May 2006

Unknown to most of the world until today it appears Israeli scientists have perfected a method of time travel. No details have been released nor have any scholarly papers been published but I know it must be true. How do I know this? The Syrians are the ones who revealed this startling breakthrough at the U.N. Security Council meeting today. In the words of Syrian diplomat Ahmed Alhariri:

If we examine the matter, we will find that Israel was behind the eruption of both World War I and World War II.

Israel was created in 1948. World War I started in 1914 and World War II started in 1939. Therefore the only way Israel could have started those wars was by sending it’s people back in time. Brilliant! I mean, that has to be it, doesn’t it? The Syrians would never engage in historical revisionism in the esteemed halls of the United Nations, would they?

In other developments Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Dan Gillerman warmly thanked Syria and Iran for bringing their unparalleled expertise to the Security Council. Ambassador Gillerman expressed his:

appreciation, which I hope is shared by members of the Security Council, for the opportunity afforded to all of us to hear lectures about terrorism by two of the world’s greatest experts on that subject.

Unfortunately their expertise on terrorism is real even if their history is faulty.

In 1967, when most Israelis were celebrating their victory in the Six Day War, my father saw nothing to celebrate. His words: “Occupation. Bad business.” The last 39 years of history make him, in retrospect, seem prophetic.

Last Tuesday (23 May), an opinion piece by James Woolsey, the former Director of Central Intelligence, titled West Bank Terrorist State was published in the Wall Street Journal. It appeared online on Monday and Aharon quoted it extensively here on Blogs of Zion.

I cannot disagree with Mr. Woolsey. I often find myself nodding when reading similar opinions coming from the Israeli right. The one question nobody answers is this: If withdrawal is the wrong answer what is the right answer? Nobody seems to have one.

Clearly the occupation is not sustainable indefinitely. There is no way Israel can rule over millions of hostile Arabs and remain a majority Jewish state. For all it’s failings fewer Jews are dying now in and near Gaza than were before Prime Minister Sharon’s disengagement plan was executed.

I see no reasonable alternative to Prime Minister Olmert’s convergence plan. Yes, it should be scaled back. There is no way a nation can share its capital with a hostile enemy and any division of Jerusalem under present circumstances would be a serious mistake. Similarly, I think the security fence should be rerouted in southern Judea to include the settlements in the Hebron hills and the Jewish quarter of Hebron itself. The Tomb of the Patriarchs should not be turned over to anyone who will not respect the religious, historical, and cultural significance of the place to the Jewish people and Jewish worship there must always be allowed.

In addition the Palestinians must be made to understand that attacks and terrorism will be met with overwhelming force. The IDF incursion into Gaza is a good start but it is not enough. The Palestinians must be made to understand that the price for attacking Israel is so very high that they are no longer willing to pay it.

Having said all that I still see no alternative to unilateral separation, or, as then Prime Minister Barak put it, “Us over here, them over there.”

So says former CIA chief James Woolsey in today’s Opinion Journal, where he warns against further pullouts:

The approach Israel is preparing to take in the West Bank was tried in Gaza and has failed utterly. The Israeli withdrawal of last year has produced the worst set of results imaginable: a heavy presence by al Qaeda, Hezbollah and even some Iranian Revolutionary Guard units; street fighting between Hamas and Fatah, and now Hamas assassination attempts against Fatah’s intelligence chief and Jordan’s ambassador; rocket and mortar attacks against nearby towns inside Israel; and a perceived vindication for Hamas, which took credit for the withdrawal. This latter almost certainly contributed substantially to Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections….Today we cannot envision the 250,000 Jewish settlers who live outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders being permitted to live at all, much less live free and unmolested, in a West-Bank-Gaza Palestinian state. But some 1.2 million Arabs, almost all Muslim, today live in Israel in peace among some five million Jews–about double the percentage of Jews now in the West Bank as a share of the Muslim population there. Israel’s Arab citizens worship freely–one hears muezzins calling the faithful to prayer as one walks around Tel Aviv. They vote in free elections for their own representatives in a real legislature, the Knesset. They give every evidence that they prefer being Arab Israelis to living in the chaos and uncertainty of a West Bank after Israeli withdrawal.

A two-state solution can become a reality when the Palestinians are held to the same standards as Israelis–to the requirement that Jewish settlers in a West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state would be treated with the same decency that Israel treats its Arab citizens. Until then, three failures in 13 years should permit us to evaluate the wisdom of further concessions.

It isn’t every day that you hear an experienced American official making the argument for two states, each with a minority of the other’s citizens. It may have some sad logic behind it: we can both hold each other hostage.

Joseph Braude of TNR reports,

Later this week, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen are expected to introduce a resolution that would make the Arab-Israeli conflict a little easier to resolve–by making it a little more complicated to discuss. The resolution urges the president to make sure that, during international discussions on refugees in the Middle East, “any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees is matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity.” Sponsors of the measure include everyone from Rick Santorum on the right to Dick Durbin on the left, and a number of congressmen and senators in between.

The resolution constitutes a long-overdue acknowledgment of a tragedy which, for decades, Arab states have denied and the international community has ignored. Nine hundred thousand Jews have been forced to flee their homes in Arab countries and Iran since the years leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. (Most left in two waves–immediately before or after Israel’s independence, and during the years following the Six Day War.) Some were deported outright; others faced widespread campaigns of violence and intimidation so unbearable as to render their ancestral homelands unlivable.

Word. The current identification of those Arabs who lived in the Mandate (Palestinians and Jordanians and other groups who self-identify in diverse ways) as the only victims of the post-World War Two shake-up is ridiculous. It’s time we realize that there were many victims of the war of 1948–and both sides deserve to have a State of their own as a way of repairing those wounds over time.

Ha’aretz reports,

President Moshe Katsav on Thursday called for Israel’s leaders and for world Jewry to strengthen Jerusalem’s status and preserve its demographic balance, and to make it into a place that will attract the next generation of Jews.

“It is incumbent on world Jewry to place the vision of Jerusalem at the center of its consciousness,” Katsav said at the state ceremony for Jerusalem Day, which marks the reunification of the city following the 1967 Six-Day War.

The president also called on Diaspora Jews to visit Jerusalem and to live there.

So this is the vision our dear President has for the Diaspora’s relationship to Zion?

Haaretz is reporting that Hebron is going to be attached to Israel proper in the final borders of the country. Or at least so claims Otniel Schneller, a Kadima MK and former settler leader. Schneller joined Kadima because he believes that it’s easier to have an effect from within than it is from outside. I assume this is a manifestation of that reasoning.
Hebron has always been a difficult question for Israel to deal with in terms of its final borders. On the one hand, the percentage of Jewish residents is tiny, and they are unforunately among the most - let’s call it passionate - of all Israeli citizens in their beliefs. Both these factors contribute to the majority’s willingness to abandon the city. On the other hand, it’s also recognized that Hebron is an ancient city with much Jewish history. There were settlements in Hebron pre-1948. So it’s very difficult to say that we should agree to a situation in which Jews are not allowed into Hebron.
Basically, I would love for Jews to be able to stay in Hebron as part of a final agreement. Hopefully Schneller with me able to come up with a way to make it happen, that will be acceptable to Olmert. Still, it’s hard for me to imagine how life in Hebron will ever be peaceful. It at least makes me happy that Schneller is trying to think of creative ways to maintain a Jewish presence there.
I think this story also ties into another item in today’s news. Certain settler leaders said they want to sit with the government and negotiate the future status of the settlements. Like Schneller, they figure this will at least allow them to shape some of the choices. I think this is a VERY important step, and I hope it happens soon.

Labor founder, Labor dissident, and Hashomer HaTzair leader Yizchak Ben-Aharon died yesterday:

Ben Aharon refused to realize that his old-fashioned unvarnished socialism was a thing of the past and left active politics in 1977. His parting shot, delivered on the night of the Likud’s historic elections victory, bringing Mapai’s hegemony to an end was “if this is the will of the people, then the people should be replaced.”

Over the last three decades, as the other members of his generation died out, he gained status as a guru to those on the left of Labor and social-revolutionaries. The leaders of his party, Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, preferred to minimize contact with him, seeing him as relic of a past standing between Labor and an estranged electorate. Instead he became a rallying-point for young radicals, wanting to relive through him an age when the Israeli proletariat were in power. Some of these young followers even took the trouble to pore over his writings collected in a dozen books. The Labor government awarded him the Israel Prize for his life work in 1995.

I wonder how these Zionists pioneers–fighters and ideologues through and through–feel at the end of their lives. Do they feel any satisfaction in what they’ve accomplished since 1948, or do they depart in deep sadness about what’s left to accomplish, and with mourning over what was never even begun? I’m no Labor Zionist–but I think I have enough distance from the partisan days of old (or of a few years ago) to appreciate someone like this, who in his absolute committment to his ideals preferred to retreat into obscurity rather than stay on the stage of Israeli history. He has more in common with Benny Begin than with Ben-Gurion. But I appreciate him more like a museum piece than a leader, a preserved relic.

It seems that those with unshakable ideololgy inevitably have to get out of the game, because they can’t take the compromises inherent in politics. In some ways being immovably ideological is a very anti-Zionist position–Zionism was all about getting back into the give and take of statecraft and leaving the isolationist ideology of galut Judaism behind.

We’ve lost the ideologues, and if anything, I think this process reached a head in the recent Israeli elections. There, ideology itself retreated into the Israeli past. So in the election that was hailed by some as the ascension of post-Zionism, perhaps we fulfilled a key part of the underlying vision held by the founders of political Zionism.

Ha’aretz has a great round-up of the articles sparked by the A.B. Yehoshua AJC speech. Here’s the intro they provide:

At a recent symposium in the U.S., author A. B. Yehoshua said that only Israel, and not Judaism, can ensure the survival of the Jewish people. Haaretz has invited public figures, community leaders, academics and opinion makers in Israel, the U.S. and Europe to take part in the debate sparked by his statement. In an article in the Haaretz Magazine of May 12, Yehoshua elaborates on his initial remarks. Several days later, he issued his “deepest apologies” to those offended by his comments.

My favorite articles are by Yossi Beilin, Shulamit Aloni, and Natan Sharansky–although some of the others are very, very good too. What joins these articles is not their ideological tilt (you’ll notice that there are huge differences not only between left-and-right but also between self-defined secular, Hebraic and Jewish rooted identities), but their seriousness with which they weigh the issue. A seriousness we should all take in recognizing that Jewish identity today cannot rest upon the definitions of the past.

On that note, one of the more ridiculous and inappropriate articles was by Guilt & Pleasure editor-in-chief Mireille Silcoff who, maybe due to her immersion in drug culture, seems to suggest that Yehoshua–a man of depth and wisdom–was high when he delivered the speech. Let me make this clear: I like Mireille’s writing a lot, and have deep respect for what she’s been able to accomplish thus far. But personal regard for a person’s past should not prevent criticism for a job poorly done.

She writes,

In the chance that you had smoked a potent pipe that had rendered you completely insane before going onto the AJC stage, please disregard the following. Remember the part of your tirade - it was after you said that American Jewry was a failure for the fact that six million perished in the Holocaust - where you were maniacally pulling on your skin, saying, “I know what I am! It is my skin! I do not share your problem!”? I think you were trying to tell us lesser mortals of the Diaspora that if we are still so unfortunate as to have to question what it means to be a Jew, it is because we live on the wrong plot of land.
Abie, please say it was the pipe. Are you still smoking it? Can you read these words through the fug?

Come on, Mireille. You should do better than that. But then again, if Edgar Keret (whom I love as a writer) is your quintessential Israeli, maybe you can’t. And that means you might consider taking a few weeks off and meeting some new people in Israel–actually getting to know the community you seem to box-in in your article.

[UPDATE: View A.B. Yehoshua’s orignal speech here.]

Glad to see our neighbor’s children are learning.

Gary Rosenblatt brings up a very important point vis-a-vis the A.B. Yehoshua debate in his editorial in this week’s Jewish Week:

Approaching 75 and physically ailing, Rabbi Hartman has taken on the air of a biblical prophet, railing against the faults of the Jewish people with a blend of sharp anger, humor and abiding love.

“You are the public voice of Judaism in the community,” he told us. “You have a serious role to play, and your job is to expose the corruption of the rabbis and others, and demand that they be moral voices.” He said that we may not be well liked but noted that “Moses wasn’t popular with his people,” in part because “he never lied about them,” acknowledging that they were stubborn, and at times worse.

According to Rabbi Hartman, Israel as a reality offers Jews the challenge to rethink and re-create a living Judaism, from caring for its citizens to dealing with its enemies.

“God doesn’t allow me the luxury of despair,” said the rabbi, who asserted that Jews must learn to celebrate as well as mourn and to engage the world rather than turning inward, ever the victim.

Perhaps the greatest concern facing Israel, he said, is its diminishing Jewish character, the result of a lack of both Jewish education and appreciation of Jewish history and peoplehood among the youth. “To think that nationalism would replace Jewishness was a tragic mistake,” he said of the modern state’s founders.

That point of view was shared by Menachem Magidor, a mathematician and president of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who said he was deeply worried about “the Jewishness of Israel as a society.” A self-proclaimed secularist, he told me he was considering instituting required courses in Jewish history, ritual and texts for incoming students, since most come to Israel’s largest university with little knowledge of their own tradition.

While even the most secular of Israelis once prided themselves on their knowledge of the Bible and the Land of Israel, this generation receives little formal Jewish education and little appreciation of Diaspora Jewry.

That, I think, is a key thing to remember: even those secular Zionists of yester-century sought to be the first of the Hebrews. “Israeli” only was important insofar as it was a Hebrew Identity. So let us rephrase the famous quotation to say, it is time to remember that we are to be the first of the Hebrews, even if we won’t be, nor should we be, the last of the Jews.

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