As American Jews, we are proud and engaged citizens of the United States. We are loyal to America, pay taxes to her, support and often have fought in her armed forces, often giving our lives for her. See, e.g., the website of the Jewish War Veterans of America at www.jwv.org . Many Jews have served America as public office holders, government administration professionals, and military professionals. We celebrate America’s holidays as our own, because they are own: Thanksgiving as a day to thank G-d for bringing us to these shores of a New World, far away from the continents of blood libels, Crusades, and Inquisitions. Columbus Day with thanks that he took that wrong turn and found this place. Veterans Day with gratitude for all who have fought under our flag for freedom. Presidents’ Day to celebrate a tradition of American political leadership that consistently has affirmed our place in America. Memorial Day to remember our fallen soldiers who fought so that America could be safe for liberty. Independence Day for marking the historic break from tyranny and the pursuit of liberty. Thus, our commitment to the country of America is primary and all-engrossing.
At the same time, we also are part of an eternal people, the Jewish People, with our eyes and hearts always turned to Tzion – to Zion – to the heart of Jerusalem where G-d set His eternal dwelling place on the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. For two thousand years of bitter Jewish Exile, through dispersion and persecution, we never abandoned our bond with and yearning for Zion. In our daily prayers, we faced and still face towards the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. Three times daily, we prayed and still pray for G-d’s return to Jerusalem. After meals that we eat with bread, we recited and still recite our prayer that He rebuild Jerusalem speedily in our days. For two thousand years, we sat and still sit on floors, weeping bitter tears by candlelight as we remembered Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av Night and Day, mourning and fasting for a return to the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem and for restoration of the Jewish People to the land that G-d promised Abraham, Isaac, and Israel (Jacob). The Holy Land, then, is part of our core heritage as Jewish People, and we cannot be separated from the Land of Israel and our connection to our forebears who lived and died there. Indeed, many proud American Jews, like Jews all over the world, arranged through the centuries, and still arrange, to be laid to rest in Israel after a full and rich life.
When the State of Israel was reestablished in 1948, that event marked an historically awesome and momentous event in Jewish faith. After nearly two thousand years of never ever giving up the claim and the hope, we saw its fulfillment begun: a Jewish Commonwealth reborn in the land we spiritually never had left. By 1967, when three Arab armies based in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan forced Israel to fight for her survival in a fearsome and ultimately miraculous defensive war that resulted with Israel’s liberation of East Jerusalem and the reunification of the City of Jerusalem as the temporal capital of the State of Israel and as the Eternal Spiritual Capital of the Jewish People, our lives as Jews everywhere were changed forever.
Israel’s independence, then, is part of our essence as Jews. Militarily, our loyalties are to America. Politically, to America. Economically, to America. Spiritually, even as Catholics throughout the world turn to the Vatican and as Moslems make their haj to Mecca, our eyes and hearts turn to Jerusalem and to Israel. We celebrate her independence as our own. We send money to support her institutions. We lobby our elected officials to take steps to offset those who would endanger her. We visit her, again and again. We send our children to learn there, whether at a yeshiva seminary for a year after high school, or for a Birthright trip, or an Aish program in spiritual discovery, or any of scores of other programs. We learn the ancient Hebrew language with modern inflections, pray almost exclusively in Hebrew, and we visit the holy sites in Bethlehem (where Rachel is buried), Shechem (Nablus, where Joseph lies), and of course Hebron (the resting place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah). Some of us plan our retirements to include significant time in Israel. So many of us, by now, have family living in Israel – cousins, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandchildren, and others – who not only speak pure Hebrew but with Israeli accents.
Israel Independence Day, then, is in good measure our celebration, too. We are invested in Israel – spiritually, emotionally, historically through our ancestors, materially. We take pride in Israel’s strides and advances, concern ourselves with her evolution, and plan our lives with the knowledge and understanding that we live in the most miraculous of times, an era that our grandparents and theirs barely could have imagined – an age and a time when many millions of Jews have returned to live in a Jewish country in Israel, with borders open to Jews everywhere so that we never again need be a people with nowhere to flee from persecution. Ours is the miracle era with the city of Jerusalem reunited and now with many hundreds of thousands more pouring into and rebuilding the cities of Judea and Samaria in the heart of our patrimony where Judaism all began. Regardless of whether a particular American Jew personally ever will set foot in Israel, much less live there, the day of Israel’s independence – Yom HaAtzma’ut – is a day for each and every American Jew to celebrate heartily and gratefully, within our hearts, among our families, as part of our communities, and as an eternal Jewish people whose spark never will cease and to whose eternal existence the modern State of Israel bears existential witness.
Showing posts with label Israel Foreign Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel Foreign Policy. Show all posts
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Monday, December 20, 2010
Open Letter to a Jewish Student re the Olive Tree Initiative
Dear Friend,
You have written several people to explain the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) to them. I have read your words, and I share some thoughts.
1. You are active in something you cannot control. You will not always be at UCI. Not everyone thinks like you. With each ensuing year, the OTI becomes something that less-devoted Jews will choose to do also. Some will do it because they hear it is “awesome.” Cool foods, cool music, and you get to meet people who even know terrorists. (But don’t worry – Gomez will be there, so it’s safe.) Some will hear that it is fabulous on a resumé if you want to apply to a major law school or MBA program. Little by little, the founding generation and its successor passes, and what is left is an institutional protoplasm that takes on a life of its own, which you no longer can control. Not every trip to Jenin will be met with responses by Jews who understand why Israel had to smash through those alleys and kill terrorists, in the aftermath of an interminable series of suicide bombings emanating specifically from Jenin-trained suicide terrorists. They will see the propaganda movie that is shown to UCI Olive Tree Initiative students in Jenin, with the Arab body parts, and they will wonder why Israel had to be so cruel. They will hear about Jenin as a “Palestinian Refugee Camp” and will not even have the presence of mind to ask how the people in Jenin can call themselves “refugees” if they now supposedly are repatriated and live in the land from which they supposedly fled, “Palestine.” They will hear the George Rishmawis telling them at OTI programs about how Israelis literally shoot live ammunition randomly at Arabs. They will see the Israeli military checkpoints at the Security Fence, and it will lack context. It would be like someone who died in the 1990s coming back to life and seeing the TSA security lines at the airport. If people do not like the long oines and invasive body searches with context, imagine the impact of seeing it without context. Maybe there will be one or two Jews on the trip who know a bit, although definitely not what you know. But you will not be there. Who will be there to ask the Arab Palestine propagandist – who bemoans the “Israeli occupation” and says “all we ever wanted was our land” – the obvious question: “You had the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip before June 1967, so what were you trying to accomplish when you founded the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964? What were you trying to liberate when the anti-Israel Arab terrorist movement formally began in 1964?” Instead, the least-ignorant-Jew on the trip – a far cry from the most knowledgeable Jew – will become the Zionist voice: “Well, East Jerusalem. I guess Israel should let that be the capital of Arab Palestine, but Israel also should be allowed to have some of Jerusalem. And Israel should not have cut so deeply into the Arab West Bank – “Palestine” – with that fence just to protect a few settlers who probably don’t belong there. OK, guys, that’s my compromise, what’s yours?” Yes, there will be OTI visits with the Israel side, too, for “balance.” But, unlike the monolithic Palestine side that does not accept a permanent Jewish-sovereign polity anywhere in the Middle East, the Israel side will be diverse. There will even be the retired Israeli general who looks back on the 1967 liberation of Jerusalem – “haKotel b’yadeinu!” – and will apologize to the UCI students on the OTI adventure for his having been caught in the same "mindless euphoria” back then that caused Israelis to lose sight of the big picture. But he will assure his UCI OTI audience that he has atoned over the years and has been active in several “peace” campaigns in recent years, even writing the Israeli Prime Minister that Israel has it all wrong – and, after all, he knows because he served under the Prime Minister’s brother.
2. You continually are under the misapprehension that Daniel Wehrenfennig is something more than a grad student who just got a Ph.D. a year ago. Despite what has been conveyed to you, which you have conveyed to me, he is not a world-famous nor even a significant peace maker. He has some publications. I have publications, too. I published a law review study that was cited by at least nine different prominent federal judges in handing down significant multi-million-dollar federal decisions. That does not make me a Supreme Court justice. This fellow is not Richard Holbrooke. He is not Henry Kissinger. He is a fellow with some publications on ideas for citizen involvement in peacemaking, from Northern Ireland to “Occupied Palestine.” It is like a lovely slim blonde woman or a great-looking hunk of a guy coming to Hollywood and expecting to be hired immediately for a starring role in the first movie for which she or he auditions. In time, she or he is waiting tables. At a seedy bar. You see, the problem is that I come at it from the perspective of someone who not only loves all of Israel, including the communities of Yehuda and Shomron, including the Neve Aliza community I helped establish in 1985 in Karnei Shomron, but also from the perspective of a rabbi. I am a rabbi who cares about Jews. This is not a good program for Jews, and it does not bring Jewish students an inch closer to Judaism, to Torah, to Shabbat, to mitzvot. An OTI Friday night at Aish HaTorah with a group that is 80 percent non-Jewish doesn’t cut it, particularly when the program spends Shabbat Day in “Arab Palestine.” A program that appallingly but predictably spends most of Rosh Hashanah in “Palestine” and Jordan doesn’t cut it – even if they tell the Jews that “Hey, if you want to leave the group for two days for your holiday, that’s OK.” I expect that from a law firm where I work. I expect that at a public school in Iowa. That does not cut it as a program for Jewish students to be spending two weeks in Israel.
3. Note that this issue never really energized me until the salaried Hillel director and the Hillel student president each opted to launch mass-distributed character-assassination letters against a member of my shul. Those letters were sent to me and thousands of other Jews on Shabbat. What Jewish organization publicly desecrates Shabbat so blithely? And they really calumniated her. Can you imagine? Based on the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of signatures to the letter defaming this woman, every single UCI Jewish student leader, every UCI Jewish student group president and vice-president, every last Jewish group on campus, and dozens other present and former UCI Jewish students all supposedly were so infuriated by her that they supposedly all signed onto a hate-filled letter within a day? In a lifetime, you will meet many Jewish leaders and even rabbis whom you will think have sold out a bit, slowed down a bit, lost whatever idealism or gleam in their eyes they may ever have had. You will hear them patronize you and talk to you about “life experience.” Well, let me tell you: I have been there, done that. I also am an activist. I still respect your fire without seeing you as “some stupid dopey kid who needs to grow up.” If I thought you were unworthy, I never would be devoting this kind of time and effort to write you as extensively as I am writing you here. I cherish and value student activists for Israel. But just as I do not superimpose on you a prejudice that you are too young for a serious discussion, don’t you superimpose on me a prejudice that I am too old. And, as a Jewish activist myself, I will tell you that in forty years of activism, going back to my first campaign – to convince NBC to renew “Star Trek” for another season – I never have gotten that many signatures onto a petition or a letter, that 100% a response, in less than a day. So there was something rotten immediately. I am telling you that the two letters that were mass-distributed that Shabbat bordered on legally actionable slander. More, the three separate letters were coordinated – a campaign coordinated among the Federation professional, the Hillel professional, and the Hillel student leader. And those letters not only were nasty, not only may have been legally actionable, but also included – in at least one case – significant forgery of names who did not sign onto it and even opposed it. Those letters attempted to a destroy a good woman over a possible scrivener’s error, but instead they opened huge new cans of worms, revealing far more than any of us had expected. That is what it took to wake up many people in this community that something here is not right. If they can defame and destroy this woman today, and we remain silent, what will stop them from defaming someone else next time? So those of us who never stopped being activists – just got detoured a few extra exits by the need to rear children, put them through high school and college, and earn income to pay bills for the kinds of personal needs (electric, gas, water) that are not funded by the Federation’s Rose Project – woke up. We found each other. We started doing some research. And we could not believe what we learned.
4. We found, as much to our shock as to our chagrin, that there is a cover-up in play. Suddenly UCI Hillel conveys that it never has supported or advocated or encouraged UCI Jewish student participation in the Olive Tree Initiative. First of all, that is a lie. It is not merely a fabrication, a falsification, or a mendacity. This is not Foggy Bottom nor “Cat on a Hit Tin Roof.” Here, we talk plainly. I am a congregational rabbi in Irvine, a member of the national executive committee of one national rabbinic body, a leader in another national rabbinic body, a former Chief Articles Editor of a prominent law review and former clerk to a nationally prominent federal appeals court judge, and I am saying it plainly: It is an outright lie by UCI Hillel. By contrast, the truth is that UCI Hillel actively advocated for and encouraged UCI Jewish student participation in the Olive Tree Initiative. I know what Tzvi Raviv told me, and I know what Bruce Manning told me. And I am a bit surprised that you seem unaware that Hillel encouraged the formation of OTI. So, as always happens in politics when the truth gets uncomfortable and difficult to answer, people give up on answering the truth and start creating “straw men” instead, knocking them down gleefully. So we now are being told by certain Hillel spokespeople that the activists are accusing Hillel of paying money towards OTI. Not true. That Hillel is accused of supporting OTI with money. Not true. Rather, Hillel stands accused of having been among those encouraging the formation and establishment of OTI, and it stands accused of having used its resources to encourage UCI Jewish students to go on OTI programs. And it is time for UCI Hillel to stop covering up and instead to admit the truth of its role in the formative year of Olive Tree Initiative. That – along with an apology to the Jewish community and to the Jewish students it misguided. Similarly, we now are being told that the activists accuse Federation of funding OTI. Not True. Of financially supporting OTI. Not true. Rather, Federation stands accused of taking Jewish charitable funds during this Great Recession, a time when Jewish Family Services of Orange County was forced to abandon its independence and to merge into Federation because there no longer was enough Jewish charitable money available to it, and giving those Jewish funds towards the airfare and tuition of Jewish students attending the Olive Tree Initiative program. Again, that Federation money made it possible for those UCI Jewish students to travel with OTI to “Palestine” to hear those terrible anti-Israel speeches in “Palestine,” to see that hateful movie in Jenin, to hear George Rishmawi threaten that, if the demands of the “Palestinian peacemakers” are not met this year, then the “peace activists” of “Palestine” may well have no alternative but to turn to violence next year.
5. More “straw men” ensued. We were told that, in our ignorance, we are calling OTI anti-Semitic. Not true. That we are calling Daniel Wehrenfennig anti-Semitic. Not true. That we oppose Wehrenfennig because he is a German. Not true. That we regard OTI as anti-Israel. Not true. That we regard Wehrenfennig as anti-Israel. Not true. Rather, what is true is that we regard the OTI as a terribly unfortunate and misguided initiative, clutched at by Dean Michael Drake and Vice President Gomez as a publicity bonanza to show their donors that, you see, we are doing something about the Muslim Student Union and its annual “Hate Israel Week” and its incessant disruptions of Jewish speakers ranging from Prof. Daniel Pipes to Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. To paraphrase in common parlance, once we cut through the phraseology and rhetoric, we are hearing this: “Look, Jews, we have the Olive Tree Initiative. So stop bothering us. And stop telling Merage that, all because he is a Jew, he should stop giving us tens of millions of dollars. OK?” Likewise, originally, the Federation and Hillel proudly also bragged about their OTI involvement. It was once upon a time. Now, in the face of the revelations about what actually happens at OTI programs, they have reverted. Now they deny, and once we cut through the phraseology and rhetoric, we are hearing this: “We never said that. We don’t support it. We don’t fund it.” It is like Bill Clinton denying that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky. “I did not have sex with that woman.” Then they tell him she preserved a dress with his DNA on it. “Oh. Well, in that case . . . .” So now we are told that it is not Federation money; rather, it is Rose Project money. But the Federation is the Rose Project, and the Rose Project is the Federation. Let us hypothesize that Rose came and said to Federation “We want to donate money to start an Institute for Historical Review, to do research disproving that the Holocaust ever happened. We will fund research to prove the Holocaust is a hoax.” Would that project be accepted as an utterly independent “Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County for Denying the Holocaust”? Let us hypothesize, with greater warmth, that Rose came and said “We have met and tested Jewish kids in Orange County who go to TVT, and we are beyond-shocked at how little they know after twelve years at TVT, so we want to start a million-dollar-fund to start a Modern Orthodox Hebrew Academy in Irvine for grades 1-12.” Do you think – for a nano-second – that there would be a “Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County for Establishing an Orthodox Hebrew Academy in Irvine?” D’ya think so? The reality is that the Rose Project’s funding of those airfares and tuitions for the Olive Tree Initiative students is part-and-parcel of a project that the Jewish Federation of Orange County proudly has accepted under its wings, and Federation boastfully has bragged about that financial subventing of OTI whenever it has suited Federation’s public relations purposes.
6. More straw men: We are being told that activists have written that [student name withheld] is anti-Israel because he/ she supported OTI. Not true. Rather, we regret that the student or students, who care about Israel, have failed to see the longer-term consequences of their promoting OTI now. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. In the end, then, Jews are the losers – primarily Jewish students. Think about it: If this Olive Tree Initiative, which you tell us is so good for the Jews, really were so sound and worthwhile, why would UCI Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Orange County now, before your very eyes, be denying their demonstrable direct involvement in OTI? Alas, this misguided initiative now has spread to two other far-flung UC campuses where there are even fewer Jewish students like you who would know what to say in Jenin. This is not what may have been intended by those within the Jewish community who helped create it, but this is what has been created, a program that neither will bring peace to the region nor harm it, but will be used manipulatively by third-parties who were not on the original radar, including but not limited to: (i) the UCI Administration, manipulating this OTI program to excuse themselves for their abysmal record on protecting Jewish students walking along Ring Road during the worst moments of “Hate Israel Week” and failing to assure that the Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the State of Israel could speak with dignity to a UCI audience; and (ii) future Jewish students looking for something awesome for their resumes, while also enjoying an awesome Mideast experience in the hot spots like Jenin, in the company of people who count terrorists among their acquaintances, and maybe parlaying it to a great law or business graduate school – devoting their Mideast experience to “doing OTI” rather than, say, doing Birthright-Israel. And is it not ironic? The Olive Tree Initiative already was in full bloom, supposedly having peeled away layers of animosity and distrust that underlay prior Muslim Student Union (MSU) actions endangering UCI as a campus safe for Jews to hear Jewish speakers, when – nevertheless and despite OTI – the MSU still broke up Ambassador Oren’s appearance at UCI.
7. A final “straw,” perhaps better characterized as “the last straw.” One of the students would tell us that “We students are the new leaders of the American Jewish community. We are the future. We know best what is best for UCI. Your role in the community is to give us the funds. And otherwise – just butt out.” And so, a word to a friend. Irvine is our community, too. We, too, are its leaders. In the Irvine and greater Orange County Jewish community, there are nationally prominent experts on Israel and the Middle East, published authors, trained and experienced teachers, leaders capable of offering Israel advocacy training and teaching, Jewish leaders who actually fly across the country to teach and train others. There are Ph.D.s and scholars, scholarly researchers and exciting speakers. We are not called upon. Our offered services repeatedly are rejected. So be it. A $5,000 honorarium from an East Coast Jewish audience pays more than would the pro bono (free of charge) presentation that the same expert among us offers locally as a loving service to the community. But let us be clear: This issue transcends the students on campus. Perhaps you may have seen Breaking Away, an Academy Award®-winning flick. Its subplot is instructive. We the Jewish community live here in Irvine today, and we will be living here tomorrow, long after several of today’s UCI college and grad students have moved on. We have a long-term stake in the community, and we therefore have a stake in the neighborhood campus that brings occasional Jew-haters (including Jewish Jew-haters) out of their respective rat holes and into our midst. We are asked – even guilted – to contribute money to UCI Hillel, apprised that it is our obligation to do so because we have a stake. I personally have made such a donation to UCI Hillel. Some of us even have devoted hundreds of hours of our own personal time to students at UCI, even at the expense of personal family time, vacation time, and at the expense of money. We have seen students come into Irvine, then move on, much as I moved on in my life 35 years ago from the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University, and subsequently from the Westwood campus of UCLA Law School. Thus, it is important to recognize that, in the course of a lifetime, many of our respective lives are intersecting concentric circles, elliptical encounters. The world does not revolve around me, and it does not revolve around this or that student. One day it is about mobilizing the Irvine and Orange County Jewish community to help the former salaried Hillel Director actualize his hopes and agenda, and then he is gone, forgotten, but we still are here. Jewish organizational professionals come and go. We have seen the revolving doors at the Irvine Bureau of Jewish Education, the American Jewish Committee, the Tarbut v’ Torah school, and yes at UCI Hillel. Through each of the transitions, we donate money and time, patience and passion and participation. One day it is the new Hillel Program Director arriving all excited with big plans, and another day it is someone else with a different program agenda. But we the Orange County Jewish community remain here, committed and devoted to this place and to our friends and families and dreams, realizing that our tzedakah dollars are being allocated in ways that we find objectionable. While phantom students’ names are signed to documents without the signatories’ knowledge, assent, authorization – and in some cases over their explicit objections – it is we, the community, that receive the defamatory letters, breaking the peaceful moment as the Shabbat ends. We do not heatedly return the letters with overheated, over-exercised verbiage, telling the senders: “The students on campus are the leaders of tomorrow, so solicit the Big Gifts and Major Donations from them. It is they, the students at UCI, who alone are impacted at UCI, so let them tend to themselves, and how dare you approach with a fundraiser’s solicitations those of us who are not on campus?”
But there is a time for everything under the heavens: A time to be still, and a time to speak. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. Among us as Jews there always is a time to love and a time for peace. But this also is a time to speak and time to refrain from embracing. There will be absolutely no support for the Federation of Orange County from this quarter, nor from those who share my concerns, until the Federation and Hillel publicly withdraw from their associations with the Olive Tree Initiative. Not one penny. My desk is loaded with ample Jewish charitable alternatives to support, and tzedakah never stops in my home. But tzedakah must be just. And there is never a shortage of worthy Jewish causes to support that never would spend a penny of Jewish tzedakah money to fly a local Jewish student to “Palestine” for a film viewing in Jenin depicting the Israeli people as barbaric and cruel murderers. No, not a charity for me.
-- Rabbi Dov Fischer
You have written several people to explain the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) to them. I have read your words, and I share some thoughts.
1. You are active in something you cannot control. You will not always be at UCI. Not everyone thinks like you. With each ensuing year, the OTI becomes something that less-devoted Jews will choose to do also. Some will do it because they hear it is “awesome.” Cool foods, cool music, and you get to meet people who even know terrorists. (But don’t worry – Gomez will be there, so it’s safe.) Some will hear that it is fabulous on a resumé if you want to apply to a major law school or MBA program. Little by little, the founding generation and its successor passes, and what is left is an institutional protoplasm that takes on a life of its own, which you no longer can control. Not every trip to Jenin will be met with responses by Jews who understand why Israel had to smash through those alleys and kill terrorists, in the aftermath of an interminable series of suicide bombings emanating specifically from Jenin-trained suicide terrorists. They will see the propaganda movie that is shown to UCI Olive Tree Initiative students in Jenin, with the Arab body parts, and they will wonder why Israel had to be so cruel. They will hear about Jenin as a “Palestinian Refugee Camp” and will not even have the presence of mind to ask how the people in Jenin can call themselves “refugees” if they now supposedly are repatriated and live in the land from which they supposedly fled, “Palestine.” They will hear the George Rishmawis telling them at OTI programs about how Israelis literally shoot live ammunition randomly at Arabs. They will see the Israeli military checkpoints at the Security Fence, and it will lack context. It would be like someone who died in the 1990s coming back to life and seeing the TSA security lines at the airport. If people do not like the long oines and invasive body searches with context, imagine the impact of seeing it without context. Maybe there will be one or two Jews on the trip who know a bit, although definitely not what you know. But you will not be there. Who will be there to ask the Arab Palestine propagandist – who bemoans the “Israeli occupation” and says “all we ever wanted was our land” – the obvious question: “You had the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip before June 1967, so what were you trying to accomplish when you founded the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964? What were you trying to liberate when the anti-Israel Arab terrorist movement formally began in 1964?” Instead, the least-ignorant-Jew on the trip – a far cry from the most knowledgeable Jew – will become the Zionist voice: “Well, East Jerusalem. I guess Israel should let that be the capital of Arab Palestine, but Israel also should be allowed to have some of Jerusalem. And Israel should not have cut so deeply into the Arab West Bank – “Palestine” – with that fence just to protect a few settlers who probably don’t belong there. OK, guys, that’s my compromise, what’s yours?” Yes, there will be OTI visits with the Israel side, too, for “balance.” But, unlike the monolithic Palestine side that does not accept a permanent Jewish-sovereign polity anywhere in the Middle East, the Israel side will be diverse. There will even be the retired Israeli general who looks back on the 1967 liberation of Jerusalem – “haKotel b’yadeinu!” – and will apologize to the UCI students on the OTI adventure for his having been caught in the same "mindless euphoria” back then that caused Israelis to lose sight of the big picture. But he will assure his UCI OTI audience that he has atoned over the years and has been active in several “peace” campaigns in recent years, even writing the Israeli Prime Minister that Israel has it all wrong – and, after all, he knows because he served under the Prime Minister’s brother.
2. You continually are under the misapprehension that Daniel Wehrenfennig is something more than a grad student who just got a Ph.D. a year ago. Despite what has been conveyed to you, which you have conveyed to me, he is not a world-famous nor even a significant peace maker. He has some publications. I have publications, too. I published a law review study that was cited by at least nine different prominent federal judges in handing down significant multi-million-dollar federal decisions. That does not make me a Supreme Court justice. This fellow is not Richard Holbrooke. He is not Henry Kissinger. He is a fellow with some publications on ideas for citizen involvement in peacemaking, from Northern Ireland to “Occupied Palestine.” It is like a lovely slim blonde woman or a great-looking hunk of a guy coming to Hollywood and expecting to be hired immediately for a starring role in the first movie for which she or he auditions. In time, she or he is waiting tables. At a seedy bar. You see, the problem is that I come at it from the perspective of someone who not only loves all of Israel, including the communities of Yehuda and Shomron, including the Neve Aliza community I helped establish in 1985 in Karnei Shomron, but also from the perspective of a rabbi. I am a rabbi who cares about Jews. This is not a good program for Jews, and it does not bring Jewish students an inch closer to Judaism, to Torah, to Shabbat, to mitzvot. An OTI Friday night at Aish HaTorah with a group that is 80 percent non-Jewish doesn’t cut it, particularly when the program spends Shabbat Day in “Arab Palestine.” A program that appallingly but predictably spends most of Rosh Hashanah in “Palestine” and Jordan doesn’t cut it – even if they tell the Jews that “Hey, if you want to leave the group for two days for your holiday, that’s OK.” I expect that from a law firm where I work. I expect that at a public school in Iowa. That does not cut it as a program for Jewish students to be spending two weeks in Israel.
3. Note that this issue never really energized me until the salaried Hillel director and the Hillel student president each opted to launch mass-distributed character-assassination letters against a member of my shul. Those letters were sent to me and thousands of other Jews on Shabbat. What Jewish organization publicly desecrates Shabbat so blithely? And they really calumniated her. Can you imagine? Based on the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of signatures to the letter defaming this woman, every single UCI Jewish student leader, every UCI Jewish student group president and vice-president, every last Jewish group on campus, and dozens other present and former UCI Jewish students all supposedly were so infuriated by her that they supposedly all signed onto a hate-filled letter within a day? In a lifetime, you will meet many Jewish leaders and even rabbis whom you will think have sold out a bit, slowed down a bit, lost whatever idealism or gleam in their eyes they may ever have had. You will hear them patronize you and talk to you about “life experience.” Well, let me tell you: I have been there, done that. I also am an activist. I still respect your fire without seeing you as “some stupid dopey kid who needs to grow up.” If I thought you were unworthy, I never would be devoting this kind of time and effort to write you as extensively as I am writing you here. I cherish and value student activists for Israel. But just as I do not superimpose on you a prejudice that you are too young for a serious discussion, don’t you superimpose on me a prejudice that I am too old. And, as a Jewish activist myself, I will tell you that in forty years of activism, going back to my first campaign – to convince NBC to renew “Star Trek” for another season – I never have gotten that many signatures onto a petition or a letter, that 100% a response, in less than a day. So there was something rotten immediately. I am telling you that the two letters that were mass-distributed that Shabbat bordered on legally actionable slander. More, the three separate letters were coordinated – a campaign coordinated among the Federation professional, the Hillel professional, and the Hillel student leader. And those letters not only were nasty, not only may have been legally actionable, but also included – in at least one case – significant forgery of names who did not sign onto it and even opposed it. Those letters attempted to a destroy a good woman over a possible scrivener’s error, but instead they opened huge new cans of worms, revealing far more than any of us had expected. That is what it took to wake up many people in this community that something here is not right. If they can defame and destroy this woman today, and we remain silent, what will stop them from defaming someone else next time? So those of us who never stopped being activists – just got detoured a few extra exits by the need to rear children, put them through high school and college, and earn income to pay bills for the kinds of personal needs (electric, gas, water) that are not funded by the Federation’s Rose Project – woke up. We found each other. We started doing some research. And we could not believe what we learned.
4. We found, as much to our shock as to our chagrin, that there is a cover-up in play. Suddenly UCI Hillel conveys that it never has supported or advocated or encouraged UCI Jewish student participation in the Olive Tree Initiative. First of all, that is a lie. It is not merely a fabrication, a falsification, or a mendacity. This is not Foggy Bottom nor “Cat on a Hit Tin Roof.” Here, we talk plainly. I am a congregational rabbi in Irvine, a member of the national executive committee of one national rabbinic body, a leader in another national rabbinic body, a former Chief Articles Editor of a prominent law review and former clerk to a nationally prominent federal appeals court judge, and I am saying it plainly: It is an outright lie by UCI Hillel. By contrast, the truth is that UCI Hillel actively advocated for and encouraged UCI Jewish student participation in the Olive Tree Initiative. I know what Tzvi Raviv told me, and I know what Bruce Manning told me. And I am a bit surprised that you seem unaware that Hillel encouraged the formation of OTI. So, as always happens in politics when the truth gets uncomfortable and difficult to answer, people give up on answering the truth and start creating “straw men” instead, knocking them down gleefully. So we now are being told by certain Hillel spokespeople that the activists are accusing Hillel of paying money towards OTI. Not true. That Hillel is accused of supporting OTI with money. Not true. Rather, Hillel stands accused of having been among those encouraging the formation and establishment of OTI, and it stands accused of having used its resources to encourage UCI Jewish students to go on OTI programs. And it is time for UCI Hillel to stop covering up and instead to admit the truth of its role in the formative year of Olive Tree Initiative. That – along with an apology to the Jewish community and to the Jewish students it misguided. Similarly, we now are being told that the activists accuse Federation of funding OTI. Not True. Of financially supporting OTI. Not true. Rather, Federation stands accused of taking Jewish charitable funds during this Great Recession, a time when Jewish Family Services of Orange County was forced to abandon its independence and to merge into Federation because there no longer was enough Jewish charitable money available to it, and giving those Jewish funds towards the airfare and tuition of Jewish students attending the Olive Tree Initiative program. Again, that Federation money made it possible for those UCI Jewish students to travel with OTI to “Palestine” to hear those terrible anti-Israel speeches in “Palestine,” to see that hateful movie in Jenin, to hear George Rishmawi threaten that, if the demands of the “Palestinian peacemakers” are not met this year, then the “peace activists” of “Palestine” may well have no alternative but to turn to violence next year.
5. More “straw men” ensued. We were told that, in our ignorance, we are calling OTI anti-Semitic. Not true. That we are calling Daniel Wehrenfennig anti-Semitic. Not true. That we oppose Wehrenfennig because he is a German. Not true. That we regard OTI as anti-Israel. Not true. That we regard Wehrenfennig as anti-Israel. Not true. Rather, what is true is that we regard the OTI as a terribly unfortunate and misguided initiative, clutched at by Dean Michael Drake and Vice President Gomez as a publicity bonanza to show their donors that, you see, we are doing something about the Muslim Student Union and its annual “Hate Israel Week” and its incessant disruptions of Jewish speakers ranging from Prof. Daniel Pipes to Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. To paraphrase in common parlance, once we cut through the phraseology and rhetoric, we are hearing this: “Look, Jews, we have the Olive Tree Initiative. So stop bothering us. And stop telling Merage that, all because he is a Jew, he should stop giving us tens of millions of dollars. OK?” Likewise, originally, the Federation and Hillel proudly also bragged about their OTI involvement. It was once upon a time. Now, in the face of the revelations about what actually happens at OTI programs, they have reverted. Now they deny, and once we cut through the phraseology and rhetoric, we are hearing this: “We never said that. We don’t support it. We don’t fund it.” It is like Bill Clinton denying that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky. “I did not have sex with that woman.” Then they tell him she preserved a dress with his DNA on it. “Oh. Well, in that case . . . .” So now we are told that it is not Federation money; rather, it is Rose Project money. But the Federation is the Rose Project, and the Rose Project is the Federation. Let us hypothesize that Rose came and said to Federation “We want to donate money to start an Institute for Historical Review, to do research disproving that the Holocaust ever happened. We will fund research to prove the Holocaust is a hoax.” Would that project be accepted as an utterly independent “Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County for Denying the Holocaust”? Let us hypothesize, with greater warmth, that Rose came and said “We have met and tested Jewish kids in Orange County who go to TVT, and we are beyond-shocked at how little they know after twelve years at TVT, so we want to start a million-dollar-fund to start a Modern Orthodox Hebrew Academy in Irvine for grades 1-12.” Do you think – for a nano-second – that there would be a “Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County for Establishing an Orthodox Hebrew Academy in Irvine?” D’ya think so? The reality is that the Rose Project’s funding of those airfares and tuitions for the Olive Tree Initiative students is part-and-parcel of a project that the Jewish Federation of Orange County proudly has accepted under its wings, and Federation boastfully has bragged about that financial subventing of OTI whenever it has suited Federation’s public relations purposes.
6. More straw men: We are being told that activists have written that [student name withheld] is anti-Israel because he/ she supported OTI. Not true. Rather, we regret that the student or students, who care about Israel, have failed to see the longer-term consequences of their promoting OTI now. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. In the end, then, Jews are the losers – primarily Jewish students. Think about it: If this Olive Tree Initiative, which you tell us is so good for the Jews, really were so sound and worthwhile, why would UCI Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Orange County now, before your very eyes, be denying their demonstrable direct involvement in OTI? Alas, this misguided initiative now has spread to two other far-flung UC campuses where there are even fewer Jewish students like you who would know what to say in Jenin. This is not what may have been intended by those within the Jewish community who helped create it, but this is what has been created, a program that neither will bring peace to the region nor harm it, but will be used manipulatively by third-parties who were not on the original radar, including but not limited to: (i) the UCI Administration, manipulating this OTI program to excuse themselves for their abysmal record on protecting Jewish students walking along Ring Road during the worst moments of “Hate Israel Week” and failing to assure that the Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the State of Israel could speak with dignity to a UCI audience; and (ii) future Jewish students looking for something awesome for their resumes, while also enjoying an awesome Mideast experience in the hot spots like Jenin, in the company of people who count terrorists among their acquaintances, and maybe parlaying it to a great law or business graduate school – devoting their Mideast experience to “doing OTI” rather than, say, doing Birthright-Israel. And is it not ironic? The Olive Tree Initiative already was in full bloom, supposedly having peeled away layers of animosity and distrust that underlay prior Muslim Student Union (MSU) actions endangering UCI as a campus safe for Jews to hear Jewish speakers, when – nevertheless and despite OTI – the MSU still broke up Ambassador Oren’s appearance at UCI.
7. A final “straw,” perhaps better characterized as “the last straw.” One of the students would tell us that “We students are the new leaders of the American Jewish community. We are the future. We know best what is best for UCI. Your role in the community is to give us the funds. And otherwise – just butt out.” And so, a word to a friend. Irvine is our community, too. We, too, are its leaders. In the Irvine and greater Orange County Jewish community, there are nationally prominent experts on Israel and the Middle East, published authors, trained and experienced teachers, leaders capable of offering Israel advocacy training and teaching, Jewish leaders who actually fly across the country to teach and train others. There are Ph.D.s and scholars, scholarly researchers and exciting speakers. We are not called upon. Our offered services repeatedly are rejected. So be it. A $5,000 honorarium from an East Coast Jewish audience pays more than would the pro bono (free of charge) presentation that the same expert among us offers locally as a loving service to the community. But let us be clear: This issue transcends the students on campus. Perhaps you may have seen Breaking Away, an Academy Award®-winning flick. Its subplot is instructive. We the Jewish community live here in Irvine today, and we will be living here tomorrow, long after several of today’s UCI college and grad students have moved on. We have a long-term stake in the community, and we therefore have a stake in the neighborhood campus that brings occasional Jew-haters (including Jewish Jew-haters) out of their respective rat holes and into our midst. We are asked – even guilted – to contribute money to UCI Hillel, apprised that it is our obligation to do so because we have a stake. I personally have made such a donation to UCI Hillel. Some of us even have devoted hundreds of hours of our own personal time to students at UCI, even at the expense of personal family time, vacation time, and at the expense of money. We have seen students come into Irvine, then move on, much as I moved on in my life 35 years ago from the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University, and subsequently from the Westwood campus of UCLA Law School. Thus, it is important to recognize that, in the course of a lifetime, many of our respective lives are intersecting concentric circles, elliptical encounters. The world does not revolve around me, and it does not revolve around this or that student. One day it is about mobilizing the Irvine and Orange County Jewish community to help the former salaried Hillel Director actualize his hopes and agenda, and then he is gone, forgotten, but we still are here. Jewish organizational professionals come and go. We have seen the revolving doors at the Irvine Bureau of Jewish Education, the American Jewish Committee, the Tarbut v’ Torah school, and yes at UCI Hillel. Through each of the transitions, we donate money and time, patience and passion and participation. One day it is the new Hillel Program Director arriving all excited with big plans, and another day it is someone else with a different program agenda. But we the Orange County Jewish community remain here, committed and devoted to this place and to our friends and families and dreams, realizing that our tzedakah dollars are being allocated in ways that we find objectionable. While phantom students’ names are signed to documents without the signatories’ knowledge, assent, authorization – and in some cases over their explicit objections – it is we, the community, that receive the defamatory letters, breaking the peaceful moment as the Shabbat ends. We do not heatedly return the letters with overheated, over-exercised verbiage, telling the senders: “The students on campus are the leaders of tomorrow, so solicit the Big Gifts and Major Donations from them. It is they, the students at UCI, who alone are impacted at UCI, so let them tend to themselves, and how dare you approach with a fundraiser’s solicitations those of us who are not on campus?”
But there is a time for everything under the heavens: A time to be still, and a time to speak. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. Among us as Jews there always is a time to love and a time for peace. But this also is a time to speak and time to refrain from embracing. There will be absolutely no support for the Federation of Orange County from this quarter, nor from those who share my concerns, until the Federation and Hillel publicly withdraw from their associations with the Olive Tree Initiative. Not one penny. My desk is loaded with ample Jewish charitable alternatives to support, and tzedakah never stops in my home. But tzedakah must be just. And there is never a shortage of worthy Jewish causes to support that never would spend a penny of Jewish tzedakah money to fly a local Jewish student to “Palestine” for a film viewing in Jenin depicting the Israeli people as barbaric and cruel murderers. No, not a charity for me.
-- Rabbi Dov Fischer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
The Flotilla of the Damned:
Who in the world runs private “supply ships” through naval blockades?
When mass murder was rampant in Rwanda, did the “International Solidarity Movement” run supply flotillas? What would Kamal Ataturk have done if a civilian flotilla were sent to Armenia while the Turks were committing genocide there? When President John F. Kennedy blockaded Cuba, would anyone have tried running a flotilla through to Havana? If they had, what would the U.S. Navy have done if they refused to stop? Has anyone tried running a parade of boats to Guantanamo Bay to assure that America’s Gitmo prisoners are well provided for? If America ultimately maximizes sanctions against Iran, blockading Ahmadinejad’s ports, how will we respond to flotillas seeking to ram through?
Israel seems positioned as the target of every bully or wannabe-tough-guy who wishes to dabble in social justice. She is perceived as the kid with thick-framed glasses whose lunch money is easiest to steal. For left-anarchist groups like the International Solidarity Movement, Israel is the target for a radical-chic war game, perhaps to alleviate students’ residual stress from just-completed final exams. Many of them may have been unaware that the International Solidarity Movement is a front group created by Palestinian Arabs, funded by Palestinian Arabs, with direct ties to Arab terrorists. Even so, a hint of the flotilla’s unilaterally hostile agenda against Israel should have been apparent when ISM leaders refused a plea from the parents of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006, to transmit a letter and package to him if they arrived in Gaza.
Israel disappointed the naifs who were lured by ISM as window dressing for the flotilla confrontation. Israel is a real country with real people who have real hopes for happiness and real aspirations for peace. Her borders are open to tourists. Her cafes and night clubs are vibrant and safe. People in her land – even outsiders – can think what they want, say what they want, even politically mobilize as they want. They have protests running all over the country. Try that in Iran.
When three youngsters inadvertently hike into Iranian territory, they end up in prison – and they remain incarcerated there for a year and more. Two American journalists journey into North Korea, and promptly are locked up in jail, unable to leave until an American President personally flies in to beg the country’s dictator personally to free them. An American journalist travels into Pakistan to conduct an interview and is butchered by Moslem fanatics. An American innocent goes into Iraq and gets himself beheaded by Islamofascists.
As juxtaposed against the real murderous oppressors of the world, Israel seems a safe place to bring one’s Berkeley activism onto the world scene for a week on the high seas after final exams. No one tells the American activists that those “freedom songs” the ringleaders are singing in Arabic actually are lyrics about massacring Jews. Unknown to the volunteers, the “peace activists” already have armed themselves with metal pipes, baseball bats, slingshots and marbles, and firebombs for the real action they are planning for the cruise. Instead, the naïve board the flotilla, cheerfully thinking: “Let’s run through a naval blockade today – won’t that be fun?”
Well, no, that won’t be fun. Israel’s neighbors have forced her to learn to survive amid a sea of hostility, surrounded by more than twenty countries that want to destroy her. Her border problems are not illegal immigrants trying to run a porous fence from one side, while people on the other side bring in all these dimes that jam up vending machines. Rather, she is bordered by the worst gang of murderous cutthroats to have run a polity since, perhaps, Attila the Hun. For Hamas, death is an industry.
Hamas runs Gaza. They are so murderous that terrorists from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah gang have fled. The nominal “President” of the “Palestine Authority,” Mahmoud Abbas stays out of Gaza because he expects he will get butchered there if he shows up. In Gaza, the internationally outlawed Hamas terror organization rules the streets, arbitrarily tortures and takes Arab Moslem opponents off to their deaths, and rules a veritable Gangland.
Hamas came into power because Israel, in one of its idyllic moments, opted unilaterally to “take a risk for peace” and abandoned all Israeli assets and properties in Gaza, forcibly uprooted and removed all Israeli citizens resident there, even dug up deceased Jews for reburial outside Gaza, and handed Gaza to Mahmoud Abbas. He lost it soon after to the Hamas thugs, as they seized power and killed Abbas’s own terrorists. Hamas then converted the Gaza region into an armed camp.
Hamas receives international funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars and euros – and the money goes disproportionately for weapons like the rockets that Hamas incessantly shoots into Israel. To get even more weapons, Hamas has constructed a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels beneath its border with Egypt and even taxes weapons smugglers for the privilege. They need those tunnels because even Egypt has to blockade Gaza.
Israel is compelled to blockade Gaza at this time. Countries like Syria and Iran already supply deadly military weaponry to Nasrallah’s Hezbollah, along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Having shot at Israel everything they had in 2006, Hezbollah finally sued for a truce when she ran out of weapons. Israel was assured that an emergency United Nations peacekeeping force would enter the terrain, and Hezbollah would not be re-supplied. Yet, today, Hezbollah has restocked so completely, with the aid of Iran and Syria, that she is more heavily armed than she was in 2006.
Israel cannot control the borders throughout Lebanon and therefore is stymied in relying on the United Nations to do what the UN never could achieve. By contrast, Israel can prevent Gaza from being stockpiled similarly, and she is obligated to protect her citizens.. In January 2002, a cargo ship the Karin-A, sailed for Gaza, ostensibly loaded with civilian supplies – food, flowers, children’s books. When Israel’s navy boarded the ship in the Red Sea, they instead found the vessel loaded chock-full with rockets, grenades, and anti-tank missiles. That is why Israel blockades and needs to blockade Gaza.
Even so, despite nonsensical slanders against Israel, ample food supplies are evident throughout Gaza. Medical supplies get through. So do fancy restaurants and Olympic-sized swimming pools.
When college youngsters decide that it would be romantic to get out their Ché Guevara t-shirts and play “freedom fighter” – maybe even get some great cell phone photos for friends, some great tweets, and even a “How-I-Spent-My-Summer” experience to “ace” a college termpaper back home for their class in “The Politics of Liberation” – they need to understand that Israel is not on summer break.
Next time, try Darfur.
When mass murder was rampant in Rwanda, did the “International Solidarity Movement” run supply flotillas? What would Kamal Ataturk have done if a civilian flotilla were sent to Armenia while the Turks were committing genocide there? When President John F. Kennedy blockaded Cuba, would anyone have tried running a flotilla through to Havana? If they had, what would the U.S. Navy have done if they refused to stop? Has anyone tried running a parade of boats to Guantanamo Bay to assure that America’s Gitmo prisoners are well provided for? If America ultimately maximizes sanctions against Iran, blockading Ahmadinejad’s ports, how will we respond to flotillas seeking to ram through?
Israel seems positioned as the target of every bully or wannabe-tough-guy who wishes to dabble in social justice. She is perceived as the kid with thick-framed glasses whose lunch money is easiest to steal. For left-anarchist groups like the International Solidarity Movement, Israel is the target for a radical-chic war game, perhaps to alleviate students’ residual stress from just-completed final exams. Many of them may have been unaware that the International Solidarity Movement is a front group created by Palestinian Arabs, funded by Palestinian Arabs, with direct ties to Arab terrorists. Even so, a hint of the flotilla’s unilaterally hostile agenda against Israel should have been apparent when ISM leaders refused a plea from the parents of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006, to transmit a letter and package to him if they arrived in Gaza.
Israel disappointed the naifs who were lured by ISM as window dressing for the flotilla confrontation. Israel is a real country with real people who have real hopes for happiness and real aspirations for peace. Her borders are open to tourists. Her cafes and night clubs are vibrant and safe. People in her land – even outsiders – can think what they want, say what they want, even politically mobilize as they want. They have protests running all over the country. Try that in Iran.
When three youngsters inadvertently hike into Iranian territory, they end up in prison – and they remain incarcerated there for a year and more. Two American journalists journey into North Korea, and promptly are locked up in jail, unable to leave until an American President personally flies in to beg the country’s dictator personally to free them. An American journalist travels into Pakistan to conduct an interview and is butchered by Moslem fanatics. An American innocent goes into Iraq and gets himself beheaded by Islamofascists.
As juxtaposed against the real murderous oppressors of the world, Israel seems a safe place to bring one’s Berkeley activism onto the world scene for a week on the high seas after final exams. No one tells the American activists that those “freedom songs” the ringleaders are singing in Arabic actually are lyrics about massacring Jews. Unknown to the volunteers, the “peace activists” already have armed themselves with metal pipes, baseball bats, slingshots and marbles, and firebombs for the real action they are planning for the cruise. Instead, the naïve board the flotilla, cheerfully thinking: “Let’s run through a naval blockade today – won’t that be fun?”
Well, no, that won’t be fun. Israel’s neighbors have forced her to learn to survive amid a sea of hostility, surrounded by more than twenty countries that want to destroy her. Her border problems are not illegal immigrants trying to run a porous fence from one side, while people on the other side bring in all these dimes that jam up vending machines. Rather, she is bordered by the worst gang of murderous cutthroats to have run a polity since, perhaps, Attila the Hun. For Hamas, death is an industry.
Hamas runs Gaza. They are so murderous that terrorists from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah gang have fled. The nominal “President” of the “Palestine Authority,” Mahmoud Abbas stays out of Gaza because he expects he will get butchered there if he shows up. In Gaza, the internationally outlawed Hamas terror organization rules the streets, arbitrarily tortures and takes Arab Moslem opponents off to their deaths, and rules a veritable Gangland.
Hamas came into power because Israel, in one of its idyllic moments, opted unilaterally to “take a risk for peace” and abandoned all Israeli assets and properties in Gaza, forcibly uprooted and removed all Israeli citizens resident there, even dug up deceased Jews for reburial outside Gaza, and handed Gaza to Mahmoud Abbas. He lost it soon after to the Hamas thugs, as they seized power and killed Abbas’s own terrorists. Hamas then converted the Gaza region into an armed camp.
Hamas receives international funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars and euros – and the money goes disproportionately for weapons like the rockets that Hamas incessantly shoots into Israel. To get even more weapons, Hamas has constructed a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels beneath its border with Egypt and even taxes weapons smugglers for the privilege. They need those tunnels because even Egypt has to blockade Gaza.
Israel is compelled to blockade Gaza at this time. Countries like Syria and Iran already supply deadly military weaponry to Nasrallah’s Hezbollah, along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Having shot at Israel everything they had in 2006, Hezbollah finally sued for a truce when she ran out of weapons. Israel was assured that an emergency United Nations peacekeeping force would enter the terrain, and Hezbollah would not be re-supplied. Yet, today, Hezbollah has restocked so completely, with the aid of Iran and Syria, that she is more heavily armed than she was in 2006.
Israel cannot control the borders throughout Lebanon and therefore is stymied in relying on the United Nations to do what the UN never could achieve. By contrast, Israel can prevent Gaza from being stockpiled similarly, and she is obligated to protect her citizens.. In January 2002, a cargo ship the Karin-A, sailed for Gaza, ostensibly loaded with civilian supplies – food, flowers, children’s books. When Israel’s navy boarded the ship in the Red Sea, they instead found the vessel loaded chock-full with rockets, grenades, and anti-tank missiles. That is why Israel blockades and needs to blockade Gaza.
Even so, despite nonsensical slanders against Israel, ample food supplies are evident throughout Gaza. Medical supplies get through. So do fancy restaurants and Olympic-sized swimming pools.
When college youngsters decide that it would be romantic to get out their Ché Guevara t-shirts and play “freedom fighter” – maybe even get some great cell phone photos for friends, some great tweets, and even a “How-I-Spent-My-Summer” experience to “ace” a college termpaper back home for their class in “The Politics of Liberation” – they need to understand that Israel is not on summer break.
Next time, try Darfur.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
PRESIDENT OBAMA'S GREAT PYRAMID SCHEME: The Two-State Solution as Final Solution
The Obama Administration has endeavored to move American Mideast policy away from a traditional understanding of Israel's security concerns and historic rights, towards a view that renders undue currency towards Mideast political theories that have not served America well, aimed more at appeasing terrorism than at assuring justice.
My extensive commentary on the subject may be found at: http://rabbidov.com/twostate.htm
After you have read it, you may circulate it as you wish, even reprinting the text rather than merely forwarding the link, but you are limited only by these two caveats: (i) you may not edit the text; (ii) the link must appear with any forwarding you do.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Israeli Public Relations: Road to Nowhere and Friendly Fire in the P.R. War
It took me forty years to figure it out, but I think I finally have figured out that Israel is not going to win any PR wars. The best we can hope for is that Fox News remains the way it is, along with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Until Israel gives up Judea, Samaria, and half of Jerusalem, she will not win any PR wars. Only after she does so will she enjoy the great-and-enduring PR gains she previously has enjoyed when she showed courage and magnanimity by giving up Yamit . . . and the Sinai . . . and her toe-hold in Southern Lebanon . . . and Gaza . . . and by signing the Oslo Accords . . . and by allowing Arafat to establish a Palestinian Authority with its own independent newspapers, television and radio, and school text books.
Each of those P.R.-winning concessions turned the tide and won Israel demonstrable and enduring worldwide enthusiasm. . . . at least for a week or two.
That kind of PR boost in world attention all-too-often seems associated with pictures from Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald when the respective Allies Forces liberated the camps. That is quite a price to pay for world sympthy. One picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth a thousand souls?
Still, it seems useful to try to explain the truth, to try the clarify the facts, if only to give some encouragement and chizuk to those comparatively few who incline to hear the truth. There is a measure of chizuk in knowing that we are right and that the whole world is wrong. (Sure, it is better if we are right, and the whole world is equally right, and we all are in synch. But if Israel is going to stand alone among the nations of the world, it still is a nice chatzi-nechamah to know, at least, that she is right.
An effort at public relations just seems the right exercise. Much as we do kiruv r'chokim, knowing that -- even when we chart successes in bringing r'chokim to Torah -- there is so much traffic going the other direction, too. Still, one does what one must do.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the PR war is not winnable on the large scale. The nations are not motivated as much by "Right and Wrong" as they are motivated by what is best for them. Outside America, we see it everywhere. And, frankly, America has been the source that has pressured Israel to retreat from Sinai in 1956, to retreat from Yamit/Sinai/South Lebanon/Gaza, to sign Oslo, to move "kadimah" towards a "roadmap" to abandon Yehudah, Shomron, and East Yerushalayim. That is America -- Israel's best friend.
It is important that we not kid ourselves. Israel's "great friend" George W. did tremendous damage to Israel's security posture during his second term by pressuring her into insane concessions to appease oil interests, "our friends the Saudis," etc. The regular bombing of Sderot and the Hamas seizure of Gaza is the result.
But we fight the fight for truth because, oh, we may as well. Not because we will accomplish anything macrocosmic, but our friends do benefit from the truth. It helps Fox News, George Will, Cal Thomas, Mark Steyn (not Jewish), a few others among them, Martin Peretz, and Krauthammer and Jeff Jacoby to have access to truth data from which to write.
And it is a good exercise to fight for the truth. Truth muscles are rarely exercised enough.
To be sure, if we don't do it, no one else will -- least of all, the Israelis. The Israelis send us, in 99% of the cases, the most useless political hacks for their public relations. People who barely speak English (and thank G-d that they are so hard to understand!), who make the most inane arguments, people whose twenty years' dutiful service in Israel in one or another political party's inner circle, pushing papers from right to left, receive the game-show-like reward -- first prize : an appointment as an ambassador or a consul-general in America. These are people who come to an audience of the best American legislators who support Jewish rights to Yesha . . . and argue with them for an hour to modify their position to support a "Two-State Solution."
The mindless equations of israeli public relations. Never sending Ethiopian Jews to present Israel's story to African Americans.
Rarely, if ever, sending successful American olim back, with their American-accented English, to explain the case for Israel in America's mama-loshon. Instead, we are sent one after another common hack, with a thick foreign accent, with barely any concept in public relations.
Only rarely did Israel give her supporters a chance to work in America with people who spoke American English -- Golda and Bibi. Both were so successful that they became Prime Ministers. A third guy, Abba Eban, spoke English so beautifully that people who heard him supported Israel even though they (like he) barely knew what he was talking about.
The lesson: send people to America who lack clever political acumen, who barely can speak English, and with thick accents at that.
The most common causes of "friendly fire" casulaties in the PR war.
Each of those P.R.-winning concessions turned the tide and won Israel demonstrable and enduring worldwide enthusiasm. . . . at least for a week or two.
That kind of PR boost in world attention all-too-often seems associated with pictures from Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald when the respective Allies Forces liberated the camps. That is quite a price to pay for world sympthy. One picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth a thousand souls?
Still, it seems useful to try to explain the truth, to try the clarify the facts, if only to give some encouragement and chizuk to those comparatively few who incline to hear the truth. There is a measure of chizuk in knowing that we are right and that the whole world is wrong. (Sure, it is better if we are right, and the whole world is equally right, and we all are in synch. But if Israel is going to stand alone among the nations of the world, it still is a nice chatzi-nechamah to know, at least, that she is right.
An effort at public relations just seems the right exercise. Much as we do kiruv r'chokim, knowing that -- even when we chart successes in bringing r'chokim to Torah -- there is so much traffic going the other direction, too. Still, one does what one must do.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the PR war is not winnable on the large scale. The nations are not motivated as much by "Right and Wrong" as they are motivated by what is best for them. Outside America, we see it everywhere. And, frankly, America has been the source that has pressured Israel to retreat from Sinai in 1956, to retreat from Yamit/Sinai/South Lebanon/Gaza, to sign Oslo, to move "kadimah" towards a "roadmap" to abandon Yehudah, Shomron, and East Yerushalayim. That is America -- Israel's best friend.
It is important that we not kid ourselves. Israel's "great friend" George W. did tremendous damage to Israel's security posture during his second term by pressuring her into insane concessions to appease oil interests, "our friends the Saudis," etc. The regular bombing of Sderot and the Hamas seizure of Gaza is the result.
But we fight the fight for truth because, oh, we may as well. Not because we will accomplish anything macrocosmic, but our friends do benefit from the truth. It helps Fox News, George Will, Cal Thomas, Mark Steyn (not Jewish), a few others among them, Martin Peretz, and Krauthammer and Jeff Jacoby to have access to truth data from which to write.
And it is a good exercise to fight for the truth. Truth muscles are rarely exercised enough.
To be sure, if we don't do it, no one else will -- least of all, the Israelis. The Israelis send us, in 99% of the cases, the most useless political hacks for their public relations. People who barely speak English (and thank G-d that they are so hard to understand!), who make the most inane arguments, people whose twenty years' dutiful service in Israel in one or another political party's inner circle, pushing papers from right to left, receive the game-show-like reward -- first prize : an appointment as an ambassador or a consul-general in America. These are people who come to an audience of the best American legislators who support Jewish rights to Yesha . . . and argue with them for an hour to modify their position to support a "Two-State Solution."
The mindless equations of israeli public relations. Never sending Ethiopian Jews to present Israel's story to African Americans.
Rarely, if ever, sending successful American olim back, with their American-accented English, to explain the case for Israel in America's mama-loshon. Instead, we are sent one after another common hack, with a thick foreign accent, with barely any concept in public relations.
Only rarely did Israel give her supporters a chance to work in America with people who spoke American English -- Golda and Bibi. Both were so successful that they became Prime Ministers. A third guy, Abba Eban, spoke English so beautifully that people who heard him supported Israel even though they (like he) barely knew what he was talking about.
The lesson: send people to America who lack clever political acumen, who barely can speak English, and with thick accents at that.
The most common causes of "friendly fire" casulaties in the PR war.
"J" Street, Growing up on the Street, and Street Survival: Why Israel Cannot Abide the Morons Who Call Themselves "Friend"
Today’s “J Street” was yesterday’s Peace Now and Breira. Always rushing to “make peace,” to trust Arafat to keep his word, to encourage and push Israel to sign Oslo Accords.
I like to think of myself as an intellectual, too. I do not cede that ground to the “J Street” crowd. But I also grew up a bit on the streets. I know both sides – the people who attended Columbia University with me, the law school types, the scholars. And I know street fighters.
Israel has a real problem -- because she is not bordered by Mexico and Canada. She is bordered by Hezbollah and Hamas. Every time Israel has conceded land, the result has been the opposite of what the J Streeters predicted. She gave up Southern Lebanon unilaterally on the theory that the cession of land would bring peace in the north. “After all, what would Arabs have to complain about up north?” Yeah. So Hezbollah moved in and eventually put Haifa within range of its shelling.
Then Israel ceded Gaza. “Who needs Gaza anyway – with all its Arab overpopulation and all the trouble? It’s not worth it – let them choke on their own suffering! They will be so busy running an economy and a government that they will not have time to bother Israel.” Yeah. So Hamas took over and turned Gaza into an arcade, with terrorists raining down missiles and rockets on Sderot. When the air raid sounds in Sderot, a person has 15 seconds lead time to get to safety underground before the shell strikes. So people cannot shower.
Israel is not dealing with post-war Germany or Japan, with France or England. She is dealing with a theology that is sworn to subjugate all Jews and to destroy a Jewish country. There is no way to get them honestly to live with us except to persuade them that the cost of fighting us is too dear. That is how Israel took Jordan and Egypt out of the confrontation – beating them in war after war, until those governments gave up on destroying Israel.
I like to think of myself as an intellectual, too. I do not cede that ground to the “J Street” crowd. But I also grew up a bit on the streets. I know both sides – the people who attended Columbia University with me, the law school types, the scholars. And I know street fighters.
Israel has a real problem -- because she is not bordered by Mexico and Canada. She is bordered by Hezbollah and Hamas. Every time Israel has conceded land, the result has been the opposite of what the J Streeters predicted. She gave up Southern Lebanon unilaterally on the theory that the cession of land would bring peace in the north. “After all, what would Arabs have to complain about up north?” Yeah. So Hezbollah moved in and eventually put Haifa within range of its shelling.
Then Israel ceded Gaza. “Who needs Gaza anyway – with all its Arab overpopulation and all the trouble? It’s not worth it – let them choke on their own suffering! They will be so busy running an economy and a government that they will not have time to bother Israel.” Yeah. So Hamas took over and turned Gaza into an arcade, with terrorists raining down missiles and rockets on Sderot. When the air raid sounds in Sderot, a person has 15 seconds lead time to get to safety underground before the shell strikes. So people cannot shower.
Israel is not dealing with post-war Germany or Japan, with France or England. She is dealing with a theology that is sworn to subjugate all Jews and to destroy a Jewish country. There is no way to get them honestly to live with us except to persuade them that the cost of fighting us is too dear. That is how Israel took Jordan and Egypt out of the confrontation – beating them in war after war, until those governments gave up on destroying Israel.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
On Obama, Democrats, Republicans, Israel, and the Futility of Knowing Who Are Friends
I did not vote for Obama, instead choosing to vote as the exit polls told us that most Jews in Orthodox circles did. Still, I view Obama's election with fascination and a touch of wonder.
Clearly, Hashem has a plan that we do not yet see or understand regarding Obama. By the natural course of events, Obama should never have been elected or, frankly, even nominated. Historians will not understand it. Nevertheless, he now is the President-elect, and we will recite the same blessing in Shul for his welfare and that of his Government as we have recited for his predecessors.
As Geraldine Ferraro said -- and she got canned for telling the truth -- rather than being victim for not looking like all those guys on the dollar bills (whose skin presumably was green?), Obama actually was the beneficiary of being quasi-African-American. Any other guy who would have sought the Presidency with his skimpy public record, youthful inexperience, and circle of corrupt acquaintances and associations, never would have gotten past Iowa and New Hampshire.
A State Senator who voted "present" 130 times, or whatever? A guy with no known record of accomplishment but with a coterie of personal associations ranging from Tony Rezko and Bill Ayres to Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and Father Phleger?
Gimme a break.
A law school professor, former president of the Harvard Law Review, who never published an article in a legal journal? Who among us in the legal field -- among those who practice, among those who focus in the halls of scholarship -- ever has heard of such a thing?
He has lived what-some-might-see as a charmed life. Hashem has a plan. This all is too aberrant to be natural life. There is a plan. G-d apparently has a plan in which Obama factors particularly.
So many of us -- half the country -- voted against Obama (not really for McCain, who was not the right choice of the moment) because we do not know what Obama stands for, do not trust him an iota, believe that he stands mostly for himself, has no record of meaningful achievement, shifted 180 degrees on Jerusalem in hours, surrounds himself with the same Clinton crowd that forced Oslo down Israel's throat and that made Arafat the most frequent foreign visitor to the White House.
All that said -- and one can go on -- I have to put my faith in Hashem and know that He has an ultimate plan, and His plan will go forth. Hubert Humphrey was a great friend of Israel, but it was Nixon-the-anti-Semite who acted rapidly and forcefully as Hashem's tool to assist Israel meaningfully during the 1973 War. Gerald Ford had a record of friendship for Israel through decades in the House, and he had Kissinger in Foggy Bottom, but they surprisingly combined to subject Israel to a searing "reassessment" of the traditional American friendship.
So many of us voted for Jimmy Carter the first time he ran. Many thought that Evangelicals --given the pro-Israel leadership models of Reverend Jerry Falwell, Reverend John Hagee, etc. -- are among Israel's biggest backers, inspired by the mandate of Genesis 12:3. Go figure -- it turned out that Carter was not evangelical on that verse, while his sister was missionizing to Jews and his brother was in bed with Kaddafi.
When Reagan came, so many of us expected George Shultz of Bechtel Corporation, which makes so much money from Arabs, to be a disastrous Secretary of State for Israel -- and, yet, Shultz probably was the best friend Israel ever had in the State Department. We thought the First Bush would follow Reagan's pro-Israel policies, and yet his Secretary of State seems to have been the worst anti-Semite in State since Cordell Hull and WWII. We figured the Second Bush would be as bad as the First, particularly after James Baker played so active a role in the legal fight over ballot-chads, and instead Bush II proved a great friend of Israel when Sharon invaded Jenin.
Thus, when Bush II was reelected, we thought we now have a proven friend in the White House and, with Sharon in Jerusalem, we now have some good strong leadership; in place. Instead, Bush turned his Mideast Policy on its head and made a point of his second term to press Sharon for a "Palestinian State" -- i.e., not really a "state" but a country called by that phony name -- and the Great Sharon unexpectedly went along with it, starting with Gush Katif and then the Gaza.
What stopped the momentum of Bush and Sharon, after the Gaza retreat, to move the retreat-pressure kadimah (forward, eastward to Judea and Samaria)? Only the combination of Sharon being felled by a stroke, then another, and Olmert thereafter being felled by a Hezbollah War and then a debilitating financial scandal and another, and Bush being felled by an incomprehensible economic collapse that started unfolding with mortgage problems just as Condoleezza was flying to the Middle East to start the pressure against Israel for new retreat.
Only that extraordinary confluence of incredible events stopped the Gush-Katification of Yehudah-Shomron.
So, I am long past predicting who among the princes of flesh-and-blood is good for Israel and who bad. I vote based on commonsense natural analyses, but I know I can be wrong because good politicians can fool you, and so can bad ones. I know that all we can do is vote based on what we reasonably expect. But, in the end, it is all in Hashem's hands. Politicians often surprise.
For the many of us who voted against Obama during this recent round, a man who entered the national stage as Tisha B'Av was ending in 2004, we could vote only based on what we thought is best. In the end, what do we know? We don't know. We absolutely do not know.
Our parents' generation bullet-voted for FDR, whom they regarded as the best American friend that Jews ever had in the White House. Turns out he and his State Department were not our best friends. Rather, they hated us and in some real measure were accessories to the mass murder of six million of us.
Democrats-Republicans. We don't know. Nixon rushed weapons to Israel in an full-blast urgent airlift. Bill Clinton gave us Oslo and Arafat.
Shalom Chaver.
Clearly, Hashem has a plan that we do not yet see or understand regarding Obama. By the natural course of events, Obama should never have been elected or, frankly, even nominated. Historians will not understand it. Nevertheless, he now is the President-elect, and we will recite the same blessing in Shul for his welfare and that of his Government as we have recited for his predecessors.
As Geraldine Ferraro said -- and she got canned for telling the truth -- rather than being victim for not looking like all those guys on the dollar bills (whose skin presumably was green?), Obama actually was the beneficiary of being quasi-African-American. Any other guy who would have sought the Presidency with his skimpy public record, youthful inexperience, and circle of corrupt acquaintances and associations, never would have gotten past Iowa and New Hampshire.
A State Senator who voted "present" 130 times, or whatever? A guy with no known record of accomplishment but with a coterie of personal associations ranging from Tony Rezko and Bill Ayres to Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and Father Phleger?
Gimme a break.
A law school professor, former president of the Harvard Law Review, who never published an article in a legal journal? Who among us in the legal field -- among those who practice, among those who focus in the halls of scholarship -- ever has heard of such a thing?
He has lived what-some-might-see as a charmed life. Hashem has a plan. This all is too aberrant to be natural life. There is a plan. G-d apparently has a plan in which Obama factors particularly.
So many of us -- half the country -- voted against Obama (not really for McCain, who was not the right choice of the moment) because we do not know what Obama stands for, do not trust him an iota, believe that he stands mostly for himself, has no record of meaningful achievement, shifted 180 degrees on Jerusalem in hours, surrounds himself with the same Clinton crowd that forced Oslo down Israel's throat and that made Arafat the most frequent foreign visitor to the White House.
All that said -- and one can go on -- I have to put my faith in Hashem and know that He has an ultimate plan, and His plan will go forth. Hubert Humphrey was a great friend of Israel, but it was Nixon-the-anti-Semite who acted rapidly and forcefully as Hashem's tool to assist Israel meaningfully during the 1973 War. Gerald Ford had a record of friendship for Israel through decades in the House, and he had Kissinger in Foggy Bottom, but they surprisingly combined to subject Israel to a searing "reassessment" of the traditional American friendship.
So many of us voted for Jimmy Carter the first time he ran. Many thought that Evangelicals --given the pro-Israel leadership models of Reverend Jerry Falwell, Reverend John Hagee, etc. -- are among Israel's biggest backers, inspired by the mandate of Genesis 12:3. Go figure -- it turned out that Carter was not evangelical on that verse, while his sister was missionizing to Jews and his brother was in bed with Kaddafi.
When Reagan came, so many of us expected George Shultz of Bechtel Corporation, which makes so much money from Arabs, to be a disastrous Secretary of State for Israel -- and, yet, Shultz probably was the best friend Israel ever had in the State Department. We thought the First Bush would follow Reagan's pro-Israel policies, and yet his Secretary of State seems to have been the worst anti-Semite in State since Cordell Hull and WWII. We figured the Second Bush would be as bad as the First, particularly after James Baker played so active a role in the legal fight over ballot-chads, and instead Bush II proved a great friend of Israel when Sharon invaded Jenin.
Thus, when Bush II was reelected, we thought we now have a proven friend in the White House and, with Sharon in Jerusalem, we now have some good strong leadership; in place. Instead, Bush turned his Mideast Policy on its head and made a point of his second term to press Sharon for a "Palestinian State" -- i.e., not really a "state" but a country called by that phony name -- and the Great Sharon unexpectedly went along with it, starting with Gush Katif and then the Gaza.
What stopped the momentum of Bush and Sharon, after the Gaza retreat, to move the retreat-pressure kadimah (forward, eastward to Judea and Samaria)? Only the combination of Sharon being felled by a stroke, then another, and Olmert thereafter being felled by a Hezbollah War and then a debilitating financial scandal and another, and Bush being felled by an incomprehensible economic collapse that started unfolding with mortgage problems just as Condoleezza was flying to the Middle East to start the pressure against Israel for new retreat.
Only that extraordinary confluence of incredible events stopped the Gush-Katification of Yehudah-Shomron.
So, I am long past predicting who among the princes of flesh-and-blood is good for Israel and who bad. I vote based on commonsense natural analyses, but I know I can be wrong because good politicians can fool you, and so can bad ones. I know that all we can do is vote based on what we reasonably expect. But, in the end, it is all in Hashem's hands. Politicians often surprise.
For the many of us who voted against Obama during this recent round, a man who entered the national stage as Tisha B'Av was ending in 2004, we could vote only based on what we thought is best. In the end, what do we know? We don't know. We absolutely do not know.
Our parents' generation bullet-voted for FDR, whom they regarded as the best American friend that Jews ever had in the White House. Turns out he and his State Department were not our best friends. Rather, they hated us and in some real measure were accessories to the mass murder of six million of us.
Democrats-Republicans. We don't know. Nixon rushed weapons to Israel in an full-blast urgent airlift. Bill Clinton gave us Oslo and Arafat.
Shalom Chaver.
Time to Pardon Jonathan Pollard
1. Pollard did a terrible, terrible thing.
2. A terrible thing. Just terrible.
3. Horrible. And he messed up the position and status of Jews in American government. He fed into anti-Semites’ worst diatribes about Jews being of diverted loyalty to foreign powers. He had no right to imperil the Jewish position in this country and, thereby, to lend credence to haters elsewhere in the world who wonder about Jews and our loyalties in those countries.
4. He has been sitting in prison for more than twenty-three years.
5. He never had a trial. He entered into a plea bargain. Then, suddenly-and-unexpectedly at sentencing, Caspar Weinberger (then the Secretary of Defense – a guy with a Jewish surname who opted for his mother’s interest in the Episcopalian Church) submitted a secret 46-page sentencing memorandum to the sentencing judge. No one knows what the memorandum said. Pollard’s lawyers were not allowed to see the secret memo. To this day, no one has ever been permitted to see what that guy wrote.
6. We know that Weinberger ultimately was found, in another context (Iran-Contra), to be one who would lie under oath. He ultimately was found guilty of perjury. The fact that someone swears to G-d to tell the truth one day and then lies that day does not prove that he lies under oath on another day. But it’s sure worse than gambling with dice. One may question whether Weinberger’s secret 46-page memorandum – which played a defining role in Pollard’s sentencing – contained pure truth or whether, as Rashi tells us about the cleverness of the m’raglim, the future-perjurous-felon began with the truth and then stretched it into falsehood. For nearly a quarter century, no one has been permitted to read the thing and dissect it.
7. Although charged with espionage (spying), Pollard never was charged with treason. Thus, he was guilty of passing classified info to an ally.
8. I am told that no one else in American history ever was sentenced to life in prison for passing classified info to an ally. I am told that the punishment for such behavior historically has been in the range of 2-4 years in prison. I have not independently verified this. I do note that the Rosenbergs went to death for passing American atomic secrets to the Communists at a time when the Communists actually were allied with America. I leave it to the objective-minded to consider the difference between passing atomic-bomb secrets to Stalin and passing whatever Pollard passed to the Israelis.
9. Pollard’s trial attorney failed him miserably by not timely appealing from the sentencing. The rules of federal appellate procedure are very strict.
10. Later, Pollard got new lawyers who perceived the outrage that no appeal ever was filed by the original attorney . They filed what-might-be-called an “appeal requesting the right to file an appeal.” (The more formal term is habeas corpus.) Three federal appeals judges considered the motion. The non-Jewish judge on the federal appeals panel ruled that Pollard had suffered a grave miscarriage of justice and deserved to have his appeal from the sentencing filed and heard. The two Jewish judges (one of them, Ruth Bader Ginzburg) ruled avar z’mano, batel korbano.
11. Israel has freed thousands of Arab terrorists, hundreds with blood on their hands, often under intense American pressure: "C'mon, Israel. Why can't you take a chance for peace? Just free them already." America itself has pardoned and freed FALN bombers. Also, a guy named – what is it? – Bill Ayers, I think – bombed American defnse establishments, and got off the hook over time. Also his wife – uh, whats-her-name Dohrn.
12. When Clinton left office, he pardoned some crook named Marc Rich, a crook on the lam in Europe. Clinton later curiously wrote an op-ed in the NY Times that he pardoned this crook at the personal request of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Time Magazine legitimately calls this one of the Ten Most Notorious Presidential Pardons in American History: http://www.time.com/time/2007/presidential_pardons/index.html Clinton's pardon of Rich was an outrage.
13. Fittingly, another of the Ten Most Notorious Presidential Pardons in American History was the elder George Bush’s pardon of the perjurous Caspar Weinberger.
14. Clinton also quasi-pardoned (not a full pardon, just a reduced punishment) some other crooks affiliated with a Chassidic group in Monroe, NY. By coincidence, even though many among their number do not even read English (only Yiddish), the Chassidic group bullet-voted for Clinton’s wife in her first U.S. Senate race against Rick Lazio. If Teddy Roosevelt had given Americans The Square Deal, and Franklin Roosevelt had given Americans The New Deal, Clinton had given the Jewish-American bullet-voters The New Square Deal.
15. Several prominent legal scholars and men of letters are among those who have filed amici curae (friends-of-the-court) briefs for Pollard. My favorites include: the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus of Notre Dame University; the ACLU, and a long list that can be found at: http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2000/122800.htm
16. I refer readers to a web page that lists comparative crimes and sentences: http://www.jonathanpollard.org/sentences.htm
17. Alan Dershowitz (of whom I am no Chasid, but he is a good gauge of whether it is an act of Jewish overreaching to seek Pollard’s pardon) has written why American Jews should be working for Pollard’s freedom: http://www.jonathanpollard.org/1999/030799.htm
18. Seymour Reich, a former chairman of the Presidents Conference, advocated a Clinton pardon seven years ago. More recently, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has called on President George W. Bush to pardon Pollard.
19. A final word: I cannot emphasize enough that Pollard did terrible, terrible stuff. I am not impressed with some people's arguments that he needed to do what he did, that he gave Israel documents that America was obligated to share with Israel anyway, that he had to do it to save lives. But, for G-d’s sake, after 23 years in prison, his continued incarceration no longer is about him. It is about us -- it is about Jews. It is a statement to American Jews that says to us every day: “We in Washington regard you differently from Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, German-Americans, Polish-Americans, Latino-Americans. You may need a reminder that other people don’t need. You need to remember what we do to people who are not loyal to this country, who have loyalties diverted elsewhere.”
Thus, Pollard's continued incarceration is personally offensive to the Jewish community.
2. A terrible thing. Just terrible.
3. Horrible. And he messed up the position and status of Jews in American government. He fed into anti-Semites’ worst diatribes about Jews being of diverted loyalty to foreign powers. He had no right to imperil the Jewish position in this country and, thereby, to lend credence to haters elsewhere in the world who wonder about Jews and our loyalties in those countries.
4. He has been sitting in prison for more than twenty-three years.
5. He never had a trial. He entered into a plea bargain. Then, suddenly-and-unexpectedly at sentencing, Caspar Weinberger (then the Secretary of Defense – a guy with a Jewish surname who opted for his mother’s interest in the Episcopalian Church) submitted a secret 46-page sentencing memorandum to the sentencing judge. No one knows what the memorandum said. Pollard’s lawyers were not allowed to see the secret memo. To this day, no one has ever been permitted to see what that guy wrote.
6. We know that Weinberger ultimately was found, in another context (Iran-Contra), to be one who would lie under oath. He ultimately was found guilty of perjury. The fact that someone swears to G-d to tell the truth one day and then lies that day does not prove that he lies under oath on another day. But it’s sure worse than gambling with dice. One may question whether Weinberger’s secret 46-page memorandum – which played a defining role in Pollard’s sentencing – contained pure truth or whether, as Rashi tells us about the cleverness of the m’raglim, the future-perjurous-felon began with the truth and then stretched it into falsehood. For nearly a quarter century, no one has been permitted to read the thing and dissect it.
7. Although charged with espionage (spying), Pollard never was charged with treason. Thus, he was guilty of passing classified info to an ally.
8. I am told that no one else in American history ever was sentenced to life in prison for passing classified info to an ally. I am told that the punishment for such behavior historically has been in the range of 2-4 years in prison. I have not independently verified this. I do note that the Rosenbergs went to death for passing American atomic secrets to the Communists at a time when the Communists actually were allied with America. I leave it to the objective-minded to consider the difference between passing atomic-bomb secrets to Stalin and passing whatever Pollard passed to the Israelis.
9. Pollard’s trial attorney failed him miserably by not timely appealing from the sentencing. The rules of federal appellate procedure are very strict.
10. Later, Pollard got new lawyers who perceived the outrage that no appeal ever was filed by the original attorney . They filed what-might-be-called an “appeal requesting the right to file an appeal.” (The more formal term is habeas corpus.) Three federal appeals judges considered the motion. The non-Jewish judge on the federal appeals panel ruled that Pollard had suffered a grave miscarriage of justice and deserved to have his appeal from the sentencing filed and heard. The two Jewish judges (one of them, Ruth Bader Ginzburg) ruled avar z’mano, batel korbano.
11. Israel has freed thousands of Arab terrorists, hundreds with blood on their hands, often under intense American pressure: "C'mon, Israel. Why can't you take a chance for peace? Just free them already." America itself has pardoned and freed FALN bombers. Also, a guy named – what is it? – Bill Ayers, I think – bombed American defnse establishments, and got off the hook over time. Also his wife – uh, whats-her-name Dohrn.
12. When Clinton left office, he pardoned some crook named Marc Rich, a crook on the lam in Europe. Clinton later curiously wrote an op-ed in the NY Times that he pardoned this crook at the personal request of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Time Magazine legitimately calls this one of the Ten Most Notorious Presidential Pardons in American History: http://www.time.com/time/2007/presidential_pardons/index.html Clinton's pardon of Rich was an outrage.
13. Fittingly, another of the Ten Most Notorious Presidential Pardons in American History was the elder George Bush’s pardon of the perjurous Caspar Weinberger.
14. Clinton also quasi-pardoned (not a full pardon, just a reduced punishment) some other crooks affiliated with a Chassidic group in Monroe, NY. By coincidence, even though many among their number do not even read English (only Yiddish), the Chassidic group bullet-voted for Clinton’s wife in her first U.S. Senate race against Rick Lazio. If Teddy Roosevelt had given Americans The Square Deal, and Franklin Roosevelt had given Americans The New Deal, Clinton had given the Jewish-American bullet-voters The New Square Deal.
15. Several prominent legal scholars and men of letters are among those who have filed amici curae (friends-of-the-court) briefs for Pollard. My favorites include: the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus of Notre Dame University; the ACLU, and a long list that can be found at: http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2000/122800.htm
16. I refer readers to a web page that lists comparative crimes and sentences: http://www.jonathanpollard.org/sentences.htm
17. Alan Dershowitz (of whom I am no Chasid, but he is a good gauge of whether it is an act of Jewish overreaching to seek Pollard’s pardon) has written why American Jews should be working for Pollard’s freedom: http://www.jonathanpollard.org/1999/030799.htm
18. Seymour Reich, a former chairman of the Presidents Conference, advocated a Clinton pardon seven years ago. More recently, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has called on President George W. Bush to pardon Pollard.
19. A final word: I cannot emphasize enough that Pollard did terrible, terrible stuff. I am not impressed with some people's arguments that he needed to do what he did, that he gave Israel documents that America was obligated to share with Israel anyway, that he had to do it to save lives. But, for G-d’s sake, after 23 years in prison, his continued incarceration no longer is about him. It is about us -- it is about Jews. It is a statement to American Jews that says to us every day: “We in Washington regard you differently from Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, German-Americans, Polish-Americans, Latino-Americans. You may need a reminder that other people don’t need. You need to remember what we do to people who are not loyal to this country, who have loyalties diverted elsewhere.”
Thus, Pollard's continued incarceration is personally offensive to the Jewish community.
Revisiting the Extraordinary Obstacles that Stopped Politicians Forcing a Retreat from Judea-Samaria
I believe, as we all do in your and my circles, that things happen for reasons that HaKadosh Barukh Hu understands better than we. As we say in the Haftorah for the fast day, His thoughts are not our thoughts.
Every single time, since June 1967, that an Israeli Prime Minister has tried to give up any part of Yesha, or that an American president has pushed the Israelis to cede part of Yesha, something unnatural has happened. Highlights: Shamir, after Madrid, rapidly lost control of Government. After Rabin was assassinated, Peres had some 80-90% popularity, so called early elections with a goal to have a strong Knesset to support massive Yesha concessions. Yet, a few months later, he had lost all support in the face of an absolutely unprecedented wave of bus bombings, and Netanyahu was elected. Netanyahu went to Wye Plantation, conceded on Hebron, and almost immediately ran into a complete turn-around from heavy popularity to a nose-dive. Ehud Barak came to Washington, offering to give up so much, and he returned to Intifada II and a landslide loss to Sharon. Sharon initially pursued targeted assassinations of terrorists and was fantastically successful and popular. Then he turned to giving up land, and he was given a potch. He proceeded to give up Gaza and announced that his next focus was kadimah – to give up land in the east. He has been in a coma ever since. Olmert had initial popularity and success, then turned to giving up Yesha, and he was hit with the war in Lebanon, which destroyed the rationale for giving up land. He persisted, so was brought down remarkably.
Meanwhile, Ford turned on Israel with the Kissinger reassessment. Soon after, Ford’s popularity declined, unrelated to the Middle East, culminating with his slipping, falling, and then saying that eastern Europe was not under Soviet hegemony. Carter came in, was immensely popular. He turned anti-Israel, brutally pressed Begin. And soon the Iranians were holding hostages while inflation hit 20%, and he was out. Reagan was mostly pro-Israel and made it through eight years with his name mostly intact. But he did press Begin on Lebanon during the 1982 War, leading to the events that caused the worst security debacle in Reagan’s Presidency – the 241 Marines blown up in South Lebanon. Bush I pressed Israel, with James Baker. There were horrible words spoken. And a strange thing happened: in the midst of an election campaign, he was in Japan at a banquet, and he was televised suddenly vomiting on the Japanese Premier. He went from 80+ popularity overnight to a nothing. The Clinton White House pressed Israel and ended up with its own crises. Bush II was the best friend Israel ever had, for most of his first 4-5 years, and he was blessed at home with great popularity. He then began pressing Sharon to give up Gaza, recognizing a “Palestinian State” and pushing a “Road Map,” and suddenly he nose-dived with huge losses two years ago. He did not learn from his potch, started talking about pursuing the Road map with Olmert, and further was reduced.
I am not sure that all this is coincidence. The past 40 years do not show that Hashem disturbed the momentum of giving up the Sinai, as He seems absolutely to have changed the course of nature to prevent every effort to give up parts of Yehuda and Shomron. But, even there, Begin went from glory and a Nobel Prize to an incalculable mental breakdown that left him spending his last years as a mentally distraught recluse in his apartment.
Every single time, since June 1967, that an Israeli Prime Minister has tried to give up any part of Yesha, or that an American president has pushed the Israelis to cede part of Yesha, something unnatural has happened. Highlights: Shamir, after Madrid, rapidly lost control of Government. After Rabin was assassinated, Peres had some 80-90% popularity, so called early elections with a goal to have a strong Knesset to support massive Yesha concessions. Yet, a few months later, he had lost all support in the face of an absolutely unprecedented wave of bus bombings, and Netanyahu was elected. Netanyahu went to Wye Plantation, conceded on Hebron, and almost immediately ran into a complete turn-around from heavy popularity to a nose-dive. Ehud Barak came to Washington, offering to give up so much, and he returned to Intifada II and a landslide loss to Sharon. Sharon initially pursued targeted assassinations of terrorists and was fantastically successful and popular. Then he turned to giving up land, and he was given a potch. He proceeded to give up Gaza and announced that his next focus was kadimah – to give up land in the east. He has been in a coma ever since. Olmert had initial popularity and success, then turned to giving up Yesha, and he was hit with the war in Lebanon, which destroyed the rationale for giving up land. He persisted, so was brought down remarkably.
Meanwhile, Ford turned on Israel with the Kissinger reassessment. Soon after, Ford’s popularity declined, unrelated to the Middle East, culminating with his slipping, falling, and then saying that eastern Europe was not under Soviet hegemony. Carter came in, was immensely popular. He turned anti-Israel, brutally pressed Begin. And soon the Iranians were holding hostages while inflation hit 20%, and he was out. Reagan was mostly pro-Israel and made it through eight years with his name mostly intact. But he did press Begin on Lebanon during the 1982 War, leading to the events that caused the worst security debacle in Reagan’s Presidency – the 241 Marines blown up in South Lebanon. Bush I pressed Israel, with James Baker. There were horrible words spoken. And a strange thing happened: in the midst of an election campaign, he was in Japan at a banquet, and he was televised suddenly vomiting on the Japanese Premier. He went from 80+ popularity overnight to a nothing. The Clinton White House pressed Israel and ended up with its own crises. Bush II was the best friend Israel ever had, for most of his first 4-5 years, and he was blessed at home with great popularity. He then began pressing Sharon to give up Gaza, recognizing a “Palestinian State” and pushing a “Road Map,” and suddenly he nose-dived with huge losses two years ago. He did not learn from his potch, started talking about pursuing the Road map with Olmert, and further was reduced.
I am not sure that all this is coincidence. The past 40 years do not show that Hashem disturbed the momentum of giving up the Sinai, as He seems absolutely to have changed the course of nature to prevent every effort to give up parts of Yehuda and Shomron. But, even there, Begin went from glory and a Nobel Prize to an incalculable mental breakdown that left him spending his last years as a mentally distraught recluse in his apartment.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Israel's Usual Gang of Idiots: Withdraw from Reality
February 12, 2008 11:50 a.m.
The Usual Gang of Idiots . . . We Told You So
Amid condemnation throughout the world against Israel unfairly cutting off utility services to Gaza, as Israel has done from time to time in its pathetically inadequate response to the incessant Hamas rocketing of Sderot, it is forgotten that the rocketing continues unabated. Israel gave up Gaza unilaterally, and Israel’s leaders congratulated themselves on the brilliance of their step toward peace. “What a concept!” they arrogantly boasted. “We just got up and left. And now we have no more problems from Gaza.”
Yes. And Hamas soon took Gaza from Abbas, almost as methodically and predictably as a fullback taking a hand-off from a quarterback in a straight draw play. For those who have been keeping score, the reign of terror never has rained more torrentially. The same cast of characters – when I was younger, Mad Magazine used to refer to its crew as the “usual gang of idiots,” but they knew what they were doing – left Southern Lebanon unilaterally with no safeguards to prevent Nasrallah from converting the area into a Hezbollah rocket garden. And the same characters, the usual gang of idiots, now pursue their lame “two-state solution” for Judea-Samaria as the murderous Abbas and his surrogate terrorist con men take advantage of George Bush’s desperate need to get the news focus away from the subprime mortgage crisis, the looming recession, oil prices, and stalemates in Iraq -- while also manipulating Olmert’s desperate desire to keep people focused on anything other than Olmert and his own incompetence. (With all the official governmental investigations underway against Olmert, it is amazing that anyone can con him. It’s like the movie “The Sting,” where only the Paul Newman character can out-con Robert Shaw’s Doyle Lonigan.)
So, Olmert’s plan to slowly hand over parts of Judea and Samaria to Abbas – who inexorably will be overthrown by Hamas on the next set of downs – would condemn Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to the kind of incessant rocketing from the east that Haifa now faces when Nasrallah goes on frenzy up north, and that Sderot lives under every day. When Ehud Barak – Israel’s least effective Prime Minister ever – gave up South Lebanon unilaterally, he assured that he had brought peace. “What a concept! We just got up and left. No more problems.” When Sharon gave up Gaza unilaterally, he assured that he had brought peace. “What a concept! We just got up and left. No more problems.” Both foolishly said that, if the Arabs go into the evacuated areas and turn them into terror zones, Israel simply could and would march right back in and take the land back. Nice and simple. So, nothing to worry about. What a concept!
Turns out they can’t. Israel can’t just march right back in, nice and simple, and turn back the clock. They can’t even turn off the electric. If the Leftists have an organization still named “Peace Now,” our side ought to form an organization called “We Told You So.”
We told you so.
In the world press, when the dozens of rockets land each day in Sderot, the reports pooh-pooh the event. “Twenty rockets fell, but no one was injured.” Or – “Twenty rockets fell, but no one was killed. Only two injuries are reported.” Read below to understand what it means when “only two injuries are reported.”
From the Jerusalem Post of February 11, 2008, written by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1202742131362&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
The Usual Gang of Idiots . . . We Told You So
Amid condemnation throughout the world against Israel unfairly cutting off utility services to Gaza, as Israel has done from time to time in its pathetically inadequate response to the incessant Hamas rocketing of Sderot, it is forgotten that the rocketing continues unabated. Israel gave up Gaza unilaterally, and Israel’s leaders congratulated themselves on the brilliance of their step toward peace. “What a concept!” they arrogantly boasted. “We just got up and left. And now we have no more problems from Gaza.”
Yes. And Hamas soon took Gaza from Abbas, almost as methodically and predictably as a fullback taking a hand-off from a quarterback in a straight draw play. For those who have been keeping score, the reign of terror never has rained more torrentially. The same cast of characters – when I was younger, Mad Magazine used to refer to its crew as the “usual gang of idiots,” but they knew what they were doing – left Southern Lebanon unilaterally with no safeguards to prevent Nasrallah from converting the area into a Hezbollah rocket garden. And the same characters, the usual gang of idiots, now pursue their lame “two-state solution” for Judea-Samaria as the murderous Abbas and his surrogate terrorist con men take advantage of George Bush’s desperate need to get the news focus away from the subprime mortgage crisis, the looming recession, oil prices, and stalemates in Iraq -- while also manipulating Olmert’s desperate desire to keep people focused on anything other than Olmert and his own incompetence. (With all the official governmental investigations underway against Olmert, it is amazing that anyone can con him. It’s like the movie “The Sting,” where only the Paul Newman character can out-con Robert Shaw’s Doyle Lonigan.)
So, Olmert’s plan to slowly hand over parts of Judea and Samaria to Abbas – who inexorably will be overthrown by Hamas on the next set of downs – would condemn Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to the kind of incessant rocketing from the east that Haifa now faces when Nasrallah goes on frenzy up north, and that Sderot lives under every day. When Ehud Barak – Israel’s least effective Prime Minister ever – gave up South Lebanon unilaterally, he assured that he had brought peace. “What a concept! We just got up and left. No more problems.” When Sharon gave up Gaza unilaterally, he assured that he had brought peace. “What a concept! We just got up and left. No more problems.” Both foolishly said that, if the Arabs go into the evacuated areas and turn them into terror zones, Israel simply could and would march right back in and take the land back. Nice and simple. So, nothing to worry about. What a concept!
Turns out they can’t. Israel can’t just march right back in, nice and simple, and turn back the clock. They can’t even turn off the electric. If the Leftists have an organization still named “Peace Now,” our side ought to form an organization called “We Told You So.”
We told you so.
In the world press, when the dozens of rockets land each day in Sderot, the reports pooh-pooh the event. “Twenty rockets fell, but no one was injured.” Or – “Twenty rockets fell, but no one was killed. Only two injuries are reported.” Read below to understand what it means when “only two injuries are reported.”
From the Jerusalem Post of February 11, 2008, written by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1202742131362&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
Brothers wounded by Kassam undergo more operations
Osher Twito, the eight-year-old Sderot boy who was very seriously wounded in a Kassam rocket attack over the weekend, underwent a second operation on his remaining leg at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer on Monday.
He remains intentionally anesthetized and respirated to minimize his pain.
His 19-year-old brother, Rami, was in good condition after he underwent a second operation on Monday as well. Although Rami was stable, Sheba officials said that both Osher and Rami would need to undergo more operations and rehabilitation to improve their functioning. The brothers were hurt when a Kassam rocket landed a few meters from where they were standing. They had gone out to buy a present for their father, whose birthday was on Monday.
On Sunday, Osher and Rami were transferred to Sheba on Sunday because Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, where they were first hospitalized, does not have the rehabilitation facilities that Osher requires.Sheba doctors still couldn't say on Monday whether Osher's remaining leg would have to be amputated or not, as there is always the threat of infection and the main artery in the ankle was damaged.
Meanwhile, the brothers and their parents were visited at Sheba on Monday by the Shabu family from Kiryat Shmona. The Shabus' son had lost a leg in a rocket attack in the North, and they wanted to reassure the Twitos that rehabilitation was possible even after such a traumatic event.
The family also received visits from outgoing mayor of Sderot, Eli Moyal, and former defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai. On Sunday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni visited them at Sheba.
We're Right and The Whole World Is Wrong
We're Right, the Whole World's Wrong
From The Forward (April 19, 2002)
The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.
We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration?
After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us?
Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?
The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?
The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan.
Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.
We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs.
Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?
Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.
We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.
Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what.
We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria.
Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.
Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney, is a board member of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council's Jewish Community Relations Committee and national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is the author of "General Sharon's War Against Time Magazine."
From The Forward (April 19, 2002)
"The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw. I don't think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong."At this moment in time, many Jews who love and support Israel hear the soft voice within, asking the question to which Kofi Annan recently alluded in Madrid: Can we alone be right, while the whole world around is wrong?
— Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary General, speaking in Madrid, Spain
The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.
We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration?
After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us?
Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?
The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?
The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan.
Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.
We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs.
Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?
Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.
We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.
Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what.
We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria.
Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.
Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney, is a board member of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council's Jewish Community Relations Committee and national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is the author of "General Sharon's War Against Time Magazine."
Jerusalem Will Not Be Divided
We have the right to an indivisible Jerusalem
From L.A. Jewish Journal (Nov. 1, 2007)
Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky invites a forthright open dialogue, a conversation about Jerusalem. Contemplating Israeli talks with those governing the autonomous Arab enclaves of Judea and Samaria -- Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestine Authority -- Rabbi Kanefsky writes that it is time for us to be honest about the story of Jerusalem. Employing the pages of The Jewish Journal, he particularly challenges those in the Orthodox Zionist community to converse, to be honest about Jerusalem.
I accept his invitation in these pages for this dialogue, for this discussion, for this honest telling of our claim to an eternally undivided capital city of Jerusalem.
Ever since I learned to pray, I learned about Jerusalem. In time as a boy, I learned to pray three times every day in my "Sh'moneh Esrai" prayer for the return to and the rebuilding of united Jerusalem. Since childhood, every time I have eaten a meal with bread, I have recited prayers of thanks for the food -- and for the rebuilding of united Jerusalem. If I eat a cookie, I follow with a prayer of thanks -- and for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. I am not unique. For 2,000 years and more, my people have cried for Jerusalem and laughed for her.
As much as I have come to love America in my lifetime -- because this country has been so good to me and my people -- I have no clue what day on the calendar the British burned the White House during the War of 1812. But I know that it was on the ninth of Av that the Babylonians burned the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. And it was the same day that Rome burned the rebuilt Temple.
This is where honesty begins in my dialogue with Rabbi Kanefsky. It may sound militaristic to him or strangely uncompromising. But my claim to Jerusalem is eternal and unyielding to a Jerusalem indivisible and united, because no one in my family line, going back to the beginning of the exile, ever yielded our claim to Jerusalem.
We were driven out by Babylonians, and we outlasted them and returned. We were exiled by Romans, and we outlasted them and returned. They built an Arch of Titus in Italy to glorify in taking down our Jerusalem, and we have outlived them and their empire, and we have returned.We got married, and we broke a glass under the chuppah to remember a Jerusalem that had fallen, even as we recited the blessing moments earlier under that same canopy that the day will come when, once again, the sounds of joy and gladness, the celebrations of the groom and bride, will be heard in Jerusalem and her outskirts.
No one compromises on capital cities. America moved her capital around -- from Philadelphia to New York to Washington, D.C. -- but she never offered to split it with the British or Jefferson Davis. No one offers to split Damascus or Beirut or Cairo or Baghdad for peace. No one offers to split Paris or London or Madrid or Prague.
Even the experience with Berlin is instructive. The world forced onto the Germans -- veritably shoved it right down their throats -- the division of Berlin. It barely lasted half a century before the wall came down and the city was reunited.
We owe no apologies, no explanations. From 1948 to 1967, King Hussein of Jordan wrongfully was regnant over East Jerusalem. He made no effort to treat it as New Amman. Nor did any Arab ruler in all of history before him ever act to make Jerusalem a capital. Jerusalem simply was not and never has been all that central to Arabia or Islam. Muslim prayers are directed toward Mecca and Medina. By contrast, praying from my locus in Southern California, I face east toward Jerusalem.
There is a corruption in the dialogue when I am challenged to speak "honestly" in defense of my right to see Jerusalem remain the eternally indivisible capital of Israel and the Jewish People. The Jews came back to Jerusalem with no less right than did America march to Washington, D.C.
If there is something wrong with entering a city by liberating it in battle, then it was equally wrong for any Arab conqueror before Israel to have entered the same city. But if a military victory places Arab negotiators at the table and drives out the British, who drove out the Ottomans, then a Jewish army's successful victory in a war of self-defense trumps all other secular-based claims to "right over might."
Because, despite any revisionist attempt to rewrite what happened in 1967, the fact remains that Israel was not looking to expand her borders but to live. And in 1948, she compromised so much more than any other nation has compromised, just to gain the ratification of a U.N. body that never has been in Israel's pocket.
Rabbi Kanefsky's call for honest conversation, for honesty from Orthodox Zionists, is an invitation to recall how the dialogue even came to begin. It began because Jews and our institutions and landmarks were driven out by marauders. And the Arab world, primarily the Jordanians, aimed to eradicate what was left. There were synagogues in Jerusalem -- the Ramban Synagogue, the Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, shuls all over East Jerusalem -- that Jordan razed to the ground. They converted one venerable shul to a cheese factory, another to a stall for goats. They uprooted tombstones from the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives and used them for pavement, for construction, even for latrines. They banned us from the Western Wall.
Jerusalem belonged to my ancestors. It belonged to my grandparents in Poland and Russia. It belongs to me. That's the honest story.
From L.A. Jewish Journal (Nov. 1, 2007)
Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky invites a forthright open dialogue, a conversation about Jerusalem. Contemplating Israeli talks with those governing the autonomous Arab enclaves of Judea and Samaria -- Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestine Authority -- Rabbi Kanefsky writes that it is time for us to be honest about the story of Jerusalem. Employing the pages of The Jewish Journal, he particularly challenges those in the Orthodox Zionist community to converse, to be honest about Jerusalem.
I accept his invitation in these pages for this dialogue, for this discussion, for this honest telling of our claim to an eternally undivided capital city of Jerusalem.
Ever since I learned to pray, I learned about Jerusalem. In time as a boy, I learned to pray three times every day in my "Sh'moneh Esrai" prayer for the return to and the rebuilding of united Jerusalem. Since childhood, every time I have eaten a meal with bread, I have recited prayers of thanks for the food -- and for the rebuilding of united Jerusalem. If I eat a cookie, I follow with a prayer of thanks -- and for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. I am not unique. For 2,000 years and more, my people have cried for Jerusalem and laughed for her.
As much as I have come to love America in my lifetime -- because this country has been so good to me and my people -- I have no clue what day on the calendar the British burned the White House during the War of 1812. But I know that it was on the ninth of Av that the Babylonians burned the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. And it was the same day that Rome burned the rebuilt Temple.
This is where honesty begins in my dialogue with Rabbi Kanefsky. It may sound militaristic to him or strangely uncompromising. But my claim to Jerusalem is eternal and unyielding to a Jerusalem indivisible and united, because no one in my family line, going back to the beginning of the exile, ever yielded our claim to Jerusalem.
We were driven out by Babylonians, and we outlasted them and returned. We were exiled by Romans, and we outlasted them and returned. They built an Arch of Titus in Italy to glorify in taking down our Jerusalem, and we have outlived them and their empire, and we have returned.We got married, and we broke a glass under the chuppah to remember a Jerusalem that had fallen, even as we recited the blessing moments earlier under that same canopy that the day will come when, once again, the sounds of joy and gladness, the celebrations of the groom and bride, will be heard in Jerusalem and her outskirts.
No one compromises on capital cities. America moved her capital around -- from Philadelphia to New York to Washington, D.C. -- but she never offered to split it with the British or Jefferson Davis. No one offers to split Damascus or Beirut or Cairo or Baghdad for peace. No one offers to split Paris or London or Madrid or Prague.
Even the experience with Berlin is instructive. The world forced onto the Germans -- veritably shoved it right down their throats -- the division of Berlin. It barely lasted half a century before the wall came down and the city was reunited.
We owe no apologies, no explanations. From 1948 to 1967, King Hussein of Jordan wrongfully was regnant over East Jerusalem. He made no effort to treat it as New Amman. Nor did any Arab ruler in all of history before him ever act to make Jerusalem a capital. Jerusalem simply was not and never has been all that central to Arabia or Islam. Muslim prayers are directed toward Mecca and Medina. By contrast, praying from my locus in Southern California, I face east toward Jerusalem.
There is a corruption in the dialogue when I am challenged to speak "honestly" in defense of my right to see Jerusalem remain the eternally indivisible capital of Israel and the Jewish People. The Jews came back to Jerusalem with no less right than did America march to Washington, D.C.
If there is something wrong with entering a city by liberating it in battle, then it was equally wrong for any Arab conqueror before Israel to have entered the same city. But if a military victory places Arab negotiators at the table and drives out the British, who drove out the Ottomans, then a Jewish army's successful victory in a war of self-defense trumps all other secular-based claims to "right over might."
Because, despite any revisionist attempt to rewrite what happened in 1967, the fact remains that Israel was not looking to expand her borders but to live. And in 1948, she compromised so much more than any other nation has compromised, just to gain the ratification of a U.N. body that never has been in Israel's pocket.
Rabbi Kanefsky's call for honest conversation, for honesty from Orthodox Zionists, is an invitation to recall how the dialogue even came to begin. It began because Jews and our institutions and landmarks were driven out by marauders. And the Arab world, primarily the Jordanians, aimed to eradicate what was left. There were synagogues in Jerusalem -- the Ramban Synagogue, the Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, shuls all over East Jerusalem -- that Jordan razed to the ground. They converted one venerable shul to a cheese factory, another to a stall for goats. They uprooted tombstones from the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives and used them for pavement, for construction, even for latrines. They banned us from the Western Wall.
Jerusalem belonged to my ancestors. It belonged to my grandparents in Poland and Russia. It belongs to me. That's the honest story.
The West Bank: A Land Without a Name
Land Without a Name: The West Bank
From National Review Online (May 23, 2002)
The recent landslide vote of the Israeli Likud party, completely rejecting an Arab country west of the Jordan River, reflects the mindset of the largest political party in Israel today. And there is good reason for that position — the land of Judea and Samaria, birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, does not necessarily belong to the Arab Islamic world.
It is instructive that the Arab world does not even have a name for the land. Think about it. "Palestine" is a name that the ancient Romans gave the Land of Israel after that now-vanished empire destroyed the last breaths of Jewish freedom in the Holy Land in 135. The Romans renamed the cities and the land to excise all memory of the stubborn Jewish patriots who had defied the empire from within the Holy Land. So, Jerusalem became Aelonia Capitolina. Shechem became Naples. (Naples later became Nablus.) And the country itself was renamed "Palestine" for the Biblical people who preceded the Jews — the Philistines.
For all the centuries of the Jewish Diaspora, long after Arabs invaded the area to conquer at the point of a sword, the land of Judea and Samaria never became an Arab territorial entity. By the 20th century, with the rise of political Zionism and the establishment by the League of Nations of a "Palestine Mandate," administered by Britain, the Jews still were the "Palestinians." Thus, the predecessor of the Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post. The predecessor of the United Jewish Appeal was the United Palestine Appeal. Even the American support group for Menachem Begin's nationalist Irgun underground called itself The American League for a Free Palestine. It sounded right to 1960s film viewers when Ari ben Canaan, Paul Newman's character in Exodus, spoke of a Jewish yearning for "Palestine." That's not ancient history; it was still that way during the Kennedy years.
The Arabs have names for countries like Syria, Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, Libya, and Kuwait. They even have two countries named Yemen. But through all of recorded time they never have had a name for the land of Judea and Samaria. "The West Bank"? Such a name describes Jersey City, lying on that bank of the Hudson. Santa Monica, perhaps, is a more elegant bank, east of the Pacific. And we may note Louisville, reposing on the south bank of the majestic Ohio River. These are cities, not countries.
But "The West Bank"? In 1964, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, it was eponymously created to liberate "Palestine" — namely, the country of Israel — from Haifa to Tel Aviv to the Negev. The Palestine Liberation Organization had no interest in the occupied part of the Kingdom of Jordan that lay west of the Jordan River. PLO. terrorists did not murder Jordanian children, as they did Israelis. They did not hijack Jordanian airplanes. They did not murder Jordanian Olympians. They had no interest in the land without a name. To this day, the logo of each and every Palestinian "activist" group, groups ranging from Hamas to Islamic Jihad to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine to Fatah, all depict the map of a "Palestine" that is identical to pre-1967 Israel — no "West Bank."
For many of the places that Yasser Arafat covets in Samaria and Judea, he uses the names of the Hebrew Bible. He claims Hebron (Genesis 23). He claims Bethlehem (Genesis 35). He claims Jericho (Joshua 5). His people burned down the Tomb of Joseph (Joshua 24). But he cannot use the Hebrew Bible's names for the land that the Christian Scriptures (Matthew 1), no less than the Torah, calls Judea — because it would sound ridiculous complaining that "the Jews have stolen Judea from the Arabs." Almost as silly as suicide bombers in Hamas calling themselves "good Samaritans."
There never — ever — has been an Arab Palestine west of the Jordan River. From 1948-1967, while Jordan's King Hussein illegally occupied the region in a temporary land grab that both the Arab and the non-Arab world rejected, no "Palestinian Arab" nation was created there. The city of Jerusalem was not elevated to any status or import. Rather, the land became desirable only after Israel liberated East Jerusalem and established itself in Judea and Samaria while fighting for its life in 1967. Indeed, as the Samaria-based Jenin refugee camp illustrates, Arabs encamped in the heart of Judea and Samaria still regard themselves as "refugees." Judea and Samaria is not their home, and their UNRWA refugee camp proclaims it. They do not want the "West Bank" for a homeland — they want a different "Palestine": Tel Aviv and Haifa.
There are now 200,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria, and another 200,000 Jews living in "Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem." They are not leaving any sooner than will the descendants of the Americanos who squatted on the Californios' land during the era of the 1849 Gold Rush. The Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo helped make the squatting in California irreversible. The Battle of the Alamo helped make the squatting in Texas irreversible. Both California and Texas came into being because brave and hearty American settlers created "illegal settlements" on "occupied land." Eventually, those illegal settlements became states in our Union. In the same way, the Likud Party Central Committee has reaffirmed that Judea and Samaria constitute the patrimonial heartland of a people that has no less right to be there than did the settlers hailing from Europe who planted themselves in Crawford, Texas.
The Likud Central Committee vote is a harbinger of a Jewish nation that is taking its patrimony off the chopping block. Perhaps Chairman Arafat should look to the Kingdom of Jordan for the land of his Palestine. That country, itself an historically recent creation, is built on 78 percent of the "Palestine Mandate." At least 1,700,000 Palestinian Arabs live in Jordan, more than in any other country. The queen is a Palestinian Arab. And the majority of all Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs. Why shouldn't King Abdullah offer territorial compromise, taking a risk for peace and making a gesture towards the queen? Yasser Arafat told President Clinton in September 1999 that he has proof there never was a Jewish Temple on the Jerusalem Temple Mount. Maybe it is time to apprise Arafat that, when he tells Americans there never were Jews at the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, he is denying not one but both prongs of our nation's Judeo-Christian heritage.
From National Review Online (May 23, 2002)
The recent landslide vote of the Israeli Likud party, completely rejecting an Arab country west of the Jordan River, reflects the mindset of the largest political party in Israel today. And there is good reason for that position — the land of Judea and Samaria, birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, does not necessarily belong to the Arab Islamic world.
It is instructive that the Arab world does not even have a name for the land. Think about it. "Palestine" is a name that the ancient Romans gave the Land of Israel after that now-vanished empire destroyed the last breaths of Jewish freedom in the Holy Land in 135. The Romans renamed the cities and the land to excise all memory of the stubborn Jewish patriots who had defied the empire from within the Holy Land. So, Jerusalem became Aelonia Capitolina. Shechem became Naples. (Naples later became Nablus.) And the country itself was renamed "Palestine" for the Biblical people who preceded the Jews — the Philistines.
For all the centuries of the Jewish Diaspora, long after Arabs invaded the area to conquer at the point of a sword, the land of Judea and Samaria never became an Arab territorial entity. By the 20th century, with the rise of political Zionism and the establishment by the League of Nations of a "Palestine Mandate," administered by Britain, the Jews still were the "Palestinians." Thus, the predecessor of the Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post. The predecessor of the United Jewish Appeal was the United Palestine Appeal. Even the American support group for Menachem Begin's nationalist Irgun underground called itself The American League for a Free Palestine. It sounded right to 1960s film viewers when Ari ben Canaan, Paul Newman's character in Exodus, spoke of a Jewish yearning for "Palestine." That's not ancient history; it was still that way during the Kennedy years.
The Arabs have names for countries like Syria, Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, Libya, and Kuwait. They even have two countries named Yemen. But through all of recorded time they never have had a name for the land of Judea and Samaria. "The West Bank"? Such a name describes Jersey City, lying on that bank of the Hudson. Santa Monica, perhaps, is a more elegant bank, east of the Pacific. And we may note Louisville, reposing on the south bank of the majestic Ohio River. These are cities, not countries.
But "The West Bank"? In 1964, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, it was eponymously created to liberate "Palestine" — namely, the country of Israel — from Haifa to Tel Aviv to the Negev. The Palestine Liberation Organization had no interest in the occupied part of the Kingdom of Jordan that lay west of the Jordan River. PLO. terrorists did not murder Jordanian children, as they did Israelis. They did not hijack Jordanian airplanes. They did not murder Jordanian Olympians. They had no interest in the land without a name. To this day, the logo of each and every Palestinian "activist" group, groups ranging from Hamas to Islamic Jihad to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine to Fatah, all depict the map of a "Palestine" that is identical to pre-1967 Israel — no "West Bank."
For many of the places that Yasser Arafat covets in Samaria and Judea, he uses the names of the Hebrew Bible. He claims Hebron (Genesis 23). He claims Bethlehem (Genesis 35). He claims Jericho (Joshua 5). His people burned down the Tomb of Joseph (Joshua 24). But he cannot use the Hebrew Bible's names for the land that the Christian Scriptures (Matthew 1), no less than the Torah, calls Judea — because it would sound ridiculous complaining that "the Jews have stolen Judea from the Arabs." Almost as silly as suicide bombers in Hamas calling themselves "good Samaritans."
There never — ever — has been an Arab Palestine west of the Jordan River. From 1948-1967, while Jordan's King Hussein illegally occupied the region in a temporary land grab that both the Arab and the non-Arab world rejected, no "Palestinian Arab" nation was created there. The city of Jerusalem was not elevated to any status or import. Rather, the land became desirable only after Israel liberated East Jerusalem and established itself in Judea and Samaria while fighting for its life in 1967. Indeed, as the Samaria-based Jenin refugee camp illustrates, Arabs encamped in the heart of Judea and Samaria still regard themselves as "refugees." Judea and Samaria is not their home, and their UNRWA refugee camp proclaims it. They do not want the "West Bank" for a homeland — they want a different "Palestine": Tel Aviv and Haifa.
There are now 200,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria, and another 200,000 Jews living in "Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem." They are not leaving any sooner than will the descendants of the Americanos who squatted on the Californios' land during the era of the 1849 Gold Rush. The Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo helped make the squatting in California irreversible. The Battle of the Alamo helped make the squatting in Texas irreversible. Both California and Texas came into being because brave and hearty American settlers created "illegal settlements" on "occupied land." Eventually, those illegal settlements became states in our Union. In the same way, the Likud Party Central Committee has reaffirmed that Judea and Samaria constitute the patrimonial heartland of a people that has no less right to be there than did the settlers hailing from Europe who planted themselves in Crawford, Texas.
The Likud Central Committee vote is a harbinger of a Jewish nation that is taking its patrimony off the chopping block. Perhaps Chairman Arafat should look to the Kingdom of Jordan for the land of his Palestine. That country, itself an historically recent creation, is built on 78 percent of the "Palestine Mandate." At least 1,700,000 Palestinian Arabs live in Jordan, more than in any other country. The queen is a Palestinian Arab. And the majority of all Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs. Why shouldn't King Abdullah offer territorial compromise, taking a risk for peace and making a gesture towards the queen? Yasser Arafat told President Clinton in September 1999 that he has proof there never was a Jewish Temple on the Jerusalem Temple Mount. Maybe it is time to apprise Arafat that, when he tells Americans there never were Jews at the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, he is denying not one but both prongs of our nation's Judeo-Christian heritage.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Israel Has Only One Option
A Country With Only One Option
When the thunderous claps in Heaven jolted Orange County out of our rooms a few Sunday mornings ago, I thought of Israel. When the earth – almost simultaneously – thundered below our feet in a 3.8 earthquake, I thought of Israel. What must it be like to live in Nahariyah, Tz’fat, Ashdod, or Haifa – and be jolted out of bed all night and out of one’s home all day by incessant thunder and earthquake?
That Sunday morning’s earth-shaking rattlings in Orange County were safe thunder and earthquakes. By contrast, the storm of Hezbollah rockets shaking Israel’s population centers aims to destroy. They are the rockets that maim and wound and murder. They are aimed without target, without discrimination – just aimed at Jewish civilian population centers. They are not targeted at a military objective but are lobbed at Jewish civilian centers – small villages, mid-sized towns, and great urban centers like Haifa. That is the strange military target of the enemy – a Hitler-like objective solely to murder Jews – any Jews, wherever the rocket may land. Just to murder Jews. Regardless of political affiliation, ethnic origin, or religious identity. Whether socialist Ashkenazim in “Red Haifa,” Sephardic immigrants from Morocco living in Kiryat Shmonah, Ethiopian Jews in Ashdod, Orthodox Hassidim in Tz’fat – or even the fools of Neturei Karta. Just to murder Jews.
For Israel, there are no options in this new Arab war aimed once again at driving Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. If she relents, then the Jewish State cannot continue as a viable entity.
If Israel did not want peace with Arabs – and for the people of Lebanon -- she would not have resisted for six years the growing need to strike at Hezbollah and to stop the build-up of anti-personnel weapons amassed along her northern border. Israel waited patiently and nervously for the Government of Lebanon to rein in a growing terrorist state-within-a-state. Even the City of Los Angeles did not allow the Symbionese Liberation Army and General Cinque to operate unfettered, waging war and recruiting troops. The City of Angels obliterated the SLA.
Nor did America allow a separate army and government to establish itself in Dixie during the Lincoln Years. Tens of thousands of Americans were killed in twenty minutes at Cold Harbor. More Americans were killed in one day at Antietam than in any other day in history up to that time. More Americans died in two days at Shiloh than during any other two days. More died in three days at Gettysburg than ever before died in three days. General Sherman marched against civilians – Americans – and incinerated the South; yet, great American heroes like Lincoln and Grant accepted the human cost of war. Sherman was medaled, not court-martialed. When a country fights for her survival as a country, she fights to survive.
The Beirut Government sat by, while Hezbollah openly built its infrastructure for terror amid the women and children of South Lebanon. Even as the Palestinian Authority abided the emergence of Hamas as a bona fide force within the areas of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza on land that would become a testing grounds for Yasser Arafat to demonstrate civility. Thus, Hezbollah and Hamas armed for years, finally dispatching terrorists brazenly across internationally recognized peaceful borders into Israel.
Hezbollah now has 12,000 missiles aimed randomly at Jewish population centers in Israel. At the rate of the 100 rockets they launch against Israel every day, Hezbollah can keep the murder and terror going non-stop for the next 120 days – four months. Iran and Syria stand ready to resupply, if only they can access the bridges and highways by which to transport their tools of mass death. America would not abide such a threat from either of our borders. No country would.
Worse, Hezbollah and Hamas stage their rockets and rocket launchers amid their civilian population. And it is a willing and supportive civilian population. In Gaza, the people voted for Hamas – this is not a peaceful population whose dreams for peace and coexistence have been hijacked by cruel generals in a midnight military coup. Rather, with Jimmy Carter testifying to their volition, this is a population who freely selected Hamas as their leadership. How can
Israel remove rockets and ground missiles that literally are based in garages of homes and in condominium complexes, in hospitals and in school buildings, amid children and moms who endorse the tactic of their role as human shield for terror? Yet how can Israel dare resist the need to take out the missiles?
How tragic that a new enemy has arisen against Western civilization – from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah – posing a new threat for a new age. Terror imposed by fascists within Islam aims to destroy civilians, women, children, male non-combatants – from the World Trade Center to the vacation hotels of Bali to the centers of Western civilian population. Do they represent the essence and core of Islam as a religion? Many of us just do not know – we would like to think not, but we just don’t know. We are not studied in Islam, so we listen genuinely for the voices of peace, the spokespersons for coexistence and mutual understanding. But we do not hear the voices of reproach, condemning the hijacking of a religion. So we do not know whether the faith has been hijacked or whether the terror is part of the faith, at least in some of its denominations overseas. But we do know that, in return for abandoning parts of Judea and Samaria to Yasser Arafat, Israel was rewarded with a government-authorized press that teaches people to hate Jews, a school system that teaches children to hate Jews, street signs named for people who murdered Jews, a summer camp program that trains children to hate Jews, a mass media of television and radio and newspapers that promote the hatred of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
Similarly, in return for abandoning Gaza unilaterally to Hamas, as urged by the present Bush Administration and implemented by the Sharon Government, Israel has been rewarded with a population on her southwestern border that democratically has elected terrorists to direct their affairs of state and convert their national agenda from building infrastructure and attending to social welfare to kidnapping innocents across the border and raining katyushas on civilians vacationing in Ashdod, launching the rockets from the Jewish homes and farms that Israel abandoned. We know that, in return for Ehud Barak unilaterally abandoning the security buffer in Southern Lebanon, as urged on him by the Clinton Administration, we now have an implacable enemy on Israel’s northern border, such as Israel never quite has experienced before. An enemy entrenched in a population that refuses to relinquish the human shield it provides to terrorists who mine the land, train rockets on Israel’s urban centers, and scheme to ambush and kidnap in cross-border forays.
For Israel there is no choice. We have seen what has become of the Maronite Christian population of Lebanon, the Christian population of Sudan, the Coptic Christian population of Egypt, the Christian populations of Iraq and Syria. We have seen what Sunnis do to Shiites every day,. and what Shiites do to Sunnis every day. It is not the way of the West but the way of intolerance and destruction. From the persecution of Berbers in Algeria to the hatred against Baluchis in Iran, it is an intolerance we have not seen since the Dark Ages. And, given what the terrorists to do to Christians – and what they do to each other – Israel knows what fate she, a state of Jews, would suffer if she falters now.
She has no choice but to live. And may she have the strength, with our support, to resist external political pressures that may aim in the future at other of her Jewish communities amid the heartland of our patrimony in Eretz Yisrael.
When the thunderous claps in Heaven jolted Orange County out of our rooms a few Sunday mornings ago, I thought of Israel. When the earth – almost simultaneously – thundered below our feet in a 3.8 earthquake, I thought of Israel. What must it be like to live in Nahariyah, Tz’fat, Ashdod, or Haifa – and be jolted out of bed all night and out of one’s home all day by incessant thunder and earthquake?
That Sunday morning’s earth-shaking rattlings in Orange County were safe thunder and earthquakes. By contrast, the storm of Hezbollah rockets shaking Israel’s population centers aims to destroy. They are the rockets that maim and wound and murder. They are aimed without target, without discrimination – just aimed at Jewish civilian population centers. They are not targeted at a military objective but are lobbed at Jewish civilian centers – small villages, mid-sized towns, and great urban centers like Haifa. That is the strange military target of the enemy – a Hitler-like objective solely to murder Jews – any Jews, wherever the rocket may land. Just to murder Jews. Regardless of political affiliation, ethnic origin, or religious identity. Whether socialist Ashkenazim in “Red Haifa,” Sephardic immigrants from Morocco living in Kiryat Shmonah, Ethiopian Jews in Ashdod, Orthodox Hassidim in Tz’fat – or even the fools of Neturei Karta. Just to murder Jews.
For Israel, there are no options in this new Arab war aimed once again at driving Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. If she relents, then the Jewish State cannot continue as a viable entity.
If Israel did not want peace with Arabs – and for the people of Lebanon -- she would not have resisted for six years the growing need to strike at Hezbollah and to stop the build-up of anti-personnel weapons amassed along her northern border. Israel waited patiently and nervously for the Government of Lebanon to rein in a growing terrorist state-within-a-state. Even the City of Los Angeles did not allow the Symbionese Liberation Army and General Cinque to operate unfettered, waging war and recruiting troops. The City of Angels obliterated the SLA.
Nor did America allow a separate army and government to establish itself in Dixie during the Lincoln Years. Tens of thousands of Americans were killed in twenty minutes at Cold Harbor. More Americans were killed in one day at Antietam than in any other day in history up to that time. More Americans died in two days at Shiloh than during any other two days. More died in three days at Gettysburg than ever before died in three days. General Sherman marched against civilians – Americans – and incinerated the South; yet, great American heroes like Lincoln and Grant accepted the human cost of war. Sherman was medaled, not court-martialed. When a country fights for her survival as a country, she fights to survive.
The Beirut Government sat by, while Hezbollah openly built its infrastructure for terror amid the women and children of South Lebanon. Even as the Palestinian Authority abided the emergence of Hamas as a bona fide force within the areas of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza on land that would become a testing grounds for Yasser Arafat to demonstrate civility. Thus, Hezbollah and Hamas armed for years, finally dispatching terrorists brazenly across internationally recognized peaceful borders into Israel.
Hezbollah now has 12,000 missiles aimed randomly at Jewish population centers in Israel. At the rate of the 100 rockets they launch against Israel every day, Hezbollah can keep the murder and terror going non-stop for the next 120 days – four months. Iran and Syria stand ready to resupply, if only they can access the bridges and highways by which to transport their tools of mass death. America would not abide such a threat from either of our borders. No country would.
Worse, Hezbollah and Hamas stage their rockets and rocket launchers amid their civilian population. And it is a willing and supportive civilian population. In Gaza, the people voted for Hamas – this is not a peaceful population whose dreams for peace and coexistence have been hijacked by cruel generals in a midnight military coup. Rather, with Jimmy Carter testifying to their volition, this is a population who freely selected Hamas as their leadership. How can
Israel remove rockets and ground missiles that literally are based in garages of homes and in condominium complexes, in hospitals and in school buildings, amid children and moms who endorse the tactic of their role as human shield for terror? Yet how can Israel dare resist the need to take out the missiles?
How tragic that a new enemy has arisen against Western civilization – from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah – posing a new threat for a new age. Terror imposed by fascists within Islam aims to destroy civilians, women, children, male non-combatants – from the World Trade Center to the vacation hotels of Bali to the centers of Western civilian population. Do they represent the essence and core of Islam as a religion? Many of us just do not know – we would like to think not, but we just don’t know. We are not studied in Islam, so we listen genuinely for the voices of peace, the spokespersons for coexistence and mutual understanding. But we do not hear the voices of reproach, condemning the hijacking of a religion. So we do not know whether the faith has been hijacked or whether the terror is part of the faith, at least in some of its denominations overseas. But we do know that, in return for abandoning parts of Judea and Samaria to Yasser Arafat, Israel was rewarded with a government-authorized press that teaches people to hate Jews, a school system that teaches children to hate Jews, street signs named for people who murdered Jews, a summer camp program that trains children to hate Jews, a mass media of television and radio and newspapers that promote the hatred of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
Similarly, in return for abandoning Gaza unilaterally to Hamas, as urged by the present Bush Administration and implemented by the Sharon Government, Israel has been rewarded with a population on her southwestern border that democratically has elected terrorists to direct their affairs of state and convert their national agenda from building infrastructure and attending to social welfare to kidnapping innocents across the border and raining katyushas on civilians vacationing in Ashdod, launching the rockets from the Jewish homes and farms that Israel abandoned. We know that, in return for Ehud Barak unilaterally abandoning the security buffer in Southern Lebanon, as urged on him by the Clinton Administration, we now have an implacable enemy on Israel’s northern border, such as Israel never quite has experienced before. An enemy entrenched in a population that refuses to relinquish the human shield it provides to terrorists who mine the land, train rockets on Israel’s urban centers, and scheme to ambush and kidnap in cross-border forays.
For Israel there is no choice. We have seen what has become of the Maronite Christian population of Lebanon, the Christian population of Sudan, the Coptic Christian population of Egypt, the Christian populations of Iraq and Syria. We have seen what Sunnis do to Shiites every day,. and what Shiites do to Sunnis every day. It is not the way of the West but the way of intolerance and destruction. From the persecution of Berbers in Algeria to the hatred against Baluchis in Iran, it is an intolerance we have not seen since the Dark Ages. And, given what the terrorists to do to Christians – and what they do to each other – Israel knows what fate she, a state of Jews, would suffer if she falters now.
She has no choice but to live. And may she have the strength, with our support, to resist external political pressures that may aim in the future at other of her Jewish communities amid the heartland of our patrimony in Eretz Yisrael.
Mahmoud Abbas is Phony: Why Negotiate with Him?
No Terms of Negotiation: If he can’t control Hamas and terrorism,
what’s the point of negotiating with him?
Modified from an article published on National Review Online (June 12, 2002)
I was a big-firm business-litigation attorney for nearly a decade. My favorite case matters are those that promptly move towards a negotiated settlement between or among parties who each emerge with something constructive, resulting in a "win-win" outcome. After the parties negotiate their agreement, we attorneys document the settlement and the parties' respective concessions. Invariably, we insert into each settlement agreement a paragraph that seems so obvious, that an attorney omitting it could risk a claim of malpractice:
Which brings us to the Middle East and Mahmoud Abbas. We may leave for another day the question of whether the "Palestinian people" actually are Arabs in Judea and Samaria, Arabs in Jordan, or the Jews of Israel. Too, we may leave for another day the question of why Arabs demand "self-determination" for Abbas's followers, even as the Arabs of Algeria deny self-determination for Berbers, the Arabs of Iraq deny self-determination for Kurds, the Egyptians oppress the Copts, the Iranians repress the Bahais and Baluchis, and the Sudanese Muslims enslave Black Christians. For the focus here is more basic:
Even if Abbas were elected legitimately, even if his "people" deserve a place at a negotiation table, it remains preposterous to expect Israel to negotiate with a guy whose best excuse for being at the table is "Don't blame me for Hamas terrorism being incubated within my Authority because I cannot control it." If he is not the instigator but the victim of a structure of terrorism intricately rooted into the soul of Palestinian Arab society and uncontrollable, then there is no point negotiating peace with him. By his proponents' own words, at best he intends well but cannot deliver peace. If Abbas cannot deliver the goods, then Israel cannot reasonably be expected to offer him concessions and abandon preciously guarded rights in return for peace promises and treaties that are destined to fail ab initio because he lacks enforcement authority.
In the end, Abbas finally has maneuvered himself out of the playing field. If he cannot control the terrorism of Hamas, it is pointless to negotiate with him.
what’s the point of negotiating with him?
Modified from an article published on National Review Online (June 12, 2002)
I was a big-firm business-litigation attorney for nearly a decade. My favorite case matters are those that promptly move towards a negotiated settlement between or among parties who each emerge with something constructive, resulting in a "win-win" outcome. After the parties negotiate their agreement, we attorneys document the settlement and the parties' respective concessions. Invariably, we insert into each settlement agreement a paragraph that seems so obvious, that an attorney omitting it could risk a claim of malpractice:
In plain talk, each party to the agreement affirms that he or she has the authority to negotiate the agreement, the authority to offer concessions in return for counter-concessions, and the authority to enforce the concessions and promises he makes. This seems manifestly sensible, even obvious: Why would a party offer concessions and bargain away claimed rights if the adversary cannot deliver counter-concessions he promises?Warranty of Authority to Execute Agreement. Each person executing this Agreement on behalf of an entity or individual and/or in a specified capacity hereby warrants and represents that he or she has been granted the power and authority to make and enter into the agreements and releases contained herein for said entity or individual in the capacity set forth herein, and that this Agreement will be duly authorized, executed, and delivered by such entity or individual, and at the time of delivery will constitute legal, valid, and binding obligations of such entity or individual and does not and at the time of
delivery will not violate any provisions of any law, agreement, or judicial
order to which such entity or individual is a party or is subject.
Which brings us to the Middle East and Mahmoud Abbas. We may leave for another day the question of whether the "Palestinian people" actually are Arabs in Judea and Samaria, Arabs in Jordan, or the Jews of Israel. Too, we may leave for another day the question of why Arabs demand "self-determination" for Abbas's followers, even as the Arabs of Algeria deny self-determination for Berbers, the Arabs of Iraq deny self-determination for Kurds, the Egyptians oppress the Copts, the Iranians repress the Bahais and Baluchis, and the Sudanese Muslims enslave Black Christians. For the focus here is more basic:
Even if Abbas were elected legitimately, even if his "people" deserve a place at a negotiation table, it remains preposterous to expect Israel to negotiate with a guy whose best excuse for being at the table is "Don't blame me for Hamas terrorism being incubated within my Authority because I cannot control it." If he is not the instigator but the victim of a structure of terrorism intricately rooted into the soul of Palestinian Arab society and uncontrollable, then there is no point negotiating peace with him. By his proponents' own words, at best he intends well but cannot deliver peace. If Abbas cannot deliver the goods, then Israel cannot reasonably be expected to offer him concessions and abandon preciously guarded rights in return for peace promises and treaties that are destined to fail ab initio because he lacks enforcement authority.
In the end, Abbas finally has maneuvered himself out of the playing field. If he cannot control the terrorism of Hamas, it is pointless to negotiate with him.
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