regime. In recent years Bashar may have become more distant from them, perhaps because he wanted to draw closer to the Sunni majority, according to Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University. Druse fidelity has begun to crack only as anti-Assad demonstrations have gained inexorable momentum and security forces have targeted the Druse. Kedar speculates that if Syria does disintegrate, the Druse could seek to restore their earlier autonomy.
Watching from the other side of the border, Israeli Druse parliamentarian, Deputy Galilee and Negev Development Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud) has tried to muster Jerusalem's support for some kind of intervention on behalf of the Syrian opposition only to be rebuffed. Lately, he's turned to the Turkish authorities asking to be allowed to lead an Israeli aid mission to the Turkish-Syrian border.
On the Golan Heights, a very small number of Druse accepted Israeli citizenship when the Knesset applied Israeli law to the territory in 1981, while most remained loyal to the Assad regime. On the whole, though some Druse have been arrested for spying for Syria, most have simply sought not to fall afoul of either Jerusalem or Damascus knowing that control of the Heights could flip in any peace deal. Israel has been generally sensitive to the Druse predicament. In mid-February, for instance, 12,000 tons of apples grown by Druse farmers near Majdal Shams were exported to Syria despite the de facto state of war between the two countries. At the start of the anti-government protests in Syria, some Golan residents demonstrated in support of Assad. But as the demonstrations gained traction more Golan Druse have turned against Assad and expressed solidarity for the opposition.
The Druse need to coldly calibrate their alliances is nowhere more pronounced than in the failed state of Lebanon. There's been no verifiable census there in decades, but there are believed to be hundreds of thousands of Druse in Lebanon with a stronghold in the Chouf Mountains. After his father Kamal was assassinated (in all likelihood by the Assads), Druse leader Walid Jumblat actually drew closer to Syria. Over the years he has switched sides intermittently most recently in March 2010. Nowadays he backs Lebanon's new hegemon, the Shi'ite Islamist movement Hezbollah, clients of the Assad dynasty though ultimately beholden to Iran.
Emphasizing his Arab credentials, Jumblat has aligned the Druse with Arab "leftists" -- essentially nationalist secularists – through his Progressive Socialist Party. His anti-Israel rhetoric has been unwavering. The Druse have been sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs, permanent "refugees" in Lebanon, and have advocated for them being granted the right to own property. This has not guaranteed the Druse immunity from attack by uncompromising Palestinian Islamists.
All the same, earlier this month Jumblat lauded the Golan Druse who collaborated in Syrian-inspired Palestinian efforts to storm across the Golan boundary with Israel. He has long urged his coreligionists in Israel not to serve in the IDF. Yet as the Assad regime wobbles, possibly weakening Hezbollah, the Lebanese Druse are becoming more assertive. A Druse member of the Hezbollah-dominated new cabinet recently resigned to protest the dearth of patronage posts allocated to his community.
Which brings us back to the 127,000-strong, overwhelmingly loyal, Druse citizens of Israel. Their young men have long been conscripted into the army where many have served with distinction. A Druse journalist, Rafik Halabi, was news director for Israel's Channel 1 during the 1990s. By 2001 a Druse had been named to Israel's cabinet (by Ariel Sharon). Patronage delivered by the Likud to the Druse town of Daliat el-Carmel has encouraged many locals to join the party. However, the acculturation process has not been effortless. Since many Druse schools teach the sciences in Arabic, Israel’s education ministry has been trying to encourage a shift to Hebrew so that graduates can better integrate into Israeli higher education. The Netanyahu has (belatedly) budgeted substantial sums for the socio-economic developing of the community. Efforts are also underway to prepare Druse young people for jobs in Israel's hi-tech sector.
This is not to suggest that Israel could not do much more to reward Druse loyalty or demonstrate greater cultural sensitivity. Earlier this year, the government defused simmering tensions by reaching a compensation deal with Druse landowners whose properties had been confiscated for a planned natural gas pipeline.
The seemingly Machiavellian character of Druse loyalties reflects what it means to be a minority people in a mostly intolerant Muslim Middle East. Just as the Druse have found it strategically prudent to concentrate mostly on high ground away from urban areas, their political strategy toward outside powers has been one of "adaptability and fluidity" according to the University of Haifa's Gabriel Ben-Dor. The Druse prefer to be loyal to the country in which they reside. At the same time, their survival depends on a knack for aligning with what Lee Smith has called the Strong Horse, offering an artful political barometer for gauging the ever-shifting balance of power in the region.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Does Israel's Labor Party Still Live?
Laboring On
Whatever became of Israel's Labor Party some five months after its leader Defense Minister Ehud Barak abruptly quit to establish his breakaway Atzmaut (Independence) Knesset faction?
Wracked by infighting, fuming over being tethered to the diplomatic policies of the Netanyahu government, and headed by one of the least popular politicians on the scene, the once-dominant Labor Party seemed moribund. Barak had surprised colleagues in January 2010 by pulling out before they could oust him; taking along four comparatively right-leaning loyalists. Barak got to retain his cabinet seat while Labor ministers Yitzhak Herzog, Avishay Braverman and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had no choice but to go into the opposition. In 2006, Labor lost several luminaries including Shimon Peres, Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik to Kadima.
Now, tabloid pundits were quick to write Labor's obituary. Yediot's Nahum Barnea, doyen of left-leaning columnists, said the party had actually "died" during Barak's short failed term as prime minister in 2000 but had only now been buried. His colleague Sima Kadmon wrote that "the public doesn't believe the Labor Party can be revived." The perennially caustic Ben Caspit at Ma'ariv adjudged Labor to be "a pile of rubble." Barak had dealt Labor "the final blow" wrote another anti-Netanyahu Ma'ariv columnist Shalom Yerushalmi.
These writers had captured the popular sentiment: A poll in Yediot the day after Barak's exit found 53% of Israeli voters thought it heralded "the end of the Labor Party." Yet even then there was a glimmer of hope: the same poll revealed that Labor would manage to retain 8 of its 13 Knesset seats were immediate elections held.
Forecasts of Labor's demise appear to have been exaggerated. Since Barak's leaving the party brought back former general-secretary Micha Harish to be its temporary chairman and tasked him with overseeing Labor's revival. Tens of thousands of new members have been recruited as part of a dynamic race on for the party's leadership. David Ben-Gurion's grandchildren, Orit Etzioni and Moshe Ben-Eliezer, have publicly invested in the movement he once led. Even rudderless, recent polls continue to show the party capturing at least eight seats.
Of course, how Labor will ultimately fare in national elections (expected before 2013 when the current Knesset's term expires) will depend on what position it stakes out on the political spectrum and that, in term, very much depends on who becomes the party's new leader. The field includes MK Isaac Herzog, son of Israel's sixth president Chaim Herzog; MK Shelly Yachimovich, a former left-oriented journalist; Amram Mitzna, a rehabilitated previous party leader; millionaire entrepreneur Erel Margalit; MK Amir Peretz, another renewed former party leader and Shlomo Buhbut, a local government politician.
Labor is hardly likely to ever again become a ruling party. One reason is that its leaders and functionaries continue to shill for Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in promoting the message that no diplomatic progress can be made because of the Netanyahu government, and not – as most Israelis believe – through any fault of the Palestinian Arabs.
Each of the leadership contenders claimed to have signed-up thousands of new members ostensibly pledged to vote for them in the September 12th party primary and subsequent run-off contest. By that yardstick, Peretz claims to have brought in the most signatures followed by Herzog and Yachimovich. Assuming the petition claims are true, Labor's membership base could emerge as the second biggest behind Likud.
With a leader – Mitzna, Herzog, Yachimovich or Perez – preliminary polling suggests that Labor could, at least hypothetically, capture 17-19 mandates. Yet when the dust settles much depends on whether the party, which still defines itself as social-democratic, can be positioned at least within shouting distance of the center-left enabling it to pick up votes from Kadima. That will not be easy.
Mitzna says outright that he's returned to politics to mobilize the "peace camp." Perez professes that he would not require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; Yachimovich prefers to take vague stands on security issues and to focus instead on promoting greater government involvement in the economy. Margalit supports an interim Palestinian state now along the parameters of the security barrier. Herzog has been arguably more judicious while still calling for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. All these positions are essentially out of kilter with public sentiment.
So while the obituaries were premature, for Labor to avoid being permanently relegated to the margins of party politics alongside Meretz whoever wins its September primary would be wise to navigate toward Israel's post-Oslo center.
As for Barak's new party, were elections held today, Atzmaut would not to cross the electoral threshold.
###
Whatever became of Israel's Labor Party some five months after its leader Defense Minister Ehud Barak abruptly quit to establish his breakaway Atzmaut (Independence) Knesset faction?
Wracked by infighting, fuming over being tethered to the diplomatic policies of the Netanyahu government, and headed by one of the least popular politicians on the scene, the once-dominant Labor Party seemed moribund. Barak had surprised colleagues in January 2010 by pulling out before they could oust him; taking along four comparatively right-leaning loyalists. Barak got to retain his cabinet seat while Labor ministers Yitzhak Herzog, Avishay Braverman and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had no choice but to go into the opposition. In 2006, Labor lost several luminaries including Shimon Peres, Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik to Kadima.
Now, tabloid pundits were quick to write Labor's obituary. Yediot's Nahum Barnea, doyen of left-leaning columnists, said the party had actually "died" during Barak's short failed term as prime minister in 2000 but had only now been buried. His colleague Sima Kadmon wrote that "the public doesn't believe the Labor Party can be revived." The perennially caustic Ben Caspit at Ma'ariv adjudged Labor to be "a pile of rubble." Barak had dealt Labor "the final blow" wrote another anti-Netanyahu Ma'ariv columnist Shalom Yerushalmi.
These writers had captured the popular sentiment: A poll in Yediot the day after Barak's exit found 53% of Israeli voters thought it heralded "the end of the Labor Party." Yet even then there was a glimmer of hope: the same poll revealed that Labor would manage to retain 8 of its 13 Knesset seats were immediate elections held.
Forecasts of Labor's demise appear to have been exaggerated. Since Barak's leaving the party brought back former general-secretary Micha Harish to be its temporary chairman and tasked him with overseeing Labor's revival. Tens of thousands of new members have been recruited as part of a dynamic race on for the party's leadership. David Ben-Gurion's grandchildren, Orit Etzioni and Moshe Ben-Eliezer, have publicly invested in the movement he once led. Even rudderless, recent polls continue to show the party capturing at least eight seats.
Of course, how Labor will ultimately fare in national elections (expected before 2013 when the current Knesset's term expires) will depend on what position it stakes out on the political spectrum and that, in term, very much depends on who becomes the party's new leader. The field includes MK Isaac Herzog, son of Israel's sixth president Chaim Herzog; MK Shelly Yachimovich, a former left-oriented journalist; Amram Mitzna, a rehabilitated previous party leader; millionaire entrepreneur Erel Margalit; MK Amir Peretz, another renewed former party leader and Shlomo Buhbut, a local government politician.
Labor is hardly likely to ever again become a ruling party. One reason is that its leaders and functionaries continue to shill for Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in promoting the message that no diplomatic progress can be made because of the Netanyahu government, and not – as most Israelis believe – through any fault of the Palestinian Arabs.
Each of the leadership contenders claimed to have signed-up thousands of new members ostensibly pledged to vote for them in the September 12th party primary and subsequent run-off contest. By that yardstick, Peretz claims to have brought in the most signatures followed by Herzog and Yachimovich. Assuming the petition claims are true, Labor's membership base could emerge as the second biggest behind Likud.
With a leader – Mitzna, Herzog, Yachimovich or Perez – preliminary polling suggests that Labor could, at least hypothetically, capture 17-19 mandates. Yet when the dust settles much depends on whether the party, which still defines itself as social-democratic, can be positioned at least within shouting distance of the center-left enabling it to pick up votes from Kadima. That will not be easy.
Mitzna says outright that he's returned to politics to mobilize the "peace camp." Perez professes that he would not require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; Yachimovich prefers to take vague stands on security issues and to focus instead on promoting greater government involvement in the economy. Margalit supports an interim Palestinian state now along the parameters of the security barrier. Herzog has been arguably more judicious while still calling for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. All these positions are essentially out of kilter with public sentiment.
So while the obituaries were premature, for Labor to avoid being permanently relegated to the margins of party politics alongside Meretz whoever wins its September primary would be wise to navigate toward Israel's post-Oslo center.
As for Barak's new party, were elections held today, Atzmaut would not to cross the electoral threshold.
###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, June 06, 2011
Public Opinion & the US - Israel Relationship
Liking Israel
The depth of empathy for the Jewish state among ordinary Americans -- persistently critical media coverage of Israel's West Bank, settlement and security policies notwithstanding – ought to be cause for positive amazement.
In stark contrast to strikingly negative European attitudes, a far-reaching CNN poll released May 31 presents an uplifting picture on American public opinion toward Israel: 65 percent of those surveyed had a generally favorable attitude. Equally heartening is a recent Rasmussen poll which found that 71% of Americans want the Palestinian Arabs to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
What regular folks think about foreign policy has often been disparaged. Winston Churchill warned politicians against keeping their ears to the ground because it would be hard for the public "to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture." Moreover, a vast swath of the American public remains blissfully ignorant about current affairs.
Be that as it may, the 24/7 news cycle and a ubiquitous Internet means that foreign affairs can hardly be conducted beyond the purview of public scrutiny as it would have been in the Victorian era.
Mass attitudes on foreign policy tend to be malleable, shaped – rather than followed – by opinion "mobilizers" in the government, media and academia. Plainly, there is a connection between what is covered and what people become interested in. But whether they are interested or not, the American public is fed a heavy diet of Middle East and Palestinian-Israeli conflict news.
In the last week of May, for example, a whopping 10 percent of all coverage was Mideast related compared to 12 percent for the troubled U.S. economy. No surprise then that nearly 18% of Americans say they follow the Arab-Israel conflict "very closely." That's only two percent less than those who say they are tracking the 2012 presidential election campaign.
Positive attitudes toward Israel have held steady through the second intifada and wars in Lebanon and Gaza. In the CNN survey, 44% of respondents identified Israel as an ally, only Britain (at 64%) scored higher. Asked where their sympathies lay 67% said Israel against 16% with the Palestinian Arabs; contrast this to 1988 when 37% were sympathetic toward Israel.
This increased level support was roughly the same across educational background, income and political affiliation though backing among those who define themselves as conservative was more robust at 83%. Within the Tea Party movement, 36% identified themselves as "very favorable" against just 6% who were "very unfavorable." Separately, we also know that there is a well-spring of support for Israel among believing Christians.
That said, most Americans (65%) would rather Washington not take sides at all. This reflects an always present and now growing trend in favor of U.S. isolationism in world affairs.
Moreover, despite near-saturation coverage ignorance about the conflict remains deep-seated as evidenced by a survey conducted by Arab-American pollster John Zogby which found "a plurality" for the so-called Palestinian "the right of return" to what is today Israel and for dismantling "settlements."
On the other hand, lack of knowledge probably doesn't explain why 51% of the "political class" (those who take strong and active interest in politics and often exercise power) in the Rasmussen survey were optimistic about the peace process in contrast to 87% of the presumably less informed "mainstream" who thought progress unlikely.
No less important is the backing Israel has within the heterogeneous U.S. Jewish community. A recent Frank Luntz poll found strong (61%) support for a united Jerusalem under Israeli jurisdiction and implied solid support for the retention of consensus or strategic settlement blocs in any peace deal.
Despite intensified campaigns by subversive groups within the community to redefine the essence of the conflict and what it means to be pro-Israel, fully 75% of U.S. Jews recognized that the ultimate Arab goal is the destruction of Israel; 94% wanted the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state thereby signaling an end to further claims. On the political front, a massive 85% thought that under President Barack Obama US-Israel relations were not going well. Which makes the next series of findings as disconcerting as they are seemingly incoherent: 55% of U.S. Jews sided with the administration even though 57% approved of the Netanyahu government's handling of relations; and 48% favor a Palestinian state "in the current situation."
The Luntz poll also illuminated the character of the community: more Democratic (50%) and independent (32%) than Republican (15%); heavily identified with the liberal streams of Judaism (52%) or "just Jewish" (37%) – whatever that means – than Orthodox (10%). Yet regardless of these distinctions, just 15% said Israel was not very important in their lives.
What does all this add up to? When it comes to the perpetual Palestinian war against Israel, rank-and-file Americans may have only a slim grasp of the complexities, yet they display an innate appreciation for the justice of Israel's cause. This is providential because no other nation is more dependent on the goodwill of Americans than Israel. The more solid that support, the greater the political constraints on any president whose pro-Israel sentiments are ambivalent. And the more apt is an Israel-friendly Congress to dispute White House pressure on Israel.
George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State in the late 1940s, observed that, "No policy -- foreign or domestic – can succeed without public support."
In the face of encouraging polling data, it behooves Israeli policymakers to shun complacency and to never, never, take the benevolence of the American people for granted.
###
The depth of empathy for the Jewish state among ordinary Americans -- persistently critical media coverage of Israel's West Bank, settlement and security policies notwithstanding – ought to be cause for positive amazement.
In stark contrast to strikingly negative European attitudes, a far-reaching CNN poll released May 31 presents an uplifting picture on American public opinion toward Israel: 65 percent of those surveyed had a generally favorable attitude. Equally heartening is a recent Rasmussen poll which found that 71% of Americans want the Palestinian Arabs to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
What regular folks think about foreign policy has often been disparaged. Winston Churchill warned politicians against keeping their ears to the ground because it would be hard for the public "to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture." Moreover, a vast swath of the American public remains blissfully ignorant about current affairs.
Be that as it may, the 24/7 news cycle and a ubiquitous Internet means that foreign affairs can hardly be conducted beyond the purview of public scrutiny as it would have been in the Victorian era.
Mass attitudes on foreign policy tend to be malleable, shaped – rather than followed – by opinion "mobilizers" in the government, media and academia. Plainly, there is a connection between what is covered and what people become interested in. But whether they are interested or not, the American public is fed a heavy diet of Middle East and Palestinian-Israeli conflict news.
In the last week of May, for example, a whopping 10 percent of all coverage was Mideast related compared to 12 percent for the troubled U.S. economy. No surprise then that nearly 18% of Americans say they follow the Arab-Israel conflict "very closely." That's only two percent less than those who say they are tracking the 2012 presidential election campaign.
Positive attitudes toward Israel have held steady through the second intifada and wars in Lebanon and Gaza. In the CNN survey, 44% of respondents identified Israel as an ally, only Britain (at 64%) scored higher. Asked where their sympathies lay 67% said Israel against 16% with the Palestinian Arabs; contrast this to 1988 when 37% were sympathetic toward Israel.
This increased level support was roughly the same across educational background, income and political affiliation though backing among those who define themselves as conservative was more robust at 83%. Within the Tea Party movement, 36% identified themselves as "very favorable" against just 6% who were "very unfavorable." Separately, we also know that there is a well-spring of support for Israel among believing Christians.
That said, most Americans (65%) would rather Washington not take sides at all. This reflects an always present and now growing trend in favor of U.S. isolationism in world affairs.
Moreover, despite near-saturation coverage ignorance about the conflict remains deep-seated as evidenced by a survey conducted by Arab-American pollster John Zogby which found "a plurality" for the so-called Palestinian "the right of return" to what is today Israel and for dismantling "settlements."
On the other hand, lack of knowledge probably doesn't explain why 51% of the "political class" (those who take strong and active interest in politics and often exercise power) in the Rasmussen survey were optimistic about the peace process in contrast to 87% of the presumably less informed "mainstream" who thought progress unlikely.
No less important is the backing Israel has within the heterogeneous U.S. Jewish community. A recent Frank Luntz poll found strong (61%) support for a united Jerusalem under Israeli jurisdiction and implied solid support for the retention of consensus or strategic settlement blocs in any peace deal.
Despite intensified campaigns by subversive groups within the community to redefine the essence of the conflict and what it means to be pro-Israel, fully 75% of U.S. Jews recognized that the ultimate Arab goal is the destruction of Israel; 94% wanted the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state thereby signaling an end to further claims. On the political front, a massive 85% thought that under President Barack Obama US-Israel relations were not going well. Which makes the next series of findings as disconcerting as they are seemingly incoherent: 55% of U.S. Jews sided with the administration even though 57% approved of the Netanyahu government's handling of relations; and 48% favor a Palestinian state "in the current situation."
The Luntz poll also illuminated the character of the community: more Democratic (50%) and independent (32%) than Republican (15%); heavily identified with the liberal streams of Judaism (52%) or "just Jewish" (37%) – whatever that means – than Orthodox (10%). Yet regardless of these distinctions, just 15% said Israel was not very important in their lives.
What does all this add up to? When it comes to the perpetual Palestinian war against Israel, rank-and-file Americans may have only a slim grasp of the complexities, yet they display an innate appreciation for the justice of Israel's cause. This is providential because no other nation is more dependent on the goodwill of Americans than Israel. The more solid that support, the greater the political constraints on any president whose pro-Israel sentiments are ambivalent. And the more apt is an Israel-friendly Congress to dispute White House pressure on Israel.
George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State in the late 1940s, observed that, "No policy -- foreign or domestic – can succeed without public support."
In the face of encouraging polling data, it behooves Israeli policymakers to shun complacency and to never, never, take the benevolence of the American people for granted.
###
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 Soldiers Shoot at WHOM on Syrian Border?
Israeli Soldiers Shoot at Protesters on Syrian Border?
At what point do those who, in the words of the article,
"crossed a new trench and tried to attack the border fence"
become rioters or invaders?
It's an interesting question for the headline writers at the Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/world/middleeast/06mideast.html?_r=1&hp
and at the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/palestinian-protesters-attempt-to-cross-at-golan-heights-israeli-troops-open-fire/2011/06/05/AG7nUWJH_story.html?hpid=z2
and at the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13660311
At what point do those who, in the words of the article,
"crossed a new trench and tried to attack the border fence"
become rioters or invaders?
It's an interesting question for the headline writers at the Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/world/middleeast/06mideast.html?_r=1&hp
and at the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/palestinian-protesters-attempt-to-cross-at-golan-heights-israeli-troops-open-fire/2011/06/05/AG7nUWJH_story.html?hpid=z2
and at the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13660311
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, June 03, 2011
Jews and Capitalism
Why are some Jews uncomfortable with capitalism? Not merely the cliché of capitalism as rapacious speculation and exploitative profiteering, but the mere idea of organizing the economy along free-market lines. While Jewish poverty is still with us chances are most Jews are more embarrassed by Jewish wealth. Perhaps the connection between power and money is the problem. Wealth is certainly one more excuse for anti-Semitism. Yet Jews would probably not have survived into the post-modern era without their genius for making money.
Free market countries tend to foster the kind of liberty and tolerance that have enabled Jews to thrive. Yet many Jews are inclined against political ideologies that champion the free market. A conference sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies on "Free Markets and Social Progress" held in Jerusalem on May 29 sought to come to grips with, among other things, this apparent discomfiture with capitalism.
Perhaps it’s a matter of branding. Promoting smaller government in order that voters can keep more of their own money is unappealing because it's perceived as boorishly self-centered, unfair, and for Jews the antithesis of tikkun olam, Russell Roberts of George Mason University argued. He sees hanging the free market idea on low taxes and small government in isolation as a mistake. Instead, people need to understand that the collective interest is manifested not in government but in a "subtle emergent order of cooperation" that transcends even market forces. For instance, in America – unlike Israel – government does not regulate religion with the result that America has a vibrant market place of religious ideas. In contrast, Judaism in Israel has been buffeted by being tethered to the state.
For Roberts the value of smaller government is that allows for informal bottom-up collective decision making that "just happens." Citing The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, Roberts argued that it is not the pursuit of wealth that makes people happy – "being loved and being lovely does."
People want to do good because they want to be liked. Capitalism understands that humans are self interested though they need not be selfish. Smaller government won't make people rich but it could make them freer and empower them to do better for themselves and their fellow human beings. Roberts believes that when left to their own devices people won't just give charity they'll cooperate with each other in ways that go beyond commerce. Therefore, those who fret over small government actually show a distain for the ability of ordinary citizens to make their own moral decisions.
What does Judaism have to say about the place of charity and generosity in the free market? Most scholars would say that the liberty inherent in the free market system encourages both these values. Provocatively, philosopher Joseph Isaac Lifshitz of the Shalem Center prefers to emphasize a distinction rooted in Jewish thought between purely altruistic charity, which he sees as laying "outside the market" in contrast to helping others enter the market which he terms "generosity."
Judaism accepts that in any choice between an individual and their neighbor putting the self first is perfectly all right. In fact, there can be no genuine fulfillment of the Biblical command to "love thy neighbor" without a healthy dose of self-interest. Lifshitz would like us to think of investment – specifically on the micro-level – as a normative good. An investor may profit but what matters morally is setting their fellow man on the path toward financial self-sufficiency.
Jewish survival, moreover, has depended not on individual charity but on communal prosperity, precisely the kind fostered by investment that is propelled not by self-abnegation but by healthy self-interest. "It is this type of political virtue that generates political power from bottom up," Lifshitz maintains. The higher moral good, then, is the "generosity" of investment rather than charity.
But how can Jews – or anyone else for that matter – fail to be discomfited by the upheaval resulting from the global financial meltdown? Isn't this the ultimate indictment of the free market and proof par excellence that society needs more economic regulation? Sam Peltzman, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago doesn't think so. He told the conference, counter-intuitively, that efforts to regulate economic conduct actually induced the very behavior that contributed to the financial crisis.
Bankers and CEOs, he said, will invariably behave in ways that offset the intended effects of any regulation. Such "offsetting behavior" begets more regulations, which beget even more offsetting behavior. The human proclivity for risk-taking can't be suppressed by bureaucratic regulations. Put plainly, economic life is far too complex to regulate. Moreover, the U.S. government's willingness to bailout banks and big corporations serves to reward rather than deter appalling economic decisions. Only the sobering prospect that bad business decisions will have bad consequences for those who make them can deter reckless risk-taking.
The views aired at the conference might seem iconoclastic only because they receive scant exposure in the media. To the extent that we give economics any thought at all, most of us adhere to conventional thinking. Jews like others prefer to adopt fashionable views on politics and economics rather than gravitate toward positions that have little resonance in the liberal newspapers we read, the public radio we listen to and the kind of television we watch.
Finally, historian Paul Johnson has pointed out, nomenclature may be another aspect of the problem. "Capitalism is an unfortunate name" for what is "not an ideology dreamed up by an economic philosopher" but a way of life that simply evolved "from the free and uncoordinated transactions and unimpeded movements of countless unknown individuals."
###
Free market countries tend to foster the kind of liberty and tolerance that have enabled Jews to thrive. Yet many Jews are inclined against political ideologies that champion the free market. A conference sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies on "Free Markets and Social Progress" held in Jerusalem on May 29 sought to come to grips with, among other things, this apparent discomfiture with capitalism.
Perhaps it’s a matter of branding. Promoting smaller government in order that voters can keep more of their own money is unappealing because it's perceived as boorishly self-centered, unfair, and for Jews the antithesis of tikkun olam, Russell Roberts of George Mason University argued. He sees hanging the free market idea on low taxes and small government in isolation as a mistake. Instead, people need to understand that the collective interest is manifested not in government but in a "subtle emergent order of cooperation" that transcends even market forces. For instance, in America – unlike Israel – government does not regulate religion with the result that America has a vibrant market place of religious ideas. In contrast, Judaism in Israel has been buffeted by being tethered to the state.
For Roberts the value of smaller government is that allows for informal bottom-up collective decision making that "just happens." Citing The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, Roberts argued that it is not the pursuit of wealth that makes people happy – "being loved and being lovely does."
People want to do good because they want to be liked. Capitalism understands that humans are self interested though they need not be selfish. Smaller government won't make people rich but it could make them freer and empower them to do better for themselves and their fellow human beings. Roberts believes that when left to their own devices people won't just give charity they'll cooperate with each other in ways that go beyond commerce. Therefore, those who fret over small government actually show a distain for the ability of ordinary citizens to make their own moral decisions.
What does Judaism have to say about the place of charity and generosity in the free market? Most scholars would say that the liberty inherent in the free market system encourages both these values. Provocatively, philosopher Joseph Isaac Lifshitz of the Shalem Center prefers to emphasize a distinction rooted in Jewish thought between purely altruistic charity, which he sees as laying "outside the market" in contrast to helping others enter the market which he terms "generosity."
Judaism accepts that in any choice between an individual and their neighbor putting the self first is perfectly all right. In fact, there can be no genuine fulfillment of the Biblical command to "love thy neighbor" without a healthy dose of self-interest. Lifshitz would like us to think of investment – specifically on the micro-level – as a normative good. An investor may profit but what matters morally is setting their fellow man on the path toward financial self-sufficiency.
Jewish survival, moreover, has depended not on individual charity but on communal prosperity, precisely the kind fostered by investment that is propelled not by self-abnegation but by healthy self-interest. "It is this type of political virtue that generates political power from bottom up," Lifshitz maintains. The higher moral good, then, is the "generosity" of investment rather than charity.
But how can Jews – or anyone else for that matter – fail to be discomfited by the upheaval resulting from the global financial meltdown? Isn't this the ultimate indictment of the free market and proof par excellence that society needs more economic regulation? Sam Peltzman, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago doesn't think so. He told the conference, counter-intuitively, that efforts to regulate economic conduct actually induced the very behavior that contributed to the financial crisis.
Bankers and CEOs, he said, will invariably behave in ways that offset the intended effects of any regulation. Such "offsetting behavior" begets more regulations, which beget even more offsetting behavior. The human proclivity for risk-taking can't be suppressed by bureaucratic regulations. Put plainly, economic life is far too complex to regulate. Moreover, the U.S. government's willingness to bailout banks and big corporations serves to reward rather than deter appalling economic decisions. Only the sobering prospect that bad business decisions will have bad consequences for those who make them can deter reckless risk-taking.
The views aired at the conference might seem iconoclastic only because they receive scant exposure in the media. To the extent that we give economics any thought at all, most of us adhere to conventional thinking. Jews like others prefer to adopt fashionable views on politics and economics rather than gravitate toward positions that have little resonance in the liberal newspapers we read, the public radio we listen to and the kind of television we watch.
Finally, historian Paul Johnson has pointed out, nomenclature may be another aspect of the problem. "Capitalism is an unfortunate name" for what is "not an ideology dreamed up by an economic philosopher" but a way of life that simply evolved "from the free and uncoordinated transactions and unimpeded movements of countless unknown individuals."
###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, May 23, 2011
MORALITY, TERROR and JUDAISM
The Jewish Way in War
How can democracies – Israel in particular – acting under the conventions of international law defeat Islamist terrorists operating by their own benighted rules? How when U.N. members states are prepared to enable the terrorists by perverting the rules of war and of human rights? This perennial dilemma was addressed at a symposium last week at Bar-Ilan University.
The war between democracies and terror organizations is inherently asymmetrical with conventional forces arrayed against terrorists embedded among their own civilian population. The liberal position articulated by the renowned Princeton University political thinker Michael Walzer, is that soldiers may not increase risks to civilians to save themselves. Even warning civilians to vacate an area prior to striking – as the IDF routinely did during the 2008-09 Gaza war – is for Walzer morally insufficient.
Caught between such fanciful liberal ideals and the cynical machinations of intergovernmental bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council that have shamelessly, discriminatorily and obsessively scapegoated Israel for opprobrium, Israeli theoreticians of war are not only insisting that international law not be misrepresented but they are also mining Jewish tradition for a moral reality check.
What does Judaism have to say about the rules of war? My colleague Aryeh Tepper pointed out here that post-Biblical Judaism was mostly silent on the subject until Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917-1994) composed a code of Jewish military law for the modern Jewish commonwealth.
Israel's war guidelines have been partly extrapolated from preexisting Jewish civil and criminal codes. The "rodef" concept, for instance, had long made it obligatory to kill someone who is "pursuing" another with murderous intent. What is warfare if not "rodef" writ-large? Similarly, the law of "pikuah nefesh" the saving of a Jewish life (in the first stance) has primacy when confronting just about any moral/legal/religious conundrum. For example, writing at the beginning of the second intifada, Rabbi David Golinkin, the leading halachic authority of Israel's Conservative movement, appears to countenance lethal measures against deadly stone throwers.
Since 1973, all of Israel's wars have involved asymmetrical combat, pitting the IDF against Arab irregulars entrenched among civilians. Jewish tradition does not seem to distinguish greatly between conventional and asymmetrical warfare. The basic rules appear the same. What is important in Judaism is to distinguish between obligatory zero-sum wars forced upon Israel and wars of choice waged for political ends. The former requires full mobilization and all-out war; the latter are subject to various checks and balances.
Would eradicating Hamas and Hezbollah fall under the category of obligatory war? The command to utterly destroy Israel's enemies, some halachic authorities citing Maimonides maintain, applied exclusively to the seven Canaanite nations that inhabited the Land of Israel in Biblical times. However, some right-wing theologians argue that those who are committed to Israel's destruction today are metaphysical remnants of its ancient eternal enemies and that the biblical laws apply.
Addressing the symposium, Prof. Stuart A. Cohen, of the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan recalled the theological and moral storm that broke out in 2010 with the publication of Hebrew monograph The King’s Torah by Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira, dean of the Od Yosef Chai seminary at Yitzhar, a settlement in Samaria. Shapira's starting point was to make a distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish life in time of war. Does Jewish law permit killing the children of a terrorist leader in order to pressure him? What if he uses his family as human shields? The rabbi concluded that they could be considered fair targets. Issues of proportionality and collateral damage simply would not matter in obligatory wars waged by Jews against non-Jews. Rabbis from across the theological and political spectrum challenged Shapira's strict constructionist interpretation of Halachic sources on the grounds that egregious behavior by Israeli soldiers would transgress the commandment not to bring shame unto God (hillul ha-Shem) and could, moreover, endanger Diaspora Jews (pikuah nefesh). Police briefly arrested Shapira; copies of his halachic-academic work were confiscated and are now near impossible to obtain.
Among those in the vanguard of crafting sensible 21st century war guidelines for the Israel Defense Forces is political philosopher Asa Kasher of Tel Aviv University. Kasher, who also addressed the Bar-Ilan conference, argued that the ethical starting point for Israel's behavior needs to be the responsibilities the Jewish state has to its own soldiers and citizens – not what it may or may not do to foreigners. In weighing the life-and-death scales between protecting Israel's citizen-soldiers and those of enemy non-combatants, Kasher argued that there is nothing moral about jeopardizing your own soldiers to protect an enemy population – provided proper precautions have been taken to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties.
If democracies are to defeat the forces of violent intolerance they will need to develop strategies to take back international law from those who have perverted it. Kasher believes that Israel has a front line role in helping the enlightened world develop the legal and moral tools to confront the scourge of terrorism. If salvaged, international law has the potential of becoming a binding part of Israel's religio-legal fabric, an idea championed by the late Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli of the national-religious camp. For now, accompanied by the distress they ought to feel at the thought that they may be forced to kill, Israeli soldiers should know that they have the moral authority to defend their country.
###
May 23, 2011
How can democracies – Israel in particular – acting under the conventions of international law defeat Islamist terrorists operating by their own benighted rules? How when U.N. members states are prepared to enable the terrorists by perverting the rules of war and of human rights? This perennial dilemma was addressed at a symposium last week at Bar-Ilan University.
The war between democracies and terror organizations is inherently asymmetrical with conventional forces arrayed against terrorists embedded among their own civilian population. The liberal position articulated by the renowned Princeton University political thinker Michael Walzer, is that soldiers may not increase risks to civilians to save themselves. Even warning civilians to vacate an area prior to striking – as the IDF routinely did during the 2008-09 Gaza war – is for Walzer morally insufficient.
Caught between such fanciful liberal ideals and the cynical machinations of intergovernmental bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council that have shamelessly, discriminatorily and obsessively scapegoated Israel for opprobrium, Israeli theoreticians of war are not only insisting that international law not be misrepresented but they are also mining Jewish tradition for a moral reality check.
What does Judaism have to say about the rules of war? My colleague Aryeh Tepper pointed out here that post-Biblical Judaism was mostly silent on the subject until Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917-1994) composed a code of Jewish military law for the modern Jewish commonwealth.
Israel's war guidelines have been partly extrapolated from preexisting Jewish civil and criminal codes. The "rodef" concept, for instance, had long made it obligatory to kill someone who is "pursuing" another with murderous intent. What is warfare if not "rodef" writ-large? Similarly, the law of "pikuah nefesh" the saving of a Jewish life (in the first stance) has primacy when confronting just about any moral/legal/religious conundrum. For example, writing at the beginning of the second intifada, Rabbi David Golinkin, the leading halachic authority of Israel's Conservative movement, appears to countenance lethal measures against deadly stone throwers.
Since 1973, all of Israel's wars have involved asymmetrical combat, pitting the IDF against Arab irregulars entrenched among civilians. Jewish tradition does not seem to distinguish greatly between conventional and asymmetrical warfare. The basic rules appear the same. What is important in Judaism is to distinguish between obligatory zero-sum wars forced upon Israel and wars of choice waged for political ends. The former requires full mobilization and all-out war; the latter are subject to various checks and balances.
Would eradicating Hamas and Hezbollah fall under the category of obligatory war? The command to utterly destroy Israel's enemies, some halachic authorities citing Maimonides maintain, applied exclusively to the seven Canaanite nations that inhabited the Land of Israel in Biblical times. However, some right-wing theologians argue that those who are committed to Israel's destruction today are metaphysical remnants of its ancient eternal enemies and that the biblical laws apply.
Addressing the symposium, Prof. Stuart A. Cohen, of the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan recalled the theological and moral storm that broke out in 2010 with the publication of Hebrew monograph The King’s Torah by Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira, dean of the Od Yosef Chai seminary at Yitzhar, a settlement in Samaria. Shapira's starting point was to make a distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish life in time of war. Does Jewish law permit killing the children of a terrorist leader in order to pressure him? What if he uses his family as human shields? The rabbi concluded that they could be considered fair targets. Issues of proportionality and collateral damage simply would not matter in obligatory wars waged by Jews against non-Jews. Rabbis from across the theological and political spectrum challenged Shapira's strict constructionist interpretation of Halachic sources on the grounds that egregious behavior by Israeli soldiers would transgress the commandment not to bring shame unto God (hillul ha-Shem) and could, moreover, endanger Diaspora Jews (pikuah nefesh). Police briefly arrested Shapira; copies of his halachic-academic work were confiscated and are now near impossible to obtain.
Among those in the vanguard of crafting sensible 21st century war guidelines for the Israel Defense Forces is political philosopher Asa Kasher of Tel Aviv University. Kasher, who also addressed the Bar-Ilan conference, argued that the ethical starting point for Israel's behavior needs to be the responsibilities the Jewish state has to its own soldiers and citizens – not what it may or may not do to foreigners. In weighing the life-and-death scales between protecting Israel's citizen-soldiers and those of enemy non-combatants, Kasher argued that there is nothing moral about jeopardizing your own soldiers to protect an enemy population – provided proper precautions have been taken to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties.
If democracies are to defeat the forces of violent intolerance they will need to develop strategies to take back international law from those who have perverted it. Kasher believes that Israel has a front line role in helping the enlightened world develop the legal and moral tools to confront the scourge of terrorism. If salvaged, international law has the potential of becoming a binding part of Israel's religio-legal fabric, an idea championed by the late Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli of the national-religious camp. For now, accompanied by the distress they ought to feel at the thought that they may be forced to kill, Israeli soldiers should know that they have the moral authority to defend their country.
###
May 23, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Canadian Relations With Israel
The Canadian Exception
Geography, history, economics and necessity have made the U.S. and Canada allies, though Americans tend to take their good neighbor to the north for granted. Israel, six-thousand miles away, has every reason not to follow the American example.
Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party, Canada's friendship toward Israel has stood in contradistinction to the treatment Jerusalem has gotten from its fair-weather European allies and a fickle Obama administration. In May 2nd elections, to Israelis' delight, Harper won a resounding electoral and ideological victory giving him a clear majority in parliament.
None of this was preordained. The trajectory of Israel's relations with Canada essentially mirrored those it has had with Western Europe – starting out warm and turning increasingly frosty. In 1947 Canada's Minister for External Affairs Lester Pearson, an internationalist liberal supported the partition of Palestine. The Zionists were grateful; the Arabs utterly rejected the two-state solution, went to war and lost.
During the 1956 Sinai Campaign France and Britain were allied with Israel as Canada sought to placate both London and a fuming Eisenhower administration. Afterwards, Ottawa's adhered to a pro-Israel stance through the 1967 Six Day War wobbling only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Pierre Trudeau in power (1968-1979 and again from 1980-1984). The 1973 Arab oil embargo, PLO airliner hijackings and terrorist outrages, such as the massacre of twenty-one Israeli schoolchildren at Ma'alot on May 15, 1974, swayed Europe and Canada against Israel.
In 1975, Trudeau postponed a UN conference slated to take place in Canada with Yasir Arafat's participation only under pressure from the Jewish community. As soon as Canada's Jewish leadership abandoned the issue, Trudeau's inhibitions about having his diplomats sit with the PLO disappeared along with any interest in opposing the Arab economic boycott of Israel.
Talk about moving Canada's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was shelved as a self-deluded Canadian government, press and intellectual elite emphatically embraced an Arab line that negated Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria. Canada, like Europe, said settlements not unremitting Arab rejectionism was the obstacle to peace.
No surprise then that Ottawa showed no understanding of Israel's predicament leading up to and during the 1982 Lebanon War. By the mid-1980s, under Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, Canada had formalized its pro-Arab course. Clark called for a Palestinian "homeland" long before Arafat even feigned recognition of Israel's right to exist and pressed Washington to exploit the political environment during the 1991 Gulf War to force Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. At the start of the first intifada (1987–1993) Clark ignored Palestinian-on-Palestinian bloodletting that would ultimately take over 1,100 Arab lives, overlooked Palestinian brutality against Jews that would claim 421 Israeli victims, and leveled his criticism primarily on Israel. Similarly, Canadian media coverage portrayed Israel as a Goliath striking down purportedly "unarmed" Palestinian protestors. Even the Canadian labor movement turned against Israel.
Only in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Islamist terror attacks and Arafat's unleashing of the second intifada that would take hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli lives did Canada begin, under Paul Martin (2003 – 2006), to slow its anti-Israel drift as exemplified by Ottawa's abstention on a UN vote against Israel's life-saving security barrier.
With Harper's election in 2006 the drift was halted and reversed. The new Canadian government became the first to cut ties with Palestinian Authority after radical Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza. In July 2006, Harper courageously stood with Israel against Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War. In 2009 Ottawa led the way in opposing a repeat performance of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Durban conference of 2001 as well as other Arab efforts to perversely exploit the UN Human Rights Council as a battering ram against Israel.
What explains this Canadian exceptionalism? Canadian political analysts insist that Harper's attitude toward the Jewish state is a matter of personal conviction and shared, moreover, by other party leaders including Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney. They see Israel for what it is: an unwavering island of democracy and a bastion of Western values in a perilous unstable region. The reconstituted Conservative party Harper now leads came into existence only in 2003 and does not carry the anti-Israel baggage of its predecessor.
Though it continues to import petroleum, Canada is actually the fifth largest energy producer in the world; third in gas; seventh in oil. Such energy independence lessens the penchant toward moral and diplomatic myopia suffered by Europe.
Harper's principled stance is by no means politically risk-free. Of the main national newspapers that delve into global affairs the National Post is editorially sympathetic to Israel though it relies on occasionally tendentious wire services for its Middle East coverage. The Globe & Mail which endorsed Harper is somewhat less supportive and its Israel bureau chief Patrick Martin has been a strident anti-Israel critic. And while Canadians are not particularly interested in foreign affairs, Harper's support for Israel hardly panders to popular opinion. A recent BBC World Service poll found that fifty-two percent of Canadians still view Israel unfavorably. During the Second Lebanon War only 45 percent agreed with Harper's pro-Israel position. In Quebec, historically less friendly to Jews and Israel, there has been even greater dissatisfaction with the government's stand.
Still, in Harper's core constituency, which includes Christian supporters of Israel, his willingness to go against the grain is valued. Moreover, increasing numbers of Jews in key Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver electoral "ridings" where they are sufficiently concentrated to hold sway have abandoned Liberal for Conservative candidates. Even the famously pro-Israel Liberal MP Irwin Cutler barely won reelection in a heavily Jewish district against his pro-Israel Conservative opponent. Unlike their co-religionists to the south, Canada's 350,000 Jews (out of a 34 million population) see themselves as part of a multicultural mosaic not a melting pot; they tend to be traditionally oriented with a large proportion having actually visited Israel. And they are far less prone to anchor their "Jewish identity" in criticizing Israeli policies.
Exactly fifty years ago, in May 1961, David Ben-Gurion became the first Prime Minister of Israel to make an official visit to Canada. Which brings us to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned visit to Washington later this month. Would it not be menschlich if he made it a point to stopover in Ottawa to personally express Israel's gratitude to Harper and the Canadian electorate for their refreshingly sincere and unqualified friendship?
###
-- May 2, 2011
Geography, history, economics and necessity have made the U.S. and Canada allies, though Americans tend to take their good neighbor to the north for granted. Israel, six-thousand miles away, has every reason not to follow the American example.
Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party, Canada's friendship toward Israel has stood in contradistinction to the treatment Jerusalem has gotten from its fair-weather European allies and a fickle Obama administration. In May 2nd elections, to Israelis' delight, Harper won a resounding electoral and ideological victory giving him a clear majority in parliament.
None of this was preordained. The trajectory of Israel's relations with Canada essentially mirrored those it has had with Western Europe – starting out warm and turning increasingly frosty. In 1947 Canada's Minister for External Affairs Lester Pearson, an internationalist liberal supported the partition of Palestine. The Zionists were grateful; the Arabs utterly rejected the two-state solution, went to war and lost.
During the 1956 Sinai Campaign France and Britain were allied with Israel as Canada sought to placate both London and a fuming Eisenhower administration. Afterwards, Ottawa's adhered to a pro-Israel stance through the 1967 Six Day War wobbling only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Pierre Trudeau in power (1968-1979 and again from 1980-1984). The 1973 Arab oil embargo, PLO airliner hijackings and terrorist outrages, such as the massacre of twenty-one Israeli schoolchildren at Ma'alot on May 15, 1974, swayed Europe and Canada against Israel.
In 1975, Trudeau postponed a UN conference slated to take place in Canada with Yasir Arafat's participation only under pressure from the Jewish community. As soon as Canada's Jewish leadership abandoned the issue, Trudeau's inhibitions about having his diplomats sit with the PLO disappeared along with any interest in opposing the Arab economic boycott of Israel.
Talk about moving Canada's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was shelved as a self-deluded Canadian government, press and intellectual elite emphatically embraced an Arab line that negated Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria. Canada, like Europe, said settlements not unremitting Arab rejectionism was the obstacle to peace.
No surprise then that Ottawa showed no understanding of Israel's predicament leading up to and during the 1982 Lebanon War. By the mid-1980s, under Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, Canada had formalized its pro-Arab course. Clark called for a Palestinian "homeland" long before Arafat even feigned recognition of Israel's right to exist and pressed Washington to exploit the political environment during the 1991 Gulf War to force Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. At the start of the first intifada (1987–1993) Clark ignored Palestinian-on-Palestinian bloodletting that would ultimately take over 1,100 Arab lives, overlooked Palestinian brutality against Jews that would claim 421 Israeli victims, and leveled his criticism primarily on Israel. Similarly, Canadian media coverage portrayed Israel as a Goliath striking down purportedly "unarmed" Palestinian protestors. Even the Canadian labor movement turned against Israel.
Only in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Islamist terror attacks and Arafat's unleashing of the second intifada that would take hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli lives did Canada begin, under Paul Martin (2003 – 2006), to slow its anti-Israel drift as exemplified by Ottawa's abstention on a UN vote against Israel's life-saving security barrier.
With Harper's election in 2006 the drift was halted and reversed. The new Canadian government became the first to cut ties with Palestinian Authority after radical Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza. In July 2006, Harper courageously stood with Israel against Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War. In 2009 Ottawa led the way in opposing a repeat performance of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Durban conference of 2001 as well as other Arab efforts to perversely exploit the UN Human Rights Council as a battering ram against Israel.
What explains this Canadian exceptionalism? Canadian political analysts insist that Harper's attitude toward the Jewish state is a matter of personal conviction and shared, moreover, by other party leaders including Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney. They see Israel for what it is: an unwavering island of democracy and a bastion of Western values in a perilous unstable region. The reconstituted Conservative party Harper now leads came into existence only in 2003 and does not carry the anti-Israel baggage of its predecessor.
Though it continues to import petroleum, Canada is actually the fifth largest energy producer in the world; third in gas; seventh in oil. Such energy independence lessens the penchant toward moral and diplomatic myopia suffered by Europe.
Harper's principled stance is by no means politically risk-free. Of the main national newspapers that delve into global affairs the National Post is editorially sympathetic to Israel though it relies on occasionally tendentious wire services for its Middle East coverage. The Globe & Mail which endorsed Harper is somewhat less supportive and its Israel bureau chief Patrick Martin has been a strident anti-Israel critic. And while Canadians are not particularly interested in foreign affairs, Harper's support for Israel hardly panders to popular opinion. A recent BBC World Service poll found that fifty-two percent of Canadians still view Israel unfavorably. During the Second Lebanon War only 45 percent agreed with Harper's pro-Israel position. In Quebec, historically less friendly to Jews and Israel, there has been even greater dissatisfaction with the government's stand.
Still, in Harper's core constituency, which includes Christian supporters of Israel, his willingness to go against the grain is valued. Moreover, increasing numbers of Jews in key Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver electoral "ridings" where they are sufficiently concentrated to hold sway have abandoned Liberal for Conservative candidates. Even the famously pro-Israel Liberal MP Irwin Cutler barely won reelection in a heavily Jewish district against his pro-Israel Conservative opponent. Unlike their co-religionists to the south, Canada's 350,000 Jews (out of a 34 million population) see themselves as part of a multicultural mosaic not a melting pot; they tend to be traditionally oriented with a large proportion having actually visited Israel. And they are far less prone to anchor their "Jewish identity" in criticizing Israeli policies.
Exactly fifty years ago, in May 1961, David Ben-Gurion became the first Prime Minister of Israel to make an official visit to Canada. Which brings us to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned visit to Washington later this month. Would it not be menschlich if he made it a point to stopover in Ottawa to personally express Israel's gratitude to Harper and the Canadian electorate for their refreshingly sincere and unqualified friendship?
###
-- May 2, 2011
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.
WHAT IF BEN-GURION WERE MEETING OBAMA AND NOT NETANYAHU
What Would Ben-Gurion Do?
Here is a hypothetical being asked around Israel: How would David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel's first prime minister and a founding father, handle himself if it were he and not Benjamin Netanyahu who was scheduled to meet President Barack Obama on Friday (May 20), address AIPAC on Monday (May 23) and speak before a joint session of the US Congress on Tuesday (May 24)? Ben-Gurion's own meeting – precisely fifty years ago this month – with President John F. Kennedy provides some context about the limits of prime ministerial charisma and the constraints on Israel's freedom of action.
Start with U.S. Jewry. Even before he set out for America, Ben-Gurion found himself embroiled in a bitter public dispute with Nahum Goldmann and Irving Miller, top American Jewish leaders, over Israel's relationship with the Diaspora. Ben-Gurion began the row by saying that a Jew could only be a Zionist by making aliya – immigrating to Israel. The Jewish leaders insisted that one could be a perfectly good Zionist by aiding Israel from afar and by unifying Jews behind Israel as the civilizational core of world Jewry. Ben-Gurion further antagonized Goldmann and Miller by having issued a joint statement with Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, which affirmed that Israel would not interfere in the internal affairs of the Diaspora and stipulating that aliya was a matter of personal choice.
Ben-Gurion well knew that the AJC in those days identified itself as non-Zionist and had pointedly stayed out of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in which Goldmann and Miller were leaders. Goldmann, who later became a vehement critic of the very Jewish establishment he helped create, lambasted Ben-Gurion for undermining the unity of American Jewry by fixing Israel-Diaspora relations with what Goldmann termed an "unrepresentative" AJC. One can only imagine Goldmann's and Miller's apoplectic reaction when they learned that while he was in the U.S. Ben-Gurion went so far as to meet with Lessing Rosenwald head of the stridently anti-Zionist American Council on Judaism.
Ben-Gurion departed Israel on May 24, 1961 travelling first to see Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. At last, on May 30 at 4:45PM he was ushered into the presidential suite at Manhattan's Waldorf Hotel for his private meeting with Kennedy. The official explanation for the venue was that JFK would be leaving from New York for a summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, the administration did not want to antagonize the Arab states by officially hosting Ben-Gurion at the White House. The premier, accompanied by Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman, was described as tense heading into the meeting which included Myer Feldman, the president's liaison to the Jewish community and Phil Talbot from the State Department.
In a remark that Ben-Gurion later told intimates he found uncouth, JFK began by saying: "You know, I was elected by the Jews of New York" – indeed he had garnered 80 percent of the Jewish vote nationwide in his razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections – and that he felt obliged to "do something" in return. Taken aback, Ben-Gurion replied, "You must do whatever is good for the free world."
There were three main items on the president's agenda. He knew that Ben-Gurion would be asking to purchase HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. Kennedy's State Department was decidedly opposed; the Pentagon was indifferent. Next, Kennedy wanted to get Ben-Gurion's assurance that Israel would not use its Dimona nuclear reactor – just visited by international inspectors who returned with a favorable report – for military purposes. And finally, Kennedy wanted Ben-Gurion to make a gesture to the Arabs on the refugee issue.
Ben-Gurion first implied that the Eisenhower administration had been inclined to sell Israel the HAWKS. When he saw this tack wasn't working he made a fresh case on the merits: The Soviets were supplying Egypt with advanced MIG-19s warplanes and the purely defensive HAWKS were needed to counter this threat. Not wanting to introduce missiles into the region – or leave Israel in a position that invited attack – JFK pledged to "continue to review the missile situation." Ben-Gurion didn't get a "yes" but he found JFK far more sympathetic than his predecessor. Indeed, in August 1962, following a meeting between 39 year-old Shimon Peres, director-general of the Defense Ministry, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy, the administration agreed to sell the anti-aircraft system to Israel.
On Dimona, Ben-Gurion had already told Diefenbaker just days earlier that as a matter of survival Israel might be forced to develop a nuclear capability. Kennedy talked in a friendly way about the recently completed international inspection at Dimona and said that there must not be even the appearance that Israel was pursing nuclear weapons. Ben-Gurion replied that for now the facility was indeed engaged in peaceful nuclear pursuits but that were Israel faced with an existential threat it would keep its future options open. Much depended on the Soviet and Egyptian threat. The signals from Gamal Nasser were more than discouraging. Ben-Gurion told JFK: "If they should defeat us they would do to the Jews what Hitler did."
Kennedy next wanted to talk about the Palestinian Arab refugees. The premier said that Nasser did not really care what happened to them. The Israeli position was that the refugees should be resettled and absorbed in Egyptian-occupied Gaza, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and in Lebanon. JFK asked Israel to take back a token number of refugees saying it would help the US in trying to mediate between the parties. Ben-Gurion predicted that the initiative would fail, but Kennedy responded that Washington would rather see the onus of rejectionism rest with the Arabs. So Ben-Gurion agreed that the initiative was "worth trying" and following the meeting told the press that he and JFK were in agreement on a refugee initiative. Either the two men did not understand one other or the U.S. toughened its stance, but when UN Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson later detailed the specifics of the repatriation proposal to Israeli officials it became clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between what Israel could live with and what Washington wanted.
By 6 P.M. the Ben-Gurion-JFK confab had concluded.
The next day, the New York Times led its coverage with the "problem of the Palestine Arab refugees."
Before leaving for London on his way back to Israel, Ben-Gurion met with the Conference of Presidents and with former president Harry S Truman, to thank him for his previous support He also saw former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ambassador Stevenson, and Labor leader George Meany.
Anticipating criticism of the meeting, the State Department had sent diplomatic notes in JFK's name to Arab countries pledging that America would be an "honest broker" and continue to press Israel on the refugees. Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted Washington wanted to remain impartial on the Arab-Israel conflict.
None of this, however, placated the likes of Lebanese-born Ahmad Shukeiri, then serving as a Saudi diplomat to the U.N. and later to become the founding head of the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was established by the Arab League in 1964. The administration's unappreciated efforts at "impartiality" nevertheless brought it in conflict with Congress which sought to cut U.S. aid to Egypt.
In grappling with the "What would Ben-Gurion Do?" question, journalist Amnon Lord, speaking recently on Israel's Knesset Channel, bemoaned the sense prevalent in Israel today that its fate is no longer in its hands; its independence seems to be dissipating. Who would have thought, he asked, that a Netanyahu government would have imposed a de facto freeze on new housing construction in Jerusalem?
Actually, Netanyahu's position is not spectacularly different from Ben-Gurion's. Granted, Obama is more of an Eisenhower than a JFK, but the options available to an Israeli premier haven't changed all that much. Ben-Gurion employed suasion on the HAWKS and succeeded; on existential questions of survival – what the future might hold for Dimona – he exhibited requisite toughness; and on the refugee issue he first tried diplomatic accommodation before digging in his heels. Fifty years on, Israel's standing with U.S. Jewry is no less complicated; its security predicament no less threatened; its international standing no less tenuous.
So Israelis would be well served if Netanyahu managed to emulate "the Old Man" by employing just the right combination of suasion, toughness and diplomacy.
###
-- May 16, 2011
Here is a hypothetical being asked around Israel: How would David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel's first prime minister and a founding father, handle himself if it were he and not Benjamin Netanyahu who was scheduled to meet President Barack Obama on Friday (May 20), address AIPAC on Monday (May 23) and speak before a joint session of the US Congress on Tuesday (May 24)? Ben-Gurion's own meeting – precisely fifty years ago this month – with President John F. Kennedy provides some context about the limits of prime ministerial charisma and the constraints on Israel's freedom of action.
Start with U.S. Jewry. Even before he set out for America, Ben-Gurion found himself embroiled in a bitter public dispute with Nahum Goldmann and Irving Miller, top American Jewish leaders, over Israel's relationship with the Diaspora. Ben-Gurion began the row by saying that a Jew could only be a Zionist by making aliya – immigrating to Israel. The Jewish leaders insisted that one could be a perfectly good Zionist by aiding Israel from afar and by unifying Jews behind Israel as the civilizational core of world Jewry. Ben-Gurion further antagonized Goldmann and Miller by having issued a joint statement with Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, which affirmed that Israel would not interfere in the internal affairs of the Diaspora and stipulating that aliya was a matter of personal choice.
Ben-Gurion well knew that the AJC in those days identified itself as non-Zionist and had pointedly stayed out of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in which Goldmann and Miller were leaders. Goldmann, who later became a vehement critic of the very Jewish establishment he helped create, lambasted Ben-Gurion for undermining the unity of American Jewry by fixing Israel-Diaspora relations with what Goldmann termed an "unrepresentative" AJC. One can only imagine Goldmann's and Miller's apoplectic reaction when they learned that while he was in the U.S. Ben-Gurion went so far as to meet with Lessing Rosenwald head of the stridently anti-Zionist American Council on Judaism.
Ben-Gurion departed Israel on May 24, 1961 travelling first to see Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. At last, on May 30 at 4:45PM he was ushered into the presidential suite at Manhattan's Waldorf Hotel for his private meeting with Kennedy. The official explanation for the venue was that JFK would be leaving from New York for a summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, the administration did not want to antagonize the Arab states by officially hosting Ben-Gurion at the White House. The premier, accompanied by Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman, was described as tense heading into the meeting which included Myer Feldman, the president's liaison to the Jewish community and Phil Talbot from the State Department.
In a remark that Ben-Gurion later told intimates he found uncouth, JFK began by saying: "You know, I was elected by the Jews of New York" – indeed he had garnered 80 percent of the Jewish vote nationwide in his razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections – and that he felt obliged to "do something" in return. Taken aback, Ben-Gurion replied, "You must do whatever is good for the free world."
There were three main items on the president's agenda. He knew that Ben-Gurion would be asking to purchase HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. Kennedy's State Department was decidedly opposed; the Pentagon was indifferent. Next, Kennedy wanted to get Ben-Gurion's assurance that Israel would not use its Dimona nuclear reactor – just visited by international inspectors who returned with a favorable report – for military purposes. And finally, Kennedy wanted Ben-Gurion to make a gesture to the Arabs on the refugee issue.
Ben-Gurion first implied that the Eisenhower administration had been inclined to sell Israel the HAWKS. When he saw this tack wasn't working he made a fresh case on the merits: The Soviets were supplying Egypt with advanced MIG-19s warplanes and the purely defensive HAWKS were needed to counter this threat. Not wanting to introduce missiles into the region – or leave Israel in a position that invited attack – JFK pledged to "continue to review the missile situation." Ben-Gurion didn't get a "yes" but he found JFK far more sympathetic than his predecessor. Indeed, in August 1962, following a meeting between 39 year-old Shimon Peres, director-general of the Defense Ministry, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy, the administration agreed to sell the anti-aircraft system to Israel.
On Dimona, Ben-Gurion had already told Diefenbaker just days earlier that as a matter of survival Israel might be forced to develop a nuclear capability. Kennedy talked in a friendly way about the recently completed international inspection at Dimona and said that there must not be even the appearance that Israel was pursing nuclear weapons. Ben-Gurion replied that for now the facility was indeed engaged in peaceful nuclear pursuits but that were Israel faced with an existential threat it would keep its future options open. Much depended on the Soviet and Egyptian threat. The signals from Gamal Nasser were more than discouraging. Ben-Gurion told JFK: "If they should defeat us they would do to the Jews what Hitler did."
Kennedy next wanted to talk about the Palestinian Arab refugees. The premier said that Nasser did not really care what happened to them. The Israeli position was that the refugees should be resettled and absorbed in Egyptian-occupied Gaza, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and in Lebanon. JFK asked Israel to take back a token number of refugees saying it would help the US in trying to mediate between the parties. Ben-Gurion predicted that the initiative would fail, but Kennedy responded that Washington would rather see the onus of rejectionism rest with the Arabs. So Ben-Gurion agreed that the initiative was "worth trying" and following the meeting told the press that he and JFK were in agreement on a refugee initiative. Either the two men did not understand one other or the U.S. toughened its stance, but when UN Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson later detailed the specifics of the repatriation proposal to Israeli officials it became clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between what Israel could live with and what Washington wanted.
By 6 P.M. the Ben-Gurion-JFK confab had concluded.
The next day, the New York Times led its coverage with the "problem of the Palestine Arab refugees."
Before leaving for London on his way back to Israel, Ben-Gurion met with the Conference of Presidents and with former president Harry S Truman, to thank him for his previous support He also saw former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ambassador Stevenson, and Labor leader George Meany.
Anticipating criticism of the meeting, the State Department had sent diplomatic notes in JFK's name to Arab countries pledging that America would be an "honest broker" and continue to press Israel on the refugees. Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted Washington wanted to remain impartial on the Arab-Israel conflict.
None of this, however, placated the likes of Lebanese-born Ahmad Shukeiri, then serving as a Saudi diplomat to the U.N. and later to become the founding head of the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was established by the Arab League in 1964. The administration's unappreciated efforts at "impartiality" nevertheless brought it in conflict with Congress which sought to cut U.S. aid to Egypt.
In grappling with the "What would Ben-Gurion Do?" question, journalist Amnon Lord, speaking recently on Israel's Knesset Channel, bemoaned the sense prevalent in Israel today that its fate is no longer in its hands; its independence seems to be dissipating. Who would have thought, he asked, that a Netanyahu government would have imposed a de facto freeze on new housing construction in Jerusalem?
Actually, Netanyahu's position is not spectacularly different from Ben-Gurion's. Granted, Obama is more of an Eisenhower than a JFK, but the options available to an Israeli premier haven't changed all that much. Ben-Gurion employed suasion on the HAWKS and succeeded; on existential questions of survival – what the future might hold for Dimona – he exhibited requisite toughness; and on the refugee issue he first tried diplomatic accommodation before digging in his heels. Fifty years on, Israel's standing with U.S. Jewry is no less complicated; its security predicament no less threatened; its international standing no less tenuous.
So Israelis would be well served if Netanyahu managed to emulate "the Old Man" by employing just the right combination of suasion, toughness and diplomacy.
###
-- May 16, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
EGYPT-ISRAEL RELATIONS AFTER MUBARAK: THE STATE OF PLAY SO FAR
New Egypt
As Israelis watched with unease Egypt's revolution unfolding they were told by European and American liberals to stop sulking; that Hosni Mubarak's February 12th departure had not been provoked by "Palestine" or "Allah;" that the chants in Tahrir Square of “Up with Egypt" more than drowned out those of “down with Israel."
Now, just short of three months into the new regime a sober assessment of Egyptian attitudes would suggest that it may be time to start worrying. The Hamas-Fatah reconciliation engineered by Egypt, regardless of its doubtful longevity, was enabled by changes in Cairo's approach toward the Islamist fanatics. Where the old regime assigned intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to deal with them as a security problem, his replacement Murad Muwafi, backed by Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi, has been dealing with Hamas as a diplomatic partner. Mubarak distrusted Hamas -- the Gaza arm of Egypt's own Muslim Brotherhood -- and nominally aligned Cairo with Fatah. Now, Hamas is getting the kind of treatment terrorists crave – respect. Its "military commander" Ahmed Ja'abari is now no less welcome in Cairo than the movement's co-founder and theoretician Mahmoud al-Zahar or its Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. Hamas, now poised to join a restructured Palestine Liberation Organization, will reportedly open a mission in Cairo.
Egypt's concurrent decision to throw open its Rafah border with the Gaza Strip will make it far easier for Hamas to send its gunmen to Iran for specialized training and to bring in ever more lethal weaponry for use against Israel. Egypt's military chief General Sami Anan preempted Jerusalem's protests by letting it be known that the decision was purely Egypt's internal affair.
Meanwhile, Egyptians have held protests on a bridge overlooking the Israeli Embassy in Cairo demanding their government sever ties with Israel, and stop exporting natural gas to the Jewish state. The export of Egyptian gas to Israel has been portrayed as yet another manifestation of the old regime's corruption with claims that Mubarak's illicit wealth was generated by his conspiring with Israel to provide gas at below market rates at the expense of the Egyptian masses. Oddly, the pipeline carrying gas to Israel (and Jordan) has been twice sabotaged since the revolution and is now inoperative. This does not trouble Finance Minister Samir Radwan who remarked that the peace agreement does not obligate Egypt to sell gas to Israel.
Scapegoating Israel has never been bad politics in Egypt so it is predictable that the new regime is riding the ubiquitous crest of antipathy toward the Jewish state. A Pew opinion survey found that 54 percent of Egyptians want the peace treaty with Israel scrapped (another 10% "don't know."). And no one hates Israel more than the Muslim Brotherhood which is viewed favorably by a whopping 75% of Egyptians. In an apparent arrangement with the ruling junta, it has pledged to compete for half the seats in forthcoming parliamentary elections. With Egyptian political conditions so unsettled and expectations bound to outstrip any incoming regime's capacity to deliver, the Brothers have prudently concluded that they are not yet ready to rule.
Perhaps they are worried that they cannot provide jobs at a time of regional upheaval when remittances and tourism are down. What would they do, for instance, about populist pressure for a minimum wage? The Brotherhood is, astonishingly, the most left-leaning of eight Salafist groups active in Egypt and may simply prefer to follow the Bolshevik approach of not seizing power until conditions are ripe. They can afford to bide their time. Already 62% of Egyptians say they want to live under a political system in which adherence to the Koran is "strict;" another 27% favor a milder form of theocratic rule. Of course, even the sliver of the population that had identified itself with Mubarak's liberal opposition is no less hostile toward Israel.
At home, like in the old Soviet Union, Egyptians have complete liberty to lament the corruption of the old regime. But open criticism of the new supreme military council is cause for immediate arrest. Some 5,000 citizens face trial in military courts for unlawful behavior during the revolution.
Abroad, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces headed by Defense Minister Muhammad Hussein Tantawi has been keeping a close eye on the unfolding Syrian situation which could influence Cairo's posture toward Jerusalem. Tantawi sought to limit criticism of the Assad regime's crackdown on protesters at the UN Human Rights Council. Concurrently, Tantawi's government-by-the-army has bolstered its legitimacy by turning the temperature of Mubarak's already "cold peace" down a few degrees.
Still, he can be expected to keep the relationship on minimal life-support if for no other reason than to avoid the ire of the U.S. government which sends $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt and is now making billions more "potentially available."
Moreover, given all that is on his plate, he would not want to spook the IDF into accelerating existing plans to augment its capabilities on the Egyptian front.
Israeli emissaries have been discreetly meeting with the new regime in Cairo, but Jerusalem's opposition to the Hamas-Fatah deal was rejected. Were Tantawi at all interested in allaying Israeli concerns about Egyptian intentions he could earn major points by leveraging Egypt's new relationship with Hamas to facilitate the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. In the interim, he could instruct foreign minister el-Arabi, who plans a visit to Ramallah, to meet Israeli officials while he's in the area.
Positive gestures would be welcome, but Israeli officials are plainly troubled by what appears to be a strategic shift in Cairo's orientation, one that in the most optimistic analysis replicates Turkey turn against Israel. Egypt's ultimate trajectory is impossible to forecast. The evidence so far suggests that no matter what government formally replaces Mubarak's the broad outlines of the new regime's approach toward Israel are already ominously discernable.
###
-- May 2, 2011
As Israelis watched with unease Egypt's revolution unfolding they were told by European and American liberals to stop sulking; that Hosni Mubarak's February 12th departure had not been provoked by "Palestine" or "Allah;" that the chants in Tahrir Square of “Up with Egypt" more than drowned out those of “down with Israel."
Now, just short of three months into the new regime a sober assessment of Egyptian attitudes would suggest that it may be time to start worrying. The Hamas-Fatah reconciliation engineered by Egypt, regardless of its doubtful longevity, was enabled by changes in Cairo's approach toward the Islamist fanatics. Where the old regime assigned intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to deal with them as a security problem, his replacement Murad Muwafi, backed by Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi, has been dealing with Hamas as a diplomatic partner. Mubarak distrusted Hamas -- the Gaza arm of Egypt's own Muslim Brotherhood -- and nominally aligned Cairo with Fatah. Now, Hamas is getting the kind of treatment terrorists crave – respect. Its "military commander" Ahmed Ja'abari is now no less welcome in Cairo than the movement's co-founder and theoretician Mahmoud al-Zahar or its Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. Hamas, now poised to join a restructured Palestine Liberation Organization, will reportedly open a mission in Cairo.
Egypt's concurrent decision to throw open its Rafah border with the Gaza Strip will make it far easier for Hamas to send its gunmen to Iran for specialized training and to bring in ever more lethal weaponry for use against Israel. Egypt's military chief General Sami Anan preempted Jerusalem's protests by letting it be known that the decision was purely Egypt's internal affair.
Meanwhile, Egyptians have held protests on a bridge overlooking the Israeli Embassy in Cairo demanding their government sever ties with Israel, and stop exporting natural gas to the Jewish state. The export of Egyptian gas to Israel has been portrayed as yet another manifestation of the old regime's corruption with claims that Mubarak's illicit wealth was generated by his conspiring with Israel to provide gas at below market rates at the expense of the Egyptian masses. Oddly, the pipeline carrying gas to Israel (and Jordan) has been twice sabotaged since the revolution and is now inoperative. This does not trouble Finance Minister Samir Radwan who remarked that the peace agreement does not obligate Egypt to sell gas to Israel.
Scapegoating Israel has never been bad politics in Egypt so it is predictable that the new regime is riding the ubiquitous crest of antipathy toward the Jewish state. A Pew opinion survey found that 54 percent of Egyptians want the peace treaty with Israel scrapped (another 10% "don't know."). And no one hates Israel more than the Muslim Brotherhood which is viewed favorably by a whopping 75% of Egyptians. In an apparent arrangement with the ruling junta, it has pledged to compete for half the seats in forthcoming parliamentary elections. With Egyptian political conditions so unsettled and expectations bound to outstrip any incoming regime's capacity to deliver, the Brothers have prudently concluded that they are not yet ready to rule.
Perhaps they are worried that they cannot provide jobs at a time of regional upheaval when remittances and tourism are down. What would they do, for instance, about populist pressure for a minimum wage? The Brotherhood is, astonishingly, the most left-leaning of eight Salafist groups active in Egypt and may simply prefer to follow the Bolshevik approach of not seizing power until conditions are ripe. They can afford to bide their time. Already 62% of Egyptians say they want to live under a political system in which adherence to the Koran is "strict;" another 27% favor a milder form of theocratic rule. Of course, even the sliver of the population that had identified itself with Mubarak's liberal opposition is no less hostile toward Israel.
At home, like in the old Soviet Union, Egyptians have complete liberty to lament the corruption of the old regime. But open criticism of the new supreme military council is cause for immediate arrest. Some 5,000 citizens face trial in military courts for unlawful behavior during the revolution.
Abroad, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces headed by Defense Minister Muhammad Hussein Tantawi has been keeping a close eye on the unfolding Syrian situation which could influence Cairo's posture toward Jerusalem. Tantawi sought to limit criticism of the Assad regime's crackdown on protesters at the UN Human Rights Council. Concurrently, Tantawi's government-by-the-army has bolstered its legitimacy by turning the temperature of Mubarak's already "cold peace" down a few degrees.
Still, he can be expected to keep the relationship on minimal life-support if for no other reason than to avoid the ire of the U.S. government which sends $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt and is now making billions more "potentially available."
Moreover, given all that is on his plate, he would not want to spook the IDF into accelerating existing plans to augment its capabilities on the Egyptian front.
Israeli emissaries have been discreetly meeting with the new regime in Cairo, but Jerusalem's opposition to the Hamas-Fatah deal was rejected. Were Tantawi at all interested in allaying Israeli concerns about Egyptian intentions he could earn major points by leveraging Egypt's new relationship with Hamas to facilitate the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. In the interim, he could instruct foreign minister el-Arabi, who plans a visit to Ramallah, to meet Israeli officials while he's in the area.
Positive gestures would be welcome, but Israeli officials are plainly troubled by what appears to be a strategic shift in Cairo's orientation, one that in the most optimistic analysis replicates Turkey turn against Israel. Egypt's ultimate trajectory is impossible to forecast. The evidence so far suggests that no matter what government formally replaces Mubarak's the broad outlines of the new regime's approach toward Israel are already ominously discernable.
###
-- May 2, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Ford Foundation & Israel
'The Road Ahead' Without Ford
With little fanfare, the Ford Foundation has declared victory and prepared for a phased withdrawal from its long, largely inconspicuous campaign to influence Israeli politics. News reports have focused mostly on the foundation's 23-year-long patronage of the New Israel Fund which, in addition to some laudable activities, has funded opaque groups that have exacerbated tensions between Jews and Arabs. Some NIF-backed pressure groups including B’Tselem, HaMoked and Adalah self-righteously colluded with the now discredited Goldstone Commission Report.
But Ford's involvement in Israel's affairs goes well beyond the New Israel Fund. The Foundation, today with $10.2 billion in assets, was created in 1936 by automobile magnate Henry Ford's son Edsel. Since then it has disbursed a staggering $16 billion in grants worldwide. While Henry was a notorious Nazi-sympathizer and anti-Semite, the foundation his money helped endow transmogrified into a quintessentially "progressive" entity devoted to promoting "social change worldwide."
In 1953 the foundation began making apolitical grants that benefited research in Israel. Then, on the very day Israel claimed victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, President Lyndon Johnson recalled McGeorge Bundy, his former foreign policy aide, newly ensconced at the helm of the Ford Foundation, to explore ways to coax Israel out of the just liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Bundy did not produce any tangible results though in hindsight his involvement can be seen as having driven the foundation's fixation with changing Israeli policies.
Ford became a benefactor of writers, researchers and pressure groups devoted to ending the "occupation" notwithstanding Arab intentions. Judging by where it puts its money, Ford views Israel as an oppressor state that routinely victimizes its Palestinian Arab minority.
By the 1980s it had helped bankroll Meron Benvenisti's West Bank Data Project campaign which sullied as ineluctably in the wrong Jewish life beyond the Green Line. When the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat declared a state – the first time around on November 15, 1988 in Tunis – it was thanks to a blueprint drafted by Prof. Jerome Segal who was later rewarded as a Ford grantee. Ford supported Stephen P. Cohen's Institute for Middle East Peace and Development which gave him the institutional heft that allowed his chum, New York Times advocacy journalist Tom Friedman to incessantly cite Cohen as a "Middle East expert" in promoting their shared views critical of Israeli policies.
Ian Lustick, the intellectual godfather of efforts to "redefine" pro-Israelism and to dissociate American Jewish backing for Israel from support for its West Bank and security policies would also go on to work for Ford. The foundation remained on the periphery of an interlocking directorate of agencies including the Foundation for Peace in the Middle East and the Tides Foundation that conducted a withering pressure campaign to force Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
The now defunct International Center for Peace in the Middle East provided the organizational front for disaffected Israeli and Americans Jewish actors such as Abba Eban and Rita Hauser as they campaigned for precipitate U.S. recognition of Arafat's PLO.
Ford also become a major funder of Arab and far-Left groups behind the virulently anti-Israel 2001 UN sponsored Durban Conference and with a few degrees of separation continued to back the malevolent boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. Whether by backing innocuous-sounding groups like One Voice and Peres Center for Peace or by supporting tendentious polling on behalf of the Geneva Initiative, Ford's efforts have weakened Israel's ability to reach a negotiated solution.
Like Peace Now, the Geneva Initiative is so well-funded by European governments that it simply does not need Ford's money. But Ford has gone on to lend moral support for J-Street as it takes Lustick's crusade to redefine pro-Israelism to ever more absurd heights.
Looking back, Ford's directors can feel vindicated that the fund's heavy investment in artfully stoking a multi-layered campaign to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice boundaries – irrespective of Palestinian belligerence – has gained inexorable momentum. Ford's outlay has helped leave Israel's security damaged, its international standing weakened and its domestic divisions worsened. As for the New Israel Fund's ability to carry on Ford's work alone after 2013, that will depend on how successful it is in branding itself dedicated to "creating a better Israel" even as it obfuscates the, shall we say, awkward activities of its dependent NGOs.
###
-- April 24, 2011
With little fanfare, the Ford Foundation has declared victory and prepared for a phased withdrawal from its long, largely inconspicuous campaign to influence Israeli politics. News reports have focused mostly on the foundation's 23-year-long patronage of the New Israel Fund which, in addition to some laudable activities, has funded opaque groups that have exacerbated tensions between Jews and Arabs. Some NIF-backed pressure groups including B’Tselem, HaMoked and Adalah self-righteously colluded with the now discredited Goldstone Commission Report.
But Ford's involvement in Israel's affairs goes well beyond the New Israel Fund. The Foundation, today with $10.2 billion in assets, was created in 1936 by automobile magnate Henry Ford's son Edsel. Since then it has disbursed a staggering $16 billion in grants worldwide. While Henry was a notorious Nazi-sympathizer and anti-Semite, the foundation his money helped endow transmogrified into a quintessentially "progressive" entity devoted to promoting "social change worldwide."
In 1953 the foundation began making apolitical grants that benefited research in Israel. Then, on the very day Israel claimed victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, President Lyndon Johnson recalled McGeorge Bundy, his former foreign policy aide, newly ensconced at the helm of the Ford Foundation, to explore ways to coax Israel out of the just liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Bundy did not produce any tangible results though in hindsight his involvement can be seen as having driven the foundation's fixation with changing Israeli policies.
Ford became a benefactor of writers, researchers and pressure groups devoted to ending the "occupation" notwithstanding Arab intentions. Judging by where it puts its money, Ford views Israel as an oppressor state that routinely victimizes its Palestinian Arab minority.
By the 1980s it had helped bankroll Meron Benvenisti's West Bank Data Project campaign which sullied as ineluctably in the wrong Jewish life beyond the Green Line. When the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat declared a state – the first time around on November 15, 1988 in Tunis – it was thanks to a blueprint drafted by Prof. Jerome Segal who was later rewarded as a Ford grantee. Ford supported Stephen P. Cohen's Institute for Middle East Peace and Development which gave him the institutional heft that allowed his chum, New York Times advocacy journalist Tom Friedman to incessantly cite Cohen as a "Middle East expert" in promoting their shared views critical of Israeli policies.
Ian Lustick, the intellectual godfather of efforts to "redefine" pro-Israelism and to dissociate American Jewish backing for Israel from support for its West Bank and security policies would also go on to work for Ford. The foundation remained on the periphery of an interlocking directorate of agencies including the Foundation for Peace in the Middle East and the Tides Foundation that conducted a withering pressure campaign to force Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
The now defunct International Center for Peace in the Middle East provided the organizational front for disaffected Israeli and Americans Jewish actors such as Abba Eban and Rita Hauser as they campaigned for precipitate U.S. recognition of Arafat's PLO.
Ford also become a major funder of Arab and far-Left groups behind the virulently anti-Israel 2001 UN sponsored Durban Conference and with a few degrees of separation continued to back the malevolent boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. Whether by backing innocuous-sounding groups like One Voice and Peres Center for Peace or by supporting tendentious polling on behalf of the Geneva Initiative, Ford's efforts have weakened Israel's ability to reach a negotiated solution.
Like Peace Now, the Geneva Initiative is so well-funded by European governments that it simply does not need Ford's money. But Ford has gone on to lend moral support for J-Street as it takes Lustick's crusade to redefine pro-Israelism to ever more absurd heights.
Looking back, Ford's directors can feel vindicated that the fund's heavy investment in artfully stoking a multi-layered campaign to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice boundaries – irrespective of Palestinian belligerence – has gained inexorable momentum. Ford's outlay has helped leave Israel's security damaged, its international standing weakened and its domestic divisions worsened. As for the New Israel Fund's ability to carry on Ford's work alone after 2013, that will depend on how successful it is in branding itself dedicated to "creating a better Israel" even as it obfuscates the, shall we say, awkward activities of its dependent NGOs.
###
-- April 24, 2011
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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