During Vice President Joseph Biden's visit to Israel last week, a routine bureaucratic approval of additional dwellings for ultra-Orthodox Jews was leaked to the media, thereby setting off a crisis in relations between the two countries. The neighborhood in question, Ramat Shlomo, is said to stand in Arab East Jerusalem. But what and where is East Jerusalem?
The term is an artificial construct, and a misnomer. Jerusalem is a city built on hills, embedded on a mountain ridge; Samaria lies to the north, Judea to the south. The city has no grid system—no Fifth Avenue to divide the east and west sides. Until Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, parts of Jerusalem were artificially separated along the armistice lines resulting from Israel's 1948 war of independence. North, south, and east Jerusalem lay under control of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
By June 28, 1967 the barriers had been dismantled. The city's boundaries were dramatically expanded beyond the six square kilometers of the Jordanian municipality, including the Old City, to embrace the Mount of Olives with its Jewish cemetery, Mount Scopus and the pre-state campus of the Hebrew University, and 28 nearby Arab villages. All were incorporated into Israel proper. Today the city's Palestinian Arabs carry ordinary blue Israeli ID cards and make full use of universal health coverage as well as other social benefits. They also enjoy the right to vote in municipal elections, but so far have opted to boycott political participation.
When the city was first liberated, former premier David Ben-Gurion called for a national effort to settle the empty spaces of metropolitan Jerusalem. Since then, international opposition notwithstanding, all Israeli governments have worked to solidify control of the city by constructing a sequence of strategically placed residential neighborhoods: Gilo and Har Homah in the south; East Talpiot in the east; Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Pisgat Ze'ev, Neve Yaakov in the north; and Ramot on the northern flank of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. Although some Jordanian government lands and some private property were confiscated, most of the strategic sites chosen were on barren hills. Only in recent years have small numbers of ideological settlers moved into densely populated Arab neighborhoods. As for Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood at the center of the latest flap, it lies to the west of Ramot—that is, in northern Jerusalem.
And where does the United States stand? Among those bodies opposing Israel's 1967 annexation was the State Department. To this day, the American consulate is housed in an antiquated compound on Nablus Road in east Jerusalem, while a separate facility in the center of the city serves as the consul general's residence. (A newly built consulate in west Jerusalem stands empty.) The embassy is in Tel Aviv, since Washington does not recognize Israel's sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem—west, east, north, or south.
Yet on June 19, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson declared: "No one wishes to see the Holy City again divided." Today, any fair-minded visitor would have to acknowledge that Jerusalem is a mosaic of neighborhoods built on hills and in valleys where Jews and Arabs live in proximity and share common spaces. There may come a time when a borough arrangement will permit them to administer the city conjointly; some Israeli governments have also offered parts of the city to a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, to imagine Jerusalem divisible along east-west lines bespeaks a profound ignorance of both history and political geography.
-- March 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
East Jerusalem
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.
Getting Abbas to the Table
The barrier built a decade ago to protect the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo from Fatah fire is being dismantled.Some residents are worried: today's tranquility is welcome, said one, but why tempt fate when there is still no peace agreement with the Palestinians, and not even direct negotiations?
Actually, direct negotiations, or a semblance of them, may be in the offing. Under intense American and EU pressure, Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority is expected grudgingly to end its year-long boycott and return to the bargaining table. But there is no sign that Abbas has any intention of seizing the moment to engage Israel in a fruitful give-and-take. Rather, the Palestinian leadership, its electoral legitimacy long expired, appears simply to have run out of excuses.
Abbas had insisted he would not talk with Benjamin Netanyahu unless Israel stopped housing construction over the Green Line. When Israel duly instituted a building moratorium, he said it was not enough since the freeze did not include Jerusalem. A further, unfulfillable precondition then followed: Israel had to commit itself in advance to withdrawing to the 1949 armistice lines. Then Abbas insisted that talks begin where they had left off with former premier Ehud Olmert, whose final magnanimous offer he had simply pocketed without comment.
Now, even as the Palestinians are being dragged back to the table, they are demanding that the construction moratorium they have denigrated for the past eleven months be extended beyond its September sunset date. If not, in the words of chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the talks will be "buried" before they can be re-launched.
Jerusalem appears unlikely to accede to this, though the cabinet might agree to limit new building to settlement blocs: i.e., strategic areas that all agree must remain within Israel in any deal. Meanwhile, the international Quartet—consisting of the U.S., the EU, Russia, and the UN—may set parameters for direct negotiations framed by its earlier statement catering to Palestinian preconditions while giving short shrift to Israel's sensibilities. If so, Jerusalem is expected to take part only in response to a separate invitation from Washington, and without preconditions. As for the other half of the Palestinian polity, the one autocratically run by Hamas in Gaza, it refuses either to entertain an accommodation with Abbas or to accept Israel's legitimacy under any circumstances.
If the fractious Palestinian polity is in no way ready for a viable deal, and if imposing a solution on Israel is politically unfeasible and strategically self-defeating, what explains the full-court press to cajole Abbas to the table? The answer appears to be this: George Mitchell (for the American administration), Tony Blair (for the Quartet), and Catherine Ashton (for the EU) are deeply invested in the notion that Abbas is prepared to deliver on a historic two-state solution, and therefore even the illusion of momentum trumps the status quo.
But does it? Yes, Israel wants to achieve a breakthrough through direct talks. But ill-conceived negotiations, in which Abbas is encouraged to advance maximalist demands regarding refugees, borders, Jerusalem, and security, could prove as counterproductive this time around as at Camp David in 2000—when, unprepared for compromise, the Palestinians unleashed a years-long paroxysm of violence.
Getting Abbas to the table, like dismantling the concrete slabs protecting Gilo, is the easy part.
--
August 2010
Actually, direct negotiations, or a semblance of them, may be in the offing. Under intense American and EU pressure, Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority is expected grudgingly to end its year-long boycott and return to the bargaining table. But there is no sign that Abbas has any intention of seizing the moment to engage Israel in a fruitful give-and-take. Rather, the Palestinian leadership, its electoral legitimacy long expired, appears simply to have run out of excuses.
Abbas had insisted he would not talk with Benjamin Netanyahu unless Israel stopped housing construction over the Green Line. When Israel duly instituted a building moratorium, he said it was not enough since the freeze did not include Jerusalem. A further, unfulfillable precondition then followed: Israel had to commit itself in advance to withdrawing to the 1949 armistice lines. Then Abbas insisted that talks begin where they had left off with former premier Ehud Olmert, whose final magnanimous offer he had simply pocketed without comment.
Now, even as the Palestinians are being dragged back to the table, they are demanding that the construction moratorium they have denigrated for the past eleven months be extended beyond its September sunset date. If not, in the words of chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the talks will be "buried" before they can be re-launched.
Jerusalem appears unlikely to accede to this, though the cabinet might agree to limit new building to settlement blocs: i.e., strategic areas that all agree must remain within Israel in any deal. Meanwhile, the international Quartet—consisting of the U.S., the EU, Russia, and the UN—may set parameters for direct negotiations framed by its earlier statement catering to Palestinian preconditions while giving short shrift to Israel's sensibilities. If so, Jerusalem is expected to take part only in response to a separate invitation from Washington, and without preconditions. As for the other half of the Palestinian polity, the one autocratically run by Hamas in Gaza, it refuses either to entertain an accommodation with Abbas or to accept Israel's legitimacy under any circumstances.
If the fractious Palestinian polity is in no way ready for a viable deal, and if imposing a solution on Israel is politically unfeasible and strategically self-defeating, what explains the full-court press to cajole Abbas to the table? The answer appears to be this: George Mitchell (for the American administration), Tony Blair (for the Quartet), and Catherine Ashton (for the EU) are deeply invested in the notion that Abbas is prepared to deliver on a historic two-state solution, and therefore even the illusion of momentum trumps the status quo.
But does it? Yes, Israel wants to achieve a breakthrough through direct talks. But ill-conceived negotiations, in which Abbas is encouraged to advance maximalist demands regarding refugees, borders, Jerusalem, and security, could prove as counterproductive this time around as at Camp David in 2000—when, unprepared for compromise, the Palestinians unleashed a years-long paroxysm of violence.
Getting Abbas to the table, like dismantling the concrete slabs protecting Gilo, is the easy part.
--
August 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Rank Rivalries In the IDF
A bare majority of Americans know that David Petraeus commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It's anyone's guess how many can name Navy Adm. Mike Mullen as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In contrast, the IDF chief of staff is a household name in Israel, has operational control over the armed services and is an ex-officio cabinet member.
That is why the current friction between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi is making headlines in Israel. Barak decided against extending Ashkenazi's term beyond February 2011 and has embarked on a highly-publicized – some say premature and humiliating – course of finding a replacement. With no dazzling general waiting in the wings the three main contenders are Yoav Galant, chief of the southern command and rumored to be Barak's favored candidate, Benny Gantz, deputy chief of staff, and Gadi Eizenkot, head of the northern command. As the unpopular leader of the waning Labor party, with his own political fortunes uncertain, Barak would not mind having Ashkenazi take early retirement and have his man ensconced sooner rather than later.
Lacking institutional processes, the quest for the chief of staff job has characteristically involved behind-the-scenes scheming. In this instance the curtain has been clumsily lifted. Thus someone – perhaps with Barak's interests at heart – leaked top secret testimony from the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that laid blame for the IDF's poorly-executed interdiction of the Gaza-bound Turkish on Ashkenazi's shoulders. Then came the bombshell that Galant had engaged wily political strategist Eyal Arad – a nemesis of Premier Benjamin Netanyahu -- to help him elbow out the incumbent. Television pundit Amnon Abramowitz broke the story based on a leaked strategy paper containing Arad's logo. Galant says he knows nothing about the paper; Arad denies authorship. The matter is now being investigated by the attorney-general.
Genuine or forged the document is a jarring reminder that the IDF chief of staff role is hardly above the political fray.
There are no ex-generals in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives. Since 1900, only one general, Dwight Eisenhower, reached White House. In Israel, however, a generalship is a stepping stone to politics. Prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were former chiefs of staff; Ariel Sharon was a major-general. Since the 1967 War, only a handful of chiefs of staff have opted against a political career.
Yet, as an institution, Israel's military is by and large apolitical just as David Ben-Gurion wanted it to be. The supremacy of the civilian echelon is sacrosanct. Still, the political leanings of prospective chiefs of staff plays a role in their selection. Moreover, influence runs both ways. In 1949 active army generals associated with the left-wing Mapai party appeared on its Knesset candidate's list – nowadays there is a cooling off period before officers can enter politics. In 1956, then chief of staff Moshe Dayan donned civilian clothes to lobby the ruling Mapai party on a sensitive security matter. General Mordechai Gur bickered with Dayan over policy when he served as Golda Meir's defense minister after the Yom Kippur War. More recently, Sharon refused to extend General Moshe Ya'alon's term as chief of staff because he was unenthusiastic about the Gaza disengagement.
That said, jingoism is not a feature of the high command's ranks. When generals formally enter politics their positions are anything but monolithic; some like Amnon Lipkin-Shahak turn left, while others like Ya'alon head right. Tel Aviv University professor Yoram Peri, a former editor of the now defunct Labor newspaper Dvar, maintains that with Israeli politics stalemated, politicians find it convenient to push ex-generals who share their security orientation -- whether hawks or doves -- into the front ranks of politics.
As Israelis gloomily observe the spectacle of their top generals and defense minister being investigated over the leaked strategy paper, and with the process of picking Ashkenazi's replacement now on hold, they can only trust that the cutthroat competition for the military's top spot and the lack of esprit de corps exposed by this episode will not impact life-and-death national security decision making.
That is why the current friction between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi is making headlines in Israel. Barak decided against extending Ashkenazi's term beyond February 2011 and has embarked on a highly-publicized – some say premature and humiliating – course of finding a replacement. With no dazzling general waiting in the wings the three main contenders are Yoav Galant, chief of the southern command and rumored to be Barak's favored candidate, Benny Gantz, deputy chief of staff, and Gadi Eizenkot, head of the northern command. As the unpopular leader of the waning Labor party, with his own political fortunes uncertain, Barak would not mind having Ashkenazi take early retirement and have his man ensconced sooner rather than later.
Lacking institutional processes, the quest for the chief of staff job has characteristically involved behind-the-scenes scheming. In this instance the curtain has been clumsily lifted. Thus someone – perhaps with Barak's interests at heart – leaked top secret testimony from the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that laid blame for the IDF's poorly-executed interdiction of the Gaza-bound Turkish on Ashkenazi's shoulders. Then came the bombshell that Galant had engaged wily political strategist Eyal Arad – a nemesis of Premier Benjamin Netanyahu -- to help him elbow out the incumbent. Television pundit Amnon Abramowitz broke the story based on a leaked strategy paper containing Arad's logo. Galant says he knows nothing about the paper; Arad denies authorship. The matter is now being investigated by the attorney-general.
Genuine or forged the document is a jarring reminder that the IDF chief of staff role is hardly above the political fray.
There are no ex-generals in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives. Since 1900, only one general, Dwight Eisenhower, reached White House. In Israel, however, a generalship is a stepping stone to politics. Prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were former chiefs of staff; Ariel Sharon was a major-general. Since the 1967 War, only a handful of chiefs of staff have opted against a political career.
Yet, as an institution, Israel's military is by and large apolitical just as David Ben-Gurion wanted it to be. The supremacy of the civilian echelon is sacrosanct. Still, the political leanings of prospective chiefs of staff plays a role in their selection. Moreover, influence runs both ways. In 1949 active army generals associated with the left-wing Mapai party appeared on its Knesset candidate's list – nowadays there is a cooling off period before officers can enter politics. In 1956, then chief of staff Moshe Dayan donned civilian clothes to lobby the ruling Mapai party on a sensitive security matter. General Mordechai Gur bickered with Dayan over policy when he served as Golda Meir's defense minister after the Yom Kippur War. More recently, Sharon refused to extend General Moshe Ya'alon's term as chief of staff because he was unenthusiastic about the Gaza disengagement.
That said, jingoism is not a feature of the high command's ranks. When generals formally enter politics their positions are anything but monolithic; some like Amnon Lipkin-Shahak turn left, while others like Ya'alon head right. Tel Aviv University professor Yoram Peri, a former editor of the now defunct Labor newspaper Dvar, maintains that with Israeli politics stalemated, politicians find it convenient to push ex-generals who share their security orientation -- whether hawks or doves -- into the front ranks of politics.
As Israelis gloomily observe the spectacle of their top generals and defense minister being investigated over the leaked strategy paper, and with the process of picking Ashkenazi's replacement now on hold, they can only trust that the cutthroat competition for the military's top spot and the lack of esprit de corps exposed by this episode will not impact life-and-death national security decision making.
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 Elhanan Yakira
Elhanan Yakira, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has all the credentials of a man of the Israeli Left: born and raised in Tel Aviv as a Zionist and socialist , a lifelong secular Jew, an opponent of West Bank settlements, an advocate of government intervention in economic policy. Yet many of his colleagues on the Left denounce him as a right-winger and a traitor.
Why? Because he maintains that Israel was not born in sin at the expense of the Palestinians Arabs and that it has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Yakira's critique of his fellow leftists, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (subtitle: "Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel"), was rejected by five Israeli publishers before finally being brought out in 2007-- only to be greeted in the Hebrew press by a months-long silence. The controversy, when it at last erupted, was fierce; Yakir, a philosopher who did not set out to be a polemicist, had started a debate on the Left.
In April, Elhanan Yakira will be speaking in the United States about the English-language edition of his iconoclastic work, just published by Cambridge University Press and carrying endorsements by, among others, Michael Walzer and Fouad Ajami. We talked in the living room of his Jerusalem home .
In Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, you coin a phrase, "the community of opprobrium." Members of this community maintain that Israel exploits the Holocaust to justify its illegitimate existence, and that the Jews have been doing to the Palestinian Arabs what the Nazis did to the Jews. In brief: blame Israel and the Jews first.
Well, I should explain that the Hebrew essays- only later did they become a book - were intended as a polemic against the Israeli community of opprobrium. As I worked on the English edition, it became clear that the Israelis are nurtured by an international community: a huge subculture devoted to the de-legitimation of Israel, the Zionist idea, and the Jewish nation. What I did in the book was essentially to take one element of this campaign-the manipulation of the Holocaust-and show how it was morally and intellectually wrong.
Who are the big names in the Israeli community of opprobrium?
There are so many, and no doubt most of them are unfamiliar to English readers. Haifa-born Ilan Pappe, who now teaches in England, completely embraces the Palestinian narrative. There is Yehuda Shenhav, who has a new book out challenging the right of Israel to exist even within the 1967 "Green Line." I devote part of my book to Adi Ophir, former editor of the post-modernist Hebrew journal Theory and Criticism and an academic at Tel Aviv University and the Shalom Hartman Institute. There is also Oren Yiftachel at Ben-Gurion University, who speaks of Zionism as a "colonialism of refugees" and "creeping apartheid." Then there is the Haaretz crowd, including Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. Outside Israel, a key name is the historian Tony Judt, with his advocacy of a bi-national state.
The community refers to Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria as, in your words, "occupation with a capital O."
To be perfectly frank, I accept much of their criticism: the settlement situation is catastrophic. But what the capital-O crowd advocates is the now fashionable "one-state solution." It's completely unworkable. Daft! They also refer to Zionism as guilty of "original sin." Their opposition to Israeli policies is so visceral that it carries them to the point where they support policies that are, in effect, annihilationist.
You write that "there is not much point in talking with the anti-Zionists."
That's right. There is no point. They can't be swayed by facts. Their anti-Zionism has a structural affinity to anti-Semitism. It is irrational. I don't want to speculate or indulge in psychoanalytic explanations. Instead, what I do in the book is to talk about anti-Zionism.
It is a condition that seems to have permeated the Israel Left.
It's actually a complicated picture. I am convinced that the silent majority on the Israeli Left is not anti-Zionist. That is certainly the case in my department at the university. But the anti-Zionists are highly mobilized. They combine ideological zeal with academic pretense—or, rather, their academic work is placed at the service of their ideology. These instructors have created an uncomfortable climate in the classroom. I myself never use my lectures as an excuse to propound my political views.
Over time, not only have the academic anti-Zionists had a devastating influence in the universities, but everything they say is nurtured and amplified by the media and the international community of opprobrium. It's a vicious circle. The non-Israelis point to the Israelis in justifying their own anti-Zionist line. For their part, the Israelis basically direct their efforts toward the outside world, which rewards them by inviting them to travel, speak, and publish their academically worthless rubbish.
Let's talk about Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), to whom you devote an entire chapter in your book. By coincidence, the first Hebrew translation of her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), is just out in Hebrew. In reviewing it, Shlomo Avineri has said that she was not tainted by Jewish self-hatred but was "a proud Jew."
I agree; she was a proud Jew. She was also a complicated Jew, and extremely ambivalent about her own Jewish identity. Though at times in her life she operated in a very Jewish milieu, she knew very little about Judaism. She grappled especially with, on the one hand, the need for Jewish political expression through a state and, on the other hand, her opposition to Jewish particularism. Still, until her death—we can't speculate beyond that—I don't believe she would have challenged the right to Jewish self-determination or countenanced calls to dismantle the state of Israel.
You refer to her Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) "a bad book" and "morally scandalous."
Well, she talks about things she doesn't understand. Her portrait of Adolf Eichmann was harnessed to her larger polemical aims. The concept of the "banality of evil," which she made famous, wasn't even hers. It originated with the German philosopher Karl Jaspers—who by the way stood courageously by his Jewish wife against the Nazis. Jaspers went on to write a book about German guilt, which Arendt read. The term "banality" appears in his letters to her.
Moreover, the Eichmann book does not propound a real theory. What she said about the "banality of evil" was intellectual gymnastics, pathetic nonsense.
In the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt was accused by her friend Gershom Scholem of lacking ahavat Yisrael, fidelity to the Jewish people.
Yes, she had this inner conflict about her Judaism and about Israel. She grappled with the place of the Jew in European culture. Her writings are often interpreted as relating to the place of Jews and of Israel on the global stage, but in fact she was addressing the dilemma of how others, particularly Westerners, understand Jews and Jewish identity. Her life was the embodiment of this dilemma—which has now been transferred to Israel and within Israel.
So what was her answer to the Jewish problem?
Integration. But I am not sure she had a coherent position. About Zionism, as I say, she was always ambivalent. That ambivalence was Hannah Arendt.
An ambivalent thinker with an incoherent position, yet an icon whose writings are constantly invoked by the community of opprobrium.
Exactly. An entire Arendt hagiography has evolved. My feeling is she would not appreciate being so used, but it is mind-boggling how many anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis, relying partially on her work, play such an important role in the campaign against Israel.
What impels some Diaspora Jews to lead the charge against Israel? You contrast them with the Chinese Diaspora, which appears to react with equanimity to the truly egregious human-rights violations of Beijing.
Yes, the Jews, unlike the Chinese, somehow feel pressured to dissociate themselves from their ancestral homeland. You'd have to ask the one-state proponent Tony Judt or the philosopher Judith Butler, who is pushing the anti-Israel boycott, to explain what motivates them and why they are emotionally invested with Israel to such an unhealthy degree.
-- March 2010
Why? Because he maintains that Israel was not born in sin at the expense of the Palestinians Arabs and that it has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Yakira's critique of his fellow leftists, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (subtitle: "Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel"), was rejected by five Israeli publishers before finally being brought out in 2007-- only to be greeted in the Hebrew press by a months-long silence. The controversy, when it at last erupted, was fierce; Yakir, a philosopher who did not set out to be a polemicist, had started a debate on the Left.
In April, Elhanan Yakira will be speaking in the United States about the English-language edition of his iconoclastic work, just published by Cambridge University Press and carrying endorsements by, among others, Michael Walzer and Fouad Ajami. We talked in the living room of his Jerusalem home .
In Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, you coin a phrase, "the community of opprobrium." Members of this community maintain that Israel exploits the Holocaust to justify its illegitimate existence, and that the Jews have been doing to the Palestinian Arabs what the Nazis did to the Jews. In brief: blame Israel and the Jews first.
Well, I should explain that the Hebrew essays- only later did they become a book - were intended as a polemic against the Israeli community of opprobrium. As I worked on the English edition, it became clear that the Israelis are nurtured by an international community: a huge subculture devoted to the de-legitimation of Israel, the Zionist idea, and the Jewish nation. What I did in the book was essentially to take one element of this campaign-the manipulation of the Holocaust-and show how it was morally and intellectually wrong.
Who are the big names in the Israeli community of opprobrium?
There are so many, and no doubt most of them are unfamiliar to English readers. Haifa-born Ilan Pappe, who now teaches in England, completely embraces the Palestinian narrative. There is Yehuda Shenhav, who has a new book out challenging the right of Israel to exist even within the 1967 "Green Line." I devote part of my book to Adi Ophir, former editor of the post-modernist Hebrew journal Theory and Criticism and an academic at Tel Aviv University and the Shalom Hartman Institute. There is also Oren Yiftachel at Ben-Gurion University, who speaks of Zionism as a "colonialism of refugees" and "creeping apartheid." Then there is the Haaretz crowd, including Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. Outside Israel, a key name is the historian Tony Judt, with his advocacy of a bi-national state.
The community refers to Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria as, in your words, "occupation with a capital O."
To be perfectly frank, I accept much of their criticism: the settlement situation is catastrophic. But what the capital-O crowd advocates is the now fashionable "one-state solution." It's completely unworkable. Daft! They also refer to Zionism as guilty of "original sin." Their opposition to Israeli policies is so visceral that it carries them to the point where they support policies that are, in effect, annihilationist.
You write that "there is not much point in talking with the anti-Zionists."
That's right. There is no point. They can't be swayed by facts. Their anti-Zionism has a structural affinity to anti-Semitism. It is irrational. I don't want to speculate or indulge in psychoanalytic explanations. Instead, what I do in the book is to talk about anti-Zionism.
It is a condition that seems to have permeated the Israel Left.
It's actually a complicated picture. I am convinced that the silent majority on the Israeli Left is not anti-Zionist. That is certainly the case in my department at the university. But the anti-Zionists are highly mobilized. They combine ideological zeal with academic pretense—or, rather, their academic work is placed at the service of their ideology. These instructors have created an uncomfortable climate in the classroom. I myself never use my lectures as an excuse to propound my political views.
Over time, not only have the academic anti-Zionists had a devastating influence in the universities, but everything they say is nurtured and amplified by the media and the international community of opprobrium. It's a vicious circle. The non-Israelis point to the Israelis in justifying their own anti-Zionist line. For their part, the Israelis basically direct their efforts toward the outside world, which rewards them by inviting them to travel, speak, and publish their academically worthless rubbish.
Let's talk about Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), to whom you devote an entire chapter in your book. By coincidence, the first Hebrew translation of her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), is just out in Hebrew. In reviewing it, Shlomo Avineri has said that she was not tainted by Jewish self-hatred but was "a proud Jew."
I agree; she was a proud Jew. She was also a complicated Jew, and extremely ambivalent about her own Jewish identity. Though at times in her life she operated in a very Jewish milieu, she knew very little about Judaism. She grappled especially with, on the one hand, the need for Jewish political expression through a state and, on the other hand, her opposition to Jewish particularism. Still, until her death—we can't speculate beyond that—I don't believe she would have challenged the right to Jewish self-determination or countenanced calls to dismantle the state of Israel.
You refer to her Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) "a bad book" and "morally scandalous."
Well, she talks about things she doesn't understand. Her portrait of Adolf Eichmann was harnessed to her larger polemical aims. The concept of the "banality of evil," which she made famous, wasn't even hers. It originated with the German philosopher Karl Jaspers—who by the way stood courageously by his Jewish wife against the Nazis. Jaspers went on to write a book about German guilt, which Arendt read. The term "banality" appears in his letters to her.
Moreover, the Eichmann book does not propound a real theory. What she said about the "banality of evil" was intellectual gymnastics, pathetic nonsense.
In the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt was accused by her friend Gershom Scholem of lacking ahavat Yisrael, fidelity to the Jewish people.
Yes, she had this inner conflict about her Judaism and about Israel. She grappled with the place of the Jew in European culture. Her writings are often interpreted as relating to the place of Jews and of Israel on the global stage, but in fact she was addressing the dilemma of how others, particularly Westerners, understand Jews and Jewish identity. Her life was the embodiment of this dilemma—which has now been transferred to Israel and within Israel.
So what was her answer to the Jewish problem?
Integration. But I am not sure she had a coherent position. About Zionism, as I say, she was always ambivalent. That ambivalence was Hannah Arendt.
An ambivalent thinker with an incoherent position, yet an icon whose writings are constantly invoked by the community of opprobrium.
Exactly. An entire Arendt hagiography has evolved. My feeling is she would not appreciate being so used, but it is mind-boggling how many anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis, relying partially on her work, play such an important role in the campaign against Israel.
What impels some Diaspora Jews to lead the charge against Israel? You contrast them with the Chinese Diaspora, which appears to react with equanimity to the truly egregious human-rights violations of Beijing.
Yes, the Jews, unlike the Chinese, somehow feel pressured to dissociate themselves from their ancestral homeland. You'd have to ask the one-state proponent Tony Judt or the philosopher Judith Butler, who is pushing the anti-Israel boycott, to explain what motivates them and why they are emotionally invested with Israel to such an unhealthy degree.
-- March 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Marranos in Reverse
At first blush, the blog reads like any modish commentary on the weekly Torah portion, complete with knowing references to the Mishnah and the building of the Tabernacle in the desert. Only upon closer examination does it become evident that the discussion of the tabernacle as a medium for drawing nearer to God is a precursor to the claim that, nowadays, God can be worshipped "directly." The blogger is a follower of "Yeshua"—a Jewish believer in Jesus.
In Jewish eyes they are apostates, but a group of "Messianic Jews" living in Israel say they follow authentic Jewish lives in the footsteps of Jesus. Spiritually akin to the Jews for Jesus movement, they differ in one salient respect: they tend not to engage in overt proselytizing. They are also much more informally organized, consisting mostly of local leaders and followers who maintain their faith through personal relationships and e-mail lists.
No one knows how many believers live in Israel—estimates vary from 5,000 to 15,000; there are said to be a hundred congregations. Many immigrated under the Law of Return or underwent Orthodox conversions upon arrival; some are native-born, and some are married to Christian spouses.
Though ardent in their faith, Messianic Jews are usually discreet about sharing their beliefs. The immigrants especially have every reason to be cautious, fearing loss of livelihood or citizenship if exposed. As for those who are "out of the closet," they face open and sometimes violent opposition. In December, police charged an Orthodox extremist with bombing the home and gravely wounding the son of a Messianic family in the West Bank town of Ariel. Last month in northern Israel, police arrested two men for setting fire to a car belonging to a Messianic Jew. In Beersheba, after years of harassment, Messianic Jews took the city's Sephardi rabbi and an anti-missionary group to court. Today a judge is scheduled to hear final testimony and closing arguments.
During the 14th and 15th centuries, the bona fides of conversos, Jews forced to embrace Christianity in Spain and Portugal, was always suspect; they were denigrated as Marranos (swine). Some number of them did live double lives: outwardly Christian while secretly adhering to Judaism. In cloaking their own faith, some Messianic Jews today feel, incongruously enough, that they are Marranos in reverse.
The logic is questionable at best. Little if anything connects the situation of Jews forced to convert to Christianity upon pain of expulsion or death with Jews who have found salvation through Jesus and yet—perversely, to their fellow Jews—insist on adhering to their identity as Jews. The courts will sort out the issues of law and civil liberties. In the meantime, in a country where identity, citizenship, and religious affiliation are intertwined with still-vivid historical memories, the presence of these Messianic Jews poses a unique challenge to the broadmindedness of Israeli society.
-- / March 2010
In Jewish eyes they are apostates, but a group of "Messianic Jews" living in Israel say they follow authentic Jewish lives in the footsteps of Jesus. Spiritually akin to the Jews for Jesus movement, they differ in one salient respect: they tend not to engage in overt proselytizing. They are also much more informally organized, consisting mostly of local leaders and followers who maintain their faith through personal relationships and e-mail lists.
No one knows how many believers live in Israel—estimates vary from 5,000 to 15,000; there are said to be a hundred congregations. Many immigrated under the Law of Return or underwent Orthodox conversions upon arrival; some are native-born, and some are married to Christian spouses.
Though ardent in their faith, Messianic Jews are usually discreet about sharing their beliefs. The immigrants especially have every reason to be cautious, fearing loss of livelihood or citizenship if exposed. As for those who are "out of the closet," they face open and sometimes violent opposition. In December, police charged an Orthodox extremist with bombing the home and gravely wounding the son of a Messianic family in the West Bank town of Ariel. Last month in northern Israel, police arrested two men for setting fire to a car belonging to a Messianic Jew. In Beersheba, after years of harassment, Messianic Jews took the city's Sephardi rabbi and an anti-missionary group to court. Today a judge is scheduled to hear final testimony and closing arguments.
During the 14th and 15th centuries, the bona fides of conversos, Jews forced to embrace Christianity in Spain and Portugal, was always suspect; they were denigrated as Marranos (swine). Some number of them did live double lives: outwardly Christian while secretly adhering to Judaism. In cloaking their own faith, some Messianic Jews today feel, incongruously enough, that they are Marranos in reverse.
The logic is questionable at best. Little if anything connects the situation of Jews forced to convert to Christianity upon pain of expulsion or death with Jews who have found salvation through Jesus and yet—perversely, to their fellow Jews—insist on adhering to their identity as Jews. The courts will sort out the issues of law and civil liberties. In the meantime, in a country where identity, citizenship, and religious affiliation are intertwined with still-vivid historical memories, the presence of these Messianic Jews poses a unique challenge to the broadmindedness of Israeli society.
-- / March 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Allon's Legacy
It was fitting that Benny Begin, son of the late Likud-party prime minister Menachem Begin, should have been the cabinet minister representing Israel's government at the annual memorial service on Monday for Labor-party icon Yigal Allon. On the Zionist political spectrum, the Begins are stalwarts of the Right, whereas Allon was decidedly a man of the Left. Yet the inheritors of their respective legacies share a sense of clarity about Jewish rights in Israel, a desire for genuine accommodation with the Arabs, and an emphatic insistence on defensible borders.
Allon was born in 1918 in the Lower Galilee and died 30 years ago. A leading figure in the Haganah—the pre-state self-defense underground operated by the left-wing Zionist establishment—he was a founder of its Palmah special-operations unit. The experience made him a lifelong proponent of preemptive military action.
During the 1948 War of Independence, Allon, by now a general, participated in many fateful campaigns, including the liberation of the Negev. Although he left the armed forces in 1950, he continued to be widely viewed as Israel's foremost strategic thinker. Allon never forgave David Ben-Gurion for not having ordered the IDF to capture the Old City and the West Bank during the war. The 1949 armistice lines, he said, failed to provide Israel with strategic depth.
After Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day war, Allon helped form a social-democratic movement that would evolve into today's Labor party. He supported settlement-building where militarily justified while opposing construction near Arab population centers. In 1968 he facilitated the Jewish return to Hebron on both security and religious-cultural grounds. At the same time, he warned that failure either to annex or to disengage from most of the Arab-populated territories would transform Israel into a colonial power.
Allon addressed Israel's topographic and demographic dilemmas in what became known as the Allon Plan. It proposed setting the country's border with Jordan at the Jordan River, fostering a belt of Israeli settlements in a 12-mile strip of land along the Jordan Valley rift, and handing over the rest of the West Bank with its Arab-population centers to Jordan. The plan was never adopted, but Allon's argument that the West Bank needed to be demilitarized, and that Israel ought to control access from the east, is today an essential plank in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's support for a two-state solution.
-- March 2010
Allon was born in 1918 in the Lower Galilee and died 30 years ago. A leading figure in the Haganah—the pre-state self-defense underground operated by the left-wing Zionist establishment—he was a founder of its Palmah special-operations unit. The experience made him a lifelong proponent of preemptive military action.
During the 1948 War of Independence, Allon, by now a general, participated in many fateful campaigns, including the liberation of the Negev. Although he left the armed forces in 1950, he continued to be widely viewed as Israel's foremost strategic thinker. Allon never forgave David Ben-Gurion for not having ordered the IDF to capture the Old City and the West Bank during the war. The 1949 armistice lines, he said, failed to provide Israel with strategic depth.
After Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day war, Allon helped form a social-democratic movement that would evolve into today's Labor party. He supported settlement-building where militarily justified while opposing construction near Arab population centers. In 1968 he facilitated the Jewish return to Hebron on both security and religious-cultural grounds. At the same time, he warned that failure either to annex or to disengage from most of the Arab-populated territories would transform Israel into a colonial power.
Allon addressed Israel's topographic and demographic dilemmas in what became known as the Allon Plan. It proposed setting the country's border with Jordan at the Jordan River, fostering a belt of Israeli settlements in a 12-mile strip of land along the Jordan Valley rift, and handing over the rest of the West Bank with its Arab-population centers to Jordan. The plan was never adopted, but Allon's argument that the West Bank needed to be demilitarized, and that Israel ought to control access from the east, is today an essential plank in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's support for a two-state solution.
-- March 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Easter 2010
Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17.
The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Passover is also the background for the events portrayed in the synoptic Gospels leading up to the passion of Christ crucified.
At the First Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), however, the Church resolutely decoupled Judaism from Christianity, severing the connection between the fourteenth of Nisan and Easter. "It is unbecoming," said the Emperor Constantine, "that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people." Easter became a date on the solar calendar, with Jesus' resurrection being celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox.
To this day there is no denying that, for many Jews, Easter recalls dreadful memories. The holiday is the source of the Church's "teaching of contempt," the damning of all Jews for the supposed crime of deicide. The cry of "Christ-killers" would pursue Jews from medieval European ghettos to the 20th-century United States. Easter is also associated with the notorious libel that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to fulfill their Passover rituals. Many of Eastern Europe's worst pogroms, including the 1903 Kishinev massacre, were launched during Easter. Indeed, no Christian holiday did more than Easter to inspire the development of modern political Zionism as an answer to Europe's insoluble "Jewish problem."
In post-Holocaust Europe, that message of collective Jewish guilt became progressively toned down, with traces still remaining in the Passion Play performed in Germany every ten years since 1634. Instead, the Jewish state of Israel has come to be identified as, in effect, "this odious people" among the nations, an object of fierce political denunciation often couched in the discredited but still-toxic religious tropes of old. In 2002, an Athens newspaper depicted the PLO chief Yasir Arafat as Jesus being crucified by the Jews; today some pro-Palestinian groups falsely claim that the Jewish state arbitrarily forbids Christians from worshipping freely at Easter.
And yet, at a time when both the Jewish and the Christian traditions face a common danger in extremist Islam, it is worth stressing that contemporary Israel has no firmer friends in the world than evangelical Christians, who recall Jesus as an observant Jew and understand his resurrection not as a post-modern metaphor but as the Gospel truth. In democratic societies, even as they agree to disagree about matters of ultimate truth, believing Jews and Christians continue to have much to talk about, and to defend.
- April 2010
The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Passover is also the background for the events portrayed in the synoptic Gospels leading up to the passion of Christ crucified.
At the First Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), however, the Church resolutely decoupled Judaism from Christianity, severing the connection between the fourteenth of Nisan and Easter. "It is unbecoming," said the Emperor Constantine, "that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people." Easter became a date on the solar calendar, with Jesus' resurrection being celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox.
To this day there is no denying that, for many Jews, Easter recalls dreadful memories. The holiday is the source of the Church's "teaching of contempt," the damning of all Jews for the supposed crime of deicide. The cry of "Christ-killers" would pursue Jews from medieval European ghettos to the 20th-century United States. Easter is also associated with the notorious libel that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to fulfill their Passover rituals. Many of Eastern Europe's worst pogroms, including the 1903 Kishinev massacre, were launched during Easter. Indeed, no Christian holiday did more than Easter to inspire the development of modern political Zionism as an answer to Europe's insoluble "Jewish problem."
In post-Holocaust Europe, that message of collective Jewish guilt became progressively toned down, with traces still remaining in the Passion Play performed in Germany every ten years since 1634. Instead, the Jewish state of Israel has come to be identified as, in effect, "this odious people" among the nations, an object of fierce political denunciation often couched in the discredited but still-toxic religious tropes of old. In 2002, an Athens newspaper depicted the PLO chief Yasir Arafat as Jesus being crucified by the Jews; today some pro-Palestinian groups falsely claim that the Jewish state arbitrarily forbids Christians from worshipping freely at Easter.
And yet, at a time when both the Jewish and the Christian traditions face a common danger in extremist Islam, it is worth stressing that contemporary Israel has no firmer friends in the world than evangelical Christians, who recall Jesus as an observant Jew and understand his resurrection not as a post-modern metaphor but as the Gospel truth. In democratic societies, even as they agree to disagree about matters of ultimate truth, believing Jews and Christians continue to have much to talk about, and to defend.
- April 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
World Jewish Congress
n a show of solidarity with Israel, leaders of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) will be gathering in Jerusalem at the end of the month. Not to be confused with the American Jewish Congress, of which it was originally an outgrowth, or the World Zionist Congress, founded by Theodor Herzl, the WJC is an umbrella group of Diaspora organizations (including the European Jewish Congress, the Latin American Jewish Congress, and others) that defines itself somewhat grandly as "the diplomatic arm of the Jewish people." If you haven't heard of it, there's a reason.
Six Jewish notables have led the WJC since its August 1936 founding in Geneva, Switzerland by 280 delegates from 32 countries. They were led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, then the president of the American Jewish Congress, and Nahum Goldmann: two men who saw themselves as champions of ordinary Jews against a condescending Jewish oligarchy. During the Holocaust, the WJC struggled—in vain—to pressure Allied officials into helping European Jews in Hitler's clutches.
When Wise died in 1949, Goldmann took full charge, running the WJC until 1977. A "statesman without a state," Goldmann negotiated the 1952 agreement obligating West Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust victims. A lifelong contrarian, Goldmann was an ambivalent Zionist at best, and after 1967 he became an outspoken critic of Israel's retention of Judea and Samaria. By 1973, he was rumored to be funding Jewish radicals advocating unconditional recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Philip Klutznick, an American millionaire who basically shared Goldmann's worldview, briefly bridged the gap at WJC until the 1979 arrival of Canadian billionaire Edgar M. Bronfman, who would run it until 2007. Bronfman, too, dissented from Israeli policies, though more discreetly. On other fronts, he led a 1986 campaign against Austria's ceremonial president Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary-general, over his Nazi past, and in 2000 embarked on a drive to pressure museums to identify and return Nazi-looted art works that had been the property of Holocaust victims. He also played a role in lobbying the Vatican to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
By 2005, the WJC had become incapacitated by allegations of financial irregularities involving its top professional. Bronfman finally sacked the executive in 2007, and over the ensuing three years, with Ronald S. Lauder now at the helm, the stain on the organization has largely dissipated.
Rather than dissenting from Israeli policies, Lauder is appreciated in Jerusalem for his warm support of the Netanyahu government's diplomacy. Lauder also published a stern open letter criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship—a foray into political suasion that, for some, only highlighted how seldom the WJC is heard from.
Goldmann may have imagined that the WJC would operate as a democratic Jewish institution, but that is hardly how he ran it; as for serving as a counter to the Jewish oligarchy, without wealthy individuals to bankroll its existence, the WJC would have disappeared long ago. Whether any organization can act or claim to act as the diplomatic arm of a fractious Diaspora has always been debatable—which, together with its lack of political acumen, may be why the WJC hardly figures on the communal radar. The question of the moment is whether its recent, heartening concern for securing the national homelan
-- August 2010
Six Jewish notables have led the WJC since its August 1936 founding in Geneva, Switzerland by 280 delegates from 32 countries. They were led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, then the president of the American Jewish Congress, and Nahum Goldmann: two men who saw themselves as champions of ordinary Jews against a condescending Jewish oligarchy. During the Holocaust, the WJC struggled—in vain—to pressure Allied officials into helping European Jews in Hitler's clutches.
When Wise died in 1949, Goldmann took full charge, running the WJC until 1977. A "statesman without a state," Goldmann negotiated the 1952 agreement obligating West Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust victims. A lifelong contrarian, Goldmann was an ambivalent Zionist at best, and after 1967 he became an outspoken critic of Israel's retention of Judea and Samaria. By 1973, he was rumored to be funding Jewish radicals advocating unconditional recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Philip Klutznick, an American millionaire who basically shared Goldmann's worldview, briefly bridged the gap at WJC until the 1979 arrival of Canadian billionaire Edgar M. Bronfman, who would run it until 2007. Bronfman, too, dissented from Israeli policies, though more discreetly. On other fronts, he led a 1986 campaign against Austria's ceremonial president Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary-general, over his Nazi past, and in 2000 embarked on a drive to pressure museums to identify and return Nazi-looted art works that had been the property of Holocaust victims. He also played a role in lobbying the Vatican to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
By 2005, the WJC had become incapacitated by allegations of financial irregularities involving its top professional. Bronfman finally sacked the executive in 2007, and over the ensuing three years, with Ronald S. Lauder now at the helm, the stain on the organization has largely dissipated.
Rather than dissenting from Israeli policies, Lauder is appreciated in Jerusalem for his warm support of the Netanyahu government's diplomacy. Lauder also published a stern open letter criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship—a foray into political suasion that, for some, only highlighted how seldom the WJC is heard from.
Goldmann may have imagined that the WJC would operate as a democratic Jewish institution, but that is hardly how he ran it; as for serving as a counter to the Jewish oligarchy, without wealthy individuals to bankroll its existence, the WJC would have disappeared long ago. Whether any organization can act or claim to act as the diplomatic arm of a fractious Diaspora has always been debatable—which, together with its lack of political acumen, may be why the WJC hardly figures on the communal radar. The question of the moment is whether its recent, heartening concern for securing the national homelan
-- August 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
The Impresario of Zionism
Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism, was born in Budapest 150 years ago next Sunday, May 2. He died at age forty-four in Vienna, four-and-a-half decades before the establishment of the state of Israel. Herzl came into maturity with no particular Jewish learning, no Hebrew, and scant ties to his community. Yet with his top hat, white gloves, and tails, this broadminded Central European journalist with a utopian streak came to be the foremost revolutionary of the modern Jewish world.
The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled on writing for the theater and journalism, where he excelled. Politically, the pivotal moment for him came in 1894 when he was covering the Dreyfus trial in presumably enlightened France. There and then he concluded that the only answer to European anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state, warning that, as far as hatred of Jews was concerned, "much worse is to come." To the chagrin of many rabbis, socialists, and assimilationists, his personal magnetism drew masses of Jews to the Zionist cause, while his sense of destiny gave him the confidence to seek support from Ottoman rulers, the Vatican, and Jewish grandees.
Herzl was not the first theoretician of political Zionism, or the first to think sensibly about the steps needed to create a third Jewish commonwealth. His unparalleled contribution was to put Zionism on both the Jewish and the international agenda. As the movement's leading prophet, he waged a fanatically intensive yet tactically shrewd campaign that virtually willed the state into being.
In 1897, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl recorded in his diary: "In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in fifty, everybody will agree." Unlike a Washington, Gandhi, or Mandela, Israel's founding father did not live to see his dream come to fruition; but he foresaw correctly.
-- April 2010
The basics outlines of Herzl's life are fairly well known. Born into a comfortable, assimilated family, he considered law but settled on writing for the theater and journalism, where he excelled. Politically, the pivotal moment for him came in 1894 when he was covering the Dreyfus trial in presumably enlightened France. There and then he concluded that the only answer to European anti-Semitism was the creation of a Jewish state, warning that, as far as hatred of Jews was concerned, "much worse is to come." To the chagrin of many rabbis, socialists, and assimilationists, his personal magnetism drew masses of Jews to the Zionist cause, while his sense of destiny gave him the confidence to seek support from Ottoman rulers, the Vatican, and Jewish grandees.
Herzl was not the first theoretician of political Zionism, or the first to think sensibly about the steps needed to create a third Jewish commonwealth. His unparalleled contribution was to put Zionism on both the Jewish and the international agenda. As the movement's leading prophet, he waged a fanatically intensive yet tactically shrewd campaign that virtually willed the state into being.
In 1897, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl recorded in his diary: "In Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this out loud today, everybody would laugh at me. In five years, perhaps, but certainly in fifty, everybody will agree." Unlike a Washington, Gandhi, or Mandela, Israel's founding father did not live to see his dream come to fruition; but he foresaw correctly.
-- April 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
High Season
Everywhere one goes, Jerusalem is crowded with visitors. Hotels are near capacity. The streets are jam-packed with tour buses. So far this year, 2.2 million tourists have visited the country. August was one of the best months ever, but tens of thousands more have now arrived for the Sukkot holiday, among them 7,000 evangelicals from 100 countries to celebrate the Christian Feast of Tabernacles. Hanukkah and Christmas promise still more
Of course, sojourning to the Holy Land is nothing new, having been practiced from time immemorial by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In ancient times, Diaspora Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. During the era of the Crusades, Benjamin of Tudela, journeying thither and yon from Spain, chronicled Palestine's remnant Jewish civilization. Judah al-Harizi reported in 1218 that the Muslims had bettered conditions for the local Jews. The travelogues of Evliya Çelebi, a Muslim Turk, recount the 1584 exodus of Safed's Jews after incessant Arab and Druse assaults. Throughout the centuries, numbers of Jewish visitors would stay on to settle in the land, while others, preeminently Theodor Herzl in 1898, would go back to organize the systematic return of the Jewish people to their homeland.
Many visitors to 21st-century Israel come out of religious conviction. Of this year's arrivals, about half are on a repeat visit. The single biggest source of tourists is the United States: some 538,000 Americans came last year, almost a quarter of the total. And yet 60 percent of U.S. Jews have yet to visit Israel—in contrast to their British coreligionists, of whom 95 percent have visited at least once. Somewhat brightening the American picture, over 230,000 young people, mainly from the U.S., have come on subsidized Birthright programs in the last ten years.
Whatever the impetus, and whatever their origins, once in the country tourists can't help being struck by the contrasts contained in its 10,000 square miles: about the same area as the state of New Jersey. In a matter of hours one can drive from snowcapped Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights to the Negev desert in the south. One can even hike the nine or so miles from the Mediterranean coast and cross the 1949 armistice lines into the West Bank. From atop a mountain ridge in Samaria one can scan metropolitan Tel Aviv, where the bulk of Israel's population is concentrated.
Such experiences yield keen geostrategic insights. But they are hardly the only attraction: untold numbers come for the rewards of sun, sea, and recreation. All told, it is little wonder that one in every twelve jobs in Israel is tourism-related, or that the industry is expected in 2010 to contribute 7.2 percent of the country's GDP.
Precisely because tourism has such enormous political, economic, and psychological ramifications, it is a sector long targeted by Israel's enemies. In 1972, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine murdered 26 people, including sixteen Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, at the country's airport. In 2000, following an excellent year for tourism, the Palestinian Arab leadership unleashed its second intifada, hitting cafes, restaurants, public transportation, even a Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel. The onslaught led to a dramatic drop in visitors; in June 2001, after a gruesome Tel Aviv nightclub bombing, the American Reform movement canceled its Israel youth programming. Those who continued to come during those dark days were disproportionately religious Jews and Christians.
Israel's detractors in the West have also invested heavily in boycotts aimed at dissuading academics, musicians, athletes, and ordinary people from visiting. Incredibly, the British Advertising Standards Authority was persuaded to ban Israel's ministry of tourism from depicting Jerusalem's Western Wall and Temple Mount in its UK advertisements. Even so, however, and despite everything, millions of travelers continue to come, thumbing their noses at the international campaign to defame and isolate the Jewish state, and dramatically avowing their confidence in its future.
-- September 2010
Of course, sojourning to the Holy Land is nothing new, having been practiced from time immemorial by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In ancient times, Diaspora Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. During the era of the Crusades, Benjamin of Tudela, journeying thither and yon from Spain, chronicled Palestine's remnant Jewish civilization. Judah al-Harizi reported in 1218 that the Muslims had bettered conditions for the local Jews. The travelogues of Evliya Çelebi, a Muslim Turk, recount the 1584 exodus of Safed's Jews after incessant Arab and Druse assaults. Throughout the centuries, numbers of Jewish visitors would stay on to settle in the land, while others, preeminently Theodor Herzl in 1898, would go back to organize the systematic return of the Jewish people to their homeland.
Many visitors to 21st-century Israel come out of religious conviction. Of this year's arrivals, about half are on a repeat visit. The single biggest source of tourists is the United States: some 538,000 Americans came last year, almost a quarter of the total. And yet 60 percent of U.S. Jews have yet to visit Israel—in contrast to their British coreligionists, of whom 95 percent have visited at least once. Somewhat brightening the American picture, over 230,000 young people, mainly from the U.S., have come on subsidized Birthright programs in the last ten years.
Whatever the impetus, and whatever their origins, once in the country tourists can't help being struck by the contrasts contained in its 10,000 square miles: about the same area as the state of New Jersey. In a matter of hours one can drive from snowcapped Mount Hermon in the northern Golan Heights to the Negev desert in the south. One can even hike the nine or so miles from the Mediterranean coast and cross the 1949 armistice lines into the West Bank. From atop a mountain ridge in Samaria one can scan metropolitan Tel Aviv, where the bulk of Israel's population is concentrated.
Such experiences yield keen geostrategic insights. But they are hardly the only attraction: untold numbers come for the rewards of sun, sea, and recreation. All told, it is little wonder that one in every twelve jobs in Israel is tourism-related, or that the industry is expected in 2010 to contribute 7.2 percent of the country's GDP.
Precisely because tourism has such enormous political, economic, and psychological ramifications, it is a sector long targeted by Israel's enemies. In 1972, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine murdered 26 people, including sixteen Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, at the country's airport. In 2000, following an excellent year for tourism, the Palestinian Arab leadership unleashed its second intifada, hitting cafes, restaurants, public transportation, even a Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel. The onslaught led to a dramatic drop in visitors; in June 2001, after a gruesome Tel Aviv nightclub bombing, the American Reform movement canceled its Israel youth programming. Those who continued to come during those dark days were disproportionately religious Jews and Christians.
Israel's detractors in the West have also invested heavily in boycotts aimed at dissuading academics, musicians, athletes, and ordinary people from visiting. Incredibly, the British Advertising Standards Authority was persuaded to ban Israel's ministry of tourism from depicting Jerusalem's Western Wall and Temple Mount in its UK advertisements. Even so, however, and despite everything, millions of travelers continue to come, thumbing their noses at the international campaign to defame and isolate the Jewish state, and dramatically avowing their confidence in its future.
-- September 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Jabotinsky
Dedicated to the memory of Shmuel Katz
The 70th yahrzeit of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was marked on July 11, at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. There was nary a mention of it in the Israeli media—an extraordinary omission given that Jabotinsky was not only a founder of the Haganah and the supreme commander of the Irgun but also a towering Zionist theoretician and leader.
Jabotinsky was born and raised in cosmopolitan Odessa, then a vibrant hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Drawn to journalism, he became an accomplished feuilletonist. His life took a fateful turn in 1903, when, fearing the pogroms sweeping Russia would reach his city, he pulled together a Jewish self-defense group. In the same year, he attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, which rejected an anguished Theodor Herzl’s plea to consider settling for an autonomous Jewish sanctuary in East Africa.
During World War I, while the Zionist establishment cautiously maintained its neutrality, Jabotinsky became the driving force behind the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the Allies. In the early 1920s, as the British mandatory authorities in Palestine capitulated regularly to Arab pressure, he organized defensive measures against Arab rioting, an activity for which he was at first imprisoned by the British and later amnestied and deported.
Jabotinsky was unwavering in his insistence that Zionism’s immediate and uncompromising goal had to be Herzl's original vision of an actual Jewish state. A rupture over the establishment's accommodationist approach toward Britain was inevitable. In 1925 he founded the Revisionist Zionist Organization, and ten years later led it out of the Congress. On Tisha b'Av 1938, he delivered a chillingly prophetic speech in Warsaw imploring the Jews of Poland to "see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction"—and to escape while they still could.
Two years later, at the age of fifty-nine, Jabotinsky died suddenly in upstate New York after inspecting an honor guard of his Betar youth movement. In Tel Aviv, the Labor newspaper Davar, which had opposed his every political move, graciously editorialized: "Jabotinsky has died. That gifted violin has been shattered." The reference was to his formidable powers as a polemicist and spellbinding speaker, capable of holding an audience in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, or German.
Jabotinsky's first biographer, Joseph B. Schechtman, described him as a "rebel, statesman, fighter, and prophet." To Shmuel Katz, his definitive biographer, "Jabo" was simply a "lone wolf." His emphasis on ethnic pride and regard for military discipline made liberals uncomfortable and led enemies to slur him as a fascist, an odd charge against a passionate 19th-century liberal and advocate of women's rights. Like others, Jabotinsky may not have fully fathomed nascent Arab nationalism; but he abhorred the idea that Arab and Jew could not live together peaceably.
Jabotinsky's multilingual journalism and literary output are keys, in their own way, to understanding his character and his take on life in general and Jewish life (and the Jewish imagination) in particular. Throughout his hectic political career, he somehow managed to write novels, poems, stories, patriotic songs, essays, and a regular column in New York's Yiddish-language Morning Journal. In reviewing an English translation of one of his novels, Hillel Halkin found a portrait of the author himself in a character inclined by nature to free-spiritedness but committed to a life of duty and self-sacrifice.
Do Jabotinsky's uncompromising views, including on the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel, enjoy a 21st-century constituency in the Jewish state? Not in the Likud, which claims his political legacy, and not in the mostly Orthodox-led settlement movement, which has its own heroes. Even in death, it seems, Jabo remains a lone wolf
-- July 2010
The 70th yahrzeit of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was marked on July 11, at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. There was nary a mention of it in the Israeli media—an extraordinary omission given that Jabotinsky was not only a founder of the Haganah and the supreme commander of the Irgun but also a towering Zionist theoretician and leader.
Jabotinsky was born and raised in cosmopolitan Odessa, then a vibrant hub of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Drawn to journalism, he became an accomplished feuilletonist. His life took a fateful turn in 1903, when, fearing the pogroms sweeping Russia would reach his city, he pulled together a Jewish self-defense group. In the same year, he attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, which rejected an anguished Theodor Herzl’s plea to consider settling for an autonomous Jewish sanctuary in East Africa.
During World War I, while the Zionist establishment cautiously maintained its neutrality, Jabotinsky became the driving force behind the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the Allies. In the early 1920s, as the British mandatory authorities in Palestine capitulated regularly to Arab pressure, he organized defensive measures against Arab rioting, an activity for which he was at first imprisoned by the British and later amnestied and deported.
Jabotinsky was unwavering in his insistence that Zionism’s immediate and uncompromising goal had to be Herzl's original vision of an actual Jewish state. A rupture over the establishment's accommodationist approach toward Britain was inevitable. In 1925 he founded the Revisionist Zionist Organization, and ten years later led it out of the Congress. On Tisha b'Av 1938, he delivered a chillingly prophetic speech in Warsaw imploring the Jews of Poland to "see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction"—and to escape while they still could.
Two years later, at the age of fifty-nine, Jabotinsky died suddenly in upstate New York after inspecting an honor guard of his Betar youth movement. In Tel Aviv, the Labor newspaper Davar, which had opposed his every political move, graciously editorialized: "Jabotinsky has died. That gifted violin has been shattered." The reference was to his formidable powers as a polemicist and spellbinding speaker, capable of holding an audience in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, or German.
Jabotinsky's first biographer, Joseph B. Schechtman, described him as a "rebel, statesman, fighter, and prophet." To Shmuel Katz, his definitive biographer, "Jabo" was simply a "lone wolf." His emphasis on ethnic pride and regard for military discipline made liberals uncomfortable and led enemies to slur him as a fascist, an odd charge against a passionate 19th-century liberal and advocate of women's rights. Like others, Jabotinsky may not have fully fathomed nascent Arab nationalism; but he abhorred the idea that Arab and Jew could not live together peaceably.
Jabotinsky's multilingual journalism and literary output are keys, in their own way, to understanding his character and his take on life in general and Jewish life (and the Jewish imagination) in particular. Throughout his hectic political career, he somehow managed to write novels, poems, stories, patriotic songs, essays, and a regular column in New York's Yiddish-language Morning Journal. In reviewing an English translation of one of his novels, Hillel Halkin found a portrait of the author himself in a character inclined by nature to free-spiritedness but committed to a life of duty and self-sacrifice.
Do Jabotinsky's uncompromising views, including on the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel, enjoy a 21st-century constituency in the Jewish state? Not in the Likud, which claims his political legacy, and not in the mostly Orthodox-led settlement movement, which has its own heroes. Even in death, it seems, Jabo remains a lone wolf
-- July 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
The Obama - Israel "Crisis"
What comes to mind when you think about great moments of crisis in U.S. foreign policy? The Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis, Iran's seizure of American hostages? Or, perhaps, Israel's decision to build residential housing in northeast Jerusalem?
Whether current tensions with Washington do constitute a crisis, and whether yesterday's crisis talks between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lead to a reduction or intensification of those tensions, will become apparent soon enough. But whatever the outcome, it is a fact that strains between Washington and Jerusalem have been part of the "special relationship" ever since President Harry S Truman granted Israel de-facto recognition in 1948.
Let us count the ways. After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Eisenhower administration forced Israel to withdraw from captured territories despite Egypt's continued belligerency. The opening of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the early 1960s contributed to strife with the Kennedy administration. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a supportive Johnson administration nevertheless issued Washington's first condemnation of Israeli settlement activity.
The beat goes on. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, the Nixon administration set forth the Rogers Plan, which sought to force Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 armistice lines. At one fractious point, the Ford administration ordered a complete reassessment of U.S.-Israel relations. Jimmy Carter was continually at odds with Menachem Begin, blaming him for every setback in the Camp David peace talks with Anwar Sadat.
Relations were no less bumpy when Ronald Reagan sold advanced electronic-surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; withheld weapons from Israel in punishment for its airstrike against Iraq's nuclear reactor and then again over the 1982 Lebanon war; demanded a settlement freeze; and granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO. Things hardly improved with the arrival of George H.W. Bush, whose administration refused loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jewish refugees until Israel agreed to a settlement freeze. Secretary of State James Baker scornfully told Israeli leaders to telephone if and when they were interested in peace.
Bill Clinton's years, dominated by the fallout from the 1993 Oslo Accords, were similarly marked by relentless pressure on Netanyahu (in his first term) to be more forthcoming to Yasir Arafat. Finally, in 2003, over Ariel Sharon's protestations, George W. Bush proclaimed a "Road Map" toward a Palestinian state in the midst of horrific Palestinian violence.
In the light of this recitation, does today's crisis with the Obama administration take on a less worrisome aspect, as simply another stage in an ongoing but finally harmless pattern? Not necessarily. For one thing, as with similar episodes in the past, this one can strengthen the perennial expectation among Arab foes of Israel that Washington will, ultimately, force Jerusalem to capitulate to their maximalist demands. For another, should the current administration seize this opportunity to attempt to impose its own "peace plan," that could indeed precipitate a real, genuine crisis.
-- March 2010
Whether current tensions with Washington do constitute a crisis, and whether yesterday's crisis talks between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu lead to a reduction or intensification of those tensions, will become apparent soon enough. But whatever the outcome, it is a fact that strains between Washington and Jerusalem have been part of the "special relationship" ever since President Harry S Truman granted Israel de-facto recognition in 1948.
Let us count the ways. After the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Eisenhower administration forced Israel to withdraw from captured territories despite Egypt's continued belligerency. The opening of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the early 1960s contributed to strife with the Kennedy administration. After the 1967 Six-Day War, a supportive Johnson administration nevertheless issued Washington's first condemnation of Israeli settlement activity.
The beat goes on. Much to Jerusalem's consternation, the Nixon administration set forth the Rogers Plan, which sought to force Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 armistice lines. At one fractious point, the Ford administration ordered a complete reassessment of U.S.-Israel relations. Jimmy Carter was continually at odds with Menachem Begin, blaming him for every setback in the Camp David peace talks with Anwar Sadat.
Relations were no less bumpy when Ronald Reagan sold advanced electronic-surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; withheld weapons from Israel in punishment for its airstrike against Iraq's nuclear reactor and then again over the 1982 Lebanon war; demanded a settlement freeze; and granted diplomatic recognition to the PLO. Things hardly improved with the arrival of George H.W. Bush, whose administration refused loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jewish refugees until Israel agreed to a settlement freeze. Secretary of State James Baker scornfully told Israeli leaders to telephone if and when they were interested in peace.
Bill Clinton's years, dominated by the fallout from the 1993 Oslo Accords, were similarly marked by relentless pressure on Netanyahu (in his first term) to be more forthcoming to Yasir Arafat. Finally, in 2003, over Ariel Sharon's protestations, George W. Bush proclaimed a "Road Map" toward a Palestinian state in the midst of horrific Palestinian violence.
In the light of this recitation, does today's crisis with the Obama administration take on a less worrisome aspect, as simply another stage in an ongoing but finally harmless pattern? Not necessarily. For one thing, as with similar episodes in the past, this one can strengthen the perennial expectation among Arab foes of Israel that Washington will, ultimately, force Jerusalem to capitulate to their maximalist demands. For another, should the current administration seize this opportunity to attempt to impose its own "peace plan," that could indeed precipitate a real, genuine crisis.
-- March 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Ramadan 2010
Three near-certainties accompany the Muslim holy month of Ramadan: in Islamic countries, the stock market climbs; in Jerusalem, the already amplified pre-dawn adhān, or call to prayer, becomes even more piercing than usual; and there is a steep rise in Muslim bloodletting.
At around the time Jews will be celebrating Rosh Hashanah, more than a billion Muslims will mark the conclusion of Ramadan with festive Eid al-Fitr meals. For the past month, observant Muslims have abstained from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset to commemorate the handing down of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. The faithful are entreated to curb wicked intentions, practice humility, and pray for forgiveness.
No doubt, for many of the faithful, Ramadan is a period of quiet reflection and spiritual serenity. For many others, however, especially in places where large numbers of Muslims cross paths with Hindus, Christians, or Jews, it is an occasion for barbarity. It is said that the gates of hell are closed during Ramadan, funneling martyrs to heaven with ease.
In Kashmir, Muslim violence against Indian security forces regularly spikes during Ramadan. Elsewhere, killing a Christian during Ramadan is deemed especially meritorious: a Syrian Catholic abducted in Mosul, north of Baghdad, was murdered this year even though the kidnappers' ransom demands had been met. All up and down Iraq, suicide bombers, roadside bombs, and snipers have taken an ungodly toll of innocent lives. In Somalia, Islamist suicide bombers killed 31 people at a Mogadishu hotel. In Lebanon, Sunnis killed Shiites and Shiites killed Sunnis in disputes over turf.
Thousands of miles away, in southern Thailand where Muslims are in the majority, Islamists set off a deadly explosive device killing, among others, a two-year-old boy. Again the reason given was Ramadan, a period in which, the Chinese news agency Xinhua notes matter-of-factly, "violence in the region always flares up." In Chechnya, bands of men attacked women in the street for not wearing headscarves. Scores of foreign troops battling the Taliban in Afghanistan have been killed, as have many civilians targeted as they shopped for food to break the fast.
Practicing Muslims are now a visible element of daily life in Europe and the Americas, and Ramadan is no longer on the margins of Western consciousness. This year, many British and U.S. news outlets provided coverage of the start of the month-long fast; others helpfully offered special features ranging from news of pertinent iPhone applications to discussions about the propriety of Muslim women visiting hair salons during the month.
Spokesmen for other faiths, trying to look beyond the miasma of violence, have conscientiously focused on the season's spiritual aspects. The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue sent greetings in 31 languages, attributing Ramadan-related violence—obliquely termed a "manipulation of religion"—to ignorance, poverty, and injustice. In India, The Hindu published an article by a Muslim author extolling the festival, while from the U.S. a respected Hindu leader sent Ramadan greetings to Muslims worldwide.
In Israel, Christians and Jews distributed food baskets to 250 needy Muslim families in the town of Lod, while in Acre the town's chief rabbi joined an Iftar banquet tendered to promote respect for non-Jewish holidays in the Jewish state. Israeli soldiers who come into contact with Palestinian Arabs have been given sensitivity training and instructed not to eat in front of fasting Muslims. Israeli authorities have gone to great lengths to facilitate access for West Bank Muslims to their shrines atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
But no amount of ecumenical goodwill can change the fact that Ramadan is a blood-soaked period. What can be done about that? Only the Muslim faithful themselves can challenge Islamists bent on brutality. There is a glimmer of hope that this is beginning to happen, but it will take a thorough political and theological reformation before the bloodletting is taken out of Ramadan.
-- September 2010
At around the time Jews will be celebrating Rosh Hashanah, more than a billion Muslims will mark the conclusion of Ramadan with festive Eid al-Fitr meals. For the past month, observant Muslims have abstained from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset to commemorate the handing down of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. The faithful are entreated to curb wicked intentions, practice humility, and pray for forgiveness.
No doubt, for many of the faithful, Ramadan is a period of quiet reflection and spiritual serenity. For many others, however, especially in places where large numbers of Muslims cross paths with Hindus, Christians, or Jews, it is an occasion for barbarity. It is said that the gates of hell are closed during Ramadan, funneling martyrs to heaven with ease.
In Kashmir, Muslim violence against Indian security forces regularly spikes during Ramadan. Elsewhere, killing a Christian during Ramadan is deemed especially meritorious: a Syrian Catholic abducted in Mosul, north of Baghdad, was murdered this year even though the kidnappers' ransom demands had been met. All up and down Iraq, suicide bombers, roadside bombs, and snipers have taken an ungodly toll of innocent lives. In Somalia, Islamist suicide bombers killed 31 people at a Mogadishu hotel. In Lebanon, Sunnis killed Shiites and Shiites killed Sunnis in disputes over turf.
Thousands of miles away, in southern Thailand where Muslims are in the majority, Islamists set off a deadly explosive device killing, among others, a two-year-old boy. Again the reason given was Ramadan, a period in which, the Chinese news agency Xinhua notes matter-of-factly, "violence in the region always flares up." In Chechnya, bands of men attacked women in the street for not wearing headscarves. Scores of foreign troops battling the Taliban in Afghanistan have been killed, as have many civilians targeted as they shopped for food to break the fast.
Practicing Muslims are now a visible element of daily life in Europe and the Americas, and Ramadan is no longer on the margins of Western consciousness. This year, many British and U.S. news outlets provided coverage of the start of the month-long fast; others helpfully offered special features ranging from news of pertinent iPhone applications to discussions about the propriety of Muslim women visiting hair salons during the month.
Spokesmen for other faiths, trying to look beyond the miasma of violence, have conscientiously focused on the season's spiritual aspects. The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue sent greetings in 31 languages, attributing Ramadan-related violence—obliquely termed a "manipulation of religion"—to ignorance, poverty, and injustice. In India, The Hindu published an article by a Muslim author extolling the festival, while from the U.S. a respected Hindu leader sent Ramadan greetings to Muslims worldwide.
In Israel, Christians and Jews distributed food baskets to 250 needy Muslim families in the town of Lod, while in Acre the town's chief rabbi joined an Iftar banquet tendered to promote respect for non-Jewish holidays in the Jewish state. Israeli soldiers who come into contact with Palestinian Arabs have been given sensitivity training and instructed not to eat in front of fasting Muslims. Israeli authorities have gone to great lengths to facilitate access for West Bank Muslims to their shrines atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
But no amount of ecumenical goodwill can change the fact that Ramadan is a blood-soaked period. What can be done about that? Only the Muslim faithful themselves can challenge Islamists bent on brutality. There is a glimmer of hope that this is beginning to happen, but it will take a thorough political and theological reformation before the bloodletting is taken out of Ramadan.
-- September 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
"Israeli Apartheid Week"
We have come a long way since the 1967 Six-Day War. Before that watershed event, Diaspora Jewish life was not noticeably animated by a vigorous commitment to Israel's cause. But the country's spectacular victory in war, in tandem with the energies released by the burgeoning mobilization to free Soviet Jewry, as well as with larger societal trends favoring ethnic assertion of all kinds, served to deepen and solidify the connection between the Diaspora and the Zionist enterprise. In America, pro-Israelism became the defining characteristic of Jewish life.
Over the ensuing decades, however, the stubborn refusal of the Arab-Muslim war to abate, and the decisive turn of the United Nations and the international Left against the Jewish state, have led to a palpable wavering in elite Jewish opinion—and, today, signs of an actual pulling-away. This is manifested at the extreme in the open involvement of a minuscule but vocal number of Jews and Israelis in the Arab cause. More worrying is the articulation of feelings of "exhaustion" on the part of some Jewish liberals and the silent but palpable disengagement of many others from Israel's cause.
Since most American Jews have never visited Israel, it is perhaps no wonder that they are at a loss to defend its strategic policies against daily barrages of criticism. Already a decade ago, a survey by the sociologist Steven M. Cohen found that relatively few American Jews felt "extremely attached" to Israel. Today, the extent of disaffection may be gauged in a symptomatic proposal for launching a "Birthright Diaspora" program to vie with Birthright Israel for the allegiance of young Jewish adults (including Israelis).
The hate-fest known as "Israeli Apartheid Week," now taking place in cities around the globe, is bound to affect the morale of Diaspora Jews, if in different ways. Some may be induced to lower their pro-Israel profile, others to dissociate themselves from the Jewish state and its policies, still others to affirm their solidarity ever more resolutely.
A mirror phenomenon can be detected among some Israelis who, isolated and resentful, have either misplaced their sense of connectedness to the Jewish people at large or seem positively determined to cut the thread binding them to what one writer derides as Israel's "symbiotic relationship" with the Diaspora. Since we are no longer one, if we ever were, why pretend to an interest in the perpetuation of Jewish life abroad? Why promote, in the manner of Tel Aviv's Beit Hatfutsot museum, the idea of a "global Jewish people"?
Such are a few of the contending currents of the present situation—a situation that planners of "Israel Apartheid Week" and similar excrescences must hope will issue in an ever greater splintering of the Jewish collective. As against the massed anti-Israel forces, one can but posit an oddly cheering fact: the more they rail, the more they testify to the bedrock persistence of the oneness they strain to obliterate. Acknowledged, unacknowledged, or repudiated, Zion was, is, and will likely remain at the core of Jewish civilization.
-- March 2010
Over the ensuing decades, however, the stubborn refusal of the Arab-Muslim war to abate, and the decisive turn of the United Nations and the international Left against the Jewish state, have led to a palpable wavering in elite Jewish opinion—and, today, signs of an actual pulling-away. This is manifested at the extreme in the open involvement of a minuscule but vocal number of Jews and Israelis in the Arab cause. More worrying is the articulation of feelings of "exhaustion" on the part of some Jewish liberals and the silent but palpable disengagement of many others from Israel's cause.
Since most American Jews have never visited Israel, it is perhaps no wonder that they are at a loss to defend its strategic policies against daily barrages of criticism. Already a decade ago, a survey by the sociologist Steven M. Cohen found that relatively few American Jews felt "extremely attached" to Israel. Today, the extent of disaffection may be gauged in a symptomatic proposal for launching a "Birthright Diaspora" program to vie with Birthright Israel for the allegiance of young Jewish adults (including Israelis).
The hate-fest known as "Israeli Apartheid Week," now taking place in cities around the globe, is bound to affect the morale of Diaspora Jews, if in different ways. Some may be induced to lower their pro-Israel profile, others to dissociate themselves from the Jewish state and its policies, still others to affirm their solidarity ever more resolutely.
A mirror phenomenon can be detected among some Israelis who, isolated and resentful, have either misplaced their sense of connectedness to the Jewish people at large or seem positively determined to cut the thread binding them to what one writer derides as Israel's "symbiotic relationship" with the Diaspora. Since we are no longer one, if we ever were, why pretend to an interest in the perpetuation of Jewish life abroad? Why promote, in the manner of Tel Aviv's Beit Hatfutsot museum, the idea of a "global Jewish people"?
Such are a few of the contending currents of the present situation—a situation that planners of "Israel Apartheid Week" and similar excrescences must hope will issue in an ever greater splintering of the Jewish collective. As against the massed anti-Israel forces, one can but posit an oddly cheering fact: the more they rail, the more they testify to the bedrock persistence of the oneness they strain to obliterate. Acknowledged, unacknowledged, or repudiated, Zion was, is, and will likely remain at the core of Jewish civilization.
-- March 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
India & Israel
Celebrating its Independence Day on August 15, the nation of India marked 63 years since the end of British rule in the sub-continent. In light of the two countries' more or less contemporaneous struggle for self-determination in the immediate aftermath of World War II, one might have thought that India would establish close ties with the newly born state of Israel straightaway. It did not happen.
Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India saw itself as a leader of the "non-aligned" bloc, and Israel as part of the West. Notwithstanding its conflict with Pakistan, its overwhelmingly Muslim neighbor, New Delhi also sought to establish itself on good terms with the Arab and Islamic world. To that end, it wholeheartedly adopted the Arab line at the UN and mapped out third-world strategy with Egypt's Gamal Nasser.
When it came to Jewish history and Zionist aspirations, India's founding elites labored under profound misapprehensions. In late 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht, Mohandas Gandhi wrote that he had no sympathy for the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. His advice to desperate and despairing European Jews was to face the Nazis with passivity; to the Jews in Palestine, he counseled an effort to convert Arab pogromists into friends.
India did finally recognize Israel in 1950, allowing Jerusalem to maintain a consular presence in Mumbai (then Bombay). But not until 1992 were full diplomatic relations established. By then, the Soviet empire had collapsed; Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was working feverishly on an Islamic bomb; and Egypt had long since made its peace with Israel.
In the years since then, the two countries have gradually drawn closer. Israelis are unabashedly smitten with India: about 35,000 of them, including many youngsters just out of army service, visit the country each year. Annual trade, which started at $200 million, has by now reached $3.5 billion, and this year India surpassed Europe as Israel's number-two export market (after the U.S.). Israel sells India minerals, fertilizer, chemicals, electronics, and, most significantly, military equipmemt.
Since the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, security ties have also strengthened. Reportedly, the two countries are jointly developing a medium-range air-defense system. The Indian navy has visited Haifa port, and India has launched commercial satellites into orbit for Israel.
But then there is Iran, on which Delhi and Jerusalem are at cross-purposes. Iran is India's second biggest oil supplier, and India—competing with China in a race to dominate the world's economy—is heavily invested in Iran's energy sector. India-Iran trade has reportedly tripled in the past five years. Geopolitics plays a role as well: India imagines Iran can be persuaded to dampen Islamist extremism in the sub-continent and curb Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan.
And there are also the cold facts of demography. True, Israel's population of seven million includes 70,000 Indian Jews—but India is a vast, multiethnic country of a billion people, and its Muslim minority, 13 percent of the population, numbers 153 million, exceeding the combined populations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Second only to Iran, India has the largest non-Arab Shi'ite population in the world. It is notable that Indian Muslims have no history of involvement in terrorism, and their religious authorities abjure political violence. Nor is India as a whole troubled by indigenous anti-Jewish sentiment. Still, the country's elites are thoroughly exposed to the prevailing global fault-finding of Israel and the concomitant rise in global anti-Semitism.
So the Israel-India relationship, while mutually vital, is delicate. Jerusalem would emphatically prefer New Delhi to stop enabling Iran, even as it must appreciate that India will calibrate its relationships according to its interests as it sees them. Under the circumstances, the question is what it would take to convince Indians that appeasing the imperialist mullahs in Tehran will in fact undermine India's long-term welfare and national interests.
-- August 2010
Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India saw itself as a leader of the "non-aligned" bloc, and Israel as part of the West. Notwithstanding its conflict with Pakistan, its overwhelmingly Muslim neighbor, New Delhi also sought to establish itself on good terms with the Arab and Islamic world. To that end, it wholeheartedly adopted the Arab line at the UN and mapped out third-world strategy with Egypt's Gamal Nasser.
When it came to Jewish history and Zionist aspirations, India's founding elites labored under profound misapprehensions. In late 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht, Mohandas Gandhi wrote that he had no sympathy for the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. His advice to desperate and despairing European Jews was to face the Nazis with passivity; to the Jews in Palestine, he counseled an effort to convert Arab pogromists into friends.
India did finally recognize Israel in 1950, allowing Jerusalem to maintain a consular presence in Mumbai (then Bombay). But not until 1992 were full diplomatic relations established. By then, the Soviet empire had collapsed; Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was working feverishly on an Islamic bomb; and Egypt had long since made its peace with Israel.
In the years since then, the two countries have gradually drawn closer. Israelis are unabashedly smitten with India: about 35,000 of them, including many youngsters just out of army service, visit the country each year. Annual trade, which started at $200 million, has by now reached $3.5 billion, and this year India surpassed Europe as Israel's number-two export market (after the U.S.). Israel sells India minerals, fertilizer, chemicals, electronics, and, most significantly, military equipmemt.
Since the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, security ties have also strengthened. Reportedly, the two countries are jointly developing a medium-range air-defense system. The Indian navy has visited Haifa port, and India has launched commercial satellites into orbit for Israel.
But then there is Iran, on which Delhi and Jerusalem are at cross-purposes. Iran is India's second biggest oil supplier, and India—competing with China in a race to dominate the world's economy—is heavily invested in Iran's energy sector. India-Iran trade has reportedly tripled in the past five years. Geopolitics plays a role as well: India imagines Iran can be persuaded to dampen Islamist extremism in the sub-continent and curb Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan.
And there are also the cold facts of demography. True, Israel's population of seven million includes 70,000 Indian Jews—but India is a vast, multiethnic country of a billion people, and its Muslim minority, 13 percent of the population, numbers 153 million, exceeding the combined populations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Second only to Iran, India has the largest non-Arab Shi'ite population in the world. It is notable that Indian Muslims have no history of involvement in terrorism, and their religious authorities abjure political violence. Nor is India as a whole troubled by indigenous anti-Jewish sentiment. Still, the country's elites are thoroughly exposed to the prevailing global fault-finding of Israel and the concomitant rise in global anti-Semitism.
So the Israel-India relationship, while mutually vital, is delicate. Jerusalem would emphatically prefer New Delhi to stop enabling Iran, even as it must appreciate that India will calibrate its relationships according to its interests as it sees them. Under the circumstances, the question is what it would take to convince Indians that appeasing the imperialist mullahs in Tehran will in fact undermine India's long-term welfare and national interests.
-- August 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
A Zionist Citadel
Zionist citadel -
This week the 73rd annual meeting of the board of governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem takes place in Israel's capital. Opened in 1925 on Mount Scopus in northeast Jerusalem, in the presence of British grandees Lord Balfour and Lord Allenby and the Zionist leadership headed by Chaim Weizmann, the fate of the university has been intertwined with that of the Yishuv and the nascent State of Israel. The school wrestled with the challenges of institution-building, offered a platform for the fierce competition of ideas, and developed the country's human potential, while encouraging Jewish-Arab coexistence. The demands the university confronted were a microcosm of the larger struggle for Jewish national survival in the face of wars, terror, boycott and de-legitimization.
With the end of the First World War and the arrival of the British Mandate, Weizmann helped to spearhead the creation of a "university of the Jewish people" whose library would become the Jewish National Library. In 1918, twelve foundation stones on land purchased from the estate of Sir John Gray-Hill were laid. Albert Einstein, delivering his opening remarks in Hebrew, gave the first formal university lecture – on the theory of relativity – in 1923. Judah Magnes became the institution's chancellor awarding the first degree in 1931. The university's teaching hospital, thanks to the munificence of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization, was to become a preeminent medical center.
In April 1948, Arab gunmen slaughtered a convoy of medical and university personnel making their way through east Jerusalem to Mount Scopus. When the 1948 War of Independence was over, Mt. Scopus remained an Israeli enclave though too dangerous to access. Classes were instead scattered throughout west Jerusalem, while Einstein and others appealed for donors to build an alternative site -- eventually inaugurated at Givat Ram in 1953. Only with the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem was Mount Scopus redeveloped into a flourishing campus.
In a Jerusalem whose population is growing increasingly non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox and Arab, the university today is a bastion of liberal Zionism. One illustration: In partnership with Hadassah and the Israel Defense Forces, HU now offers a distinctive six-year fast-track track physicians-training program in "military medicine." Nevertheless, the conduct of a number of graduates and faculty, with their compulsive anti-Zionism and obsessive embrace of the Palestinian Arab cause, has tended to capture the headlines. After years of indulgence, such whinging is no longer going unanswered.
Day-to-day, however, the "crisis" that most concerns the university's president, Menahem Ben-Sasson, is financial. Government support has been reduced by $8 million; HU is saddled by burdensome pension obligations; it foots a NIS 30 million security bill (nine students and staff were murdered in a 2002 bombing of a campus cafeteria by Palestinian terrorists); the global economic downturn resulted in a $17 million drop in foreign donations. Negotiated salary cuts and summer furloughs notwithstanding, HU ended its 2008/2009 fiscal year with a $30 million deficit.
All is not bleak. The task of strengthening the "university of the Jewish people" is now more equitably shared by a board that is divided, roughly, into one-hundred Israeli and one-hundred Diaspora governors. The university is doing well in garnering grants for its researchers: $45m from Israeli sources; $12m from US granting agencies; $8m from German sources and so on, last year. Its Amirim program identifies and nourishes undergraduates with outstanding potential. [There is healthy intellectual cross-pollination with other world-class institutions. For example, a doctoral student in music and another in Talmud are now studying at Princeton University in an exchange program sponsored by the Tikvah Fund.] The university is vigorously seeking to reverse Israel's brain drain, enticing back scholars and thereby further boosting the university's ability to capture research grants. And since undergraduates do not arrive on campus after IDF service with a sufficiently broad educational background, the university recently instituted a scheme to provide them with a solid grounding in the liberal arts.
Like the state it preceded into existence, Hebrew University finds itself in the throes of crisis. Yet a balanced assessment would note reasons for optimism: international stature, tens of thousands of enrolled students, illustrious faculty, alumni that include six recent Nobel Prize laureates, custodianship of Einstein's literary legacy, and an abiding role in fostering the Zionist enterprise.
This week the 73rd annual meeting of the board of governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem takes place in Israel's capital. Opened in 1925 on Mount Scopus in northeast Jerusalem, in the presence of British grandees Lord Balfour and Lord Allenby and the Zionist leadership headed by Chaim Weizmann, the fate of the university has been intertwined with that of the Yishuv and the nascent State of Israel. The school wrestled with the challenges of institution-building, offered a platform for the fierce competition of ideas, and developed the country's human potential, while encouraging Jewish-Arab coexistence. The demands the university confronted were a microcosm of the larger struggle for Jewish national survival in the face of wars, terror, boycott and de-legitimization.
With the end of the First World War and the arrival of the British Mandate, Weizmann helped to spearhead the creation of a "university of the Jewish people" whose library would become the Jewish National Library. In 1918, twelve foundation stones on land purchased from the estate of Sir John Gray-Hill were laid. Albert Einstein, delivering his opening remarks in Hebrew, gave the first formal university lecture – on the theory of relativity – in 1923. Judah Magnes became the institution's chancellor awarding the first degree in 1931. The university's teaching hospital, thanks to the munificence of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization, was to become a preeminent medical center.
In April 1948, Arab gunmen slaughtered a convoy of medical and university personnel making their way through east Jerusalem to Mount Scopus. When the 1948 War of Independence was over, Mt. Scopus remained an Israeli enclave though too dangerous to access. Classes were instead scattered throughout west Jerusalem, while Einstein and others appealed for donors to build an alternative site -- eventually inaugurated at Givat Ram in 1953. Only with the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem was Mount Scopus redeveloped into a flourishing campus.
In a Jerusalem whose population is growing increasingly non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox and Arab, the university today is a bastion of liberal Zionism. One illustration: In partnership with Hadassah and the Israel Defense Forces, HU now offers a distinctive six-year fast-track track physicians-training program in "military medicine." Nevertheless, the conduct of a number of graduates and faculty, with their compulsive anti-Zionism and obsessive embrace of the Palestinian Arab cause, has tended to capture the headlines. After years of indulgence, such whinging is no longer going unanswered.
Day-to-day, however, the "crisis" that most concerns the university's president, Menahem Ben-Sasson, is financial. Government support has been reduced by $8 million; HU is saddled by burdensome pension obligations; it foots a NIS 30 million security bill (nine students and staff were murdered in a 2002 bombing of a campus cafeteria by Palestinian terrorists); the global economic downturn resulted in a $17 million drop in foreign donations. Negotiated salary cuts and summer furloughs notwithstanding, HU ended its 2008/2009 fiscal year with a $30 million deficit.
All is not bleak. The task of strengthening the "university of the Jewish people" is now more equitably shared by a board that is divided, roughly, into one-hundred Israeli and one-hundred Diaspora governors. The university is doing well in garnering grants for its researchers: $45m from Israeli sources; $12m from US granting agencies; $8m from German sources and so on, last year. Its Amirim program identifies and nourishes undergraduates with outstanding potential. [There is healthy intellectual cross-pollination with other world-class institutions. For example, a doctoral student in music and another in Talmud are now studying at Princeton University in an exchange program sponsored by the Tikvah Fund.] The university is vigorously seeking to reverse Israel's brain drain, enticing back scholars and thereby further boosting the university's ability to capture research grants. And since undergraduates do not arrive on campus after IDF service with a sufficiently broad educational background, the university recently instituted a scheme to provide them with a solid grounding in the liberal arts.
Like the state it preceded into existence, Hebrew University finds itself in the throes of crisis. Yet a balanced assessment would note reasons for optimism: international stature, tens of thousands of enrolled students, illustrious faculty, alumni that include six recent Nobel Prize laureates, custodianship of Einstein's literary legacy, and an abiding role in fostering the Zionist enterprise.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Arab Moderates: Help, or Hindrance?
At the re-launching of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, attention will be focused on Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu. But Egypt's ailing president, Hosni Mubarak, will also be in attendance, as will Jordan's King Abdullah II. To maintain their bona fides as Arab moderates, the two men helped cajole Abbas to resume face-to-face negotiations with Israel. So did other Arab states in the U.S. orbit, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates.
Their support was needed: left to his own devices, the politically enfeebled Abbas would no doubt have preferred to stay put. He and his team are already threatening to walk out when Israel's moratorium on settlement-building expires on September 26. At home, Abbas's participation in Washington is opposed by the leaders of all factions of his own organization, the PLO; Hamas's Khaled Mashaal has declared the talks "illegitimate" and not binding on the Palestinian polity; and ten other Syrian-backed rejectionist groups have similarly condemned the talks.
Thus, even if, for argument's sake, Abbas sincerely wants to break the cycle of self-destructive rejectionism characteristic of Palestinian Arab politics for the past century, he will need truly unequivocal backing from Mubarak, Abdullah, and the rest. But would Cairo and Amman take the lead? If history is any guide, the answer is no.
On his way back from a round of negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Yasir Arafat went straight to seek the support of Mubarak. Yet far from encouraging compromise with Israel, Mubarak adamantly opposed it. For his part, Abdullah, who had come to the throne the previous year, kept his head down. Today, the situation is, if anything, even less conducive to supporting peace with Israel.
In Egypt, Mubarak's party has just nominated the eighty-two-year-old ruler for a sixth presidential term, should he want it. (Rumors are rife that he might step aside in favor of his son Gamal.) Meanwhile, ordinary Egyptians are embittered by the regime's miserable economic performance and cynical about prospects of political reform. But when it comes to Israel, opinion hardens: Mubarak, who patented the "cold peace" paradigm, is criticized as being too soft. The blackouts plaguing the countryside in this summer's withering heat have accelerated demands that Egypt stop exporting natural gas to Israel.
Abdullah's position is possibly even more complicated, because much of Jordan's population is Palestinian Arab. The king's attendance in Washington this week has been denounced by Jordan's Trade Unions Council as a betrayal of the Palestinians. Jordanian chemists have refused to invite their Israeli colleagues to an international conference scheduled for the fall in Amman. The government, under intense pressure over a troubled economy, faces an Islamist-inspired boycott of parliamentary elections slated for November.
Abdullah, Mubarak, and Abbas may get points from the Obama administration just for showing up alongside Netanyahu. The Gulf Arabs won't even do that much. Timid though they have been in their peacemaking rhetoric, they are roundly condemned for it at home.
In the long run, this playing for time by the so-called Arab moderates is unsustainable: it agitates rejectionists while offering nothing tangible to Israelis who want a deal. The Arab states were instrumental in creating, perpetuating, and exacerbating the Palestinian problem. If anyone has a moral obligation to solve it, they do. A good place to begin would be to make it explicit to Abbas that they will back him unreservedly should he decide to negotiate with Israel in good faith.
-- August 2010
Their support was needed: left to his own devices, the politically enfeebled Abbas would no doubt have preferred to stay put. He and his team are already threatening to walk out when Israel's moratorium on settlement-building expires on September 26. At home, Abbas's participation in Washington is opposed by the leaders of all factions of his own organization, the PLO; Hamas's Khaled Mashaal has declared the talks "illegitimate" and not binding on the Palestinian polity; and ten other Syrian-backed rejectionist groups have similarly condemned the talks.
Thus, even if, for argument's sake, Abbas sincerely wants to break the cycle of self-destructive rejectionism characteristic of Palestinian Arab politics for the past century, he will need truly unequivocal backing from Mubarak, Abdullah, and the rest. But would Cairo and Amman take the lead? If history is any guide, the answer is no.
On his way back from a round of negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Yasir Arafat went straight to seek the support of Mubarak. Yet far from encouraging compromise with Israel, Mubarak adamantly opposed it. For his part, Abdullah, who had come to the throne the previous year, kept his head down. Today, the situation is, if anything, even less conducive to supporting peace with Israel.
In Egypt, Mubarak's party has just nominated the eighty-two-year-old ruler for a sixth presidential term, should he want it. (Rumors are rife that he might step aside in favor of his son Gamal.) Meanwhile, ordinary Egyptians are embittered by the regime's miserable economic performance and cynical about prospects of political reform. But when it comes to Israel, opinion hardens: Mubarak, who patented the "cold peace" paradigm, is criticized as being too soft. The blackouts plaguing the countryside in this summer's withering heat have accelerated demands that Egypt stop exporting natural gas to Israel.
Abdullah's position is possibly even more complicated, because much of Jordan's population is Palestinian Arab. The king's attendance in Washington this week has been denounced by Jordan's Trade Unions Council as a betrayal of the Palestinians. Jordanian chemists have refused to invite their Israeli colleagues to an international conference scheduled for the fall in Amman. The government, under intense pressure over a troubled economy, faces an Islamist-inspired boycott of parliamentary elections slated for November.
Abdullah, Mubarak, and Abbas may get points from the Obama administration just for showing up alongside Netanyahu. The Gulf Arabs won't even do that much. Timid though they have been in their peacemaking rhetoric, they are roundly condemned for it at home.
In the long run, this playing for time by the so-called Arab moderates is unsustainable: it agitates rejectionists while offering nothing tangible to Israelis who want a deal. The Arab states were instrumental in creating, perpetuating, and exacerbating the Palestinian problem. If anyone has a moral obligation to solve it, they do. A good place to begin would be to make it explicit to Abbas that they will back him unreservedly should he decide to negotiate with Israel in good faith.
-- August 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
On Eagles' Wings
The story of Israel's determination to survive is inextricably linked to the military aircraft deployed to defend its skies and take the battle to the enemy. A new chapter is now opening with the decision by Defense Minister Ehud Barak to approve, pending cabinet ratification, the purchase from the United States of twenty F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft at a base price of $96 million each. The manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, promises the new jet will be capable of penetrating the most sophisticated air defenses. Unfortunately, the plane is only now going into production and won't reach the Israel Air Force for at least five years—too late to play a role in any immediate solution to the Iranian nuclear threat.
The various eras of Israel's politico-military history can be limned through its planes. During the 1948-49 War of Independence, the front-line aircraft was the Sakeen, manufactured in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, procured in disassembled form, and brought to the country in defiance of an international arms embargo. Complemented by an odd assortment of other planes and heroic pilots (many from abroad), the Sakeen helped Israel achieve control over its own skies by the end of the war.
In the early 1950s, as the Soviet Empire turned sadistically anti-Semitic, Jerusalem had to look elsewhere for weaponry. Unable to establish a much-desired strategic relationship with Washington, it turned to the world market for military-surplus aircraft. These included the British-manufactured Spitfire and the American-made Mustang. Israel's first military jet, the British Meteor, was bought openly in 1953. All these saw the country through the 1956 Sinai campaign.
When realpolitik brought France and Israel into an early-1960s alliance, Jerusalem finally had a reliable flow of arms—most crucially, starting in 1962, the Mirage jet, which proved indispensable to victory in the 1967 war. But the French connection ended abruptly several days before the war when Charles de Gaulle declared a weapons embargo. Fortunately, it was then that the Johnson administration established the U.S. as Israel's main arms supplier, selling it, among other things, F-4 Phantom fighter bombers and A-4 Skyhawk ground-attack aircraft.
The American bond, initiated in earnest with the Kennedy administration's sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, became an authentic "special relationship" rooted in shared values and mutual security interests. Israel fought the 1973 Yom Kippur War largely with U.S.-supplied equipment. By the 1980s, the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon fighter-bomber, along with the E-2 Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning system, had joined the arsenal.
Indeed, the sale of military aircraft came to be a barometer for the general health of the Washington-Jerusalem relationship. A frosty Carter administration, piqued over Israeli policies in Lebanon and the West Bank, rejected a request to co-produce the F-16 and prevented Israel from selling its Kfir jet (built with U.S. components) to Ecuador. The use of F-16s and F-15s in Israel's 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak elicited threats of an arms embargo from the Reagan administration.
Israel Aerospace Industries, established to lessen the country's dependency on outside sources, would become a world-class manufacturer and exporter of weaponry. But in 1987 Israel made the fateful decision not to proceed with production of its own multirole Lavi fighter—a choice that Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, continues to maintain was short-sighted: had the Lavi been perfected, he asserts, it would today have obviated the need to purchase the F-35. Other critics of the new F-35 purchase worry that it will beggar the defense budget; some even argue that now should be the moment for Israel to make the quantum leap to unmanned strategic aircraft.
While Israel produces its own AWACS planes, plus a variety of aerial drones, its efforts at self-sufficiency are constrained by its small size, limited resources, and ultimate reliance on Washington. With its population exposed to an unprecedented ballistic-missile threat, Jerusalem has needed to collaborate with the U.S. on perfecting the Arrow defense system and to deploy U.S.-made Hawk and Patriot surface-to-air missiles. Nor could the soon-to-be-deployed Iron Dome, designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars, have been manufactured without U.S. support.
Clearly, in all these cases the U.S. has benefited greatly from the lessons of Israel's experience in wartime. But whatever the merits of the current decision to go with the F-35, this latest prospective sale also illuminates Israel's continuing, vital, and enduring—albeit dependent—relationship with the United States.
-- August 2010
The various eras of Israel's politico-military history can be limned through its planes. During the 1948-49 War of Independence, the front-line aircraft was the Sakeen, manufactured in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, procured in disassembled form, and brought to the country in defiance of an international arms embargo. Complemented by an odd assortment of other planes and heroic pilots (many from abroad), the Sakeen helped Israel achieve control over its own skies by the end of the war.
In the early 1950s, as the Soviet Empire turned sadistically anti-Semitic, Jerusalem had to look elsewhere for weaponry. Unable to establish a much-desired strategic relationship with Washington, it turned to the world market for military-surplus aircraft. These included the British-manufactured Spitfire and the American-made Mustang. Israel's first military jet, the British Meteor, was bought openly in 1953. All these saw the country through the 1956 Sinai campaign.
When realpolitik brought France and Israel into an early-1960s alliance, Jerusalem finally had a reliable flow of arms—most crucially, starting in 1962, the Mirage jet, which proved indispensable to victory in the 1967 war. But the French connection ended abruptly several days before the war when Charles de Gaulle declared a weapons embargo. Fortunately, it was then that the Johnson administration established the U.S. as Israel's main arms supplier, selling it, among other things, F-4 Phantom fighter bombers and A-4 Skyhawk ground-attack aircraft.
The American bond, initiated in earnest with the Kennedy administration's sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, became an authentic "special relationship" rooted in shared values and mutual security interests. Israel fought the 1973 Yom Kippur War largely with U.S.-supplied equipment. By the 1980s, the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon fighter-bomber, along with the E-2 Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning system, had joined the arsenal.
Indeed, the sale of military aircraft came to be a barometer for the general health of the Washington-Jerusalem relationship. A frosty Carter administration, piqued over Israeli policies in Lebanon and the West Bank, rejected a request to co-produce the F-16 and prevented Israel from selling its Kfir jet (built with U.S. components) to Ecuador. The use of F-16s and F-15s in Israel's 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak elicited threats of an arms embargo from the Reagan administration.
Israel Aerospace Industries, established to lessen the country's dependency on outside sources, would become a world-class manufacturer and exporter of weaponry. But in 1987 Israel made the fateful decision not to proceed with production of its own multirole Lavi fighter—a choice that Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, continues to maintain was short-sighted: had the Lavi been perfected, he asserts, it would today have obviated the need to purchase the F-35. Other critics of the new F-35 purchase worry that it will beggar the defense budget; some even argue that now should be the moment for Israel to make the quantum leap to unmanned strategic aircraft.
While Israel produces its own AWACS planes, plus a variety of aerial drones, its efforts at self-sufficiency are constrained by its small size, limited resources, and ultimate reliance on Washington. With its population exposed to an unprecedented ballistic-missile threat, Jerusalem has needed to collaborate with the U.S. on perfecting the Arrow defense system and to deploy U.S.-made Hawk and Patriot surface-to-air missiles. Nor could the soon-to-be-deployed Iron Dome, designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars, have been manufactured without U.S. support.
Clearly, in all these cases the U.S. has benefited greatly from the lessons of Israel's experience in wartime. But whatever the merits of the current decision to go with the F-35, this latest prospective sale also illuminates Israel's continuing, vital, and enduring—albeit dependent—relationship with the United States.
-- August 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
World Zionist Congress
The 36th congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) opens in Jerusalem today, bringing together hundreds of delegates drawn from political parties in Israel's Knesset as well as from Zionist and Jewish organizations in the Diaspora. On the agenda are subjects ranging from the condition of Zionism in Israeli society and worldwide, to settlement in Judea and Samaria, to Israel-Diaspora relations. Unfortunately, no matter how stimulating the speeches may be, no one anticipates any fateful decisions or even any serious grappling with existential questions.
This is a far cry from, for example, the sixth congress in 1903, Theodor Herzl's last, which wrestled with whether, in the face of spiraling anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, Jews should settle for a homeland anywhere at all rather than holding out for the land of Israel. Or take the momentous twelfth congress, held in an atmosphere of comparative optimism with the end of World War I and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration; there, the assembled Zionists debated their relations with the Arabs.
Then there was the seventeenth congress of 1931, which took place in the shadow of continuing Arab violence and ended in organizational rupture over demands by Vladimir Jabotinsky that the movement openly declare its aim to be the creation of a Jewish state. Exactly two decades later, three years after the birth of Israel, the congress met for the first time in Tel Aviv, where delegates sought to map out the relationship between movement and state.
By contrast, the prosaic issue confronting today's congress involves the possibly baleful influence of the WZO's newest constituent, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party—undoubtedly nationalist, but with no philosophical connection to Zionism—on religious pluralism inside the movement.
Some will ask whether vestigial bodies like the WZO—and the Jewish Agency, for that matter—serve any real purpose. Both are funded largely by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Israeli government. Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, is seeking to revitalize that organization by means of a new mission: actively fostering Jewish identity and unity between the Diaspora and Israel. As for the WZO, its main role is to provide patronage and funds to constituent organizations, the best of which promote youth movements, educational programs, and scholarships, dispatching emissaries to Diaspora communities and advancing the cause of aliyah.
All the while, Zionism today is under unremitting intellectual and political assault around the world, and it is excruciatingly obvious that the case for Zion has to be made anew—as if the fate of the entire enterprise hangs in the balance. If the World Zionist Organization is not up to the task, who is?
-- June 2010
This is a far cry from, for example, the sixth congress in 1903, Theodor Herzl's last, which wrestled with whether, in the face of spiraling anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, Jews should settle for a homeland anywhere at all rather than holding out for the land of Israel. Or take the momentous twelfth congress, held in an atmosphere of comparative optimism with the end of World War I and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration; there, the assembled Zionists debated their relations with the Arabs.
Then there was the seventeenth congress of 1931, which took place in the shadow of continuing Arab violence and ended in organizational rupture over demands by Vladimir Jabotinsky that the movement openly declare its aim to be the creation of a Jewish state. Exactly two decades later, three years after the birth of Israel, the congress met for the first time in Tel Aviv, where delegates sought to map out the relationship between movement and state.
By contrast, the prosaic issue confronting today's congress involves the possibly baleful influence of the WZO's newest constituent, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party—undoubtedly nationalist, but with no philosophical connection to Zionism—on religious pluralism inside the movement.
Some will ask whether vestigial bodies like the WZO—and the Jewish Agency, for that matter—serve any real purpose. Both are funded largely by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Israeli government. Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, is seeking to revitalize that organization by means of a new mission: actively fostering Jewish identity and unity between the Diaspora and Israel. As for the WZO, its main role is to provide patronage and funds to constituent organizations, the best of which promote youth movements, educational programs, and scholarships, dispatching emissaries to Diaspora communities and advancing the cause of aliyah.
All the while, Zionism today is under unremitting intellectual and political assault around the world, and it is excruciatingly obvious that the case for Zion has to be made anew—as if the fate of the entire enterprise hangs in the balance. If the World Zionist Organization is not up to the task, who is?
-- June 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Meeting Efraim Karsh
Author of Palestine Betrayed,
Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.
This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.
The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.
Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.
In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough.
Who "betrayed" Palestine?
Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.
You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?
A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.
What were the obligations of Great Britain under the Mandate for Palestine?
The League of Nations instructed the British to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine as envisaged by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
How did Britain fulfill these obligations?
Almost from the beginning the British authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab efforts to avert the implementation of the Mandate. Finally, in July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward. The Peel Commission, appointed by London, concluded that Arabs and Jews couldn't peacefully coexist in a single state and recommended repudiating the terms of the Mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with what was then called Transjordan, and a truncated Jewish state.
But hadn't the British "twice promised" Palestine, first to the Arabs and then to the Jews?
Certainly not. In his correspondence with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, which led to the Great Arab Revolt during World War I, Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner for Egypt, specifically excluded Palestine from the prospective Arab empire promised to Hussein. This was acknowledged by the sharif in their exchanges and also by his son Faisal, the future founding monarch of Iraq, shortly after the war.
You bring to light a World War II conversation about atomic weapons between Nazi-SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the mufti Hajj Amin Husseini.
Yes. Arriving in Berlin in November 1941, and promptly awarded an audience with Hitler, the mufti spent the rest of the war in the service of the Third Reich, broadcasting Nazi propaganda and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the German killing machine. Himmler and the mufti spent hours ruminating on the absolute evil of the Jews. It was during one of these conversations, sometime in the summer of 1943, that Himmler gleefully told Hajj Amin of the Nazi "final solution," which by that time had led to the extermination of some three million Jews. He also confided the great progress made in developing a nuclear weapon that in Himmler's opinion would win the war for Germany. The mufti would never forget this conversation, boasting decades later in his memoirs that "there were no more than ten officials in the German Reich who were privy to this secret."
Arab historians and others now say that Israel's victory in the 1948-49 War of Independence was preordained, given the weakness of the Arabs.
Hardly. By April 1948, after four months of fighting against the mufti's men as well as an irregular pan-Arab force-dubbed the Arab Liberation Army-that had penetrated Palestine from outside, the Jewish position had become precarious. It was only after the Jews launched their first large offensive in early April, aimed at breaching the siege of Jerusalem, that the Palestinian Arab war effort began to unravel rapidly, culminating in total collapse and mass exodus by mid-May.
Then Israel proclaimed its independence.
Yes-and immediately the country was invaded by the regular armies of the neighboring Arab states. The previous succession of Jewish victories was checked, the nascent state was thrown back on the defensive, and the fight became a struggle for its very survival. Ultimately, the newly-established Israeli army managed to turn the tables, at the exorbitant human cost of one percent of the new state's population.
At the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948, the Irgun, a pre-state paramilitary force, is said to have massacred hundreds upon hundreds of innocent and unarmed men, women, and children.
According to a reliable report a day after the event, some 100 Arabs, including women and children, were killed in the fighting for the village. This figure is confirmed by Arif al-Arif, the doyen of Palestinian Arab historians, in his seminal Arabic-language study of the nakba (disaster), as Palestinians refer to the events of 1948-49. Al-Arif stipulates heavy fighting on both sides, claiming that the villagers killed more than 100 Jewish fighters (the actual figure was four dead and 32 wounded). Of the 110 Arab fatalities, he alleges that only seven were killed in action while the rest were peaceful civilians murdered in their homes. By contrast, an intelligence report issued three days after the event by the Haganah, the main Jewish fighting force, underscored the operational incompetence and disarray of the attacking Irgunists as well as their lack of discipline, manifested among other ways in acts of plunder, but makes no mention of a massacre.
In Palestine Betrayed you come to essentially the same conclusion as does Benny Morris in his recent book 1948: namely, that the only party systematically interested in "transfer" or "expulsion" in this period was the Arabs.
Morris does seem to have tacitly disowned his early writings, not least by acknowledging that the underlying cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict was and is the adamant Arab and Muslim refusal to accept the idea of Jewish statehood in any part of Palestine. Millions of Arabs, Jews, and foreign observers of the Middle East fully recognized these facts as early as 1948; at that time, the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society were nowhere described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. Regrettably, this historical truth has been erased from public memory.
But in the case of the town of Lydda, the Haganah did drive out Arab residents.
The Lydda expulsion of July 1948 was the only instance where a substantial urban population was driven out during the course of the war. It stemmed not from a pre-existing plan but from a string of unexpected developments. Only when Israeli forces encountered stiffer resistance than expected was the decision made to "encourage" the population's departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east. The aim was to avoid leaving a hostile armed base at the rear of the Israeli advance and, by clogging the main roads, to forestall a possible counterattack by the Arab Legion.
This is not to deny that Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinian Arabs. But these were exceptions that occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations-notably the need to deprive the enemy of strategic sites where no Jewish forces were available to hold them.
You write that, in any case, hundreds of thousands of Arabs had fled Palestine while the British were still in place-that is, prior to Israeli independence.
That is correct. And this tells us that even if the Zionists had instigated a plot to expel the Palestinian Arabs-which they most certainly did not-Britain's extensive military presence in the country would have precluded the slightest possibility of a systematic "ethnic cleansing."
What then was the catalyst for their flight?
The fear, disorientation, and economic privation that accompany all armed hostilities. But to these must be added, crucially, the local Palestinians' despair of their own leadership, the role taken by that leadership in actively forcing widespread evacuations, and perhaps above all the lack of communal cohesion or of the willingness, especially at the highest levels, to subordinate personal interest to the general good.
You cite documents by Jewish figures in Haifa actually pleading with the city's Arab leaders not to flee.
They did not listen to such pleas, no doubt because remaining would have amounted to a tacit acquiescence in Jewish statehood.
The UN says there are 4.7 million Palestine refugees today. How many Arabs actually fled Palestine?
By the time of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, some 300,000-340,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled their homes. By the end of the war several months later, the numbers had swollen to 583,000-609,000 refugees.
Why didn't Israel welcome them back afterward?
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet on September 12, 1948 that if direct talks with the Arabs should culminate in a real peace, the refugees would return. On the other hand, "Should [postwar arrangements] fall short of peace with the Arabs, we will not allow their return."
You contend that Palestinian Arabs, if left to their own devices, would have chosen coexistence.
Therein lay the great tragedy of the 1920-48 era. Despite constant terror and intimidation, including the killing by Arab fanatics of moderates within their own community, peaceful coexistence with Jews was far more prevalent than were eruptions of violence, and the violence was the work of a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.
It was the Arab leadership that rejected Jewish statehood even in a small part of Palestine-not from concern for the national rights of the Palestinian Arabs, but from the desire to fend off a perceived encroachment on the pan-Arab patrimony.
So the Arab war goal was not to create a Palestinian state?
It was common knowledge at the time that the pan-Arab invasion was more of a geopolitical scramble for Palestine than an attempt to secure the Palestinians' national rights. After 1948-49, neither Egypt nor Transjordan moved to establish an independent Palestinian entity in Gaza and the West Bank; this reflected the wider perception of the Palestine problem as a corollary of the pan-Arab agenda rather than as a distinct or urgent issue in its own right.
Abdel Rahman Azzam, the first head of the Arab League, once mused that it took centuries for the Arabs to reconcile themselves to having lost Spain; he wasn't sure they could ever adjust to losing any part of Palestine.
Unfortunately, the prospect of such an adjustment still seems far from auspicious. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state provided the Palestinians recognized Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's negotiator, reacted to this by warning that Netanyahu "will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him."
And so, more than six decades after the mufti condemned his people to statelessness, his reckless policies live on and are continually reenacted. Only when today's Arab leaders end this legacy of intransigence can the Palestinians hope to put their self-inflicted nakba behind them.
###
Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.
This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.
The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.
Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.
In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough.
Who "betrayed" Palestine?
Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.
You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?
A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.
What were the obligations of Great Britain under the Mandate for Palestine?
The League of Nations instructed the British to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine as envisaged by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
How did Britain fulfill these obligations?
Almost from the beginning the British authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab efforts to avert the implementation of the Mandate. Finally, in July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward. The Peel Commission, appointed by London, concluded that Arabs and Jews couldn't peacefully coexist in a single state and recommended repudiating the terms of the Mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with what was then called Transjordan, and a truncated Jewish state.
But hadn't the British "twice promised" Palestine, first to the Arabs and then to the Jews?
Certainly not. In his correspondence with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, which led to the Great Arab Revolt during World War I, Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner for Egypt, specifically excluded Palestine from the prospective Arab empire promised to Hussein. This was acknowledged by the sharif in their exchanges and also by his son Faisal, the future founding monarch of Iraq, shortly after the war.
You bring to light a World War II conversation about atomic weapons between Nazi-SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the mufti Hajj Amin Husseini.
Yes. Arriving in Berlin in November 1941, and promptly awarded an audience with Hitler, the mufti spent the rest of the war in the service of the Third Reich, broadcasting Nazi propaganda and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the German killing machine. Himmler and the mufti spent hours ruminating on the absolute evil of the Jews. It was during one of these conversations, sometime in the summer of 1943, that Himmler gleefully told Hajj Amin of the Nazi "final solution," which by that time had led to the extermination of some three million Jews. He also confided the great progress made in developing a nuclear weapon that in Himmler's opinion would win the war for Germany. The mufti would never forget this conversation, boasting decades later in his memoirs that "there were no more than ten officials in the German Reich who were privy to this secret."
Arab historians and others now say that Israel's victory in the 1948-49 War of Independence was preordained, given the weakness of the Arabs.
Hardly. By April 1948, after four months of fighting against the mufti's men as well as an irregular pan-Arab force-dubbed the Arab Liberation Army-that had penetrated Palestine from outside, the Jewish position had become precarious. It was only after the Jews launched their first large offensive in early April, aimed at breaching the siege of Jerusalem, that the Palestinian Arab war effort began to unravel rapidly, culminating in total collapse and mass exodus by mid-May.
Then Israel proclaimed its independence.
Yes-and immediately the country was invaded by the regular armies of the neighboring Arab states. The previous succession of Jewish victories was checked, the nascent state was thrown back on the defensive, and the fight became a struggle for its very survival. Ultimately, the newly-established Israeli army managed to turn the tables, at the exorbitant human cost of one percent of the new state's population.
At the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948, the Irgun, a pre-state paramilitary force, is said to have massacred hundreds upon hundreds of innocent and unarmed men, women, and children.
According to a reliable report a day after the event, some 100 Arabs, including women and children, were killed in the fighting for the village. This figure is confirmed by Arif al-Arif, the doyen of Palestinian Arab historians, in his seminal Arabic-language study of the nakba (disaster), as Palestinians refer to the events of 1948-49. Al-Arif stipulates heavy fighting on both sides, claiming that the villagers killed more than 100 Jewish fighters (the actual figure was four dead and 32 wounded). Of the 110 Arab fatalities, he alleges that only seven were killed in action while the rest were peaceful civilians murdered in their homes. By contrast, an intelligence report issued three days after the event by the Haganah, the main Jewish fighting force, underscored the operational incompetence and disarray of the attacking Irgunists as well as their lack of discipline, manifested among other ways in acts of plunder, but makes no mention of a massacre.
In Palestine Betrayed you come to essentially the same conclusion as does Benny Morris in his recent book 1948: namely, that the only party systematically interested in "transfer" or "expulsion" in this period was the Arabs.
Morris does seem to have tacitly disowned his early writings, not least by acknowledging that the underlying cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict was and is the adamant Arab and Muslim refusal to accept the idea of Jewish statehood in any part of Palestine. Millions of Arabs, Jews, and foreign observers of the Middle East fully recognized these facts as early as 1948; at that time, the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society were nowhere described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. Regrettably, this historical truth has been erased from public memory.
But in the case of the town of Lydda, the Haganah did drive out Arab residents.
The Lydda expulsion of July 1948 was the only instance where a substantial urban population was driven out during the course of the war. It stemmed not from a pre-existing plan but from a string of unexpected developments. Only when Israeli forces encountered stiffer resistance than expected was the decision made to "encourage" the population's departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east. The aim was to avoid leaving a hostile armed base at the rear of the Israeli advance and, by clogging the main roads, to forestall a possible counterattack by the Arab Legion.
This is not to deny that Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinian Arabs. But these were exceptions that occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations-notably the need to deprive the enemy of strategic sites where no Jewish forces were available to hold them.
You write that, in any case, hundreds of thousands of Arabs had fled Palestine while the British were still in place-that is, prior to Israeli independence.
That is correct. And this tells us that even if the Zionists had instigated a plot to expel the Palestinian Arabs-which they most certainly did not-Britain's extensive military presence in the country would have precluded the slightest possibility of a systematic "ethnic cleansing."
What then was the catalyst for their flight?
The fear, disorientation, and economic privation that accompany all armed hostilities. But to these must be added, crucially, the local Palestinians' despair of their own leadership, the role taken by that leadership in actively forcing widespread evacuations, and perhaps above all the lack of communal cohesion or of the willingness, especially at the highest levels, to subordinate personal interest to the general good.
You cite documents by Jewish figures in Haifa actually pleading with the city's Arab leaders not to flee.
They did not listen to such pleas, no doubt because remaining would have amounted to a tacit acquiescence in Jewish statehood.
The UN says there are 4.7 million Palestine refugees today. How many Arabs actually fled Palestine?
By the time of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, some 300,000-340,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled their homes. By the end of the war several months later, the numbers had swollen to 583,000-609,000 refugees.
Why didn't Israel welcome them back afterward?
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet on September 12, 1948 that if direct talks with the Arabs should culminate in a real peace, the refugees would return. On the other hand, "Should [postwar arrangements] fall short of peace with the Arabs, we will not allow their return."
You contend that Palestinian Arabs, if left to their own devices, would have chosen coexistence.
Therein lay the great tragedy of the 1920-48 era. Despite constant terror and intimidation, including the killing by Arab fanatics of moderates within their own community, peaceful coexistence with Jews was far more prevalent than were eruptions of violence, and the violence was the work of a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.
It was the Arab leadership that rejected Jewish statehood even in a small part of Palestine-not from concern for the national rights of the Palestinian Arabs, but from the desire to fend off a perceived encroachment on the pan-Arab patrimony.
So the Arab war goal was not to create a Palestinian state?
It was common knowledge at the time that the pan-Arab invasion was more of a geopolitical scramble for Palestine than an attempt to secure the Palestinians' national rights. After 1948-49, neither Egypt nor Transjordan moved to establish an independent Palestinian entity in Gaza and the West Bank; this reflected the wider perception of the Palestine problem as a corollary of the pan-Arab agenda rather than as a distinct or urgent issue in its own right.
Abdel Rahman Azzam, the first head of the Arab League, once mused that it took centuries for the Arabs to reconcile themselves to having lost Spain; he wasn't sure they could ever adjust to losing any part of Palestine.
Unfortunately, the prospect of such an adjustment still seems far from auspicious. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state provided the Palestinians recognized Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's negotiator, reacted to this by warning that Netanyahu "will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him."
And so, more than six decades after the mufti condemned his people to statelessness, his reckless policies live on and are continually reenacted. Only when today's Arab leaders end this legacy of intransigence can the Palestinians hope to put their self-inflicted nakba behind them.
###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
UNIFIL: Peacekeepers or Enablers?
The response of the civilized world to events in southern Lebanon—where Hizballah, in preparation for its next act of aggression, is reportedly digging tunnels at the border with northern Israel—is doubly revealing. It says much about the non-enforcement of international law in an area dominated by Islamist irregular forces. And it is a reliable indicator of what might happen if, in the event of an agreement between the Palestinian leadership and Israel, international peacekeepers were to be stationed in the West Bank and Gaza.
The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has been an ineffective presence in south Lebanon dating back to 1978, when the area was subjugated by Palestinian gunmen. But in 2006 the force's mandate was enlarged under Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War, to include monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Hizballah and supporting a 15,000-strong contingent of Lebanese troops south of the Litani River. The resolution, which has no real enforcement mechanism, also calls for the disarming of "all militias" (read: Hizballah) and an end to arms smuggling (meaning from Syria and Iran to Hizballah). But the militia is booming, and the smuggling is unabated.
Meanwhile, only 6,000 Lebanese troops have been deployed; anticipating trouble with Hizballah, they have been known to refuse to accompany UNIFIL in carrying out maneuvers that could rile the terrorist militia. After a recent incident in which weapons of French peacekeepers were seized, a UNIFIL officer was wounded, and an armored vehicle was vandalized by "villagers," Beirut promised to send 5,000 more soldiers to the south and France has reportedly offered to bolster its presence. But the UN has yet to respond to France's offer, and all it could muster in response to the "villagers'" depredations against its forces was a limp Security Council plea, addressed to no one in particular, for ensuring the "safety and freedom of movement of the peacekeepers."
"We are fully aware of the problems [UN] military operations in civilian areas may cause," said UNIFIL commander Alberto Asarta Cuevas at a meeting with village chiefs to urge greater "dialogue" with his peacekeepers. No doubt. With any number of private homes serving as Hizballah arms depots, or sitting astride bunkers and command centers, unrestricted UNIFIL access would clearly have the potential to cause friction.
The Israeli army recently declassified intelligence it has gathered concerning Hizballah's deployment in southern Lebanon and handed its findings to the UN. According to the IDF's copious documentation, Hizballah has positioned weapons caches less than 200 feet from schools and hospitals, embedded some 20,000 militia members inside 160 villages, and camouflaged 40,000 short-, medium- and long-range missiles—the last being capable of striking Tel Aviv. In the village of Khiam, located twelve miles from the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, there are no fewer than ten weapons-storage facilities. Also operating in the area, unhindered by UNIFIL, are Iranian military advisers.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon responded to the IDF's revelations with a stern rebuke—of Israel. He holds Jerusalem to blame for raising "the specter of a miscalculation by either party leading to a resumption of hostilities, with potentially devastating consequences for Lebanon and the region."
In fact, the IDF may have had a much more specific aim in mind, and Ban Ki-Moon may have guessed it. By publicizing some of what it knows about Hizballah's deployment of forces amid the civilian population in south Lebanon, Israel may intend to signal that, in any future round of fighting, non-combatant casualties will be the legal and moral responsibility of Hizballah—and, ultimately, of UNIFIL itself, the body charged with preventing the very situation it has permitted to develop.
Beyond the case of southern Lebanon, the utter lack of any international will to disarm Hizballah, or to penalize Syria and Iran for unlawfully arming it, delivers a stark lesson to Israelis about the folly of delegating their country's security, particularly in the West Bank, to peacekeepers under the aegis of the United Nations, NATO, or any other international body
-- July 2010
The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has been an ineffective presence in south Lebanon dating back to 1978, when the area was subjugated by Palestinian gunmen. But in 2006 the force's mandate was enlarged under Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War, to include monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Hizballah and supporting a 15,000-strong contingent of Lebanese troops south of the Litani River. The resolution, which has no real enforcement mechanism, also calls for the disarming of "all militias" (read: Hizballah) and an end to arms smuggling (meaning from Syria and Iran to Hizballah). But the militia is booming, and the smuggling is unabated.
Meanwhile, only 6,000 Lebanese troops have been deployed; anticipating trouble with Hizballah, they have been known to refuse to accompany UNIFIL in carrying out maneuvers that could rile the terrorist militia. After a recent incident in which weapons of French peacekeepers were seized, a UNIFIL officer was wounded, and an armored vehicle was vandalized by "villagers," Beirut promised to send 5,000 more soldiers to the south and France has reportedly offered to bolster its presence. But the UN has yet to respond to France's offer, and all it could muster in response to the "villagers'" depredations against its forces was a limp Security Council plea, addressed to no one in particular, for ensuring the "safety and freedom of movement of the peacekeepers."
"We are fully aware of the problems [UN] military operations in civilian areas may cause," said UNIFIL commander Alberto Asarta Cuevas at a meeting with village chiefs to urge greater "dialogue" with his peacekeepers. No doubt. With any number of private homes serving as Hizballah arms depots, or sitting astride bunkers and command centers, unrestricted UNIFIL access would clearly have the potential to cause friction.
The Israeli army recently declassified intelligence it has gathered concerning Hizballah's deployment in southern Lebanon and handed its findings to the UN. According to the IDF's copious documentation, Hizballah has positioned weapons caches less than 200 feet from schools and hospitals, embedded some 20,000 militia members inside 160 villages, and camouflaged 40,000 short-, medium- and long-range missiles—the last being capable of striking Tel Aviv. In the village of Khiam, located twelve miles from the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, there are no fewer than ten weapons-storage facilities. Also operating in the area, unhindered by UNIFIL, are Iranian military advisers.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon responded to the IDF's revelations with a stern rebuke—of Israel. He holds Jerusalem to blame for raising "the specter of a miscalculation by either party leading to a resumption of hostilities, with potentially devastating consequences for Lebanon and the region."
In fact, the IDF may have had a much more specific aim in mind, and Ban Ki-Moon may have guessed it. By publicizing some of what it knows about Hizballah's deployment of forces amid the civilian population in south Lebanon, Israel may intend to signal that, in any future round of fighting, non-combatant casualties will be the legal and moral responsibility of Hizballah—and, ultimately, of UNIFIL itself, the body charged with preventing the very situation it has permitted to develop.
Beyond the case of southern Lebanon, the utter lack of any international will to disarm Hizballah, or to penalize Syria and Iran for unlawfully arming it, delivers a stark lesson to Israelis about the folly of delegating their country's security, particularly in the West Bank, to peacekeepers under the aegis of the United Nations, NATO, or any other international body
-- July 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Christianity in the Middle East
Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Cyprus on Sunday was marred by events that cast their own, baleful light on the purpose of his mission: to unveil a Vatican position paper on the deteriorating condition of Christianity in the Middle East. Hours before his arrival, one of the document's authors, Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar of Anatolia, was murdered by his "mentally unstable" driver. Padovese had only recently met with Turkish authorities to discuss the problems of that country's tiny Christian minority—and had previously extended Christian forgiveness to a Muslim youth who in 2006 murdered a Catholic priest. Three more Turkish Christians were murdered in their Bible publishing house in 2007.
The draft document, "The Catholic Church in the Middle East," exemplifies the tightrope walked by the Vatican with regard to the ever-worsening circumstance of Christianity in the region. Worried about the dwindling indigenous communities of Christian Arabs and about newly arriving Christian workers from Asia, but with an eye to Islamic sensibilities, the paper artfully cites Israel's "occupation of Palestinian territories" as harming Christian Arabs no less than their Muslim compatriots. In its Italian-language version, as the New York Times points out, the document goes further, explicitly warning against the use of the Bible "to justify the political injustice imposed on the Palestinians." In this same connection the Church also thoroughly dissociates itself from "certain Christian fundamentalist theologies"—in other words, Christian Zionism with its unstinting support of Israel.
But the heart of the document—cushioned by its de-rigueur genuflecting to the Palestinian cause—is the assertion that "Oftentimes, relations between Christians and Muslims are difficult, principally because Muslims make no distinction between religion and politics, thereby relegating Christians to the precarious position of being considered non-citizens." "Too often," it hastens to add, Muslims mistakenly identify Christianity with the West—even though "modernity" also poses risks to Christians. Finally, the Church warns against active Christian proselytizing among Muslims.
Early in his papacy, at Regensburg in Germany, Benedict quoted an "erudite Byzantine emperor" talking with "startling brusqueness" about Islamic religious violence. If his intention then was to engage Muslims in vigorous but reasoned polemical disputation, it failed; many of his hoped-for interlocutors reacted with rage, some by killing Christians and burning churches. Four years later, the tone of "The Catholic Church in the Middle East" suggests an abandonment of any claims to religious rights and justice in favor of a plea for Muslim forbearance.
-- June 2010
The draft document, "The Catholic Church in the Middle East," exemplifies the tightrope walked by the Vatican with regard to the ever-worsening circumstance of Christianity in the region. Worried about the dwindling indigenous communities of Christian Arabs and about newly arriving Christian workers from Asia, but with an eye to Islamic sensibilities, the paper artfully cites Israel's "occupation of Palestinian territories" as harming Christian Arabs no less than their Muslim compatriots. In its Italian-language version, as the New York Times points out, the document goes further, explicitly warning against the use of the Bible "to justify the political injustice imposed on the Palestinians." In this same connection the Church also thoroughly dissociates itself from "certain Christian fundamentalist theologies"—in other words, Christian Zionism with its unstinting support of Israel.
But the heart of the document—cushioned by its de-rigueur genuflecting to the Palestinian cause—is the assertion that "Oftentimes, relations between Christians and Muslims are difficult, principally because Muslims make no distinction between religion and politics, thereby relegating Christians to the precarious position of being considered non-citizens." "Too often," it hastens to add, Muslims mistakenly identify Christianity with the West—even though "modernity" also poses risks to Christians. Finally, the Church warns against active Christian proselytizing among Muslims.
Early in his papacy, at Regensburg in Germany, Benedict quoted an "erudite Byzantine emperor" talking with "startling brusqueness" about Islamic religious violence. If his intention then was to engage Muslims in vigorous but reasoned polemical disputation, it failed; many of his hoped-for interlocutors reacted with rage, some by killing Christians and burning churches. Four years later, the tone of "The Catholic Church in the Middle East" suggests an abandonment of any claims to religious rights and justice in favor of a plea for Muslim forbearance.
-- June 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
American Jewish Congress: The End?
Shrunken and wizened, the American Jewish Congress lies on its evident death bed, debilitated by a loss of raison d'être as much as by Bernard Madoff's financial depredations. Under the circumstances, reflections on the spotty record of its approach to Jewish life, or on waste and duplication in the alphabet soup of the Jewish organizational world, may forgivably give way to a longer-term look at a once-proud agency's origins and purposes.
The AJCongress was established in 1918, largely by "downtown" East European Jews out to challenge "uptown" German Reform Jews and their flagship agency, the American Jewish Committee, founded twelve years earlier. The downtowners, no underachievers themselves, were irked by the AJCommittee's elitism and its antipathy toward Zionism. The idea for a more representative umbrella group, which began to germinate as early as 1915, gained momentum in response to the AJCommittee's unenthusiastic reaction to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
After World War I, the new "congress" lobbied the Versailles conference on behalf of Europe's remaining Jewish communities. While some uptowners, led by Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, were urging President Woodrow Wilson not to support the Balfour Declaration, the downtowners pressured from the opposite direction.
The congress was supposed to disband after Versailles, but in 1928 an ad-hoc coalition of Orthodox, Zionist, and fraternal groups reassembled under Stephen Wise and ultimately reconstituted themselves as an independent membership organization. Unlike the AJCommittee, which worked behind the scenes, the new AJCongress engaged in direct action. In the 1930s it organized boycotts of goods from Nazi Germany. In 1942, convinced that reports of Hitler's genocide were true, it held a mass rally at New York's Madison Square Garden—although Wise also acquiesced in FDR's ruling that the rescue of European Jewry would have to wait until the fighting ended.
In the postwar era, the AJCongress co-founded the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and established a niche for itself with its 1960s campaign against the Arab economic boycott of Israel. But its main passions centered on domestic American affairs, where, faithful to the left-liberal agenda, it positioned itself as the Jewish community's progressive lawyer: challenging restrictive clubs, litigating for the rigid separation of church and state, backing special legal dispensations for American blacks, and opposing the Vietnam war.
In the late 60s and 70s the AJCongress came under sharp criticism for its conspicuous failure to speak out against roiling black anti-Semitism and for its opposition to Jewish parochial schools. In response, AJCongress leaders claimed that some Jews preferred day-school education for their children "not because they loved God but because they were afraid of the Negro." In time they would re-think such reckless aspersions, somewhat modifying the agency's position in the process.
By now, in any case, much of the Jewish communal agenda had become dominated by Israel. Like other liberal establishment figures, AJCongress leaders were aghast and befuddled at the 1977 election of Menachem Begin as Israel's prime minister. Arthur Hertzberg, the group's president, sought to sever support for the Jewish state from support of its government, especially when it came to settlements in the Israel-administered territories. Joachim Prinz, a former president and staunch Begin foe, prophesied that the community's obsession with Israel would damage its own spiritual well-being. Henry Siegman, the agency's executive director during the crucial period 1978–1994, went on to become one of Israel's harshest critics.
Always junior to the Anti-Defamation League and AJCommittee, the AJCongress survived on communal money, its own fundraising, and the "memberships" of tourists visiting Israel through its travel service. In its heyday, it boasted 300 chapters and published a fortnightly newsletter and the quarterly Judaism. But by the 1990s the agency was moribund. Both its leaders and its base had moved on, as new organizations on either end of the political spectrum—and, in the liberal center, its old nemesis the AJCommittee—were rendering it redundant or irrelevant.
All the more reason, then, to recall the once-revolutionary contributions made by this organization in behalf of Zionism, a more representative Jewish leadership, and the willingness forthrightly to pursue Jewish interests in the public square.
-- July 2010
The AJCongress was established in 1918, largely by "downtown" East European Jews out to challenge "uptown" German Reform Jews and their flagship agency, the American Jewish Committee, founded twelve years earlier. The downtowners, no underachievers themselves, were irked by the AJCommittee's elitism and its antipathy toward Zionism. The idea for a more representative umbrella group, which began to germinate as early as 1915, gained momentum in response to the AJCommittee's unenthusiastic reaction to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
After World War I, the new "congress" lobbied the Versailles conference on behalf of Europe's remaining Jewish communities. While some uptowners, led by Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, were urging President Woodrow Wilson not to support the Balfour Declaration, the downtowners pressured from the opposite direction.
The congress was supposed to disband after Versailles, but in 1928 an ad-hoc coalition of Orthodox, Zionist, and fraternal groups reassembled under Stephen Wise and ultimately reconstituted themselves as an independent membership organization. Unlike the AJCommittee, which worked behind the scenes, the new AJCongress engaged in direct action. In the 1930s it organized boycotts of goods from Nazi Germany. In 1942, convinced that reports of Hitler's genocide were true, it held a mass rally at New York's Madison Square Garden—although Wise also acquiesced in FDR's ruling that the rescue of European Jewry would have to wait until the fighting ended.
In the postwar era, the AJCongress co-founded the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and established a niche for itself with its 1960s campaign against the Arab economic boycott of Israel. But its main passions centered on domestic American affairs, where, faithful to the left-liberal agenda, it positioned itself as the Jewish community's progressive lawyer: challenging restrictive clubs, litigating for the rigid separation of church and state, backing special legal dispensations for American blacks, and opposing the Vietnam war.
In the late 60s and 70s the AJCongress came under sharp criticism for its conspicuous failure to speak out against roiling black anti-Semitism and for its opposition to Jewish parochial schools. In response, AJCongress leaders claimed that some Jews preferred day-school education for their children "not because they loved God but because they were afraid of the Negro." In time they would re-think such reckless aspersions, somewhat modifying the agency's position in the process.
By now, in any case, much of the Jewish communal agenda had become dominated by Israel. Like other liberal establishment figures, AJCongress leaders were aghast and befuddled at the 1977 election of Menachem Begin as Israel's prime minister. Arthur Hertzberg, the group's president, sought to sever support for the Jewish state from support of its government, especially when it came to settlements in the Israel-administered territories. Joachim Prinz, a former president and staunch Begin foe, prophesied that the community's obsession with Israel would damage its own spiritual well-being. Henry Siegman, the agency's executive director during the crucial period 1978–1994, went on to become one of Israel's harshest critics.
Always junior to the Anti-Defamation League and AJCommittee, the AJCongress survived on communal money, its own fundraising, and the "memberships" of tourists visiting Israel through its travel service. In its heyday, it boasted 300 chapters and published a fortnightly newsletter and the quarterly Judaism. But by the 1990s the agency was moribund. Both its leaders and its base had moved on, as new organizations on either end of the political spectrum—and, in the liberal center, its old nemesis the AJCommittee—were rendering it redundant or irrelevant.
All the more reason, then, to recall the once-revolutionary contributions made by this organization in behalf of Zionism, a more representative Jewish leadership, and the willingness forthrightly to pursue Jewish interests in the public square.
-- July 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
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