Against a background of sharp disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem, the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee winds down today.
On Monday, the 7,500 delegates—Jews, Christians, African Americans, as well as European and Canadian activists—heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare that the United States would tell Israel the "truth" when "difficult but necessary choices" had to be made. Today, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama. Delegates from all 50 states planned to spend Tuesday on Capitol Hill speaking with their respective Senators and Members of Congress.
But what is AIPAC, and what does it mean to be pro-Israel at a time when many American Jews are said to be discomfited by actions of the Israeli government and tensions with Washington?
Its name notwithstanding, AIPAC is not a political-action committee created to give money to friendly politicians. Nor is it a foreign lobby. Founded in the 1950's, AIPAC aimed at becoming America's premier, bipartisan, homegrown pro-Israel pressure group. The group's incumbent president is usually a communal leader, Republican or Democrat, with strong ties to the administration then in power. Its current head, Lee Rosenberg from Illinois, was among Obama's staunchest Jewish supporters during the 2008 campaign.
But AIPAC has also become a lightning rod for the animus of those who essentially oppose all Israeli security policies while insisting they favor the country's "right to exist." In The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (1987), the journalist Edward Tivnan charged AIPAC with unprecedented influence over Congress. In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), the "realist" academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt updated and amplified Tivnan's critique, positing that an all-powerful lobby was "silencing any debate at all" on the Middle East, rendering impossible the proper pursuit of American interests, and, through its blind support of Israel's West Bank policies, helping to foment anti-American terrorism.
In reality, AIPAC's leadership includes both supporters and opponents of Israel's West Bank policies. What the organization embraces is a pro-Israel model that leaves to Israelis themselves decisions of existential consequence, reached through the consensus of the country's body politic. AIPAC thus emphatically favors a two-state solution; insists on direct talks between Arabs and Israelis; holds the Palestinians to be the recalcitrant party; and robustly rejects any outside imposition of a "solution."
Is this any different from the model embraced by the overwhelming majority of the American people, and confirmed in survey after survey of national opinion?
-- March 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Understanding AIPAC
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Russia & Israel
Nineteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist empire, Russia has reconstituted its role as a significant player in the Middle East and Islamic world. What does it want? Mainly, influence, stability, and the opportunity to make a great deal of money selling weapons. While not driven by ideology, as in the cold war, these goals are mostly out of sync with Israel's.
Cases in point: Moscow has announced that the nuclear-power plant it has been intermittently constructing and fueling outside the city of Bushehr in Iran will go into operation by the end of the summer. After a meeting in Damascus between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Syrian President Bashar Assad, it emerged that Russia would sign a major arms deal (apparently underwritten by Iran) to supply Syria with MIG-29 fighter planes and cruise missiles. Disregarding the stated policy of the "Quartet on the Middle East," of which his country is a member, Medvedev also conferred with Hamas head Khaled Mashaal. During a subsequent meeting in Ankara with President Tayyip Erdogan, he said that no party—meaning Hamas—should be excluded from the diplomatic process.
On the other side of the ledger, relations between Jerusalem and Moscow may be better today than at any time since the late 1940s. As distinct from the cold-war era, Israeli leaders nowadays deal directly with the Kremlin. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a hushed visit last year to Moscow to talk about Iran. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has hoped to nudge the two countries closer by emphasizing cultural affinities, symbolized by the presence in Israel of a million Russian-speaking immigrants. While asserting that he would never weaken Israel's bonds with Washington to curry favor in Moscow, Lieberman has also said that in today's multipolar world, Jerusalem needs to cultivate relations with other powers. President Shimon Peres, in Moscow to help mark the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, presumably reiterated what Israel hopes to get from Russia: a limit on the kinds of weapons it sells in the region; help, rather than hindrance, in the effort to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb; pressure on Syria to adhere to its contractual obligations not to transfer Russian-manufactured weapons to Hizballah.
Where to draw the balance?
There has been some collaboration between Russia and Israel's armaments industry, but Jerusalem's commitments to Washington greatly constrain any enlargement of such ventures. Although Russia shares with Israel an interest in combating Islamic terrorism, it insists that the Islamic uprisings in the Caucasus are a criminal matter and emphatically rejects any connection between them and the larger confrontation between jihadist Islam and the West. It may even be that Moscow's fairly consistent diplomatic support of Iran's mullahs (despite the occasional spat) is a quid pro quo for their refraining from fomenting Islamist terror within Russia's borders.
And this is not to mention other factors, including Moscow's renewed rivalry with the U.S.; the persistence of its traditionally autocratic form of government; its long history of antipathy to Jews; and the plethora of economic incentives awaiting it in the Muslim and Arab worlds. In short, warmer as Russia-Israel relations have become in some respects, there is a sharp limit to how good they can get.
-- June 2010
Cases in point: Moscow has announced that the nuclear-power plant it has been intermittently constructing and fueling outside the city of Bushehr in Iran will go into operation by the end of the summer. After a meeting in Damascus between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Syrian President Bashar Assad, it emerged that Russia would sign a major arms deal (apparently underwritten by Iran) to supply Syria with MIG-29 fighter planes and cruise missiles. Disregarding the stated policy of the "Quartet on the Middle East," of which his country is a member, Medvedev also conferred with Hamas head Khaled Mashaal. During a subsequent meeting in Ankara with President Tayyip Erdogan, he said that no party—meaning Hamas—should be excluded from the diplomatic process.
On the other side of the ledger, relations between Jerusalem and Moscow may be better today than at any time since the late 1940s. As distinct from the cold-war era, Israeli leaders nowadays deal directly with the Kremlin. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a hushed visit last year to Moscow to talk about Iran. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has hoped to nudge the two countries closer by emphasizing cultural affinities, symbolized by the presence in Israel of a million Russian-speaking immigrants. While asserting that he would never weaken Israel's bonds with Washington to curry favor in Moscow, Lieberman has also said that in today's multipolar world, Jerusalem needs to cultivate relations with other powers. President Shimon Peres, in Moscow to help mark the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, presumably reiterated what Israel hopes to get from Russia: a limit on the kinds of weapons it sells in the region; help, rather than hindrance, in the effort to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb; pressure on Syria to adhere to its contractual obligations not to transfer Russian-manufactured weapons to Hizballah.
Where to draw the balance?
There has been some collaboration between Russia and Israel's armaments industry, but Jerusalem's commitments to Washington greatly constrain any enlargement of such ventures. Although Russia shares with Israel an interest in combating Islamic terrorism, it insists that the Islamic uprisings in the Caucasus are a criminal matter and emphatically rejects any connection between them and the larger confrontation between jihadist Islam and the West. It may even be that Moscow's fairly consistent diplomatic support of Iran's mullahs (despite the occasional spat) is a quid pro quo for their refraining from fomenting Islamist terror within Russia's borders.
And this is not to mention other factors, including Moscow's renewed rivalry with the U.S.; the persistence of its traditionally autocratic form of government; its long history of antipathy to Jews; and the plethora of economic incentives awaiting it in the Muslim and Arab worlds. In short, warmer as Russia-Israel relations have become in some respects, there is a sharp limit to how good they can get.
-- June 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Meeting Irving Finkel
On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds
A British Museum scholar offers a Darwinian explanation for Judaism's survival.
On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.
Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.
Finkel outlined his thesis in a late-February talk at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem entitled "New Light on the Babylonian Exile." He is in the midst of writing a book on the subject, and an American literary agent stands ready to help place it.
Barefoot, with his flowing white beard and long white hair offset by a tee-shirt and black jeans—which is how I found him when we sat down for this interview—Finkel looks more like an ancient Hebrew prophet than a buttoned-down London librarian.
Your job has an interesting designation.
Yes, people think an Assistant Keeper must work for the zoo. It's actually a 19th-century title.
What languages do you work in?
I read the ancient languages of Iraq: Sumerian and Babylonian in cuneiform script. They are written on clay tablets that were uncovered in British Museum excavations in the 1800's. We have roughly 130,000 fragments, some as small as your miniature tape recorder. The clay came from the river banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. They were perfect for making clear inscriptions. Miraculously, they survive in the ground unless deliberately destroyed.
What we have in our collection is a potpourri of fascinating material like the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as what amount to grocery lists.
How did you get interested in cuneiform?
Well, I always wanted to work at the British Museum and to study a difficult language. My plan was to study Egyptian hieroglyphics at the University of Birmingham, but the professor upped and died after just a day of classes. It was suggested that I switch tracks.
Just how many scholars alive today can do what you do?
All the people who can read cuneiform can fit into this living room.
When was cuneiform used?
Between 3200 B.C.E and the 2nd century C.E. In the meantime, the Semitic alphabet came into being in Canaan around 1000 B.C.E., and for a millennium the two forms existed side by side.
Only a handful of people, people in power, could read or write in cuneiform, while the Semitic alphabet was easier to learn and could be written in ink on leather and wood.
There is a misconception that cuneiform—and hieroglyphics—are primitive forms of communications. In fact, they preserve sophisticated languages capable of complex ideas, imagery, and even irony.
Have you ever visited Iraq?
I'm afraid that "Finkel" is too Jewish a name. Under Saddam Hussein and even before, visitors had to prove they were not Jewish in order to visit.
When were the ancient Judeans in Babylon?
It started during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar in the early-6th century B.C.E. To hear the Bible tell it, everything regarding Nebuchadnezzar centered on the Jews. But from Nebuchadnezzar's vantage point, Judea was a minor though bothersome state strategically placed between Mesopotamia and Egypt. In 597 B.C.E, well before the Temple's destruction, he looted gold from the Temple and took King Jehoiakin captive to Babylon.
And when the Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. and the city razed and the people sent to Babylon, what made their exile so different from the expulsion of the Northern Kingdom's population by the Assyrians a century and a half earlier?
The Assyrians deported the Israelites en masse, and the tribes then disappeared from history. But Nebuchadnezzar took mainly the intelligentsia, with the intention of acculturating them—of getting them to be "Babylonianized"—so that, once reeducated, they might be reinstated back home. All this is detailed in the first chapter of the Book of Daniel.
How did that go?
I've tried to visualize what happened with these displaced Judeans. Some were, let's say, ultra-Orthodox, fiercely loyal to tradition; some were proto-Zionists who starting in 538 would return to Israel under the decree of Cyrus. There were also those who became so acculturated that they would stick around forever, all the way until the rise of the modern Ba'ath party. And there were those who would marry out and disappear.
You might be describing New York or London.
That's right. I start with the idea that, fundamentally, people are no different today from what they were in ancient times. The human mind is the same, and so is the range of human intelligence and behavior.
My own approach is not to adumbrate the study of ancient religion in a way that makes it seem irretrievable and remote, but to think of it as the same as contemporary religions but with some differences. Humanity is unchanging.
Where does that lead you with regard to Jewish life?
The Judeans had been ripped out of their surroundings and dumped in a huge, complex, bewildering urban capital: the greatest city in the Near East. This people, the Judeans, were at a point of transition. They had a unique monotheistic tradition in which nobody could see God. All the other ancient gods could be seen; once an effigy was created, the god came to inhabit the space created for him. By contrast, not only was the God of the displaced Judeans invisible, He was unforgiving and He was interested only in men.
That last bit helps explain the pattern of wobbly monotheism reflected in the biblical narrative. Women were not served functionally by the austere male deity, and were therefore attracted to house gods. I believe the whole trouble confronted by the biblical prophets had to do with women—for instance, Jezebel's bringing in the cult of Baal. The sense we get from the prophets is of sexual betrayal, the betrayed party being God.
The exile challenged the Judeans to refine their ideas about their single God. Thinking of God as an elusive abstraction did not serve to maintain cohesion. To complicate matters further, there were local theologians in Babylon who were also arguing for one god: their patron deity was Marduk, and they held that all the other gods were but manifestations of his powers. We have cuneiform records encapsulating this dispute among Babylonian theologians.
As a single god, Marduk contributed to the insecurity of Jewish belief. The great fear was that the Judean flock would succumb to idol worship or to marrying out, or both. If that happened, the population would disappear just like the Northern Israelites in Assyria. This threat engendered the need for the biblical text to be finished, in order to solidify the Judeans' belief in their superior understanding of monotheism. What was needed was a theology.
So the "Jews" did something to prevent a replay of the Assyrian outcome. What they did was to produce the Bible, a work that practically screams out that it was written by humans.
Remember, the Judeans arrived already literate. They had with them the chronicles of their kings; trunk-loads of scrolls. They wove these into a narrative, while the missing bits—meaning, from the start of humanity until the point where their historical records began—they took from the local tradition and bent to fit ethical Jewish ideas.
You're referring to parallels between the Bible's flood story and the Epic of Gilgamesh?
No, not parallels. The flood story in Genesis basically overlaps with the Babylonian story. The two are interdependent, cut from the same cloth. What I mean is that the Judean intelligentsia knew Babylon's folk tales, but gave them a Jewish twist. The same holds for the similarity between the baby-in-the-bulrushes story of Moses and the story of the Assyrian king Sargon, whose mother also placed him in a reed basket.
And the rest of the Judean sources?
The whole narrative of scripture was simple and lucid: begat, begat, begat. It's like a phone book. The idea was to connect your beautiful and eligible daughter to a genealogy intended to maintain cohesion and identity.
Nothing was composed in Babylonia; they already had the foundation. But existing scripture was crafted to demonstrate that God is present. He moves the chess pieces. You get a canonization of religious identity. Monotheism is streamlined.
So Judaism as we know it was born in Babylon as a direct consequence of the exile. This experience created the Jewish people, and eventually also set the pattern for Christianity and Islam.
You are describing the evolutionary development of Jewish civilization.
What I am offering is a form of Darwinism that transforms disparate phenomena into a continuum. I am saying that the exile was responsible for Judaism. That the Judeans behaved in the way we would have expected them to behave, based on what we know about how Jews in New York or London behaved upon their arrival millennia later.
Even the intellectual approach of the Talmud is a product of the larger Babylonian culture, reflecting three generations of learning during the period of exile. The rabbinic method of taking innocuous sentences and getting them to demonstrate just about anything reflects a specific heritage of learning. We find similar intellectual exercises in Babylonian cuneiform that illuminate otherwise obscure statements. There are linguistic similarities; there is the idea of the alphabet having numerical value (gematria); there is the idea that statements can have double meanings, leading to a particular form of textual analysis. In cuneiform, each syllable has multiple meanings, so there has to be a mechanism for explanation. Thus the Judean scholars molded Babylonian concepts to the needs of their own tradition.
How do your ideas fit with those of other scholars on this period?
Frankly, I have distilled my thesis simply on the strength of my own knowledge of the Bible coupled with a lifetime acquaintance with the cuneiform sources that are relevant to the whole issue. In writing my book, I have decided simply to present my argument as a logical and lucid explanation that accommodates the diverse issues that make up the whole problem. Consequently I have turned my back on the mountains of existing writing and theorizing on different aspects of the phenomenon. As far as I know, no one has proposed this larger idea before, and I have no interest in defending it or contrasting it with other schools of thought or argument; to me it is simply correct.
-- Feb 2010
A British Museum scholar offers a Darwinian explanation for Judaism's survival.
On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.
Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.
Finkel outlined his thesis in a late-February talk at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem entitled "New Light on the Babylonian Exile." He is in the midst of writing a book on the subject, and an American literary agent stands ready to help place it.
Barefoot, with his flowing white beard and long white hair offset by a tee-shirt and black jeans—which is how I found him when we sat down for this interview—Finkel looks more like an ancient Hebrew prophet than a buttoned-down London librarian.
Your job has an interesting designation.
Yes, people think an Assistant Keeper must work for the zoo. It's actually a 19th-century title.
What languages do you work in?
I read the ancient languages of Iraq: Sumerian and Babylonian in cuneiform script. They are written on clay tablets that were uncovered in British Museum excavations in the 1800's. We have roughly 130,000 fragments, some as small as your miniature tape recorder. The clay came from the river banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. They were perfect for making clear inscriptions. Miraculously, they survive in the ground unless deliberately destroyed.
What we have in our collection is a potpourri of fascinating material like the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as what amount to grocery lists.
How did you get interested in cuneiform?
Well, I always wanted to work at the British Museum and to study a difficult language. My plan was to study Egyptian hieroglyphics at the University of Birmingham, but the professor upped and died after just a day of classes. It was suggested that I switch tracks.
Just how many scholars alive today can do what you do?
All the people who can read cuneiform can fit into this living room.
When was cuneiform used?
Between 3200 B.C.E and the 2nd century C.E. In the meantime, the Semitic alphabet came into being in Canaan around 1000 B.C.E., and for a millennium the two forms existed side by side.
Only a handful of people, people in power, could read or write in cuneiform, while the Semitic alphabet was easier to learn and could be written in ink on leather and wood.
There is a misconception that cuneiform—and hieroglyphics—are primitive forms of communications. In fact, they preserve sophisticated languages capable of complex ideas, imagery, and even irony.
Have you ever visited Iraq?
I'm afraid that "Finkel" is too Jewish a name. Under Saddam Hussein and even before, visitors had to prove they were not Jewish in order to visit.
When were the ancient Judeans in Babylon?
It started during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar in the early-6th century B.C.E. To hear the Bible tell it, everything regarding Nebuchadnezzar centered on the Jews. But from Nebuchadnezzar's vantage point, Judea was a minor though bothersome state strategically placed between Mesopotamia and Egypt. In 597 B.C.E, well before the Temple's destruction, he looted gold from the Temple and took King Jehoiakin captive to Babylon.
And when the Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. and the city razed and the people sent to Babylon, what made their exile so different from the expulsion of the Northern Kingdom's population by the Assyrians a century and a half earlier?
The Assyrians deported the Israelites en masse, and the tribes then disappeared from history. But Nebuchadnezzar took mainly the intelligentsia, with the intention of acculturating them—of getting them to be "Babylonianized"—so that, once reeducated, they might be reinstated back home. All this is detailed in the first chapter of the Book of Daniel.
How did that go?
I've tried to visualize what happened with these displaced Judeans. Some were, let's say, ultra-Orthodox, fiercely loyal to tradition; some were proto-Zionists who starting in 538 would return to Israel under the decree of Cyrus. There were also those who became so acculturated that they would stick around forever, all the way until the rise of the modern Ba'ath party. And there were those who would marry out and disappear.
You might be describing New York or London.
That's right. I start with the idea that, fundamentally, people are no different today from what they were in ancient times. The human mind is the same, and so is the range of human intelligence and behavior.
My own approach is not to adumbrate the study of ancient religion in a way that makes it seem irretrievable and remote, but to think of it as the same as contemporary religions but with some differences. Humanity is unchanging.
Where does that lead you with regard to Jewish life?
The Judeans had been ripped out of their surroundings and dumped in a huge, complex, bewildering urban capital: the greatest city in the Near East. This people, the Judeans, were at a point of transition. They had a unique monotheistic tradition in which nobody could see God. All the other ancient gods could be seen; once an effigy was created, the god came to inhabit the space created for him. By contrast, not only was the God of the displaced Judeans invisible, He was unforgiving and He was interested only in men.
That last bit helps explain the pattern of wobbly monotheism reflected in the biblical narrative. Women were not served functionally by the austere male deity, and were therefore attracted to house gods. I believe the whole trouble confronted by the biblical prophets had to do with women—for instance, Jezebel's bringing in the cult of Baal. The sense we get from the prophets is of sexual betrayal, the betrayed party being God.
The exile challenged the Judeans to refine their ideas about their single God. Thinking of God as an elusive abstraction did not serve to maintain cohesion. To complicate matters further, there were local theologians in Babylon who were also arguing for one god: their patron deity was Marduk, and they held that all the other gods were but manifestations of his powers. We have cuneiform records encapsulating this dispute among Babylonian theologians.
As a single god, Marduk contributed to the insecurity of Jewish belief. The great fear was that the Judean flock would succumb to idol worship or to marrying out, or both. If that happened, the population would disappear just like the Northern Israelites in Assyria. This threat engendered the need for the biblical text to be finished, in order to solidify the Judeans' belief in their superior understanding of monotheism. What was needed was a theology.
So the "Jews" did something to prevent a replay of the Assyrian outcome. What they did was to produce the Bible, a work that practically screams out that it was written by humans.
Remember, the Judeans arrived already literate. They had with them the chronicles of their kings; trunk-loads of scrolls. They wove these into a narrative, while the missing bits—meaning, from the start of humanity until the point where their historical records began—they took from the local tradition and bent to fit ethical Jewish ideas.
You're referring to parallels between the Bible's flood story and the Epic of Gilgamesh?
No, not parallels. The flood story in Genesis basically overlaps with the Babylonian story. The two are interdependent, cut from the same cloth. What I mean is that the Judean intelligentsia knew Babylon's folk tales, but gave them a Jewish twist. The same holds for the similarity between the baby-in-the-bulrushes story of Moses and the story of the Assyrian king Sargon, whose mother also placed him in a reed basket.
And the rest of the Judean sources?
The whole narrative of scripture was simple and lucid: begat, begat, begat. It's like a phone book. The idea was to connect your beautiful and eligible daughter to a genealogy intended to maintain cohesion and identity.
Nothing was composed in Babylonia; they already had the foundation. But existing scripture was crafted to demonstrate that God is present. He moves the chess pieces. You get a canonization of religious identity. Monotheism is streamlined.
So Judaism as we know it was born in Babylon as a direct consequence of the exile. This experience created the Jewish people, and eventually also set the pattern for Christianity and Islam.
You are describing the evolutionary development of Jewish civilization.
What I am offering is a form of Darwinism that transforms disparate phenomena into a continuum. I am saying that the exile was responsible for Judaism. That the Judeans behaved in the way we would have expected them to behave, based on what we know about how Jews in New York or London behaved upon their arrival millennia later.
Even the intellectual approach of the Talmud is a product of the larger Babylonian culture, reflecting three generations of learning during the period of exile. The rabbinic method of taking innocuous sentences and getting them to demonstrate just about anything reflects a specific heritage of learning. We find similar intellectual exercises in Babylonian cuneiform that illuminate otherwise obscure statements. There are linguistic similarities; there is the idea of the alphabet having numerical value (gematria); there is the idea that statements can have double meanings, leading to a particular form of textual analysis. In cuneiform, each syllable has multiple meanings, so there has to be a mechanism for explanation. Thus the Judean scholars molded Babylonian concepts to the needs of their own tradition.
How do your ideas fit with those of other scholars on this period?
Frankly, I have distilled my thesis simply on the strength of my own knowledge of the Bible coupled with a lifetime acquaintance with the cuneiform sources that are relevant to the whole issue. In writing my book, I have decided simply to present my argument as a logical and lucid explanation that accommodates the diverse issues that make up the whole problem. Consequently I have turned my back on the mountains of existing writing and theorizing on different aspects of the phenomenon. As far as I know, no one has proposed this larger idea before, and I have no interest in defending it or contrasting it with other schools of thought or argument; to me it is simply correct.
-- Feb 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Zionism Derangement Syndrome
A smoldering resentment, bordering on political paranoia, is palpable in sectors of Israel's Left these days. Everywhere, it seems, powerful enemies are conspiring to undermine the centers of cultural influence that leftists have long regarded as their own property, and as beyond criticism. Their response bears a resemblance to the left-wing American affliction that the columnist Charles Krauthammer memorably labeled "Bush Derangement Syndrome."
One recent challenge to Left hegemony is a proposed law now winding its way through the Knesset's legislative process. The bill, prompted in part by an independent report on certain Israeli pressure groups, including Peace Now and B'Tselem, would require political-advocacy organizations to reveal how much money they receive from foreign powers. On the face of it, this seems unexceptionable enough: in the U.S., the Foreign Agents Registration Act has long stipulated that persons paid to act in a political capacity by a foreign principal must declare their relationship; the proposed Israeli law, by contrast, would merely require the reporting of donations from foreign states and state-funded foundations.
Another challenge comes from a new grass-roots student effort called Im Tirtzu. The organization, which insists its political platform is centrist, has declared its intention of urging Diaspora Jewish donors to reconsider their support of Israeli universities whose humanities and social-science departments are bastions of anti-Zionist teachings and whose tenured faculty work to propel the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. The group will also urge students to avoid academic departments that silence or intimidate those voicing Zionist convictions.
Finally, a meticulously documented and scathing 141-page report, "Post-Zionism in Academia," released by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a conservative think tank, has found that nearly all social-science and humanities departments at Israeli universities are dominated by faculty advocating radical positions anathema to the country's mainstream. The situation is said to be particularly egregious at Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities, where, according to the report, most curricular readings in sociology are "post-Zionist"—really anti-Zionist—in orientation.
To each of these initiatives, the Left's panicked response has been not to question or rebut facts and arguments but to cry outrage and to accuse the critics of engaging in attempted censorship and intimidation—in, to use the much-favored scare word, "McCarthyism." Thus, the New Israel Fund, borrowing in its own way from the late Wisconsin demagogue's playbook, has denounced Im Tirtzu as "ultra-nationalist" and "extremist"—and, in a final sign of the student organization's turpitude, as a recipient of money from evangelical Christians. The president of Ben-Gurion University has branded Im Tirtzu for engaging in a "witch hunt"; Haifa University's president has protested that it is the one politicizing academia; and Yossi Sarid, former chair of the Meretz party, has lambasted the group as a "gang of hoodlums." Says the president of Tel Aviv University, dismissively, "It's impossible to divide the world into Zionists and anti-Zionists."
The president might have been channeling the editors of Haaretz, the influential newspaper that has devoted the fullest coverage and highest dudgeon to the unfolding events. There is indeed a genuinely Zionist Left in Israel, though its strength is waning, but the paper's editors have veered unpredictably between supporting this tendency and voicing an empathically anti-Zionist line—thereby contributing to the definitional muddle seemingly endorsed by the president of Tel Aviv University. In its own heated blast at Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies, Haaretz referred to their principals as "political commissars," to their work as "shameful," and to their aims as "spreading fear . . . and undermining freedom of expression." As for respecting the views of Israel's mainstream public, the paper wrinkled up its editorial nose at so patently "illegitimate [an] ethnocratic distinction."
What next? As the rather unhinged nature of these reactions suggest, Israel's Left is beginning to fear that its uncontested hold over major centers of the country's elite culture may be as vulnerable as its hold over political power has proved to be. One thing to watch will be the behavior of the remaining Zionists on the Left, and in particular whether, like Haaretz, they will wish to continue providing intellectual cover for a cadre of overtly anti-Zionist radicals. Another is the behavior of Diaspora donors, and in particular how much they really care that Israeli universities have been nurturing a political culture inhospitable to the Zionist enterprise.
As for those now challenging the Left's hegemony in academia and elsewhere, their own challenge will be how best to resurrect the Zionist ethos whose destruction they have accurately diagnosed and faithfully reported.
One recent challenge to Left hegemony is a proposed law now winding its way through the Knesset's legislative process. The bill, prompted in part by an independent report on certain Israeli pressure groups, including Peace Now and B'Tselem, would require political-advocacy organizations to reveal how much money they receive from foreign powers. On the face of it, this seems unexceptionable enough: in the U.S., the Foreign Agents Registration Act has long stipulated that persons paid to act in a political capacity by a foreign principal must declare their relationship; the proposed Israeli law, by contrast, would merely require the reporting of donations from foreign states and state-funded foundations.
Another challenge comes from a new grass-roots student effort called Im Tirtzu. The organization, which insists its political platform is centrist, has declared its intention of urging Diaspora Jewish donors to reconsider their support of Israeli universities whose humanities and social-science departments are bastions of anti-Zionist teachings and whose tenured faculty work to propel the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. The group will also urge students to avoid academic departments that silence or intimidate those voicing Zionist convictions.
Finally, a meticulously documented and scathing 141-page report, "Post-Zionism in Academia," released by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a conservative think tank, has found that nearly all social-science and humanities departments at Israeli universities are dominated by faculty advocating radical positions anathema to the country's mainstream. The situation is said to be particularly egregious at Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities, where, according to the report, most curricular readings in sociology are "post-Zionist"—really anti-Zionist—in orientation.
To each of these initiatives, the Left's panicked response has been not to question or rebut facts and arguments but to cry outrage and to accuse the critics of engaging in attempted censorship and intimidation—in, to use the much-favored scare word, "McCarthyism." Thus, the New Israel Fund, borrowing in its own way from the late Wisconsin demagogue's playbook, has denounced Im Tirtzu as "ultra-nationalist" and "extremist"—and, in a final sign of the student organization's turpitude, as a recipient of money from evangelical Christians. The president of Ben-Gurion University has branded Im Tirtzu for engaging in a "witch hunt"; Haifa University's president has protested that it is the one politicizing academia; and Yossi Sarid, former chair of the Meretz party, has lambasted the group as a "gang of hoodlums." Says the president of Tel Aviv University, dismissively, "It's impossible to divide the world into Zionists and anti-Zionists."
The president might have been channeling the editors of Haaretz, the influential newspaper that has devoted the fullest coverage and highest dudgeon to the unfolding events. There is indeed a genuinely Zionist Left in Israel, though its strength is waning, but the paper's editors have veered unpredictably between supporting this tendency and voicing an empathically anti-Zionist line—thereby contributing to the definitional muddle seemingly endorsed by the president of Tel Aviv University. In its own heated blast at Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies, Haaretz referred to their principals as "political commissars," to their work as "shameful," and to their aims as "spreading fear . . . and undermining freedom of expression." As for respecting the views of Israel's mainstream public, the paper wrinkled up its editorial nose at so patently "illegitimate [an] ethnocratic distinction."
What next? As the rather unhinged nature of these reactions suggest, Israel's Left is beginning to fear that its uncontested hold over major centers of the country's elite culture may be as vulnerable as its hold over political power has proved to be. One thing to watch will be the behavior of the remaining Zionists on the Left, and in particular whether, like Haaretz, they will wish to continue providing intellectual cover for a cadre of overtly anti-Zionist radicals. Another is the behavior of Diaspora donors, and in particular how much they really care that Israeli universities have been nurturing a political culture inhospitable to the Zionist enterprise.
As for those now challenging the Left's hegemony in academia and elsewhere, their own challenge will be how best to resurrect the Zionist ethos whose destruction they have accurately diagnosed and faithfully reported.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
The Arab Peace Initiative
Among the things remaining unclear in the aftermath of the visit to Washington last week of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the next negotiating move of the Palestinians. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has warned that if his objectives in the "proximity talks" mediated by the U.S. are not achieved by mid-September, he will ask the Arab League to press harder with its 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. This document has become part of the verbiage of international declarations on the Arab-Israel conflict. According to the American envoy George Mitchell, it has also been incorporated into the Obama administration's peacemaking strategy. What is it?
The initiative was born after the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States, carried out by Muslim terrorists fifteen of whom were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Recognizing that his kingdom's image as a viper's nest of Islamic fanaticism undermined its vital relationship with Washington, and in the midst of the Palestinians' murderous second intifada against Israel's civilian population, Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah invited New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to Riyadh to present a peace plan. The plan was touted as offering Israel "full normalization" of relations with the Arab and Muslim world in exchange for an Israeli "full withdrawal" to the armistice boundaries in place from 1949 until the outset of the 1967 Six-Day War.
The following month, an already watered-down version of Abdullah's plan was officially adopted by an Arab League summit in Beirut. Its inauspicious unveiling took place on the day after the ghastly terrorist suicide-bombing of a Passover Seder in Israel's coastal town of Netanya. In a muted reaction to the plan, Jerusalem acknowledged that it did reverse the League's long-standing policy of "No peace, no negotiation, no recognition" set forth at its infamous August 1967 Khartoum summit.
Yet the plan did little else. Instead of offering the promised "full normalization," it vaguely held out a "full peace," presumably along the cold Egyptian model. It also referred to UN General Assembly Resolution 194, commonly understood to grant the 700,000 Arab refugees from the 1948 war, along with millions of their descendants, the right to "return" to a now-truncated Israel in what would amount to a demographic death-knell to the Jewish state. The initiative absolved the Arab countries of any responsibility for absorbing their Palestinian brethren. And by calling for a withdrawal from all territory captured by Israel in the Six-Day war, the initiative patently rejected Security Council Resolution 242, which since 1967 has been the sine qua non of all peacemaking efforts. Nor did the initiative make even a fleeting mention of the inalienable rights of the Jewish people to a national homeland. Finally, it was put forward as a non-negotiable, take-it-or-leave-it diktat.
In the eight years since the initiative was announced, the Palestinian polity has been torn asunder, with the comparatively less extreme Fatah running West Bank affairs and the rejectionist Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip. With the Palestinians thus fragmented and the Arab League frozen in intransigence by radical forces, can anything transform this dead-letter initiative into a linchpin for peace?
Egypt and Jordan broke with the Arab consensus to make their separate peace with Israel. No one expects that kind of courage out of Riyadh. But what if the Saudis were to announce that, from their point of view, the plan is an overture, i.e., not a diktat but a starting point for direct negotiations with Israel?
The initiative was born after the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States, carried out by Muslim terrorists fifteen of whom were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Recognizing that his kingdom's image as a viper's nest of Islamic fanaticism undermined its vital relationship with Washington, and in the midst of the Palestinians' murderous second intifada against Israel's civilian population, Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah invited New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to Riyadh to present a peace plan. The plan was touted as offering Israel "full normalization" of relations with the Arab and Muslim world in exchange for an Israeli "full withdrawal" to the armistice boundaries in place from 1949 until the outset of the 1967 Six-Day War.
The following month, an already watered-down version of Abdullah's plan was officially adopted by an Arab League summit in Beirut. Its inauspicious unveiling took place on the day after the ghastly terrorist suicide-bombing of a Passover Seder in Israel's coastal town of Netanya. In a muted reaction to the plan, Jerusalem acknowledged that it did reverse the League's long-standing policy of "No peace, no negotiation, no recognition" set forth at its infamous August 1967 Khartoum summit.
Yet the plan did little else. Instead of offering the promised "full normalization," it vaguely held out a "full peace," presumably along the cold Egyptian model. It also referred to UN General Assembly Resolution 194, commonly understood to grant the 700,000 Arab refugees from the 1948 war, along with millions of their descendants, the right to "return" to a now-truncated Israel in what would amount to a demographic death-knell to the Jewish state. The initiative absolved the Arab countries of any responsibility for absorbing their Palestinian brethren. And by calling for a withdrawal from all territory captured by Israel in the Six-Day war, the initiative patently rejected Security Council Resolution 242, which since 1967 has been the sine qua non of all peacemaking efforts. Nor did the initiative make even a fleeting mention of the inalienable rights of the Jewish people to a national homeland. Finally, it was put forward as a non-negotiable, take-it-or-leave-it diktat.
In the eight years since the initiative was announced, the Palestinian polity has been torn asunder, with the comparatively less extreme Fatah running West Bank affairs and the rejectionist Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip. With the Palestinians thus fragmented and the Arab League frozen in intransigence by radical forces, can anything transform this dead-letter initiative into a linchpin for peace?
Egypt and Jordan broke with the Arab consensus to make their separate peace with Israel. No one expects that kind of courage out of Riyadh. But what if the Saudis were to announce that, from their point of view, the plan is an overture, i.e., not a diktat but a starting point for direct negotiations with Israel?
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Meeting Anthony Julius
A London-based lawyer with the firm of Mishcon de Reya, Anthony Julius has the unusual distinction of being a solicitor-advocate—a barrister who can also appear in court. He was on the defense team in the suit filed against the historian Deborah Lipstadt by the Holocaut denier David Irving; he has participated in litigating many cases bearing on the interests of Israel; and he represented Princess Diana in the last years of her life. A first-rate scholar, he is also the author of T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1995), Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Jewish Art (2001), and Transgressions: The Offenses of Art (2002).
Now comes Julius's magnum opus, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, just released in the United States. This large, sweeping book is more than a solidly researched and highly readable history of English anti-Semitism; it is an attempt to chart the evolution of anti-Semitism itself, to explain what it is (and what it is not), and to demonstrate how to recognize and name it. Its early chapters—on religious and literary anti-Semitism in pre-modern England—set the stage for Julius's coverage of the modern era and especially of the present day, when the boundaries between hatred of Jews and detestation of the Jewish state have become thoroughly blurred. Indeed, it is the prevalence of anti-Zionism in today's England that motivated Julius to undertake this lucid, erudite, and compelling study.
Julius insists on fair-mindedness but makes no pretense to dispassion. Writing this book, he says, has been like swimming long-distance through a sewer. Out of the mire of his subject, he has produced a work of gripping force.
At whom is this book directed?
At the general reader; it was not written for a specifically academic audience. It is intended to be informative—and it may be useful against anti-Semites.
How long did it take to write Trials of the Diaspora?
About five years. At a quite early stage, it became clear to me that a purely narrative account of English anti-Semitism would be intolerable to read—one awful thing after another. Instead, I saw that the subject was best organized by reference to specific categories or themes, and that is largely how the book is organized.
When do you make time for writing in your busy career?
I divide my time among family, law work, and writing. That's it.
If there is a word that's ubiquitous in Trials, it's "tropes"—which you employ to refer to the relentless litany of overused anti-Semitic clichés.
Yes, the discourse of anti-Semitism—malicious lies about Jews, as distinct from violence against Jews—is best analyzed through its clichés.
The word trials in the title: where did the idea for that come from?
There is an aspect of life in the Diaspora that is best understood as an ordeal. Also, the word is partly in homage to Philip Roth, who wrote in Operation Shylock that "In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial."
You delineate various strains of anti-Semitism, ranging from snobbery and prejudice to racism and genocide. Then you characterize anti-Semitism as involving beliefs about Jews that are both false and hostile. Yet in the final analysis you seem to say that the phenomenon is a tangled bundle of irrational sentiments and that it has no overarching definition.
Yes. "Anti-Semitism" is best understood as comprising a group of related hatreds, some lethal, some not.
To some British Jews, the idea that their country is being Islamized, as suggested by Melanie Phillips in her book Londonistan, is bogus. But you seem to feel that anti-Semitism is wearing down a Jewish community grappling with rising violence and abuse.
Contemporary anti-Semitism demoralizes Anglo-Jewry. But it is to be set against aspects of Anglo-Jewish life—Limmud-type study gatherings, Jewish Book Week, kosher restaurants, and so on—that are enlivening and elevating.
You argue that modern English anti-Semitism is unique, that it has a distinctive "mentality."
Among anti-Semitisms, the English brand was innovative. The first medieval blood libel occurred in England, and so, in 1290, did the first nation-wide expulsion of the Jews. There's a heritage.
Apart from Gentile anti-Semitism and, today, anti-Zionism, there's the specifically Jewish variety of criticism of Israel. Why are you so incensed when Israel's Jewish critics in the UK begin their attacks with "As a Jew, I..."?
Criticisms are true or false, independent of the confessional or ethnic identity of the critic.
British Jewish opposition to the idea of a Jewish state predates the Balfour Declaration, as you remind your readers. What do today's anti-Zionists have in common with their predecessors?
Not much! The pre-Balfour Declaration anti-Zionist Jews were either working-class Jews, who preferred revolution at home, or middle-class Jews, who preferred assimilation. Contemporary anti-Zionist Jews are mostly drawn to anti-Zionism as a means of asserting a Jewish identity.
The Guardian newspaper, with its popular website, plays a vanguard role in disseminating the new anti-Zionism, yet many American Jews and even some Anglo-Israelis enjoy the Guardian from afar.
It's not hard to see why. The new anti-Zionism overstates and misrepresents the significance of the 120-year old contest between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, over the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan; it also melodramatizes the contest, assigning to one side all the vice, and to the other all the virtue. The Guardian provides a forum for the dissemination of this skewed perspective.
Contrary to the protestations of the anti-Israel crowd, no one seriously suggests that every criticism of Israeli policies is anti-Semitic. So when is the line crossed from legitimate criticism to something more sinister?
When the criticism draws on anti-Semitic language—for example, "Israel lobby," or "Jewish lobby"—or connects with longstanding anti-Semitic practices like boycotts.
Shouldn't vociferous de-legitimization, by Jews, of Israel's right to exist be inherently understood in psycho-political terms? Isn't it bizarre that some people's singular connection to Jewish life takes the form of anti-Zionism?
Yes, and yes.
But you seem to abjure the term "self-hatred," preferring to cast such opponents of Jewish self-determination as contributors to anti-Semitism.
Many individuals of Jewish origin are proud of their status as opponents of the Jewish state. They are not self-haters; they are self-admirers.
-- May 2010
Now comes Julius's magnum opus, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, just released in the United States. This large, sweeping book is more than a solidly researched and highly readable history of English anti-Semitism; it is an attempt to chart the evolution of anti-Semitism itself, to explain what it is (and what it is not), and to demonstrate how to recognize and name it. Its early chapters—on religious and literary anti-Semitism in pre-modern England—set the stage for Julius's coverage of the modern era and especially of the present day, when the boundaries between hatred of Jews and detestation of the Jewish state have become thoroughly blurred. Indeed, it is the prevalence of anti-Zionism in today's England that motivated Julius to undertake this lucid, erudite, and compelling study.
Julius insists on fair-mindedness but makes no pretense to dispassion. Writing this book, he says, has been like swimming long-distance through a sewer. Out of the mire of his subject, he has produced a work of gripping force.
At whom is this book directed?
At the general reader; it was not written for a specifically academic audience. It is intended to be informative—and it may be useful against anti-Semites.
How long did it take to write Trials of the Diaspora?
About five years. At a quite early stage, it became clear to me that a purely narrative account of English anti-Semitism would be intolerable to read—one awful thing after another. Instead, I saw that the subject was best organized by reference to specific categories or themes, and that is largely how the book is organized.
When do you make time for writing in your busy career?
I divide my time among family, law work, and writing. That's it.
If there is a word that's ubiquitous in Trials, it's "tropes"—which you employ to refer to the relentless litany of overused anti-Semitic clichés.
Yes, the discourse of anti-Semitism—malicious lies about Jews, as distinct from violence against Jews—is best analyzed through its clichés.
The word trials in the title: where did the idea for that come from?
There is an aspect of life in the Diaspora that is best understood as an ordeal. Also, the word is partly in homage to Philip Roth, who wrote in Operation Shylock that "In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial."
You delineate various strains of anti-Semitism, ranging from snobbery and prejudice to racism and genocide. Then you characterize anti-Semitism as involving beliefs about Jews that are both false and hostile. Yet in the final analysis you seem to say that the phenomenon is a tangled bundle of irrational sentiments and that it has no overarching definition.
Yes. "Anti-Semitism" is best understood as comprising a group of related hatreds, some lethal, some not.
To some British Jews, the idea that their country is being Islamized, as suggested by Melanie Phillips in her book Londonistan, is bogus. But you seem to feel that anti-Semitism is wearing down a Jewish community grappling with rising violence and abuse.
Contemporary anti-Semitism demoralizes Anglo-Jewry. But it is to be set against aspects of Anglo-Jewish life—Limmud-type study gatherings, Jewish Book Week, kosher restaurants, and so on—that are enlivening and elevating.
You argue that modern English anti-Semitism is unique, that it has a distinctive "mentality."
Among anti-Semitisms, the English brand was innovative. The first medieval blood libel occurred in England, and so, in 1290, did the first nation-wide expulsion of the Jews. There's a heritage.
Apart from Gentile anti-Semitism and, today, anti-Zionism, there's the specifically Jewish variety of criticism of Israel. Why are you so incensed when Israel's Jewish critics in the UK begin their attacks with "As a Jew, I..."?
Criticisms are true or false, independent of the confessional or ethnic identity of the critic.
British Jewish opposition to the idea of a Jewish state predates the Balfour Declaration, as you remind your readers. What do today's anti-Zionists have in common with their predecessors?
Not much! The pre-Balfour Declaration anti-Zionist Jews were either working-class Jews, who preferred revolution at home, or middle-class Jews, who preferred assimilation. Contemporary anti-Zionist Jews are mostly drawn to anti-Zionism as a means of asserting a Jewish identity.
The Guardian newspaper, with its popular website, plays a vanguard role in disseminating the new anti-Zionism, yet many American Jews and even some Anglo-Israelis enjoy the Guardian from afar.
It's not hard to see why. The new anti-Zionism overstates and misrepresents the significance of the 120-year old contest between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, over the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan; it also melodramatizes the contest, assigning to one side all the vice, and to the other all the virtue. The Guardian provides a forum for the dissemination of this skewed perspective.
Contrary to the protestations of the anti-Israel crowd, no one seriously suggests that every criticism of Israeli policies is anti-Semitic. So when is the line crossed from legitimate criticism to something more sinister?
When the criticism draws on anti-Semitic language—for example, "Israel lobby," or "Jewish lobby"—or connects with longstanding anti-Semitic practices like boycotts.
Shouldn't vociferous de-legitimization, by Jews, of Israel's right to exist be inherently understood in psycho-political terms? Isn't it bizarre that some people's singular connection to Jewish life takes the form of anti-Zionism?
Yes, and yes.
But you seem to abjure the term "self-hatred," preferring to cast such opponents of Jewish self-determination as contributors to anti-Semitism.
Many individuals of Jewish origin are proud of their status as opponents of the Jewish state. They are not self-haters; they are self-admirers.
-- May 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Mainline Protestants and Israel
So enamored are today's mainline Protestant churches with the Palestinian Arab "narrative" that they seem to have altogether forgotten, or denied, their own prior history of support for Israel and Zionism. Indeed, some of them appear to be trying to derail the Zionist enterprise altogether.
The English Puritans who came to North America in the 17th century linked their fate in the New World to that of biblical Israel. By the early 19th century, the Presbyterian minister John McDonald was urging Christians to help the Jews of Old World Europe to return to Zion. Later in the 19th century, the Methodist preacher William Eugene Blackstone traveled far and wide to campaign for the same cause. Many Anglicans were similarly disposed. In Britain, Lord Balfour described himself as a "Zionist."
In March 1948, despite the persistence of anti-Semitism in the United States, fully half of Protestant Americans voiced support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Today, the mainline denominations, which represent a dwindling yet still influential minority of American Christians, regularly take left-wing positions on matters of both theology and politics, and their attitude toward Israel has changed decisively. Theologically, most of today's Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and others no longer believe that the Bible is the word of God or should be interpreted as literally true. The theological basis for connecting the people of Israel to the land of Israel has consequently evaporated. Politically, the institutions of mainstream Christianity have embraced much of the Left's antipathy toward Jewish national self-determination and a view of the Arab-Israel conflict in the black-and-white terms of oppressors and victims.
The results are visible in such recent initiatives as a document being circulated by Methodists that calls for boycotting goods produced in the West Bank, or the vote of the UK's Anglican Communion in favor of economic divestment from Israel.
It is true that these denominations have objective interests in the Arab world, rooted in concern for the diminishing numbers of Palestinian Christians struggling to survive in an environment of increasingly ascendant Islamic extremism. But it is also true that church activists living or stationed in the Middle East wholeheartedly endorse Arab political sensibilities and lobby aggressively inside their institutions against the Zionist enterprise. Further skewing the picture, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, an umbrella organization of mainline church bodies, propagates a version of the Israel-Arab conflict that is insidiously damaging to Israel's survival.
Given this stacked deck, it is easy to appreciate the relief of Jewish organizations when, at a recent meeting of the policymaking body of the Presbyterian Church, a plank defaming Israel as an "apartheid" state failed to pass. But, while condescending to endorse Israel's right to exist, the Presbyterians simultaneously approved "for study" the disingenuous Kairos document—"the Christian Palestinians' word to the world about what is happening in Palestine." This document labels the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and the West Bank as "aggression," "evil," and a "sin" that must be "resisted and removed." Violence is ostensibly abjured, but "peaceful resistance" and "boycotts" are legitimized. The Presbyterians have also obliquely called for withholding military aid from Israel in order to pressure it back to the armistice lines that ended the 1948-49 war.
This "Presbyterian answer" to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has left church leaders boasting that they may have "stumbled upon a way of building peace." In fact, what they have done is to place the Jewish state unjustly in the dock and to single it out for undeserved opprobrium—an act that might more properly be considered an occasion not for self-gratulation but for soul-searching. In light of it, the wholehearted support for the Zionist enterprise coming from the vibrant evangelical wing of American Protestantism is all the more heartwarming and, politically, indispensable.
-- april 2010
The English Puritans who came to North America in the 17th century linked their fate in the New World to that of biblical Israel. By the early 19th century, the Presbyterian minister John McDonald was urging Christians to help the Jews of Old World Europe to return to Zion. Later in the 19th century, the Methodist preacher William Eugene Blackstone traveled far and wide to campaign for the same cause. Many Anglicans were similarly disposed. In Britain, Lord Balfour described himself as a "Zionist."
In March 1948, despite the persistence of anti-Semitism in the United States, fully half of Protestant Americans voiced support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Today, the mainline denominations, which represent a dwindling yet still influential minority of American Christians, regularly take left-wing positions on matters of both theology and politics, and their attitude toward Israel has changed decisively. Theologically, most of today's Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and others no longer believe that the Bible is the word of God or should be interpreted as literally true. The theological basis for connecting the people of Israel to the land of Israel has consequently evaporated. Politically, the institutions of mainstream Christianity have embraced much of the Left's antipathy toward Jewish national self-determination and a view of the Arab-Israel conflict in the black-and-white terms of oppressors and victims.
The results are visible in such recent initiatives as a document being circulated by Methodists that calls for boycotting goods produced in the West Bank, or the vote of the UK's Anglican Communion in favor of economic divestment from Israel.
It is true that these denominations have objective interests in the Arab world, rooted in concern for the diminishing numbers of Palestinian Christians struggling to survive in an environment of increasingly ascendant Islamic extremism. But it is also true that church activists living or stationed in the Middle East wholeheartedly endorse Arab political sensibilities and lobby aggressively inside their institutions against the Zionist enterprise. Further skewing the picture, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, an umbrella organization of mainline church bodies, propagates a version of the Israel-Arab conflict that is insidiously damaging to Israel's survival.
Given this stacked deck, it is easy to appreciate the relief of Jewish organizations when, at a recent meeting of the policymaking body of the Presbyterian Church, a plank defaming Israel as an "apartheid" state failed to pass. But, while condescending to endorse Israel's right to exist, the Presbyterians simultaneously approved "for study" the disingenuous Kairos document—"the Christian Palestinians' word to the world about what is happening in Palestine." This document labels the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and the West Bank as "aggression," "evil," and a "sin" that must be "resisted and removed." Violence is ostensibly abjured, but "peaceful resistance" and "boycotts" are legitimized. The Presbyterians have also obliquely called for withholding military aid from Israel in order to pressure it back to the armistice lines that ended the 1948-49 war.
This "Presbyterian answer" to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has left church leaders boasting that they may have "stumbled upon a way of building peace." In fact, what they have done is to place the Jewish state unjustly in the dock and to single it out for undeserved opprobrium—an act that might more properly be considered an occasion not for self-gratulation but for soul-searching. In light of it, the wholehearted support for the Zionist enterprise coming from the vibrant evangelical wing of American Protestantism is all the more heartwarming and, politically, indispensable.
-- april 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Britain & Israel
Prime Minister Gordon Brown went to Buckingham Palace yesterday to ask Queen Elizabeth to dissolve parliament on April 12. New elections will take place on May 6. At the moment, the Conservative party under David Cameron is leading Brown's Labor party in the polls; the Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg, are in a strong third position
The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the U.K. continues to exercise considerable influence in the international arena. Britain is a major force in the European Union and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; it plays a leading role in NATO and the 54-nation Commonwealth. It also remains a world financial center and, through the BBC, wields considerable "soft power" worldwide.
As for its relations with Israel, trade now stands at £2.3 billion annually. But politically the country has been an indifferent friend at best, funding a dozen advocacy organizations that press Jerusalem to soften its security policies.
What would a change in government mean for British-Israel relations? Probably not a great deal—all three parties are on record as favoring Israel's withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines. Still, significant differences are discernible in the parties' approach.
Labor: Brown has close personal ties to the Jewish community; his father, a Presbyterian minister, was chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Foreign Minister David Miliband is a non-practicing Jew who recently ordered an Israeli diplomat expelled in connection with Israel's alleged forging of British passports in the assassination of Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Justice Secretary Jack Straw has refused to modify the country's Universal Jurisdiction law, invoked to threaten visiting Israeli officials with arrest on "war crimes" charges. The Labor party essentially accepted the Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war. Last week, Britain merely abstained in the UN Human Rights Council vote demanding that Israel pay reparations to Gaza.
Several Labor back benchers are notorious Israel-bashers. Gerald Kaufman has compared IDF soldiers to Nazis; Martin Linton warned that Israel's "long tentacles" could warp the outcome of the coming elections. A group with the name Labor Friends of Israel has called on the government to pressure both Israelis and Palestinians "evenhandedly."
Liberal Democrats: Clegg has urged Britain to stop selling weapons to Israel. MP Paul Rowen is one of parliament's most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause. And former MP Jenny Tonge, now in the House of Lords, declared it was worth investigating whether IDF aide workers in Haiti were actually harvesting organs for transplant. On the plus side of the ledger, the party recently authorized a support group to foster better relations with the Jewish community.
Conservatives: The tone of party pronouncements on Israel are notably sympathetic. William Hague, a former party leader and now Shadow Foreign Secretary, criticized Labor for not voting against the Goldstone Report. There are promises to modify the Universal Jurisdiction law.
Britain's Jewish community of 300,000 souls holds sway in perhaps a half-dozen of the country's 646 constituencies. While there are just four Muslim MPs, politicians are mindful that the overall Muslim population stands at 2.4 million. Most Jews will likely vote their economic and social interests, though a vocal minority can be expected to support the Tories purely because of Labor's shabby treatment of the Jewish state.
-- April 2010
The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the U.K. continues to exercise considerable influence in the international arena. Britain is a major force in the European Union and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; it plays a leading role in NATO and the 54-nation Commonwealth. It also remains a world financial center and, through the BBC, wields considerable "soft power" worldwide.
As for its relations with Israel, trade now stands at £2.3 billion annually. But politically the country has been an indifferent friend at best, funding a dozen advocacy organizations that press Jerusalem to soften its security policies.
What would a change in government mean for British-Israel relations? Probably not a great deal—all three parties are on record as favoring Israel's withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines. Still, significant differences are discernible in the parties' approach.
Labor: Brown has close personal ties to the Jewish community; his father, a Presbyterian minister, was chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Foreign Minister David Miliband is a non-practicing Jew who recently ordered an Israeli diplomat expelled in connection with Israel's alleged forging of British passports in the assassination of Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Justice Secretary Jack Straw has refused to modify the country's Universal Jurisdiction law, invoked to threaten visiting Israeli officials with arrest on "war crimes" charges. The Labor party essentially accepted the Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war. Last week, Britain merely abstained in the UN Human Rights Council vote demanding that Israel pay reparations to Gaza.
Several Labor back benchers are notorious Israel-bashers. Gerald Kaufman has compared IDF soldiers to Nazis; Martin Linton warned that Israel's "long tentacles" could warp the outcome of the coming elections. A group with the name Labor Friends of Israel has called on the government to pressure both Israelis and Palestinians "evenhandedly."
Liberal Democrats: Clegg has urged Britain to stop selling weapons to Israel. MP Paul Rowen is one of parliament's most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause. And former MP Jenny Tonge, now in the House of Lords, declared it was worth investigating whether IDF aide workers in Haiti were actually harvesting organs for transplant. On the plus side of the ledger, the party recently authorized a support group to foster better relations with the Jewish community.
Conservatives: The tone of party pronouncements on Israel are notably sympathetic. William Hague, a former party leader and now Shadow Foreign Secretary, criticized Labor for not voting against the Goldstone Report. There are promises to modify the Universal Jurisdiction law.
Britain's Jewish community of 300,000 souls holds sway in perhaps a half-dozen of the country's 646 constituencies. While there are just four Muslim MPs, politicians are mindful that the overall Muslim population stands at 2.4 million. Most Jews will likely vote their economic and social interests, though a vocal minority can be expected to support the Tories purely because of Labor's shabby treatment of the Jewish state.
-- April 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Meeting Israel Prize Winner Hanoch Bartov
To judge by the many prestigious awards his country has bestowed upon him, and by his prolific output—including ten novels, six collections of short stories, and three books of essays—the eighty-four-year-old Hanoch Bartov should need no introduction. And yet, outside Israel, this master of Hebrew style and quintessential son of the Jewish people and the Jewish state is relatively little known.
One can only hope this will change now that Bartov is about to receive his country's highest honor, the Israel Prize, to be awarded at a nationally televised ceremony on Independence Day, April 20. Informed of the prize, the voluble octogenarian cracked that, although arriving "a little late," it at least provided "scientific proof that there is life after death."
Born in Petah Tikvah to immigrant parents in 1926, the young Bartov preferred burying his head in a book to playing sports. He received a religious education but left school at fifteen to become an apprentice diamond polisher. At seventeen, he joined the Palestine regiment that later became the Jewish Brigade, a formation tardily authorized by Winston Churchill toward the closing stages of World War II.
At war's end, Bartov remained in Europe, where he helped to seek out surviving Jewish refugees and transport them "illegally" into Palestine. Twenty years later, his experience would provide material for a novel, The Brigade, one among the few Bartov works available in English.
Back in Palestine, Bartov spent several semesters at the Hebrew University before being abruptly called up in 1947 to serve in the Haganah during Israel's War of Independence. Thereafter, his career as a writer, which included decades as a columnist for Maariv as well as the steady production of distinguished works of fiction and non-fiction, began in earnest.
When did you first see your name in print?
I started writing as the result of an army bet when I was nineteen. It was a very short story about unrequited love, a subject troubling me at the time. It took me a while to figure out where to send it, but six or seven weeks later a check arrived for a little over a pound—a lot of money at the time.
I was not yet a writer, but I was writing. I'd caught the bug.
Unlike many Israeli writers, you insist on calling yourself a "Jewish writer."
One of my formative experiences was serving in the Jewish Brigade in Europe. A second, after the War of Independence, was living in Jerusalem's German Colony where my wife and I were surrounded by Holocaust refugees rebuilding their lives. After my experiences with the survivors, I dropped my exclusively "Israeli" identity. If I was not foremost a Jew, what did I share with these people who had gone through the hell of the Holocaust?
Hillel Halkin, who translated one of your books, has said that you were among the first in Israel's literary establishment to write in the language people actually spoke.
Yes. Though I employ linguistic allusions to Torah and Mishnah, I don't go in for flowery usage or images. I'm not a fan of post-modern writing, either. I write what I see.
Which authors would you recommend to someone who wants to start exploring contemporary Hebrew literature?
First, read my books!
What book would I find on your bedside table?
Josephus' The Wars of the Jews. It's really about the wars among the Jews. An ancient book, but I read it to understand the tragic parallels with our own times.
You are a man of the Left.
I am Left, but left alone. My Left was shattered many decades ago by the revelations about the crimes of Stalin. Nowadays, I find the Meretz party to be irrelevant, and Labor is led by a millionaire [Ehud Barak], a bourgeois par excellence.
Where does that leave you?
Adhering to certain values that, if besmirched, would make the Zionist enterprise meaningless. Israel needs to be a society based on justice and honesty, the values propagated by the ancient Hebrew prophets. We used to be egalitarian, but we've become a plutocracy. There is a shocking disparity of income. I was disillusioned with Communism, but I remain a social democrat—an old-fashioned socialist.
What do you make of Israel's anti-Zionist Left?
You're speaking of the Left in academia. They are mere curiosities. They lead comfortable lives and mouth platitudes.
In retrospect, was Israel's founding generation mistaken in aiming to create a "new Jew?"
Before the Holocaust, the idea of creating a Jew with none of the baggage of the Diaspora seemed reasonable. But after the loss of Europe's authentic centers of Jewish life, the situation changed. We in Israel did not appreciate how much, and regrettably we allowed our children and grandchildren to grow up Jewishly illiterate
What is the way forward?
It's not religious extremism, though frankly I prefer the [fanatical ultra-Orthodox and anti-Zionist] Neturei Karta types to the Hebrew-speaking post-Zionism crowd. Why? Because after a generation or two, there's a chance the ultra-Orthodox may become heretics, but they'll still retain enough of their heritage to stay Jewish, whereas those who are Jewishly illiterate will be lost forever.
Getting back to literature, in the last ten years you have published two novels, a long novella, and a collection of essays. What next?
I'm not comfortable talking about work in progress. But I do have a project that's been in the works for several years. Now that I've won the Israel Prize, I feel duty-bound to finish it.
As for my recent fiction, I continue to grapple with the Israeli-Jewish connection, tackling it from different angles. For instance, in 2006 I published Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street [Mi-hutz la-Ofek, Me`ever la-Rechov], a work that took me twenty-eight years to complete. I don't really call it a novel because it deals with an actual family and I let their story speak for itself.
They were from Kovno, in Lithuania: very Zionist, speaking Hebrew and always intending to come to Palestine but never succeeding. During the brief Soviet occupation [June 1940–June 1941] before the Nazis invaded, they were able to send two of their sons here. I met one of them in the Jewish Brigade, and the other I knew later in Jerusalem. Miraculously, the family back home survived the Holocaust; they were reunited by our Jewish Brigade, and the entire family--the youngest boy was thirteen--made it to Israel. Both the adult sons fought in the War of Independence, but tragically the older one was killed in action. The parents lived well into their eighties with all of these memories.
For me, this is a saga that mixes Jewish and Israeli fates. In what sense? You never know whether you are going to survive or die.
--April 2010
One can only hope this will change now that Bartov is about to receive his country's highest honor, the Israel Prize, to be awarded at a nationally televised ceremony on Independence Day, April 20. Informed of the prize, the voluble octogenarian cracked that, although arriving "a little late," it at least provided "scientific proof that there is life after death."
Born in Petah Tikvah to immigrant parents in 1926, the young Bartov preferred burying his head in a book to playing sports. He received a religious education but left school at fifteen to become an apprentice diamond polisher. At seventeen, he joined the Palestine regiment that later became the Jewish Brigade, a formation tardily authorized by Winston Churchill toward the closing stages of World War II.
At war's end, Bartov remained in Europe, where he helped to seek out surviving Jewish refugees and transport them "illegally" into Palestine. Twenty years later, his experience would provide material for a novel, The Brigade, one among the few Bartov works available in English.
Back in Palestine, Bartov spent several semesters at the Hebrew University before being abruptly called up in 1947 to serve in the Haganah during Israel's War of Independence. Thereafter, his career as a writer, which included decades as a columnist for Maariv as well as the steady production of distinguished works of fiction and non-fiction, began in earnest.
When did you first see your name in print?
I started writing as the result of an army bet when I was nineteen. It was a very short story about unrequited love, a subject troubling me at the time. It took me a while to figure out where to send it, but six or seven weeks later a check arrived for a little over a pound—a lot of money at the time.
I was not yet a writer, but I was writing. I'd caught the bug.
Unlike many Israeli writers, you insist on calling yourself a "Jewish writer."
One of my formative experiences was serving in the Jewish Brigade in Europe. A second, after the War of Independence, was living in Jerusalem's German Colony where my wife and I were surrounded by Holocaust refugees rebuilding their lives. After my experiences with the survivors, I dropped my exclusively "Israeli" identity. If I was not foremost a Jew, what did I share with these people who had gone through the hell of the Holocaust?
Hillel Halkin, who translated one of your books, has said that you were among the first in Israel's literary establishment to write in the language people actually spoke.
Yes. Though I employ linguistic allusions to Torah and Mishnah, I don't go in for flowery usage or images. I'm not a fan of post-modern writing, either. I write what I see.
Which authors would you recommend to someone who wants to start exploring contemporary Hebrew literature?
First, read my books!
What book would I find on your bedside table?
Josephus' The Wars of the Jews. It's really about the wars among the Jews. An ancient book, but I read it to understand the tragic parallels with our own times.
You are a man of the Left.
I am Left, but left alone. My Left was shattered many decades ago by the revelations about the crimes of Stalin. Nowadays, I find the Meretz party to be irrelevant, and Labor is led by a millionaire [Ehud Barak], a bourgeois par excellence.
Where does that leave you?
Adhering to certain values that, if besmirched, would make the Zionist enterprise meaningless. Israel needs to be a society based on justice and honesty, the values propagated by the ancient Hebrew prophets. We used to be egalitarian, but we've become a plutocracy. There is a shocking disparity of income. I was disillusioned with Communism, but I remain a social democrat—an old-fashioned socialist.
What do you make of Israel's anti-Zionist Left?
You're speaking of the Left in academia. They are mere curiosities. They lead comfortable lives and mouth platitudes.
In retrospect, was Israel's founding generation mistaken in aiming to create a "new Jew?"
Before the Holocaust, the idea of creating a Jew with none of the baggage of the Diaspora seemed reasonable. But after the loss of Europe's authentic centers of Jewish life, the situation changed. We in Israel did not appreciate how much, and regrettably we allowed our children and grandchildren to grow up Jewishly illiterate
What is the way forward?
It's not religious extremism, though frankly I prefer the [fanatical ultra-Orthodox and anti-Zionist] Neturei Karta types to the Hebrew-speaking post-Zionism crowd. Why? Because after a generation or two, there's a chance the ultra-Orthodox may become heretics, but they'll still retain enough of their heritage to stay Jewish, whereas those who are Jewishly illiterate will be lost forever.
Getting back to literature, in the last ten years you have published two novels, a long novella, and a collection of essays. What next?
I'm not comfortable talking about work in progress. But I do have a project that's been in the works for several years. Now that I've won the Israel Prize, I feel duty-bound to finish it.
As for my recent fiction, I continue to grapple with the Israeli-Jewish connection, tackling it from different angles. For instance, in 2006 I published Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street [Mi-hutz la-Ofek, Me`ever la-Rechov], a work that took me twenty-eight years to complete. I don't really call it a novel because it deals with an actual family and I let their story speak for itself.
They were from Kovno, in Lithuania: very Zionist, speaking Hebrew and always intending to come to Palestine but never succeeding. During the brief Soviet occupation [June 1940–June 1941] before the Nazis invaded, they were able to send two of their sons here. I met one of them in the Jewish Brigade, and the other I knew later in Jerusalem. Miraculously, the family back home survived the Holocaust; they were reunited by our Jewish Brigade, and the entire family--the youngest boy was thirteen--made it to Israel. Both the adult sons fought in the War of Independence, but tragically the older one was killed in action. The parents lived well into their eighties with all of these memories.
For me, this is a saga that mixes Jewish and Israeli fates. In what sense? You never know whether you are going to survive or die.
--April 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Making Tzipi Livni Look Good
I can't say I am disappointed in Shaul Mofaz of Kadima since I did not have high expectations of him in the first place.
But his intemperate piece in yesterday's Maariv and his remarks on Israel Radio today about the Im Tirtzu movement are nevertheless notable.
Mofaz thinks it is "thuggish" to call attention to a political culture at Ben-Gurion & other universities which creates a safe haven for Israelis enablers of the boycott of Israel movement.
Yet speaking out of both sides of his mouth he also said that anti-Zionist lecturers should not be employed. Huh?
I have nothing against employing anti-Zionists. But when you reach a tipping point and the anti-Zionists set the tone for an entire department and even a campus, something is terribly wrong.
But his intemperate piece in yesterday's Maariv and his remarks on Israel Radio today about the Im Tirtzu movement are nevertheless notable.
Mofaz thinks it is "thuggish" to call attention to a political culture at Ben-Gurion & other universities which creates a safe haven for Israelis enablers of the boycott of Israel movement.
Yet speaking out of both sides of his mouth he also said that anti-Zionist lecturers should not be employed. Huh?
I have nothing against employing anti-Zionists. But when you reach a tipping point and the anti-Zionists set the tone for an entire department and even a campus, something is terribly wrong.
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, July 16, 2010
British Jews and Israel
On Friday, Jewish Ideas Daily called attention to an important survey of British Jewish public opinion:
http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/Attitudes%20of%20Jews%20in%20Britain%20towards%20Israel.pdf
One finding that struck me is that 95 percent of UK Jews have visited Israel. Granted the journey is not as long as a trip from North America. Still, it is significant contrasted with US Jews -- MOST of whom have NEVER been to Israel.
http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/Attitudes%20of%20Jews%20in%20Britain%20towards%20Israel.pdf
One finding that struck me is that 95 percent of UK Jews have visited Israel. Granted the journey is not as long as a trip from North America. Still, it is significant contrasted with US Jews -- MOST of whom have NEVER been to Israel.
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, July 09, 2010
Now that's what I call an exchange: What Jerusalem Can Learn from Washington & Moscow
10 Russian agents who infiltrated suburban America were deported in exchange for four people said to have been spying for the West and held in Russian prisons.
10 for 4.
The four were said to have delivered such good material to make the lopsided exchange reasonable.
10 for 4.
Not 1,000 for 1.
Not ONE of the 10 released pose any threat to US national security. Not one.
1,000 for 1? When among the 1,000 are scores who will kill again? Not spy again, kill again.
No way.
10 for 4.
The four were said to have delivered such good material to make the lopsided exchange reasonable.
10 for 4.
Not 1,000 for 1.
Not ONE of the 10 released pose any threat to US national security. Not one.
1,000 for 1? When among the 1,000 are scores who will kill again? Not spy again, kill again.
No way.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Celebrating the Venice Declaration
No, it's not your imagination.
The editor of the op-ed pages of the International Herald Tribune has allowed two sympathetic pieces about Israel to appear since the Turkish/Hamas flotilla provocation.
There was the oped by Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the US and one by the eloquent Israeli-American author Daniel Gordis.
Everything else, day in and day out has lived up to the usual illiberal idea of balance: On one one hand, criticism of Israel by Arabs; on the other hand, criticism of Israeli policies by Israelis.
Today's piece by Sharon Pardo of Ben-Gurion University and Yonatan Touval urging Europe to pressure Israel is the latest installment of the IHT -- the Global Edition of the NYTimes -- onslaught.
Which is not to say the IHT is worse than the British press.
Pardo & Touval look back with fondness on the 30th anniversary of the Venice Declaration -- the European push for the legitimization of the PLO.
After all, that eventually led to Oslo.
Their piece would work in The Onion as satire.
But these guys are serious. I feel a European junket coming on.
The editor of the op-ed pages of the International Herald Tribune has allowed two sympathetic pieces about Israel to appear since the Turkish/Hamas flotilla provocation.
There was the oped by Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the US and one by the eloquent Israeli-American author Daniel Gordis.
Everything else, day in and day out has lived up to the usual illiberal idea of balance: On one one hand, criticism of Israel by Arabs; on the other hand, criticism of Israeli policies by Israelis.
Today's piece by Sharon Pardo of Ben-Gurion University and Yonatan Touval urging Europe to pressure Israel is the latest installment of the IHT -- the Global Edition of the NYTimes -- onslaught.
Which is not to say the IHT is worse than the British press.
Pardo & Touval look back with fondness on the 30th anniversary of the Venice Declaration -- the European push for the legitimization of the PLO.
After all, that eventually led to Oslo.
Their piece would work in The Onion as satire.
But these guys are serious. I feel a European junket coming on.
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 08, 2010
Ross Douthat: worth skipping
I have to confess that I tend to give a miss to Ross Douthat's NYTimes op-eds.
But it is worth reading one from time to time to remind myself why -- at least when it comes to Israel -- the man knows not from whence he speaks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/opinion/07douthat.html?hp
Ross, before there were Crusader states, indeed before there was Christianity -- there was the Jewish state of Israel and an already ancient Jewish civilizational connection to the country.
The moral stance to take -- the right thing to do -- is to support Israel not to join the jackals.
But it is worth reading one from time to time to remind myself why -- at least when it comes to Israel -- the man knows not from whence he speaks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/opinion/07douthat.html?hp
Ross, before there were Crusader states, indeed before there was Christianity -- there was the Jewish state of Israel and an already ancient Jewish civilizational connection to the country.
The moral stance to take -- the right thing to do -- is to support Israel not to join the jackals.
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 07, 2010
More on the peace activists
In case you missed it:
The following passengers on board the Mavi Marmara are known to be involved in terrorist activity.
Fatimah Mahmadi (born 1979), is a United States resident of Iranian origin, and an active member of the organization "Viva Palestine", she attempted to smuggle forbidden electronic components into the Gaza Strip.
Ken O'Keefe (Born 1969), an American and British citizen, is a radical anti-Israel activist and operative of the Hamas Terror organization. He attempted to enter the Gaza Strip in order to form and train a commando unit for the Palestinian terror organization.
Hassan Iynasi (born 1982), a Turkish citizen and activist in a Turkish charity organization, is known of providing financial support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Terror organization.
Hussein Urosh, a Turkish citizen and activist in the IHH organization, was on his way to the Gaza Strip in order to assist in smuggling Al-Qaeda operatives via Turkey into the Strip.
Ahmad Umimon (born 1959), is a French citizen of Moroccan origin, and an operative of the Hamas Terrorist organization.
***************
Also, have a look at
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
The following passengers on board the Mavi Marmara are known to be involved in terrorist activity.
Fatimah Mahmadi (born 1979), is a United States resident of Iranian origin, and an active member of the organization "Viva Palestine", she attempted to smuggle forbidden electronic components into the Gaza Strip.
Ken O'Keefe (Born 1969), an American and British citizen, is a radical anti-Israel activist and operative of the Hamas Terror organization. He attempted to enter the Gaza Strip in order to form and train a commando unit for the Palestinian terror organization.
Hassan Iynasi (born 1982), a Turkish citizen and activist in a Turkish charity organization, is known of providing financial support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Terror organization.
Hussein Urosh, a Turkish citizen and activist in the IHH organization, was on his way to the Gaza Strip in order to assist in smuggling Al-Qaeda operatives via Turkey into the Strip.
Ahmad Umimon (born 1959), is a French citizen of Moroccan origin, and an operative of the Hamas Terrorist organization.
***************
Also, have a look at
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
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 04, 2010
One tidbit from the Friday Haaretz
There is actually one op-ed word reading in the Friday Haaretz. But I can't link it here because it is not yet on the web.
The piece is by Israel Harel entitled "Exhausting ourselves to death." He recall the famous quote by Chaim Weizmann: It is easier to take the Jews out of the galut (diaspora) than to take the galut out of the Jews.
The reaction of Israel's media elite and intelligentsia to the world's defamation of our country was akin to how ghetto Jews reacted in the bad old day before the state.
We've acted, Harel says, "like an insecure community"; "we do not stop flagellating ourselves over not having done enough to provide 'information' to those who hate us, as if they do not know the truth."
Harel goes on to point out that we still have many friends in the US and elsewhere but their friendship is not appreciated or treated as somehow "strange."
The Friday page one of today's (Friday's) Haaretz is the least anti-Israel -- the least post-Zionist -- of the week. Curious.
The piece is by Israel Harel entitled "Exhausting ourselves to death." He recall the famous quote by Chaim Weizmann: It is easier to take the Jews out of the galut (diaspora) than to take the galut out of the Jews.
The reaction of Israel's media elite and intelligentsia to the world's defamation of our country was akin to how ghetto Jews reacted in the bad old day before the state.
We've acted, Harel says, "like an insecure community"; "we do not stop flagellating ourselves over not having done enough to provide 'information' to those who hate us, as if they do not know the truth."
Harel goes on to point out that we still have many friends in the US and elsewhere but their friendship is not appreciated or treated as somehow "strange."
The Friday page one of today's (Friday's) Haaretz is the least anti-Israel -- the least post-Zionist -- of the week. Curious.
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, June 03, 2010
Trading access for access: Let the Red Cross See Gilad Schalit
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman proposes that Israel open a number of additional overland passages into the Hamas-occupied Gaza Strip in return for a commitment from the Islamist rulers to allow regular monthly visits by Red Cross representatives to Gilad Schalit.
It's certainly an idea worth considering.
It's certainly an idea worth considering.
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, June 02, 2010
Meanwhile....
You never know quite what to believe. Mossad chief Meir Dagan told members of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the Iranian nuclear program is facing many technological difficulties.
The NYTimes is reporting that Iran has now produced a stockpile of nuclear fuel that experts say would be enough, with further enrichment, to make two nuclear weapons.
The NYTimes is reporting that Iran has now produced a stockpile of nuclear fuel that experts say would be enough, with further enrichment, to make two nuclear weapons.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
The pressure mounts on Israel
It's no fun waking up to see the world's irrational reaction to the interdiction of the non-humanitarian flotilla bound for Hamas-controlled Gaza continuing to dominate the news. To hear the Irish premier warn Israel of the consequences of the next interdiction.
The Irish premier. Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What does Ireland have to do with Gaza?
The world's hostility and refusal to even consider Israel's position seems almost ...metaphysical.
Our existence has become such a terrible nuisance. They either do not know or do not care what Hamas would do if we stepped back and allowed unfettered access to Gaza. Israelis would love nothing better than to wash our hands of Gaza.
Critics here say the problem is hasbara.
I wish.
I heard a British anchor yesterday press a beleaguered Israeli spokesman trying to explain what our commandos encountered on the "aid ship.": "Yes, but you shot them, didn't you...yes, yes, but you shot them, didn't you?"
She was not open to so much as hearing Israel's position.
Yes the IDF tape of what our commandos faced should have been released earlier. No doubt. For our own edification. To help Israelis cope through that long Monday morning.
But I doubt it would have persuaded a world that has closed its mind toward Israel. They have eyes but they do not see; ears but do not hear.
Haaretz, as usual, continues to do irreparable damage to the Zionist enterprise -- a tradition that dates back decades.
Tuesday's front page was replete with sickening self-flagellation.
Wednesday's paper is a joke; an exercise in self-indulgence in which novelists were invited to take over most of the news pages. Post-modernist Haaretz: Truth/Fiction. Whatever.
The Irish premier. Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What does Ireland have to do with Gaza?
The world's hostility and refusal to even consider Israel's position seems almost ...metaphysical.
Our existence has become such a terrible nuisance. They either do not know or do not care what Hamas would do if we stepped back and allowed unfettered access to Gaza. Israelis would love nothing better than to wash our hands of Gaza.
Critics here say the problem is hasbara.
I wish.
I heard a British anchor yesterday press a beleaguered Israeli spokesman trying to explain what our commandos encountered on the "aid ship.": "Yes, but you shot them, didn't you...yes, yes, but you shot them, didn't you?"
She was not open to so much as hearing Israel's position.
Yes the IDF tape of what our commandos faced should have been released earlier. No doubt. For our own edification. To help Israelis cope through that long Monday morning.
But I doubt it would have persuaded a world that has closed its mind toward Israel. They have eyes but they do not see; ears but do not hear.
Haaretz, as usual, continues to do irreparable damage to the Zionist enterprise -- a tradition that dates back decades.
Tuesday's front page was replete with sickening self-flagellation.
Wednesday's paper is a joke; an exercise in self-indulgence in which novelists were invited to take over most of the news pages. Post-modernist Haaretz: Truth/Fiction. Whatever.
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 01, 2010
How to understand Israel's Response to the Gaza Flotilla
The developing diplomatic and media reaction to Israel's interdiction Monday of a pro-Palestinian flotilla steaming toward the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip speaks volumes: about Israel's deepening isolation in the world and the perverted moral priorities of the international community.
Even before Defense Minister Ehud Barak presented Israel's preliminary report at a 1 p.m. Tel Aviv news conference the censorious deluge had begun. The European Union called for an end to the quarantine of Gaza; Greece cancelled a scheduled visit by the commander of the Israeli Air Force; France unleashed a stinging denunciation; Switzerland called in the Israeli ambassador.
A morning anchor on Britain's Sky News demanded an Israeli spokesman tell him why Israel had no respect for international law. Not one satellite news channel in the region carried Barak's English-language briefing. Only a few bothered to broadcast an earlier statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
As soon as operational conditions permitted, Jerusalem wasted no time in presenting its case, but what it said was promptly ignored, denigrated or dismissed.
These basic facts were known early on:
• Organizers: The flotilla was instigated by the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, an extremist Islamist organization based in Turkey in collaboration with the violence-prone International Solidarity Movement. Their moves were coordinated with Turkey and Hamas.
• Aid was a pretext: Organizers were offered the opportunity to ship any humanitarian supplies to Gaza via the Israeli port of Ashdod; a million tons of humanitarian supplies have entered Gaza from Israel over the last 18 months. They refused.
• Propaganda was the aim: IHH was repeatedly warned that under no circumstances would its convoy be permitted to sail into Gaza. Only when last-minute sea-to-sea warnings to desist were ignored were the vessels boarded by Israeli navy commandos. There was minimal resistance on five of the six boats as the troops, equipped with anti-riot gear, came aboard.
• Violence was premeditated: Instead of encountering "peace activists" the commandos rappelling down from helicopters onto the largest boat – the multi- story ocean liner Mavi Marmara with hundreds of militants aboard -- were set upon by crowds armed with knives, metal bars, and Molotov cocktails. At least two commandos are in hospital with gunshot wounds; another has a fractured skull. The commandos radioed that they feared being overwhelmed and lynched (video) and were given permission to use live fire.
These are the circumstances – self-defense – in which 9 pro-Palestinian activists, mostly Turkish nationals, were killed.
Nevertheless, Israel confronts a media intifada in which rage replaces rationality. From the outset, Arab news outlets and their enablers, stoked anti-Israel sentiment with bogus claims disseminated by new media technologies that 20 "activists" had been wantonly slaughtered, and that the Islamic Movement's northern branch chief Raed Salah (an Islamist agitator who carries an Israeli passport and was on board the Mavi Marmara) had been "assassinated." He is alive and well.
Arab leaders in Israel have called for raucous a general strike; Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad has urged Hamas to put aside its differences with Fatah in the common struggle against Israel. Radicalized Turkey, now allied with Iran and Hamas, may have found a pretext for a formal break in diplomatic ties with Israel.
Liberal Europe has trotted out the usual litany of charges. Israel is accused of violating international law, notwithstanding that it is legally entitled to quarantine Hamas which has declared war on Israel. The Jewish state is excoriated for acting on the high-seas, though that's where the unlawful intent of the flotilla could best be preempted. It is criticized for disproportionate use of force, though its soldiers met with lethal opposition.
In practice, any steps Israel takes in self-defense are adjudged "disproportionate."
In many ways, Monday's dawn clash off the Israeli coast was an incident foretold. At the UN, U.S. diplomats blocked a completely one-sided formal Security Council resolution condemning Israel that had demanded a Goldstone-like commission of inquiry. Instead, they tiredly acquiesced to a less equivocal censure which calls for an "impartial investigation."
Yet this is an administration that prides itself on "never letting a serious crisis go to waste."
It is, therefore, not too late for President Barack Obama to lead the civilized word out of its moral stupor; to emphatically declare that the season for shameless scapegoating of the Jewish state is over; to assert that Israel is in the forefront of a struggle against Western civilization by insidious Islamist fanaticism.
Even before Defense Minister Ehud Barak presented Israel's preliminary report at a 1 p.m. Tel Aviv news conference the censorious deluge had begun. The European Union called for an end to the quarantine of Gaza; Greece cancelled a scheduled visit by the commander of the Israeli Air Force; France unleashed a stinging denunciation; Switzerland called in the Israeli ambassador.
A morning anchor on Britain's Sky News demanded an Israeli spokesman tell him why Israel had no respect for international law. Not one satellite news channel in the region carried Barak's English-language briefing. Only a few bothered to broadcast an earlier statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
As soon as operational conditions permitted, Jerusalem wasted no time in presenting its case, but what it said was promptly ignored, denigrated or dismissed.
These basic facts were known early on:
• Organizers: The flotilla was instigated by the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, an extremist Islamist organization based in Turkey in collaboration with the violence-prone International Solidarity Movement. Their moves were coordinated with Turkey and Hamas.
• Aid was a pretext: Organizers were offered the opportunity to ship any humanitarian supplies to Gaza via the Israeli port of Ashdod; a million tons of humanitarian supplies have entered Gaza from Israel over the last 18 months. They refused.
• Propaganda was the aim: IHH was repeatedly warned that under no circumstances would its convoy be permitted to sail into Gaza. Only when last-minute sea-to-sea warnings to desist were ignored were the vessels boarded by Israeli navy commandos. There was minimal resistance on five of the six boats as the troops, equipped with anti-riot gear, came aboard.
• Violence was premeditated: Instead of encountering "peace activists" the commandos rappelling down from helicopters onto the largest boat – the multi- story ocean liner Mavi Marmara with hundreds of militants aboard -- were set upon by crowds armed with knives, metal bars, and Molotov cocktails. At least two commandos are in hospital with gunshot wounds; another has a fractured skull. The commandos radioed that they feared being overwhelmed and lynched (video) and were given permission to use live fire.
These are the circumstances – self-defense – in which 9 pro-Palestinian activists, mostly Turkish nationals, were killed.
Nevertheless, Israel confronts a media intifada in which rage replaces rationality. From the outset, Arab news outlets and their enablers, stoked anti-Israel sentiment with bogus claims disseminated by new media technologies that 20 "activists" had been wantonly slaughtered, and that the Islamic Movement's northern branch chief Raed Salah (an Islamist agitator who carries an Israeli passport and was on board the Mavi Marmara) had been "assassinated." He is alive and well.
Arab leaders in Israel have called for raucous a general strike; Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad has urged Hamas to put aside its differences with Fatah in the common struggle against Israel. Radicalized Turkey, now allied with Iran and Hamas, may have found a pretext for a formal break in diplomatic ties with Israel.
Liberal Europe has trotted out the usual litany of charges. Israel is accused of violating international law, notwithstanding that it is legally entitled to quarantine Hamas which has declared war on Israel. The Jewish state is excoriated for acting on the high-seas, though that's where the unlawful intent of the flotilla could best be preempted. It is criticized for disproportionate use of force, though its soldiers met with lethal opposition.
In practice, any steps Israel takes in self-defense are adjudged "disproportionate."
In many ways, Monday's dawn clash off the Israeli coast was an incident foretold. At the UN, U.S. diplomats blocked a completely one-sided formal Security Council resolution condemning Israel that had demanded a Goldstone-like commission of inquiry. Instead, they tiredly acquiesced to a less equivocal censure which calls for an "impartial investigation."
Yet this is an administration that prides itself on "never letting a serious crisis go to waste."
It is, therefore, not too late for President Barack Obama to lead the civilized word out of its moral stupor; to emphatically declare that the season for shameless scapegoating of the Jewish state is over; to assert that Israel is in the forefront of a struggle against Western civilization by insidious Islamist fanaticism.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Meet This Year's Israel Prize Winner for Hebrew Literature
Introducing Hanoch Bartov:
To judge by the many prestigious awards his country has bestowed upon him, and by his prolific output—including ten novels, six collections of short stories, and three books of essays—the eighty-four-year-old Hanoch Bartov should need no introduction. And yet, outside Israel, this master of Hebrew style and quintessential son of the Jewish people and the Jewish state is relatively little known.
Please see my interview:
www.jewishideasdaily.com
To judge by the many prestigious awards his country has bestowed upon him, and by his prolific output—including ten novels, six collections of short stories, and three books of essays—the eighty-four-year-old Hanoch Bartov should need no introduction. And yet, outside Israel, this master of Hebrew style and quintessential son of the Jewish people and the Jewish state is relatively little known.
Please see my interview:
www.jewishideasdaily.com
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 07, 2010
New Elections Have Been Called in the UK
Will a change in government matter to US-Israel relations?
Please visit:
www.Jewishideasdaily.com
Please visit:
www.Jewishideasdaily.com
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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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, March 03, 2010
Musings on Moses & Muhammad
During the last full week of February, Jews and Muslims memorialized their respective founding prophets who, coincidentally, both died on their own birthdays.
Judaism commemorated Adar 7 as the day when Moses was born and died (coinciding with February 21); Islam commemorated Rabi-al-Awwal 12 (coinciding with February 26) as Muhammad's birthday and the anniversary of his death. The day, Milad an-Nabi, has religious as well as cultural significance. In Southeast Asia, for instance, it is marked by a carnival atmosphere. More conservative Muslim authorities hold that there is no theological basis to sanctify the day.
Yet this year in Damascus, it was a pan-Islamic occasion which saw Syrian President Bashar Assad, an Alawite, and the Persian Shi'ite president of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinijad, attend a Sunni-led service.
Among Jews, the day is set aside for fasting and penitence but nowadays observed only by sectors within the Orthodox world. During medieval times, in Egypt, for example, Adar 7 took on communal and cultural significance; while Adar 8 was a carnival day! This made some conservative rabbis unhappy and they imposed restrictions on the participation of women.
The two faiths use different calendars so this year's convergence of birth/death anniversaries was mere coincidence. Yet there are some notable parallels along with dissimilarities between the two founders.
Moses was raised as a prince, but his birth father plays only a cameo role in the Torah and Muhammad's father, Abdullah, died while the prophet-to-be was still in his mother's womb. Some of Muhammad's successors were uncomfortable with the parallels the Koran draws with the Torah -- as when the Muslim holy book replicates the Torah's story of Moses smiting the rock for water.
Where Moses was a reluctant leader; Muhammad was keen and confident. Both men were warrior prophets, but Moses went to battle unenthusiastically, and appeared not to relish the role as commander-in-chief. Perhaps that is a reason why modern Israel memorializes those of its fallen soldiers whose graves are not known on the same day it remembers Moses.
Muhammad saw himself as more than the inheritor of Moses' mantle; he had come to perfect the earlier prophet's message. Muhammad, who came into contact with the Jewish tribes of Arabia viewed Judaism as a direct challenge to his religious mission. There is an account, for instance, of how his face changed color when he saw a follower reading from the Torah. The Hadith has Muhammad declaring that were Moses his contemporary, the Israelite would have become a Muslim.
Whereas Moses died with Joshua designated as his clear successor, Israelite fragmentation along tribal lines, notwithstanding -- Muhammad's demise led to a schism played out to this day between Sunnis and Shi'ites.
In the end, Moses expired in presence of God alone, whereas Muhammad passed away from an illness in his wife Aisha's home today. No one knows where Moses' burial place is. Muhammad is buried in the Al-Masjid al-Nabawi Mosque in Medina.
Judaism commemorated Adar 7 as the day when Moses was born and died (coinciding with February 21); Islam commemorated Rabi-al-Awwal 12 (coinciding with February 26) as Muhammad's birthday and the anniversary of his death. The day, Milad an-Nabi, has religious as well as cultural significance. In Southeast Asia, for instance, it is marked by a carnival atmosphere. More conservative Muslim authorities hold that there is no theological basis to sanctify the day.
Yet this year in Damascus, it was a pan-Islamic occasion which saw Syrian President Bashar Assad, an Alawite, and the Persian Shi'ite president of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinijad, attend a Sunni-led service.
Among Jews, the day is set aside for fasting and penitence but nowadays observed only by sectors within the Orthodox world. During medieval times, in Egypt, for example, Adar 7 took on communal and cultural significance; while Adar 8 was a carnival day! This made some conservative rabbis unhappy and they imposed restrictions on the participation of women.
The two faiths use different calendars so this year's convergence of birth/death anniversaries was mere coincidence. Yet there are some notable parallels along with dissimilarities between the two founders.
Moses was raised as a prince, but his birth father plays only a cameo role in the Torah and Muhammad's father, Abdullah, died while the prophet-to-be was still in his mother's womb. Some of Muhammad's successors were uncomfortable with the parallels the Koran draws with the Torah -- as when the Muslim holy book replicates the Torah's story of Moses smiting the rock for water.
Where Moses was a reluctant leader; Muhammad was keen and confident. Both men were warrior prophets, but Moses went to battle unenthusiastically, and appeared not to relish the role as commander-in-chief. Perhaps that is a reason why modern Israel memorializes those of its fallen soldiers whose graves are not known on the same day it remembers Moses.
Muhammad saw himself as more than the inheritor of Moses' mantle; he had come to perfect the earlier prophet's message. Muhammad, who came into contact with the Jewish tribes of Arabia viewed Judaism as a direct challenge to his religious mission. There is an account, for instance, of how his face changed color when he saw a follower reading from the Torah. The Hadith has Muhammad declaring that were Moses his contemporary, the Israelite would have become a Muslim.
Whereas Moses died with Joshua designated as his clear successor, Israelite fragmentation along tribal lines, notwithstanding -- Muhammad's demise led to a schism played out to this day between Sunnis and Shi'ites.
In the end, Moses expired in presence of God alone, whereas Muhammad passed away from an illness in his wife Aisha's home today. No one knows where Moses' burial place is. Muhammad is buried in the Al-Masjid al-Nabawi Mosque in Medina.
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.
German liberalism
Friedrich Naumann
When thinking of 20th century Germany, the first thing that comes to mind isn't its liberal tradition. Yet not only has a centrist liberal polity emerged from the ashes of the Nazi regime which ruled from 1933 until 1945, but the origins of liberalism in Germany can be traced to a political tradition dating back to the early 1900s.
To hear Prof. Moshe Zimmermann, the 67 year-old-head of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem tell it, modern German history could have gone either way; there is nothing metaphysical in the German political character that made the rise of the Nazis inevitable. It was, instead, a matter of circumstances and bad luck framed by economic depression and military defeat in the First World War.
To drive home this point, Zimmerman cited the legacy of Friedrich Naumann (1860-1919) a Lutheran pastor turned politician and Reichstag member who sought to navigate his middle class constituents toward social reform and political tolerance.
Speaking Monday at a seminar on German liberalism at Hebrew University, co-sponsored by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty, Zimmerman insisted that liberalism and emancipation were as much a part of Germany's political legacy as its darker contributions.
Naumann's answer to the Jewish question, Zimmermann told Jewish Ideas Daily, was to proclaim that there really ought to be no Jewish question at all; that anti-Semitism was wrong and counter-productive, and that there was no trans-national or over-arching Jewish problem; that whatever problems Jews faced (or, presumably, were thought to cause) could be solved within the framework of the countries in which they lived.
These progressive views were enunciated in a political environment in which hatred of Jews permeated even democratic movements.
Naumann visited Palestine in 1898 – the same year as did Kaiser Wilhelm II and Theodore Herzl – and returned home with mildly anti-Zionist attitudes. Why? Firstly, because he didn't conceive of the Jews as a nation, people or ethnicity, but as a religious denomination. Nor did he think the Zionist enterprise would take off. And, finally, he worried that Zionism would exacerbate intolerance toward Jews within Germany.
As far as Zimmerman knows, Naumann did not give Zionism further consideration and did not publicly react to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
GERMAN LIBERALS of the early 1900s have little in common with their 21st century counterparts, Zimmerman said. Though it is doubtful whether the Friedrich Naumann Foundation -- which is affiliated with the Free Democratic Party, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition -- would agree. Germany's foreign minister is FDP chair Guido Westerwelle. He and Merkel currently disagree about taxes (he wants them cut) and nuclear power plans (he wants them built).
In any event, the liberals of old opposed the conservative understanding of civil society (Gesellschaft) as an "organism" which worked best under authoritarian rule. In contrast, the liberals championed individual over group rights.
Definitions of liberalism have evolved over the decades, but at minimum it is an ideology that "considers individuals the seat of moral value and each individual as of equal worth," according to political sociologist John A. Hall.
The German liberals of Naumann's era engaged in political combat against the aristocracy and oligarchy on the one hand, and the working classes on the other.
Their natural constituency was the middle class – the bourgeois – the very strata in which the Jews felt most at home.
******
THE argument that racism and authoritarianism were not inherently more at home in the pre-WWII German body politic than liberalism is, shall we say, revisionist. But in championing this position, Zimmerman, who wrote his master's thesis on Naumann, is hardly being at his most controversial.
The product of a privileged national-religious Jerusalem home, Zimmerman has established a notorious reputation beyond the sphere of his academic work for having compared IDF soldiers serving in Judea and Samaria to the SS, and Hebron settlers to the Hitler Youth.
All of which goes to show that even agreeable academic, an expert on liberalism, can give voice to intolerance.
When thinking of 20th century Germany, the first thing that comes to mind isn't its liberal tradition. Yet not only has a centrist liberal polity emerged from the ashes of the Nazi regime which ruled from 1933 until 1945, but the origins of liberalism in Germany can be traced to a political tradition dating back to the early 1900s.
To hear Prof. Moshe Zimmermann, the 67 year-old-head of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem tell it, modern German history could have gone either way; there is nothing metaphysical in the German political character that made the rise of the Nazis inevitable. It was, instead, a matter of circumstances and bad luck framed by economic depression and military defeat in the First World War.
To drive home this point, Zimmerman cited the legacy of Friedrich Naumann (1860-1919) a Lutheran pastor turned politician and Reichstag member who sought to navigate his middle class constituents toward social reform and political tolerance.
Speaking Monday at a seminar on German liberalism at Hebrew University, co-sponsored by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty, Zimmerman insisted that liberalism and emancipation were as much a part of Germany's political legacy as its darker contributions.
Naumann's answer to the Jewish question, Zimmermann told Jewish Ideas Daily, was to proclaim that there really ought to be no Jewish question at all; that anti-Semitism was wrong and counter-productive, and that there was no trans-national or over-arching Jewish problem; that whatever problems Jews faced (or, presumably, were thought to cause) could be solved within the framework of the countries in which they lived.
These progressive views were enunciated in a political environment in which hatred of Jews permeated even democratic movements.
Naumann visited Palestine in 1898 – the same year as did Kaiser Wilhelm II and Theodore Herzl – and returned home with mildly anti-Zionist attitudes. Why? Firstly, because he didn't conceive of the Jews as a nation, people or ethnicity, but as a religious denomination. Nor did he think the Zionist enterprise would take off. And, finally, he worried that Zionism would exacerbate intolerance toward Jews within Germany.
As far as Zimmerman knows, Naumann did not give Zionism further consideration and did not publicly react to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
GERMAN LIBERALS of the early 1900s have little in common with their 21st century counterparts, Zimmerman said. Though it is doubtful whether the Friedrich Naumann Foundation -- which is affiliated with the Free Democratic Party, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition -- would agree. Germany's foreign minister is FDP chair Guido Westerwelle. He and Merkel currently disagree about taxes (he wants them cut) and nuclear power plans (he wants them built).
In any event, the liberals of old opposed the conservative understanding of civil society (Gesellschaft) as an "organism" which worked best under authoritarian rule. In contrast, the liberals championed individual over group rights.
Definitions of liberalism have evolved over the decades, but at minimum it is an ideology that "considers individuals the seat of moral value and each individual as of equal worth," according to political sociologist John A. Hall.
The German liberals of Naumann's era engaged in political combat against the aristocracy and oligarchy on the one hand, and the working classes on the other.
Their natural constituency was the middle class – the bourgeois – the very strata in which the Jews felt most at home.
******
THE argument that racism and authoritarianism were not inherently more at home in the pre-WWII German body politic than liberalism is, shall we say, revisionist. But in championing this position, Zimmerman, who wrote his master's thesis on Naumann, is hardly being at his most controversial.
The product of a privileged national-religious Jerusalem home, Zimmerman has established a notorious reputation beyond the sphere of his academic work for having compared IDF soldiers serving in Judea and Samaria to the SS, and Hebron settlers to the Hitler Youth.
All of which goes to show that even agreeable academic, an expert on liberalism, can give voice to intolerance.
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.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
CHECK OUT MY NEW HOME
Dear Reader,
Below is the final editorial I have written for The Jerusalem Post in my capacity as Editorial Page Editor.
I am delighted to tell you that I have accepted a new job with the Jewish Ideas Daily website as managing editor. It is an ideas-driven (as opposed to news driven) site and I look forward to the challenge. I join an outstanding team of editors.
So, please visit Jewish Ideas Daily: http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/ and take a moment to register.
My thanks to all my friends and colleagues at The Post for nearly 11 fascinating years of creativity.
Elliot
==============================================================================
Passport ‘rage’
Dahu Khalfan Tamim now has a world-class reputation for detective work. The head of the Dubai police swiftly determined that Hamas’s Mahmoud Mabhouh did not die of natural causes at the five-star Bustan Rotana Hotel on Jan. 20. He was assassinated.
Let’s for the sake of argument grant that Israel did away with Mabhouh; that he was not killed by Iran or over some intra-Palestinian dispute, and that clues pointing to Israeli culpability are genuine.
Mabhouh certainly deserved to be assassinated by Israel. Hamas declared war on Israel. And he co-founded its military wing and was personally involved in the (separate) 1989 killings of IDF soldiers Ilan Sa’adon and Avi Sasportas.
Mabhouh was a key link in the unlawful syndicate which delivers Iranian weapons to Gaza. He was apparently tasked with importing an arsenal that would make life hellish for Israelis living in metropolitan Tel Aviv. He was, perhaps, Hamas’s equivalent to Hizbullah’s Imad Mughniyeh, whose car blew up in Damascus two years ago.
YOU CAN tell a great deal about the moral compass and political leanings of a society by observing its reaction to the Mabhouh liquidation.
There is unease in Europe because the purported assassins identified by Dubai were travelling under forged French, German, Irish and British passports; and identities of Israelis with dual-citizenship were utilized.
Even The Times of London, whose editorial page has been sympathetic toward Israel, expressed chagrin over the affair, saying this country had shown poor regard for the “future security of British passport holders overseas.” Frankly, there is little reason to think that the tradecraft employed in this assassination – which we will not second guess at this stage – jeopardizes anyone.
Actually, what troubles us is the question of whose passport Mabhouh was traveling under and why he was allowed to enter neutral Dubai on gun-running business.
Of course, that’s not how the British see it. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen warned that if Israel had used British passports for “nefarious” purposes – meaning sending Mabhouh to his Maker – Bowen expected, or would it be more accurate to say, hoped for, “a crisis” in relations between London and Jerusalem.
The Guardian quoted a Foreign Office mandarin as gloating: “Relations were in the freezer before this. They are in the deep freeze now.” The paper then grumbled about the British government’s “supine” response to the assassination, editorializing against the government’s proposal to lift the threat of lawfare. The Guardian wants visiting Israeli ministers to continue to worry about facing Palestinian-inspired “war crimes” charges.
With the British media delighting in the assassination-passport kerfuffle – a Daily Mail headline screamed: “Dragged into a Mossad murder plot” – Menzies Campell, a routinely anti-Israel elder of the Liberal Democrats, declared that “Israel has some explaining to do.”
An anyway beleaguered Prime Minister Gordon Brown intoned: “We have got to carry out a full investigation into this. The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care.” Sentiments echoed by Opposition Leader David Cameron.
The most encouraging view – paradoxically – came from Robert Fisk, the Independent’s inveterate Israel-basher: He suspects that London and Paris colluded with Jerusalem in Mabhouth’s assassination, in a reprise of the 1956 Sinai Campaign. That explained, he wrote, the flawless biometric passports.
What an uplifting (if improbable) scenario: MI6 and the Directorate-General for External Security working in tandem with the Mossad to stop Iranian arms from reaching Hamas.
PERHAPS the shrill reaction in some (though certainly not all) British quarters is not rooted purely in anti-Israelism. Chances are that at least parts of the British intelligentsia and media would have reacted similarly if the man in that hotel room had been Osama bin Laden... or Adolf Eichmann. And this pigheaded refusal to acknowledge that sometimes the ends do justify the means reflects a moral impoverishment that’s not limited to Britain.
Some pundits here have also gone wobbly, asking whether the Mabhouh hit was worth the trouble; others are rashly calling for the resignation of Mossad chief Meir Dagan.
In fact, removing a Mabhouh or a Mughniyeh – agents of evil engaged in sensitive compartmentalized work – significantly disrupts Hamas and Hizbullah. It sows distrust within enemy ranks. And it forces whoever replaces them to dissipate their energies just trying to stay alive.
Below is the final editorial I have written for The Jerusalem Post in my capacity as Editorial Page Editor.
I am delighted to tell you that I have accepted a new job with the Jewish Ideas Daily website as managing editor. It is an ideas-driven (as opposed to news driven) site and I look forward to the challenge. I join an outstanding team of editors.
So, please visit Jewish Ideas Daily: http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/ and take a moment to register.
My thanks to all my friends and colleagues at The Post for nearly 11 fascinating years of creativity.
Elliot
==============================================================================
Passport ‘rage’
Dahu Khalfan Tamim now has a world-class reputation for detective work. The head of the Dubai police swiftly determined that Hamas’s Mahmoud Mabhouh did not die of natural causes at the five-star Bustan Rotana Hotel on Jan. 20. He was assassinated.
Let’s for the sake of argument grant that Israel did away with Mabhouh; that he was not killed by Iran or over some intra-Palestinian dispute, and that clues pointing to Israeli culpability are genuine.
Mabhouh certainly deserved to be assassinated by Israel. Hamas declared war on Israel. And he co-founded its military wing and was personally involved in the (separate) 1989 killings of IDF soldiers Ilan Sa’adon and Avi Sasportas.
Mabhouh was a key link in the unlawful syndicate which delivers Iranian weapons to Gaza. He was apparently tasked with importing an arsenal that would make life hellish for Israelis living in metropolitan Tel Aviv. He was, perhaps, Hamas’s equivalent to Hizbullah’s Imad Mughniyeh, whose car blew up in Damascus two years ago.
YOU CAN tell a great deal about the moral compass and political leanings of a society by observing its reaction to the Mabhouh liquidation.
There is unease in Europe because the purported assassins identified by Dubai were travelling under forged French, German, Irish and British passports; and identities of Israelis with dual-citizenship were utilized.
Even The Times of London, whose editorial page has been sympathetic toward Israel, expressed chagrin over the affair, saying this country had shown poor regard for the “future security of British passport holders overseas.” Frankly, there is little reason to think that the tradecraft employed in this assassination – which we will not second guess at this stage – jeopardizes anyone.
Actually, what troubles us is the question of whose passport Mabhouh was traveling under and why he was allowed to enter neutral Dubai on gun-running business.
Of course, that’s not how the British see it. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen warned that if Israel had used British passports for “nefarious” purposes – meaning sending Mabhouh to his Maker – Bowen expected, or would it be more accurate to say, hoped for, “a crisis” in relations between London and Jerusalem.
The Guardian quoted a Foreign Office mandarin as gloating: “Relations were in the freezer before this. They are in the deep freeze now.” The paper then grumbled about the British government’s “supine” response to the assassination, editorializing against the government’s proposal to lift the threat of lawfare. The Guardian wants visiting Israeli ministers to continue to worry about facing Palestinian-inspired “war crimes” charges.
With the British media delighting in the assassination-passport kerfuffle – a Daily Mail headline screamed: “Dragged into a Mossad murder plot” – Menzies Campell, a routinely anti-Israel elder of the Liberal Democrats, declared that “Israel has some explaining to do.”
An anyway beleaguered Prime Minister Gordon Brown intoned: “We have got to carry out a full investigation into this. The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care.” Sentiments echoed by Opposition Leader David Cameron.
The most encouraging view – paradoxically – came from Robert Fisk, the Independent’s inveterate Israel-basher: He suspects that London and Paris colluded with Jerusalem in Mabhouth’s assassination, in a reprise of the 1956 Sinai Campaign. That explained, he wrote, the flawless biometric passports.
What an uplifting (if improbable) scenario: MI6 and the Directorate-General for External Security working in tandem with the Mossad to stop Iranian arms from reaching Hamas.
PERHAPS the shrill reaction in some (though certainly not all) British quarters is not rooted purely in anti-Israelism. Chances are that at least parts of the British intelligentsia and media would have reacted similarly if the man in that hotel room had been Osama bin Laden... or Adolf Eichmann. And this pigheaded refusal to acknowledge that sometimes the ends do justify the means reflects a moral impoverishment that’s not limited to Britain.
Some pundits here have also gone wobbly, asking whether the Mabhouh hit was worth the trouble; others are rashly calling for the resignation of Mossad chief Meir Dagan.
In fact, removing a Mabhouh or a Mughniyeh – agents of evil engaged in sensitive compartmentalized work – significantly disrupts Hamas and Hizbullah. It sows distrust within enemy ranks. And it forces whoever replaces them to dissipate their energies just trying to stay alive.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Iran...as time runs out
The eleventh hour
The Islamic Republic of Iran celebrated its 31st anniversary yesterday with an enormous rally held in the shadow of the Azadi Tower. The monument was built by the Shah in 1971 to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. The plaza surrounding the monument has been cynically renamed Freedom Square.
One day, when the Iranian people overthrow this evil regime, perhaps they will rededicate the square as a memorial to the victims of the Khomeinists – dissidents such as Muhammad Reza Ali-Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour, who were judicially executed last month. Of the 5,000 people arrested since the country’s June 2009 “elections,” 11 have met a similar fate.
A recent Amnesty International report tells the stories of some of the regime’s victims who were simply murdered: Amir Javadifar, a 25-year-old student of management at Qazvin Azad University, was beaten and tortured to death. Twenty-eight-year-old Taraneh Mousavi was raped and tortured before her burned body was dumped in an open field. Those who speak against the regime place not only themselves but also family members in jeopardy. This is true even for disillusioned Khomeinists.
ALL THIS helps explain why the regime’s celebrations went unmolested. Dissidents previously released from custody were warned to stay home. State-controlled media were reminded to watch what they disseminated. All images coming out of the country were carefully controlled by the regime. Foreign media outlets such as CNN and BBC have been banned from Iran. Internet and other new media (Twitter, Facebook) were disrupted.
Opposition figures who did try to rally supporters were intercepted by government thugs and intimidated into returning home; others were arrested. The AP, relying on opposition Web sites, reported on clashes between security forces and protesters away from the pro-government rally. Police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators, and paintballs to mark them for arrest.
Footage broadcast on YouTube showed small numbers of – undoubtedly courageous – opposition demonstrators waving green ribbons. But an unprecedented police clampdown appears to have snuffed out any hope that the opposition could parlay the regime’s party into a day of meaningful protest.
Instead, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad harangued – Castro-style – those who turned up for over an hour, telling them that Iran had already produced its first batch of uranium enriched to a 20-percent level. If true, it’s a step that brings an atomic bomb exponentially closer. In his next breath, the disingenuous dictator declared: “When we say we do not manufacture the bomb, we mean it.”
ON Wednesday, the Obama administration intensified existing US sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It blocked the assets of an Iranian general and four companies affiliated with the IRGC.
The administration argues that its unsuccessful year-long effort to reason with the mullahs has given it the political capital to ask the UN Security Council to support a system of sanctions that would further hinder Iran’s banking, shipping and insurance industries. The world will soon learn whether Russia and China will feign cooperation while working to water down President Barack Obama’s proposed resolution.
David E. Sanger of The New York Times suggests Obama is gambling that a global agreement on sanctions will persuade the mullahs to stop spinning their centrifuges. We’d like the president to raise the stakes and press the UN to prohibit the export of refined petroleum to Iran.
Some say tough sanctions will send the masses into the arms of the government and undermine the opposition. But yesterday’s rally showed that the regime doesn’t have a problem putting on a show of support; and that the opposition is weak, fragmented and under siege.
The prospects of the opposition are unpredictable, regardless of what happens on the sanctions front. Pretending otherwise strikes us as a lame excuse for doing nothing.
We also understand that sanctions on gasoline could enrich the IRGC, which already controls Iran’s black market in commodities. Still, the debilitating impact on the regime of endless lines at petrol stations should not be underestimated.
Dawdling by two US administrations and by an international community preoccupied with immediate economic gratification has brought the world to this eleventh hour. It may already be too late for the real sanctions option.
But given the stark alternative – isn’t it worth a try?
The Islamic Republic of Iran celebrated its 31st anniversary yesterday with an enormous rally held in the shadow of the Azadi Tower. The monument was built by the Shah in 1971 to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. The plaza surrounding the monument has been cynically renamed Freedom Square.
One day, when the Iranian people overthrow this evil regime, perhaps they will rededicate the square as a memorial to the victims of the Khomeinists – dissidents such as Muhammad Reza Ali-Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour, who were judicially executed last month. Of the 5,000 people arrested since the country’s June 2009 “elections,” 11 have met a similar fate.
A recent Amnesty International report tells the stories of some of the regime’s victims who were simply murdered: Amir Javadifar, a 25-year-old student of management at Qazvin Azad University, was beaten and tortured to death. Twenty-eight-year-old Taraneh Mousavi was raped and tortured before her burned body was dumped in an open field. Those who speak against the regime place not only themselves but also family members in jeopardy. This is true even for disillusioned Khomeinists.
ALL THIS helps explain why the regime’s celebrations went unmolested. Dissidents previously released from custody were warned to stay home. State-controlled media were reminded to watch what they disseminated. All images coming out of the country were carefully controlled by the regime. Foreign media outlets such as CNN and BBC have been banned from Iran. Internet and other new media (Twitter, Facebook) were disrupted.
Opposition figures who did try to rally supporters were intercepted by government thugs and intimidated into returning home; others were arrested. The AP, relying on opposition Web sites, reported on clashes between security forces and protesters away from the pro-government rally. Police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators, and paintballs to mark them for arrest.
Footage broadcast on YouTube showed small numbers of – undoubtedly courageous – opposition demonstrators waving green ribbons. But an unprecedented police clampdown appears to have snuffed out any hope that the opposition could parlay the regime’s party into a day of meaningful protest.
Instead, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad harangued – Castro-style – those who turned up for over an hour, telling them that Iran had already produced its first batch of uranium enriched to a 20-percent level. If true, it’s a step that brings an atomic bomb exponentially closer. In his next breath, the disingenuous dictator declared: “When we say we do not manufacture the bomb, we mean it.”
ON Wednesday, the Obama administration intensified existing US sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It blocked the assets of an Iranian general and four companies affiliated with the IRGC.
The administration argues that its unsuccessful year-long effort to reason with the mullahs has given it the political capital to ask the UN Security Council to support a system of sanctions that would further hinder Iran’s banking, shipping and insurance industries. The world will soon learn whether Russia and China will feign cooperation while working to water down President Barack Obama’s proposed resolution.
David E. Sanger of The New York Times suggests Obama is gambling that a global agreement on sanctions will persuade the mullahs to stop spinning their centrifuges. We’d like the president to raise the stakes and press the UN to prohibit the export of refined petroleum to Iran.
Some say tough sanctions will send the masses into the arms of the government and undermine the opposition. But yesterday’s rally showed that the regime doesn’t have a problem putting on a show of support; and that the opposition is weak, fragmented and under siege.
The prospects of the opposition are unpredictable, regardless of what happens on the sanctions front. Pretending otherwise strikes us as a lame excuse for doing nothing.
We also understand that sanctions on gasoline could enrich the IRGC, which already controls Iran’s black market in commodities. Still, the debilitating impact on the regime of endless lines at petrol stations should not be underestimated.
Dawdling by two US administrations and by an international community preoccupied with immediate economic gratification has brought the world to this eleventh hour. It may already be too late for the real sanctions option.
But given the stark alternative – isn’t it worth a try?
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, February 11, 2010
IT IS TOUGH TO BE PRO-ISRAEL ON CAMPUS? IT ALWAYS WAS!
Away with campus timidity
In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful… The members of the Muslim Student Union at the University of California, Irvine, condemn and strongly oppose the presence of Michael Oren on our campus… Oren personally participated in the Israeli Defense Force in wars that took place in Lebanon and Palestine…Oren and his partners should only be granted a speakers platform in the International Criminal Court...
IN THE name of demonizing the Jewish state, intimidating its supporters and making it ever more difficult to present Israel’s case, Muslim campaigners and their allies at the UC-Irvine campus on Monday repeatedly disrupted a talk by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren. Eleven of the louts were detained, issued summonses and released.
In trying to silence Oren, they made a mockery of the university’s commitment to freedom of speech and treated its dedication to respectful dialogue with downright disdain. Yes, they probably discomfited our ambassador, but they shamed UC-Irvine and its alumni.
UNFORTUNATELY, what happened on Monday in southern California mirrors the experience of Israeli spokespeople on the European continent, in Britain and increasingly on liberal American campuses. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s address last October at the University of Chicago was disrupted by Muslim student organizations and their fellow-travelers. Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s, described efforts in British universities to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state as a “daily obsession.”
Next month, Israel’s enemies on campus will hold a series of vitriolic, well-orchestrated events aimed at delegitimizing this country and hammering home the poisonous idea that the Jewish people has no right to self-determination or a national homeland. In the words of Jerusalem Post columnist Gil Troy, they will be continuing the campaign to “make Israel toxic.”
A colossal untruth promoted by the anti-Zionist camp – that Israel is “an apartheid state” – is starting to be believed by the gullible or intellectually dishonest. The old Arab boycott of Israel has been reinvigorated by calls for “divestment.”
Troy is right to argue that friends of Israel can hardly expect to sway those who have “swallowed the apartheid libel and drunk the anti-Israel Kool-Aid.”
The Zionist goal, he argues, should be bolstering “wavering Jewish students and the vast uninformed and uninterested middle.”
WE SUSPECT Jewish college students are doing a bit too much “wavering.”
It is true that Jerusalem speaks with many voices – but it has done so since the 1970s. Spurious efforts to “redefine” what “being pro-Israel means” are also not new.
Moreover, campuses have never been bastions of pro-Israelism. Not in the 1960s, when America’s black power movement became enamored with the Arab cause; not in the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter struggled in vain to conceal his contempt for Menachem Begin, and when Time magazine demonized our premier as a modern-day Fagin.
It was no picnic being on campus in the 1980s, when an NBC anchor stood on a Beirut rooftop, with smoke billowing in the background from burning PLO targets, and declared, “…Nothing like it has ever happened in this part of the world. I kept thinking... of the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War…We are now dealing with an imperial Israel.”
Nor did pro-Israel activism come easy in the early 1990s, when a “pitiless” Yitzhak Rabin expelled 415 Islamic fanatics to southern Lebanon; international pressure eventually forced him to rescind the move, setting the stage for the flowering of Hamas.
In the 21st century a difficult campus situation got even worse, partly due to an influx of Muslim students and the affinity of the anti-globalization movement for the Palestinian cause.
NONE OF this absolves the current cadre of Jewish student activists from stepping up to the plate. The Twitter generation even has the advantage of circumventing the silencing of Israel by utilizing new media.
Never has it been more important to cast timidity aside. To reassert that no one has a stronger claim to this land than the Jewish people; to denounce the notion that Israel’s “original sin” was being re-born after 2000 years; and to explain that the “occupation” and settlements are fundamentally red-herring issues that would fade away, were the Palestinians to negotiate in earnest for a two-state solution.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Mumps
Viral irrationalism
More than 300 people in Monsey and New Square, two hassidic enclaves north of New York City, have contracted the mumps, a disease spread by coughing and sneezing. Symptoms include fever, headache and swollen glands. Now the disease has reached haredi communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
Epidemiologists suspect the outbreak started in August in a Catskills summer camp with an 11-year-old boy who brought the mumps to the US from England. In London, the Health Protection Agency reported over 800 cases in 2009 – a significant uptick over the previous year.
By age four, children ought to have been immunized against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, whooping cough, and several other diseases which strike in childhood, yet can have deleterious life-long consequences.
Unfortunately, a not-insignificant minority of parents are refusing to immunize their children, fearing vaccines contain harmful side effects and/or out of conviction that Mother Nature would not approve.
The Jewish community, here and in the Diaspora, is not immune to such irrationalism. Some people have been instructed by their clerics not to immunize; some have been swept up in the quagmire of medical quackery, while still others are convinced profiteering pharmaceutical companies are conspiring to promote unnecessary vaccines.
As a consequence, Israel’s Arab sector is, overall, better immunized than its Jewish population. Among Jews, unvaccinated children are thought to be found mostly among hassidim, back-to-nature secular bohemians, and their settler counterparts.
THE phenomenon of children not being immunized has increased in parallel with the growth of the Internet and the dissemination of junk science. Yet the medical community shares some of the blame.
In 1998, The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, published a study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield which linked vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) with autism. As The New York Times recently pointed out, the editors of the journal did not know that Wakefield had an interest in promoting a single measles vaccine and that he was being financed by a lawyer campaigning against the MMR combination vaccine. In any event, Wakefield’s sample group was only 12 children.
As a consequence of the publicity generated by the Lancet article – only now retracted – some parents decided against the prevailing view of the medical community and did not immunize their children. Equally tragic, many parents of autistic children were made to feel responsible for their children’s disability. The emotional damage to these parents is incalculable.
Obviously, no vaccine is 100 percent safe or 100% effective. But scientists insist that there is no causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism.
On mumps, the blogosphere is full of rumors that even those vaccinated have been struck by the disease because there is an “unusual strain going around.” In fact, the mumps vaccine does not provide total protection; it does require a booster jab and failure to get this follow-up dose can leave a person exposed.
Not being immunized, however, leaves you 100% vulnerable.
Science is about probabilities. Case in point: Just because Israel was not hit by a swine flu pandemic does not mean that the Health Ministry was wrong to consider a worst-case scenario in its planning (even though it erred in its ultimate assessment and consequently overreacted). Immunizations against the regular flu and the swine flu are still indicated, say physicians.
IN NEW York City, which has one of the finest public health systems in the world, youngsters are not permitted to enter elementary school without proof of immunization. Unfortunately, proof of immunization is generally not required for admission by the various municipal school systems in this country.
Thankfully, most Israeli children are immunized through the Tipat Halav well-baby clinics. Under the health basket, childhood vaccinations are completely free. Boosters are provided (free) by school nurses. But lack of money is no excuse for failing to immunize.
We urge the Health Ministry to consider requiring parents to provide a child’s pinkas hisunim – immunization record – when they register their youngsters for school. The enforcement tool would be simple: Any municipality or stream, including most of the haredi sector, which is found to admit unimmunized children, would face loss of funding from the national government.
gohome print
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, February 08, 2010
THE ARAB LEAGUE'S 'CLEAR THINKING' SECRETARY-GENERAL
Amr Moussa's missed opportunity
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa must be frustrated having to spend an inordinate amount of time holding together his fractious membership when, plainly, he’d rather be out bashing Israel.
Lately, to keep Libya as the venue for the March 27 Arab League summit, Moussa has had to soothe Lebanese feelings. Lebanon’s Amal Party holds a grudge against Col. Muammar Gaddafi for his suspected involvement in the disappearance of Musa Sadr, a venerated Shi’ite cleric, who went missing more than 30 years ago in Libya.
Still, over the weekend, the secretary-general made time to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Cairo. The Associated Press quoted Moussa as hinting that a renewal of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations could be near, but he pledged that this time the Arabs would not be taken in by “Israeli trickery” – everything would be written down!
Moussa, who has headed the league since 2001, is a former Egyptian foreign minister purported to be popular at home, particularly for his strident anti-Israel line.
Supporters have put his name forth as the ideal man, in the fullness of time, to replace President Hosni Mubarak. Now age 74, Moussa could be presented as an interim rais when Mubarak leaves the scene – someone with international credentials, political savvy, and no ties to the Mukhabarat secret police or Mubarak’s family.
British journalist Patrick Seale, widely respected in the Arab world, wrote a laudatory op-ed about Moussa in the February 5 New York Times. Seale described Moussa as “tough, affable, plain-speaking” if occasionally grumpy.
Seale’s summation of Moussa’s positions, as we read it, is that the secretary-general would prefer that the Security Council impose a solution on Israel; meanwhile, he opposes a resumption of peace talks until there is total Israeli freeze on all construction over the Green Line; he’d like to see Western countries deal more openly with Hamas, and wants Egypt to lift its blockade of Gaza.
Moussa does not favor a nuclear-armed Iran, but his abhorrence of Israel exceeds his fear of the mullahs.
Seale appears disheartened that “For all his courage, clear thinking and prestige, Amr Moussa lies outside the mainstream of international decision-making.”
MOUSSA’S “clear thinking” was again on display at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos when he warned that if Palestine is not established soon, the league would give up on the two-state solution.
In other words, if the Arabs can’t have their way – on boundaries, refugees, Jerusalem, demilitarization and their adamant refusal to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people – they’ll “have to resort – and soon... to a one-state solution.”
Moussa’s rhetoric feigns support for peace, though the conditions he sets actually return the Arabs to their classic rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in this land.
Indeed, the league was established in 1945 to unify the Arabs against nascent Jewish independence. It rejected the UN partition of Palestine into two states. After failing to strangle Israel at its creation, the league declared a boycott of Israel, created a blacklist, and insisted that companies doing business with Arab states could not also trade with the Jewish state. By the late 1970s, thanks to US efforts and subsequent peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians, plus the globalized economy, the league’s boycott lost its steam.
In 2002, with Moussa at the helm, the league adopted a Saudi-inspired peace initiative at its Beirut summit. It essentially asked the Palestinian Arabs to give up claims for citizenship anywhere outside of “Palestine.”
Of Israel it demanded a pullback to the hard-to-defend 1948-1967 Armistice Lines; a redivision of Jerusalem; and allowing millions of Arab refugees and their descendents wishing to return to their former homes in pre-1948 Israel to do so (or be paid compensation).
The initiative is not open to discussion, even though accepting it “as is” essentially requires Israel to commit suicide. If Israel were to agree, however, the league would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended.”
ISN’T IT too bad that the Arab League’s paramount envoy to the outside world, the man some say wants to be president of Egypt, could never bring himself to rise above such gamesmenship and help navigate his organization in the direction of genuine reconciliation with Israel?
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, February 05, 2010
WAR DRUMS IN THE NORTH
Dear Reader,
Later this month, I will be leaving The Jerusalem Post to take on a new and exciting role at the Jewish Ideas Daily website. I look forward to telling you more about it soon.
Shabbat shalom
EJ
[What happens to the truce between Assad & the Muslim Brotherhood if he makes real peace with the Jewish state?]
Frustration in Damascus
Israel has completed its withdrawal from the Golan Heights as stipulated in the Syria-Israel Treaty of Peace; ambassadors have been exchanged; embassies opened; direct flights established; an exhibit of ancient artifacts from Jerusalem's Bible Lands Museum has been loaned to the National Museum in Damascus. Asma Assad and Sarah Netanyahu are engaged in a series of collaborative civil society initiatives…
Bashar Assad understands the price he and the ruling Alawite minority would have to pay, in a country that is 74 percent Sunni, for a genuine peace with Israel. That is why in this week’s New Yorker, Assad frankly told Seymour Hersh that even if Syria regained the entire Golan, Israel, “cannot expect me to give them the peace they expect.”
Indeed, if Israel got the peace we expected, Assad’s de-facto truce with the Muslim Brotherhood would come undone. He’d have to expel Hamas leaders from Syria, a step the Brotherhood would find insufferable. A bad divorce with Teheran would ensue. Hizbullah would reorient Lebanon’s policies accordingly.
In short, Assad would be going down the path taken by the late Anwar Sadat: carving out a separate peace with Israel while the Palestinian issue festered, albeit due to the Palestinians’ own intransigence.
Naturally, if Assad got the Golan Heights on his terms, the legitimacy of his regime would be bolstered. But no Israeli government – not Yitzhak Rabin’s and not Binyamin Netanyahu’s – can come down from the Golan in return for a sham peace.
Assad will not risk a real peace that would force Syria to rethink its ideological identity in the absence of the Zionist bogeyman. How could he justify continued authoritarian rule?
Moreover, real peace would open Syria to progressive influences. The regime could come under pressure from now dormant liberal reformers. The 18,000 Druse and 2,000 Alawites on the Golan would be reunited with their co-religionists, but decades of life under the Zionists will have created social, economic and, yes, political expectations that could “contaminate” the larger Syrian polity.
So a strong argument can be made that the last thing Assad really wants is peace with Israel.
Yet if this assessment is excessively cynical and Assad is prepared to take major risks for peace – he needs to come to Jerusalem and ask for the Golan. His appearance at the Knesset podium would likely create an inexorable momentum for a total Israeli withdrawal.
REGRETTABLY, Assad cannot afford to make real peace. Worse still, through a series of military and rhetorical miscalculations – inspired, perhaps, by Iranian mischief-making – Assad is blundering toward a conflagration with Israel.
Assad’s brinkmanship has worn down his opponents in the Arab world and the West. The destabilizing policies that made Syria a charter member of the Axis of Evil since the early 2000s are unchanged, yet European leaders flock to meet with him, and Washington is fixing to return its ambassador to Damascus.
The dictator has reason to feel cocky.
Syria has lately supplied Hizbullah with weaponry that practically dares Israel to take action. Indeed, Arab press reports speculate that Assad may have made a strategic decision – no doubt egged-on by the mullahs in Iran – that his alliance with Hizbullah and Hamas is worth a confrontation with Israel.
IT’S IN this context that we read Assad’s remarks Wednesday to visiting Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos that Israel is not serious about achieving peace and that Israel is pushing the region toward war. Clearly, Assad is attributing to Israeli decision-makers the very behavior that is motivating him. His foreign minister, Waleed Mouallem, accused Israel of “spreading an atmosphere of war.” He threatened that “a war at this time will be transferred to [Israeli] cities.”
And with that, this disciple of Gandhi invited the Jewish state to “follow the track of peace.”
Syrian bellicosity has caused some Israeli pundits to appeal to their own government to make a peacemaking “breakthrough.” And so the prime minister repeated that he’s ready to negotiate with Assad without preconditions, anywhere, any time, also through suitable third party mediation.
Assad is accustomed to getting his way – except with Israel. Frustration, however, is a poor excuse to set in motion a series of events that is bound to end in tears for both sides
Later this month, I will be leaving The Jerusalem Post to take on a new and exciting role at the Jewish Ideas Daily website. I look forward to telling you more about it soon.
Shabbat shalom
EJ
[What happens to the truce between Assad & the Muslim Brotherhood if he makes real peace with the Jewish state?]
Frustration in Damascus
Israel has completed its withdrawal from the Golan Heights as stipulated in the Syria-Israel Treaty of Peace; ambassadors have been exchanged; embassies opened; direct flights established; an exhibit of ancient artifacts from Jerusalem's Bible Lands Museum has been loaned to the National Museum in Damascus. Asma Assad and Sarah Netanyahu are engaged in a series of collaborative civil society initiatives…
Bashar Assad understands the price he and the ruling Alawite minority would have to pay, in a country that is 74 percent Sunni, for a genuine peace with Israel. That is why in this week’s New Yorker, Assad frankly told Seymour Hersh that even if Syria regained the entire Golan, Israel, “cannot expect me to give them the peace they expect.”
Indeed, if Israel got the peace we expected, Assad’s de-facto truce with the Muslim Brotherhood would come undone. He’d have to expel Hamas leaders from Syria, a step the Brotherhood would find insufferable. A bad divorce with Teheran would ensue. Hizbullah would reorient Lebanon’s policies accordingly.
In short, Assad would be going down the path taken by the late Anwar Sadat: carving out a separate peace with Israel while the Palestinian issue festered, albeit due to the Palestinians’ own intransigence.
Naturally, if Assad got the Golan Heights on his terms, the legitimacy of his regime would be bolstered. But no Israeli government – not Yitzhak Rabin’s and not Binyamin Netanyahu’s – can come down from the Golan in return for a sham peace.
Assad will not risk a real peace that would force Syria to rethink its ideological identity in the absence of the Zionist bogeyman. How could he justify continued authoritarian rule?
Moreover, real peace would open Syria to progressive influences. The regime could come under pressure from now dormant liberal reformers. The 18,000 Druse and 2,000 Alawites on the Golan would be reunited with their co-religionists, but decades of life under the Zionists will have created social, economic and, yes, political expectations that could “contaminate” the larger Syrian polity.
So a strong argument can be made that the last thing Assad really wants is peace with Israel.
Yet if this assessment is excessively cynical and Assad is prepared to take major risks for peace – he needs to come to Jerusalem and ask for the Golan. His appearance at the Knesset podium would likely create an inexorable momentum for a total Israeli withdrawal.
REGRETTABLY, Assad cannot afford to make real peace. Worse still, through a series of military and rhetorical miscalculations – inspired, perhaps, by Iranian mischief-making – Assad is blundering toward a conflagration with Israel.
Assad’s brinkmanship has worn down his opponents in the Arab world and the West. The destabilizing policies that made Syria a charter member of the Axis of Evil since the early 2000s are unchanged, yet European leaders flock to meet with him, and Washington is fixing to return its ambassador to Damascus.
The dictator has reason to feel cocky.
Syria has lately supplied Hizbullah with weaponry that practically dares Israel to take action. Indeed, Arab press reports speculate that Assad may have made a strategic decision – no doubt egged-on by the mullahs in Iran – that his alliance with Hizbullah and Hamas is worth a confrontation with Israel.
IT’S IN this context that we read Assad’s remarks Wednesday to visiting Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos that Israel is not serious about achieving peace and that Israel is pushing the region toward war. Clearly, Assad is attributing to Israeli decision-makers the very behavior that is motivating him. His foreign minister, Waleed Mouallem, accused Israel of “spreading an atmosphere of war.” He threatened that “a war at this time will be transferred to [Israeli] cities.”
And with that, this disciple of Gandhi invited the Jewish state to “follow the track of peace.”
Syrian bellicosity has caused some Israeli pundits to appeal to their own government to make a peacemaking “breakthrough.” And so the prime minister repeated that he’s ready to negotiate with Assad without preconditions, anywhere, any time, also through suitable third party mediation.
Assad is accustomed to getting his way – except with Israel. Frustration, however, is a poor excuse to set in motion a series of events that is bound to end in tears for both sides
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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