More on Meron Rapoport and Haaretz

Well, although I googled "Amira Hess" in Hebrew before I posted the story below. I didn't google "Rapoport." I should have: his departure from Haaretz already appeared on Monday here:

Apparently, Rapoport is one of three reporters associated with former editor David Landau who are leaving Haaretz. Landau appointed him news editor. His departure may be filed under the headline "New Editor Shakes Things Up at Haaretz."

David Landau was a good editor (I am sorely tempted to add, "for a liberal Zionist.") He was to be congratulated inter alia for bringing in Rapoport. I haven't noticed an ideological shift with the changing of the guard, but, then again, I haven't been looking. Before Meron Rapoport came over to Haaretz, he worked at Yediot Aharonot as a desk editor. He was fired from that position after he published Moti Gilat's story under the headline, "Sharon Did Not Speak the Truth"

Haaretz has been a courageous, if elitist, newspaper. Let us hope that this will not change. I certainly hope that Rapoport will continue to write his exposes.

Haaretz Rumored to Have Fired Amira Hass and Meron Rapoport

I just heard rumors that two of Haaretz's best investigative journalists, Amira Hass and Meron Rapoport, will no longer be employed by the newspaper.

Amira Hass, Israel's prize-winning journalist, has been on sabbatical from Haaretz and will not be returning (according to the rumors.) I don't know anything more than that, including whether the decision was a mutual one.

The rumors about Rapoport are more disturbing. Hass is an established journalist and will land on her feet. Rapoport is not as well-known but has his finger on the pulse of events going on in the army and in the territories. He is an extraordinary and valuable resource on exposing the sins of the Occupation. From what I have heard, he was fired, pure and simple.

That's all I know, folks. I would love to get emails from Rapoport and Hass saying that the report of their firings has been greatly exaggerated. I will update you on this as the facts become known.

By the way, if you are wondering about Gideon Levy, I am told that as a member of Haaretz's editorial board, he has sufficient clout with the publisher. On the other hand, I would have said the same thing about the others.

Back Home to Baka, But Please Keep Commenting

I won't be posting or responding for a few days since I am flying home to Jerusalem tomorrow. I have received some critical comments on my "Baka Lefties" and "Finklestein's Deportation" posts, and I will respond to them. I have also received privately some nice comments on the post about the Ninty-Four Year Old Supporter of Obama.

Thank you all.

Finkelstein's Deportation and the Reaction of Progressive Jews

God punishes Jews who observe the Sabbath with a zillion emails when the Sabbath is over.

So I learned that Norman Finkelstein was deported from Israel after the rest of the Jewish blogosphere had reported on it. Still, I may be the first sabbath-observant progressive blogger to report on it, since Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Watzman, the other progressive orthodox Jewish bloggers, have nothing on it on their South Jerusalem site.

So here's my take on the deportation. As readers of this blog know, I have gone to bat for Finkelstein before, not because I agree with everything he says, but because he has been hounded mercilessly.

In brief, Norman Finkelstein was declared persona non grata and deported from Israel after he was detained at the Ben-Gurion airport and questioned about his meetings with Hizbollah. So say the reports in the Israeli media. For news read ynet

It's hard to make sense of this. Was he deported because he was considered a security threat? That would imply that the Israelis were nervous that he could report on Israel to Hizbollah in such a way as to compromise Israeli security. That is the most charitable explanation of Israel's actions. If that is the correct one, then the Israel Secret Services are simply crazy.

Another explanation is that Israel was upset with Finkelstein because he had openly consorted with and supported an enemy, and that there is no obligation of any county to let in foreign nationals who do this. The security business was just a pretext. If that is the correct explanation, then Israel is acting as we Israelis have come to expect of it -- as an authoritarian regime that picks on the weak, in this case, foreign nationals.

A third explanation is that Finkelstein was barred because he is a high-profile critic of Israel, even without the Hizbollah business. Israel regularly bars the entry of pro-Palestinian academics who come to show support for activists. I really hope that Israel hasn't stooped that low in Finkelsteins's case, but I wouldn't be surprised.

There is a way to determine which explanation is correct. Perhaps Noam Chomsky can be convinced to visit Israel. Finkelstein has written nothing that Chomsky substantively disagrees with. And Chomsky met with Nasrallah and praised Hizbollah. I doubt that Finkelstein is out ahead of Chomsky on the Hizbollah contact business.

Would Israel bar Noam Chomsky from visiting? No blanking way -- the man is too powerful a force in intellectual circles. The embarrassment would be too great. Chomsky is a protected high-profile critic.

Israel can go after Finkelstein because it knows that he won't have the support that a Chomsky would have. And that is what all this boils down to -- picking on a weak out-of-work academic who occasionally talks and writes like an annoying New York Jew. Heck, I even know Jews who call themselves progressives who wouldn't go to bat for Finkelstein. Everybody has his or her Finkelstein story to tell. So who will support him, besides the Palestinians who have been encouraged by a New York Jew who goes to bat for them? Does anybody besides a few socialist Brits and Palestinian supporters care that Finkelstein was barred from going to visit his B'Tselem activist friend in Hebron?

Listen up, Jews -- and I mean some of the progressive Jews who are hesitating on this one. Titbayeshu lakhem -- Shame on you! How can you profess skepticism about who is right here, when you know that the Israeli track record on truth-telling is a lot worse than Finkelstein's? How can you take a position opposed to that of the moderate Association for Civil Rights in Israel that has reportedly condemned the deportation?

If you are a progressive Zionist, the default mode must be to support Finkelstein until you have conclusive evidence that he constitutes an existential threat to the state of Israel And since you can never see that evidence, you have no reason to trust even a High Court decision against Finkelstein. Because the High Court has proven unreliable time after time in these matters. Its default mode is to back the security establishment. (Occasionally -- just occasionally -- it comes through.)

Frankly, I am surprised by the reaction of some of those who call themselves "progressive," who profess to hate Bush, who cry about the loss of civil liberties in this country, and then take a "wait-and-see" attitude about who is right in this affair, or who don't want to go to bat for Finkelstein because he annoys them, or because he said, "We are all Hizbollah." Criticize him, by all means, for kowtowing to the fundamentalists, but what does that have to do with the price of felafel?

Look, I don't understand why Chomsky and Finkelstein celebrate Hizbollah. OK, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that, and I don't think Hizbollah or Hamas should be demonized. But lionized? Please...as a modern orthodox Jew, I would be happy to put all the fundamentalists on a boat and send them out to an uninhabited island where they duke it out (More likely, they will find out how much they have in common.)

But that's not the point. The point is that the ongoing hounding of Norman Finkelstein should make any decent human being vomit. Let the guy alone. Let him publish his books and keep his website. Why shouldn't he be allowed to see the West Bank for himself and to visit his B'Tselem friend in Hebron?

By the way, it is not just Finkelstein who is being barred from Hebron Michael Sfard, is now representing the "Breaking the Silence" organization, which has been barred by the police from conducting its tours in Hebron.

Progessives should unite on this one. And if you don't want to join, then at least think hard before you write against.

One Elderly Jew's Passionate Support of Obama

Over the past few months I have had some interesting discussions with a 94-year old Jewish supporter of Barack Obama. The supporter, a prominent real estate developer, was one of the pillars of the Jewish community in his prime. A past president of the local Federation, the Jewish Community Center, and a board member of a big conservative shul, he has led a long and active life of service to the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. I should also mention that he is a life-long liberal, who only once wavered in his support for Democrats, and that was when he supported John Anderson over Jimmy Carter in 1980. (He has come to respect Jimmy Carter in his post-presidency.)

I asked him how he came to support Obama. After all, he seemed to be bucking the demographics: white, elderly, Jewish former businessmen aren't supposed to be in the Obama camp. This is what he told me:

About a year and a half ago, I was given Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope. I didn't know anything about him, except that he had given a good speech at the Democratic Convention. Well, I read that book, and I was amazed by his life story, and by his vision for America. On the strength of that book I decided to support the campaign, and I have continued to do so. If anything, I have become more disenchanted with Hillary Clinton, who has run a negative campaign. She comes nowhere near Obama. Most of the people who don't support him don't really know anything about him.

What about his views on Israel?

All the candidates have similar views on Israel. His is just as positive as the rest.

Are you nervous that, well, as an African-American, he may not always be so favorable to Israel, or for that matter, to the Jews.

Let me tell you something. One of the reasons I support him is because he is an African-American. All my life I have supported the cause of racial equality. For years I gave money to the NAACP. I remember growing up, working in my father's grocery market, which was in a black neighborhood. I was very friendly with a group of young blacks, so much so that they asked me to be a counselor of their group. I said, "But I am not like you." They said, "It don't matter, Bernie, we like you." Once they told me they were going to Hagerstown, and they insisted I go with them, which I did. I believe in treating fairly all people, regardless of their race and their religion. I have believed that all my life.

You know, McCain is pretty moderate, compared with Bush. I suppose you could live with him as president.

I could live with him, but I couldn't support him. He is not, in my opinion, a very bright man. Of course, I respect him for being a prisoner of war -- I served in World War II. But that doesn't mean that he would be a good president.

Joe Lieberman supports him.

Well, I don't like him much either. He should start voting more like a Democrat and stop supporting people like Bush.

You know, I heard that you talked about Obama at the family seder last year.

Yes, I did. When they got to the part of the Haggadah called "Barekh", I said, "Not Barekh, Barack!"

Recently, this elderly gentleman has been suffering from clinical depression, which makes him pessimistic and anxious about Obama's chances. He worries a lot. So I have been trying to cheer him up and give him hope, with a little help from a friend, who is a prominent fundraiser for Obama.

And with a little help from the candidate himself. You see, when Obama heard about Bernie, he sent him a copy of the book he liked so much, The Audacity of Hope. And to help him fight his depression, the candidate inscribed it:

To Bernie,

Keep Dreaming Big Dreams

Barack Obama

Thanks, Barack.

And may you soon recover from your depression, Dad.

Yehezkel Dror's Defence of Jewish Fascism in the Forward

"Fascism" means many things to many people, and is, I grant, an overworked term. Leftists cry "fascist" so many times that it is hard to tell a real fascist when you see one. So for the purposes of this article, let me define "Jewish fascism" as a belief that the existence of a Jewish state trumps all values, especially moral ones; that individual and collective morality must be submerged to the interests of that state. In Zionist historiography, "Jewish fascism" is identified with the revisionists, but that is arguable. Jabotinsky, like so many others, often talked the fascist talk, but was ambivalent. Labor Zionists did not like to talk openly like Jabotinsky, since they were socialists, but their tactics confirmed his strategy. In recent years, Jewish fascism is associated with neocons like Poldheretz and Ruth Wisse, who opens her book on Jewish Power with a story implying that a live immoral Jew is better than a dead Jewish mensch, something that even Judah Halevy wouldn't have believed.

Yehezkel Dror, a professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a recipient of the Israel Prize, has written a not-so-brilliant defence of Jewish Fascism in the Forward, of all places. The argument is a familiar one and contains the familiar elisions: the state of Israel = the Jewish people, so the survival of the former is the same as the survival of the latter, or at least a necessary condition. Dror doesn't even bother to raise the question whether the state of Israel is good for the survival of the Jews; he holds that truth to be self-evident. The fact that more Jews have died as Jews since 1945 because of the Jewish state than of any other cause doesn't faze him. The fact that not a single Jew has been rescued by the Jewish state that wasn't previously endangered by it doesn't cross his mind. He could argue, of course, that Jewish existence is more certain than it was a century ago. But he doesn't; he just takes it for granted.

But let's grant him the point that the survival of Israel = the survival of the Jews. The question is what can be done in order to ensure that survival? And it turns out that Dror, like many other intellectual fascists, wimps out at this point. He allows that it is legitimate to criticize policies of the state, so long as they are unreasonable, or do not advance the state's interests. Who is to judge what they are? Well, Dror, I suppose, and other like-minded individuals; certainly there is no good argument why Israeli-style democracy is essential for the survival of the state. A fundamentalist theocracy a la Iran would do just as well.

No, for Dror the issue is between realpolitik and liberal morality; chuck the latter, he says, in favor of the former. All right, in that case we have chucked neoconservatism and liberal interventionism, and we are back with Walt and Mearsheimer's thesis that US unlimited support for Israel is against the US interest. Look, I have no problem with realpolitik (sorry guys), but why say that it has anything to do with Judaism or with Jews? Once again, Dror has no argument for a liberal democratic state; he believes in it precisely because of the values with which he was inculcated.

Are state's moral agents? That is a long philosophical discussion that I can't go into. But whether they are or whether they are not, states that allow widespread immorality generally are not stable over time. If Dror wants to argue that liberal morality is in the Jewish state's interest (for one thing, it is a stabilizing factor, for another, it eases a small state like Israel's acceptance in the family of nations, that is one thing. And I imagine he would agree to that. But it is a sign of his intellectual poverty that he can't see that that conclusion is undermined by his main claim.

The truth is that folks like Dror, Podhoretz, and Wisse attempt to provide moral justifications for Israel's actions. When they think they can't, they resort to the Jewish Fascist strategy of Israel's "survival" trumping all considerations. The form of their argument is: either Israel's actions are moral, or morality doesn't count.

Of course, as I said, none of this has anything to do with Judaism. I suppose that it does have something to do with all those Jewish kings in the Bible who identified their own interest with the interest of their people, and were promptly disabused of that idea by the prophets. Prophetic Judaism doesn't count much with the Jewish fascists. Jewish fascism is the latest version of Jewish zealotry that goes back to Reuven and Shimon, who would massacre an entire people to avenge the lost honor of their sister Dina. For them, the clan's survival trumped all morality. To Azure's editor David Hazony, the brothers were just engaging in realpolitik.

My response -- the Jewish response -- is Israel's last word: Be-sodam al tavo nafshi. "I will not participate in their councils." Jewish zealotry is as Jewish as felafel, my favorite Palestinian dish.

Baka Lefties

Hell hath no fury like a settler criticized by the liberal Zionist.

The settler looks disdainfully at the liberal Zionist and says, “We are doing in Judea and Samaria what you guys did for a century throughout the Land of Israel.” If the Zionist leftie happens to live in a formerly Arab neighborhood, like Jerusalem's Katamon, Baka, Talbieh – or in Sheikh Munis, the Arab village where Tel-Aviv University sits today -- the settler gloatfully throws this at him: “You guys are worse than we are. At least we built settlements on land where nobody ever lived. You live in Arab houses."

At this point, the liberal Zionist generally sputters in outraged response: “There is no comparison. Where we live is internationally recognized, albeit de facto, as part of the state of Israel. Even the Palestinian national leadership has recognized Israel’s right to the lands within the pre-67 borders, or at least it doesn’t demand more than this. What was done by a Zionist movement in pursuit of independence, and during a war, cannot be compared to the actions of a sovereign state after independence and during peace time. Moreover, the actions of the settlers thwart the possibility of a two-state solution.” Some may even add that they are willing to move out of their formerly Arab neighborhoods in the case of a peace settlement, provided they get fair compensation.

Yada, yada, yada....

All this is well and good when discussing the behavior of states and their citizens. But I want to talk in this post about personal morality,. And I will start with myself.

I am a Baka Leftie. I live in that part of South Jerusalem that Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Watzman write so elegantly from and about in their South Jerusalem blog. Baka was a Palestinian middle to upper-class neighborhood before 1947; after the war it was used to house Jewish immigrants from North Africa. Some of those original immigrants still live in Baka, although many have died or moved elsewhere. The neighborhood has been undergoing “gentrification” for over two decades, with a lot of the old properties bought up, at outrageous prices, by American and French absentee owners. Local residents, less well-off, have purchased flats in the shikunim (“projects”) that are slowly being renovated, at least on the outside. These owners include a fair number of liberal American Jews who made aliyah in the seventies and the eighties. Not all the lefties are Anglos. Aging Peace-Now activists like the philosophers Avishai Margalit and Menachem Brinker live in Baka, though you won’t seem them frequenting synagogues like Yedidya, Shira Hadasha, bastions of the Anglo-orthodox left, or Kol ha-Neshama of the Anglo-reform left.

Now I don’t live inside an Arab house, but I do live on top of one; my flat was built around ten years ago on somebody’s roof. Needless to say, the Palestinian owner of the roof didn’t get a penny from the purchase. I have no idea who he or she is/was. I can console myself with the idea that I am not living inside his house. But so what -- I am living on a roof that does not belong to me, utilizing air rights that don’t belong to me.

So how do I justify this to myself morally? The answer is that I can't. It took me thirty years to realize that there is no justification. Of course, there are a lot worse things than what I am doing, but that doesn't make me feel better. Robert Fulghum said it best: One of the things we learn in kindergarten is not to take things that don’t belong to us. Living in a house which was taken from the owners is stealing. It’s that simple. True, others do it all the time. But so what?

After forty years it is time that the "Baka Lefties" get together and discuss the problem, critically and honestly. Preferably that discussion should be with Palestinian groups.

Several years ago I privately began inquiries with Palestinians to see if I could find the original owners of the house on which I live. What would I have done had I found them? Well, first of all, I would have apologized for living on top of their house. Second, I would have tried to come to a a financial understanding with them that would not prejudice any future claims they would have to state-compensation. And third, and more basically, I would ask their permission to live on top of their house.

I did all this without telling anybody, including my family, who gave me hell for not involving them. I wasn't very successful. Since then I heard that an acquaintance of mine, who lives in Talpiyot, had successfully done the same thing. I am not at the liberty to divulge his name, especially since I haven’t spoken with him about it. But when I was making my inquiries as to the owners, I was encouraged by the Palestinians with whom I was in contact (with the notable exception of the London-based Salman Abu Sitta, who told me to give up the whole project, and just support a group like Zochrot.)

I think the time has come to organize. There is now a critical mass of Baka Lefties –and not just Baka Lefties, but Israelis of all sort, who, I believe, would be willing to try to attempt some sort of encounter between settlers and refugees. Perhaps we should try to work through Zochrot; perhaps somebody has a better idea of proceeding.

But we must stop saying that this is only a matter for the government. If we wait for the government to do something about the injustice, we will die waiting. And, frankly, as bad as I feel about living on top of somebody else’s house, without his or her knowledge, or permission, I feel a lot worse about living out my life and dying there.

Liberal guilt? You bet. But I am tired of hearing facile raitonalizations. I see no reason why I have to wait for other people in order for me to do the right thing.

Help me out here, ye gang of agin' sixties activists! Let’s do something about this thing before we are sent to Baka old-age homes -- which also belong to Arab refugees.

Shabbat Shalom

Leon Uris' Influence on Barack Obama

Jeffrey ("You-Can-Dump-On-Israel-As-Long-As-You-Are-A-Liberal-Zionist-Like-Me") Goldberg has an interview with Obama in Atlantic.Com that will trouble Obama supporters who are under the illusion that the US can still be an honest broker in the Middle East. On the same day when my Shabbas-minyan-mate Joe Lieberman wonders out loud why a Hamas spokesman welcomes an Obama presidency, a wary Goldberg goads Obama into expressing his undying admiration for the Jewish state.

JG: You’ve talked about the role of Jews in the development of your thinking

BO: I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris. So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

In that paragraph, and in the entire interview, you see why Walt and Mearsheimer's thesis of an Israel Lobby is so, well, irrelevant. There is an Israel Lobby in America, and it is called America (minus some leftwing churches and Muslims). So why should anybody be surprised that Obama goes on and on about his understanding for Israel, with just a few words about the Palestinians. (Goldberg, who apparently is spooked by goyim talking about Palestinians, never brings up the subject.) This is all Obama has to say about the Palestinian people.

When I visited Ramallah, among a group of Palestinian students, one of the things that I said to those students was: “Look, I am sympathetic to you and the need for you guys to have a country that can function, but understand this: if you’re waiting for America to distance itself from Israel, you are delusional. Because my commitment, our commitment, to Israel’s security is non-negotiable.” I’ve said this in front of audiences where, if there were any doubts about my position, that’d be a place where you’d hear it.

So there you have it -- according to Obama, the Israelis get a country whose "security is non-negotiable", whereas the Palestinians get, if they are good, "a country that can function."

That could be any liberal Zionist speaking, and it will play big with Obama's target audience, the Jewish liberals like my sister-in-law who are still nervous about him.

There is, of course, the ritual Goldberg defamation of Jimmy Carter in his best Alan Dershowitz manner:

JG: What do you make of Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that Israel resembles an apartheid state?

Funny, Jeff, but I never heard Jimmy Carter suggest that Israel resembles an apartheid state. I did hear him express his fear that the West Bank may resemble de facto a system of apartheid because of separate roads, separate laws, and separate water resources for settlers and natives. I have heard you suggest somewhat similar thing sans the "A"-word. Of course, you are a Jew and Carter isn't.

It is no surprise that Obama stays squarely within the American liberal Zionist consensus on Israel. I have said from the beginning that he will disappoint, and that there is a lot more to this election than Israel.

But maybe not all is bleak if he brings in a diverse Middle East team. Before the last presidential election, I had lunch with a prominent neocon intellectual and military historian, a man who had been a high-profile supporter of both Iraq wars. I asked him who he was voting for, and he said, "John Kerry". When I expressed surprise, he said, "Look, I may have some misgivings about Kerry. But I know the people he is working with, and they are intelligent -- unlike the Bush folks who were responsible for the fiasco in Iraq."

That may be true of Obama, though, frankly, I don't have the hutzpah -- sorry, the audacity -- to have much hope on this one.

Rob Malley "Sacked" from Obama Campaign? Puleeze!!!

Leave it to Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz's out-of-touch rightwing US correspondent, to fall for a cooked-up story from the London Times about Rob Malley's being "sacked" from the Obama campaign. Rosner "reported" the story here. Since Malley never served in the Obama campaign, he couldn't have been sacked from it. He has acted as an informal advisor in the past and no doubt he will in the future, along with several others. Because of the McCain's campaign effort to tie Obama with Malley, Malley formally "severed all ties" on Friday with the campaign. This is nothing more than a media gimmick to puncture McCain's campaign. As for McCain, well, he obviously has "lost his bearings," not because he is old, but because he is dumb.

The London Times story was that after the McCain campaign pointed out that Malley talked with Hamas, he was fired. I suppose that the Brits can be forgiven for completely misinterpreting the following remark of Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr. Obama

Rob Malley has, like hundreds of other experts, provided informal advice to the campaign in the past. He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future

So if Malley never had a formal role in the campaign, then how can he be "sacked" from it? Note that LaBolt didn't say that Malley hadn't given advice in the past nor would he in the future, only that he wouldn't play a role in the campaign. It's comforting to know that Malley won't be overseeing campaign strategy for Obama. Duh!

I can't blame the Brits for manufacturing news. But Rosner, who could pick up the phone from his Suburban Maryland home and call Malley, should know better. His pathetic attempts to deflate Obama (usually with question marks, so as to appear as if he himself doesn't necessarily buy the rumors, e.g., "Will Jews support Obama?" or "Is International Support Hurting Obama?") haven't reaped any fruit.

The McCain folks are trying to dig up Obama's past associations with -- God forbid --Rashid Khalidi to smear him with the Jews. Well, I am on record saying that I hope the Jews don't vote for Obama, so that he can elected without our help and then not be beholden to us. But the truth is that Jews will vote overwhelmingly for Obama -- mark my words -- much to the chagrin of the rightwingers, and to the detriment of the Palestinians.

As Obama's political career has taken off, he has distanced himself from the Palestinians to win elections and to get the Jewish vote. That's just what politicians do. When the Palestinians have the political clout that the Jews do, then things may change, but when will that happen?

For Obama's abandonment of the Palestinians after initial expression of sympathy, see today's Times. But anybody who reads the Electronic Intifada has known about that for some time.

As for "talking to Hamas"...everybody knows that Hamas is a major player, and that the United States (and the Quartet) erred by boycotting the democratically-elected Palestinian Authority. You don't need Rob Malley to understand the drift of the following passage:

"...in setting rigid, all-or nothing preconditions for engagement after the [Palestinians parliament] election, US diplomacy was perceived as confusing the positions of Hamas as a movement with the actions of the elected Palestinians government. The preconditions adopted by the Quartet closed off diplomacy."

That is a direct slap at US and Israeli policy of non-engagement with the Hamas-led PA government. And it is not made by Rob Malley, but by Daniel C. Kurtzer and Scott Lasensky in their book, "Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace." (p. 72)

Dan Kurtzer will no doubt play a major role in the Middle East policy of the Obama administration -- but McCain's Jewish Republicans find Malley easier to go after now.

Man, are they aiming at the wrong guy. Ed Lasky at the American Thinker rightly senses that Kurtzer's views differ significantly -- and, in his eyes, dangerously -- from the views of previous administrations under which Kurtzer served. That is because those administrations failed abysmally in their Middle East policy. Still, don't expect anything but a change in tone from an Obama administration on the Middle East, Kurtzer or no Kurtzer.

Still, that will be welcome.

The Liberal Wimp's Guide to Celebrating Yom ha-Atzma'ut and Remembering an-Nakba

Of all people, Bradley Burston in Haaretz summed up a lot of my feelings on this, the 60th anniversary of founding of the State of Israel, and the commemoration of the Nakba. Of course, I reject totally his symmetry between us and them. But he obviously is not in the mood for celebrating. Read the article here

The other day I was asked whether I recite the Hallel prayer with a blessing on Yom ha-Atzma'ut. That is traditionally a demarcator between enthusiastic religious Zionists and more halakhically cautious ones; of course, the ultra-orthodox don't recite it at all. This is what I told the questioner: There is a famous midrash on the parting of the Red Sea, where the Almighty rebukes the angels who are singing His praises by saying, "My creatures (i.e., the Egyptians) are drowning, and you sing a song of praise?" Now God may allow recently-freed slaves to rejoice over the downfall of their oppressors. But surely not that is not the ideal. And when those who are drowning in sea are not oppressors but innocent victims of, according to the Zionist narrative, Jewish liberation -- then how can any decent person rejoice?

The answer is that despite the sixty-year old (100 + year old?) Nakba, there are some positive elements to the Jewish state founded sixty years ago, that imperfect regime that engaged (and engages) in ethnic cleansing and dividing up the spoils of war. In fact, they are too numerous to mention.

So here's the liberal wimp's list of things to do to celebrate Israel's Independence Day:

1) If you can't have a mangal (barbecue) at least eat felafel. It's a good Palestinian dish that Israeli Jews have -- what else? -- appropriated from them. When you eat it, have a special kavannah that you are eating it for the sake of uniting the Palestinian and the Israeli Jewish people.

2) If you live outside of Israel, don't attend any of the community celebrations honoring sixty years of Israeli independence. Or if you do, hand our t-shirts that say, "Happy Birthday, Israel" on the front, and "Remember the Nakba" on the back. Be prepared to run fast.

3) Buy five copies of the powerful English translation of S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh and send it to family and friends. This is a short powerful book that brings home the Nakba in a way that Elie Wiesel's Night brought home the Holocaust to me forty years ago.

4) Honor the Palestinian and Jewish activists who labor day and night to bring justice to the Palestinians inside and outside of Israel. "The day is short and the labor is long." There are so many groups whose work allows wimpy liberals like me to sleep a little better at night. May God bless them all.

But a special blessing this year to Gabi Eldor, of the Jaffa Arab-Jewish theater, Yosef (Pappe) Allo, a Jerusalem activist, Sa'id el-Uqbi, a peace activist, Sherry Bashi, Gisha (organization that works to provide access for Palestinians, Beni Gefen, peace activist, Alon Lee Green, labor activist, Giora Segal, educator and teacher; Yigal Ezrati, the Arabic-Hebrew Theater in Jaffa, Lilia Pether, foreign worker activist, Ehud Shem Tov, Social TV. (Please forgive the misspellings. These activists were honored by lighting the torches at the Alternative Torch Lighting Ceremony sponsored by Yesh Gvul

5) Give a donation to the Obama campaign. All right, I know this one is cheezy. And I don't have many illusions. But of all the candidates, he has the most potential to do something, which I don't believe he will do, to bring justice, which I don't believe will happen, to the Palestinians.

That's all. Note that I didn't post this until the day was over. My bad.

Judah Magnes -- The Forgotten Prophet

There is a series in Haaretz called, "1948 Diaries," which today featured Judah Magnes's Zionist activities to prevent the unilateral establishment of a Jewish state. I have reproduced the article below. Unfortunately, this is a very busy week (month) for me, so I have to be a bit brief on comment.

But one of my occasional readers, bar_kochba132, has asked that even if Magnes was right, what was the alternative? I will let him say it in his words:

A continuation of the British mandate seemed not to be in the cards, because Britain was bankrupt and they were going to pull out of their main base in Egypt anyway, so Palestine had less and less strategic importance to them (once they had to give up the Suez Canal). One possibility was a UN Mandate, but those have been problematic. A unitary state would have likely lead to a Lebanon-type situation with an ongoing civil war, with the Arabs jealous of Jewish economic dominance. So what did Magnes think was the solution?

Oy, I simply can't answer that important question now. And, needless to say, 1948 is not 2008. But here it is in brief:

Magnes was a pragmatist and a tireless diplomat. As I have said before, he should be distinguished from Buber, Simon, and the Brit Shalom crowd. Before the establishment of the state, he pushed for a binational state, and was encouraged by the minority UNSCOP that called for a federal state. The latter solution was also rejected by the Arab States; some of the Arab side were prepared to allow the Jews to have minority rights and a certain degree of cultural autonomy, but not parity of any sort. As the article states, Magnes was prepared for a temporary UN mandate or trusteeship, and he was also in favor of postponing the implementation of partition (as was the US State Department). Following the establishment of the State of Israel, he argued for a federation of several states with a joint army, economic and foreign policies.

The tragedy of Magnes was that his ideas were, I believe, right in principle, but their timing was wrong. Neither the Zionists nor the Arabs were willing to listen, and he understood quite well the logic of their positions.

After the semester is over, I will post a fascinating debate between Aubrey (Abba) Eban and Judah Magnes that appeared in Commentary in 1948. He called then for a United States of Palestine. Who would have thought sixty years ago, and in a much altered situation, that so much of that debate is relevant?

1948 diaries: Saving the Jews from themselves

By Ofri Ilani

Judah Magnes, a founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and its first president, was in poor health on April 13, 1948. The 70-year-old Magnes knew the end was near, but that didn't stop him from flying to Washington, D.C., in an effort to end the violence in the soon-to-be-born State of Israel. He represented almost no one other than a group of peace-seeking professors, but was nonetheless able to access and influence the American administration.

He had access because the State Department wanted to slow down partition, and they wanted Magnes to influence Truman. It didn't work.

The details of this forgotten period during Israel's struggle for independence are revealed in excerpts of Magnes' diary, published here for the first time, which describe the Zionist leader's attempt to convince the president of the United States to force a cease-fire and prevent both the implementation of the partition plan and the establishment of a Jewish state.

When the United Nations passed the partition plan on November 29, 1947, not all the Jews celebrated in the streets. A group of intellectuals, most of them Hebrew University lecturers, believed that the war that would break out in the wake of the establishment of a Jewish state would bring disaster down on the Jews and the Arabs alike. Magnes, a Reform rabbi, pacifist and anti-imperialist who was known for his opposition to World War I, was one of the most important Zionist leaders of his era. He was a leading figure in the New York Jewish community and was a key liaison between the Zionist leadership and the American administration. He moved to Israel in 1922 and came out in support of the establishment of a single, binational state for Jews and Arabs, with a government comprised of representatives from both peoples.

Magnes' personal diary, which he wrote in English, discusses his despair at the violence as the British Mandate came to an end, intermingling those accounts with descriptions of his worsening health and his nightmares.

On April 12, 1948, Magnes wrote in his diary: "For more than a generation I have been pleading for peace, conciliation, understanding. How can I not and stand before the world and say: 'Friends, stop the bloodshed. Understanding is possible.' This is the moment I have been preparing for all these years."

The American consul told Magnes that if no trusteeship were formed by May 15, Palestine would enter a period full of "very grave danger with bloodshed," Magnes wrote the same day. "Great need of courageous, constructive attitude such as mine," he wrote. "Therefore time come for me and others selected... or me alone to come to U.S. in order to cooperate." Magnes expressed the hope that if a state were declared, the United States would impose sanctions on Israel, saying that there can be no war without money or ammunition.

On April 13, Magnes was informed that 34 Hebrew University and Hadassah hospital employees were killed in an attack on a convoy to Mount Scopus. All told, 77 people were killed in the attack, many of them Magnes' friends. But Manges was no less shocked by the massacre than he was by the circumstances that preceded it: Four days earlier, the Irgun and Lehi pre-state Jewish underground militias killed more than 100 Palestinians at Deir Yassin.

At the funerals of those killed in the convoy attack, Magnes condemned the cruelty of both sides, and was denounced as a traitor by many members of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine).

"Unlike other Zionist leaders, like [David] Ben-Gurion, Magnes' diaries are not just a political document," says Hebrew University Prof. Aryeh Goren, who is researching and editing Magnes' writings. "His writing is very personal - he shares and talks about his misgivings and his weaknesses."

Magnes considered himself to be a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and the prophet Jeremiah, and opposed all forms of nationalism that are based on military force. The Ihud (Unity) association he established with several others is seen as the flagship group of left-wing Zionists regarding all that pertains to Jewish-Arab relations. Its members were attacked by nearly all the political parties in the pre-state period, and were described as defeatists, ghetto-like and anti-patriotic.

A long study of the Ichud was published by Prof. Joseph Heller in Hebrew a few years ago. Unfortunately, it is only in Hebrew, and the author can't afford to have it translated into English. (I should mentioned in passing that the author does not share Magnes's views, or thinks that they would have worked.)

"Magnes predicted that even if we win the war, there would then be another war, and another one. It would never end," says Goren. "When the battles of the War of Independence began, he tried to halt the implementation of the UN decision and advance the idea that was promoted then by the American State Department, that the UN would freeze the partition decision and in the interim force both sides into a trusteeship with a temporary government, until the conditions suit another arrangement. Magnes thought that this was an opportunity to stop the turn of events, in the hope that in the meantime there would be understanding and it would be possible to talk."

Magnes died several months after the establishment of the state. His loss was not only a great loss to the Jewish people but to Zionism and the State of Israel. He is virtually a forgotten figure. And the reason for that, aside from the obvious one that he went against the master narrative, is that, as an American and a reform Jew, he was an outsider in a country founded by Russian Jewish nationalists on a European socialist model. In a sense, the failure of Magnes was the first of countless failures of liberal Zionist American Jews to have an impact on the country. His writings have never been translated into Hebrew, and, aside from Heller's book, very few have studied him.

But his time will come

Now the Hebron Settlers Are Attacking the Road Map Implementation Monitor

Haaretz is reporting that the Hebron settlers successfully disrupted the visit to Hebron by General William Frasier, the new road map implementation monitor. They managed to get one of their jeeps into his motorcade, whereupon his security people's car hit the jeep and a fight broke out between the settlers and the security people. The general and his people left the place immediately.

Apparently the settler hooligans don't discriminate -- or they believe that General Frasier is a crazy leftwing self-hating Jew.

Police Bar "Breaking the Silence" Tour Group From Entering Hebron

This just in from Haaretz: The Israeli police in Hebron (a.k.a. the military wing of the Hebron settlers) have prevented Bne Avraham/Breaking the Silence from giving tours of Hebron. These tours have been going on for three years without much incident. But emboldened by their violence last week, the Hebron settlers (a.k.a. the pseudo-Jews, or the Judaeo-Nazis) have convinced the police that the balagan the settlers make can be avoided by barring the "outside agitators."

I know, I know, this is small potatoes compared with some of the other stories from Haaretz, such as the millions of liters of raw sewage that are polluting and poisoning the water of the Gazans, due to the ongoing siege of Gaza, or the humiliation of Palestinians by Border Police.

The Hell only gets worse. Happy Birthday.

Still, with any luck, Michael Sfard will get a court order instructing the police to allow the tours to go on. And if the courts rule against the group, well, heck, I will be back at the end of May, and I will be happy to drive to Hebron and give the same tour.

Leftist group: Police barring us from monitoring Hebron settlers By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

The group "Shovrim Shtika" (breaking the silence) said that the police have recently begun barring the organization from touring Hebron to monitor the actions of settlers. The main reason for this, according to the group, is the fact that the police has surrendered to the policies of the settlers in Hebron and Kiryat Arba.

The police, for their part, describe the "Shovrim Shtika" tours as a "platform for extreme left-wingers to enter the Jewish territory and create an imbalance in the area." The police maintain that they have not done anything that deviates from the law.

An altercation erupted Thursday between activists and settlers from Hebron and Kiryat Arba. Yehuda Shaul of "Shovrim Shtika", who has been organizing tours of Hebron for three years, said that he arrived in Kiryat Arba and turned with his group to show them an outpost outside the settlement and was then stopped at the entrance by a group of settlers who surrounded the vehicle he was in.

The right wing activists tell a different story: Noam Arnon said he and his friends were among the few people at the scene who did not surround the vehicle. He said that the car shaul was in had driven backwards in efforts to run over another activist.

A police officer who arrived at the scene forbade the group from touring Hebron, even though the tour was already coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces and the police, and despite the fact that the settlers can travel freely anywhere in the area.

According to Shaul, this was the third such incident this week. He explained that this kind of restriction was a part of a growing trend. Attorney Michael Sfard said that the police behavior in these incidents has become "the executing arm of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, and if this behavior doesn't change, legal action will be taken."

Are the Palestinians "Oppressed and Abused" by their Leaders

For my sins, I am a member of a listserve called the "Jewish Faculty Roundtable." Too much of the listserve is devoted to Israel, particularly the question of the so-called "anti-Israel climate" on campuses. It is good that Jews, especially wealthy Jews, believe that there is such a climate. For then they donate lots of money to universities, who then hire scholars of "Israel Studies," most of whom are center-left (if they are Israeli, they are usually more to the left.)

But on a recent post, Ed Halper, who is a professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Georgia, and a fine scholar, made the following remark about the "abuse and oppression" of the Palestinians by their leaders

The [Palestinian] leaders' intransigence, propagandizing, willingness to use ordinary Palestinians for cannon fodder, along with their theft of aid funds has done everything to prolong this conflict and prevent implementation of the only just and feasible solution, the self-determination for the two communities.

I cannot understand how people who claim to be leftists can turn a blind eye to this oppression.

Here's my response to this very bad argument.

First, change "Palestinians" to "Israelis", and change "theft of aid funds" to "fiscal corruption", and you have, arguably, an accurate description of Israel@60. So what?

Or, if you like, substitute "Americans," who, arguably, have been oppressed by their government for the last eight years. So what?

Or, if you believe that the Palestinians have been oppressed by their leaders -- I don't -- my question to you will be, so what?

It doesn't make a damn difference.

Because, you see, what the Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians, have in common is that their governments were elected in fair elections. The Palestinian elections were monitored by international observers. In each case, the people should have gotten what they deserved. If they voted the bums in, that's their headache.

But only in one case -- that of the Palestinians -- were the elections results overturned by outside interference. After supporting elections -- elections, I may add, that to a large extent, actually threw the corrupt bums out -- Israel arrested the elected officials that it did not like and imposed a siege on Gaza -- not because it was actually being attacked, but because the Palestinians had elected a group viewed by the US and Israel (and much of Europe), to be a terrorist organization.

Fair enough...but if you justify Israel's actions in the interest of Israeli security (what about Palestinian security?), you have automatically declared Palestinians territories to be, if not under occupation, than under the thumb of Israel. And therefore you have made the Israelis responsible for the governance of thsoe territories.

Indeed, it follows that the Israelis are responsible for the oppression of the Palestinians, even by their leaders -- for their leaders really have no power but serve at the whim of the Israelis.

In short, you can't have it both ways, but that is exactly what Israel, and its defenders want. They are willing to give the Palestinians autonomy as long as it is no threat to Israel.

If the Palestians feel "oppressed" by their leaders, then it is up for them to vote them out. To a large extent they did just that -- but that's when the "grownups" stepped in.

Sarah Kreimer's Moving on to 'Stage-two Zionism'

Sarah Kreimer, a former head of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), and a pioneer in Jewish-Arab economic development, wrote an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post today, much of which I agree with, some of which I don't. We both made aliyah in the 1980's; we both consider ourselves liberals; we both look forward to an Israel which is not a state of the Jews, but a homeland for the Jews and the Palestinians.

What separates us is that whereas Ms. Kreimer insists upon a two-state solution, a Palestinian state with a Palestian majority alongside an Israel with a Jewish majority, I don't. I prefer the two-state solution (it seems more feasible, in principle, and it has the support of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, as well as much of the world), but I have no rooted objection to some other solution, provided that the solution respects the national aspirations of Jews and Palestinians.

But more than that: Ms. Kreimer rightly wants Israel to become a state of all its citizens, yet in the same breath, she wants it to have a majority of Jews. I suppose that her desire in itself is all right -- a Christian may express a personal preference to live in a US with a majority of Christians. What I fear is that this personal preference becomes a national exigency. And that, I find, problematic.

Once Israel becomes a state of all its citizens; once there is an Israeli nationality (of which Jewishness is a big, though not exclusive, part), then, and only then, can we consider Israel a liberal democracy. A state like that won't be concerned with what percentage is Jewish, because it will be 100% Israeli. (See my post, "Zionism without a Jewish State") Counting Jewish heads should not be an issue. It is not the quantity of the Jews, but the quality of the Judaism, which will determine how much a Jewish state Israel is.

The issue is not one of "moving on to 'stage-two Zionism'", but rather of "moving on to 'stage-one Israelism'. Or, if you like, of returning to the non-statist Zionism of people like Magnes.

Still, Ms. Kreimer and I agree on so many things, that I thought I would show my readers that I am not the only crazy liberal American-Israeli out there who wants to see Israel transform itself into a liberal democracy.

Apr 29, 2008 22:52 | Updated Apr 29, 2008 23:30

Moving on to 'stage-two Zionism'

By SARAH KREIMER

'Make a decision - are you citizens of Israel, or of the Palestinian Authority?" Yisrael Beitenu MK David Rotem challenged the Arab citizens of Israel in a recent Israeli news interview. Sadly, on the eve of Israel's 60th celebration of independence, ongoing Israeli policy is pushing almost one-fifth of our citizenry - the Arab Israelis, or Palestinian citizens of Israel - into the corner of choosing between being Israelis or being Palestinians; when, in fact, they are both. This impossible choice plagues not only the million Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel - living in Ramle, Lod, the Galilee and the Negev. Rather, it poses an existential dilemma to the basic vision of our country.

I IMMIGRATED to Israel, in 1980, to be part of building a society of which I, a liberal Jew from America, could be proud. Often, I am proud of being an Israeli. When my kids and I push through the Hebrew Book Week crowds, eagerly choosing from among thousands of works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, written in a language that was unspoken 100 years ago. When I go to my Kupat Holim HMO in Jerusalem, and my doctor is Armenian, our pediatrician is a Mizrahi Jew, and the eye doctor is a Russian immigrant. When I walk through the Knesset, and see ultra-Orthodox MK Eli Yishai, secular-Jewish MK Zahava Gal-on, and Muslim Arab MK Jamal Zahalka - all legislating for the State of Israel.

Today, Israel stands among the developed nations as a world leader in health care and technology. There is a lot to be proud of in Israel. A lot to be ashamed of, as well.

In the Negev, the Israeli government continues to refuse 70,000 Beduin citizens the right to settle on lands they have inhabited for centuries. In Israel's mixed Jewish-Arab cities, building permits are denied to rehabilitate Arab homes, while adjacent Jewish neighborhoods flourish. In the Galilee, rather than investing in developing Arab towns, the government continues to constrict their lands in order to expand Jewish towns. As a result, in modern, successful Israel, over 50% of Israeli Arab families live under the poverty line.

SIXTY YEARS ago, the young State of Israel, using the Absentee Property Law, appropriated hundreds of thousands of dunams of land, owned by Arabs who had fled their homes - in the Galilee, the Negev, the mixed cities of Ramle, Lod, Jaffa, Haifa and Acco. Over the coming decades massive government (and international Jewish) investment gave birth to scores of new Jewish development towns, kibbutzim and moshavim throughout the country - consolidating possession of the land. Meanwhile, the Arab towns and neighborhoods that remained continued to be restricted, receiving little public investment, and facing labyrinthine planning systems designed to limit their development, or even re-allocate their remaining lands.

In 2008, this ethnic approach - draconian, yet necessary in the 1950s and 1960s - still dominates national land use and development policy in Israel. Today, if we continue this approach to building the "Jewish democratic state" we doom ourselves to a non-democratic state, known to the world as "Jewish." But such a state will not be Jewish in ways of which we can be proud.

AFTER 60 years, it is time to re-design our current path, with the aim of building a society that fully belongs to both its Jewish and Arab citizens. This aim is not only just; it is in the overall Israeli interest. It also affects, and is affected by, any effort to achieve a two-state solution.

First, despite Yisrael Beitenu's demand to choose, Arab citizens of Israel are Palestinians. In some cases, they are the sisters or cousins of those who left in 1948, who are now living in Jordan, in Lebanon, and in Gaza. In all cases, one million Palestinian citizens of Israel maintain a constant balancing act - between their identification with their Israeli citizenship, and their identification with their Palestinian peoplehood. When their attempts to build a legal home or develop their neighborhood are rebuffed, their identification with Israel weakens. When their country bombs or shoots their people the balancing act becomes intolerable.

Second, failure in building a two-state future increases the national conflict among citizens inside Israel. Since the beginning of the Oslo process in 1993, until its violent interruption in October 2000, most Arab citizens of Israel sought their own civic aspirations in achieving equality in the state in which they lived - Israel. They sought, for their stateless Palestinian brethren, a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

As the prospect of a Palestinian state dims, and Israeli government policies and proclamations continue seeking to "Judaize" the Galilee and the Negev, Arab citizens of Israel turn increasingly to the idea of achieving Palestinian self-determination within the State of Israel. The more that mainstream politicians regard Arab citizens as a foreign element to be contained and later jettisoned in a "land swap," the more these same citizens withdraw from participation in Israeli democracy, and seek their future through increased autonomy - as a national minority within Israel.

AS WE celebrate Israel's 60th birthday, we need to make a paradigm shift, and to re-envision our society. Sixty years after the founding of the state, we must declare an end to stage one of Zionism - state-building - and move to stage two of society-building. We need to redefine our Israeli civic enterprise, not as a Jewish State, but as a Jewish Homeland, in a state with shared citizenship. Otherwise, in clinging to the visions that have guided Israel in the past, we will destroy what has been built.

Israel - within its pre-1967 lines - is a shared home. It is a Homeland for the Jewish people; but it also a home for the descendants of the Arabs who were living here and became citizens in 1948. Over these 60 years they, too, have worked, paid taxes, and built their future and their children's future here in the land of their birth.

At the same time, if our Homeland is to be genuinely democratic, with a Jewish majority, a viable Palestinian Homeland must be established alongside ours - with its own Palestinian majority and law of return for Palestinians. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said at the Annapolis conference in November 2007: without the two-state solution, Israel is "finished." As long as only one state exists in this Land (between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River), our Jewish national home will not be sustainable. Sixty years after achieving statehood, our national home awaits this completion.

The immediate steps on the path to this vision are clear. Jettison the settlement enterprise - both within the Green Line ("Judaizing" the Galilee, the Negev, and the mixed cities of Ramle, Jaffa, Acre and Lod), as well as beyond it (in east Jerusalem and the West Bank). Dismantle institutional discrimination - particularly in land-use, planning, and resource allocation - and develop the country for all citizens equally. Teach Hebrew and Arabic as the official languages they are; and teach the histories, narratives and poetry of both peoples in our schools. Pursue "complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants" - as proposed in Israel's Declaration of Independence.

After 60 years of independence, it is time to recognize that an Israel that attempts to neglect, dispossess or exclude its Arab citizens is not Jewish; and is not sustainable. It is time to stop defining the Jewishness of the state by the amount of land controlled by Jewish towns or citizens, but by the justice of our society. It is time to be guided by the vision of Israel as a decent, fair, democratic society for all Israelis -Arab and Jewish - as we pursue a two-state solution that will allow national fulfillment for both peoples.

Leon Wieseltier's Trashing of Martin Amis's Islam-Bashing

My shul-buddy Leon Wieseltier led off the New York Times Book Review yesterday with a devestating piece on The Second Plane, a bigoted anti-Islam screed by the novelist, Martin Amis. Wieseltier is a maven of literary invective (and single malt scotch, but that's another story.) Just read the opening paragraph of the review, and you will know what I mean.

On Sept. 10, 2001, nobody in America seemed to know anything about Islam. On Sept. 12, 2001, everybody seemed to know everything about Islam. Well, not quite; but it is really a wonder the way the arcane particulars of an alien civilization now trip off every tongue. People who would not know if a page of Arabic is upside down or right side up helpfully expound upon the meaning of jahilliyah. Sayyid Qutb is quickly overtaking Reinhold Niebuhr as the theologian about whom the un- or antitheological pronounce with the most serene authority. Nothing creates intellectual confidence like catastrophe. After the mind breaks, it stiffens; in the aftermath of grief, it lets in only certainty. In a time of war, complexity is suspected of a sapping effect, and so a mental curfew is imposed. From the maxim that we must know our enemy, we infer that our enemy may be easily known.

According to Wieseltier

Amis seems to regard his little curses as almost military contributions to the struggle. He has a hot, heroic view of himself. He writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate. He is not only outraged by Sept. 11, he is also excited by it. “If Sept. 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.” Don’t you see? It no longer matters that we missed the Spanish Civil War. ¡No pasarán!

I particularly like the phrase: "with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin." What passes for knowledge of Islam among non-Muslims is so pathetic.

Not that Wieseltier has adopted a multi-cultural stance towards all faiths and creeds. He is still very much the liberal hawk that many of my readers can't abide. And yes, there is the obligatory line that shows that he, too, can be an undiscriminating Islamist basher:

[Amis] is correct that in Islamism the many doctrines of antimodernism, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are one doctrine

And there is a nary a word about other, more moderate forms of Islam, or non-lethal forms of Islamism.

But the book offends deeply two components of Wieseltier's identity -- his commitment to historical scholarship in all its complexity, and his faith as a religious Jew. Only a deeply religious person could have been so wounded by Amis's indiscriminate attacks on religion, as if it is the source of all modern evils. What Amis and others of his ilk don't realize is that reason, tolerance, and skepticism, are found just as much among the religious as they are among the secular or among the great masses of neither -- and this is as it has always been. Bigotry, sloppy thinking, and, I may add, bad writing, are not the monopoly of any group. On the contrary, the position of the religious intellectual in society, as a member of a beleaguered minority within an elite, cultivates her intellecutal skepticism and humility.

Yasher Koah, Leon. Maybe this calls for an extra shot next Shabbat.

David Shulman's New Testimony

Last year I posted some excerpts of David Shulman's book Dark Hope, a memoir mostly about his work with Ta'ayush, the Jewish-Arab group that supports those who are suffering the most from the Israeli occupation. (I translated from the Hebrew, not realizing that the book was about to come out in English.)

Yesterday, I read Shulman's moving Afterword to the recently-published English translation of S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh, the novella that describes an expulsion of Palestinianan villagers in 1948. I will have a separate post about that book.

But today I want to help circulate a report from Shulman that I just received from Dr. Elliot Horowitz. As far as I know it is not yet on the web. The post also mentions the recently-departed Gerald Cromer, also a professor, and a friend of my daughter's inlaws.

What can I say? My brain screams when I read things like this...and I am reading more and more of them.

Um Zeituna, April 5, 2008

Things are heating up in the hills south of Hebron. We're not sure why. One guess is that someone in the Civil Administration, that is, the Israeli occupation authority, has taken a deliberate decision. Or it may simply be the further, continuous entrenchment of the occupation itself, with its natural effects—the remorseless appropriation of more and more land, the consequent harassment of Palestinian civilians living on or near these lands, the expansion of the settlers-only road system, the soporific, shameful legal system that mostly serves the soldiers and the settlers. In any case, there is no doubt about what is happening on the ground. Two weeks ago Palestinian children were viciously attacked by settlers, and several wounded, as they were walking to school. The army escort that was supposed to protect them stood by passively. Over the last weeks, each time our volunteers have come down to escort shepherds to their grazing lands, they have been assaulted. Amiel and a small group near the settlement of Maon were surrounded, beaten, and nearly lynched. Meanwhile, one of the settler Rabbis has published a legal opinion setting out a calculus of human value in the occupied territories: one Jew, says the Rabbi, is worth a thousand Palestinian lives.

It's clear we're needed. The rains failed this year, the earth is dry, and the grazing grounds are much reduced. The cave-dwellers depend on their herds of sheep and goats for subsistence. For now, at least, there are still a few green wadis suitable for grazing, and the shepherds have to make the most of them. In theory, a rough modus vivendi was worked out with the soldiers: Palestinians can graze their flocks in the flat bed of the wadis between the settlements, but they are forbidden to let the sheep graze anywhere on the hills. Never mind that these hills have belonged since Biblical times to these same shepherds. In practice, moreover, the settlers drive the shepherds away even from the wadi bed, too, usually beating them for good measure.

We walk down the rocky slope, thick with thorns, to join Ahmad, who is grazing his herd just below the cow-barn of Maon. Ahmad is from Tuba, with its tents and caves, a kilometer or so away over the hills. Lambs bleat in the fierce sun. It is early morning. Within minutes, a discovery: small piles of parched maize are scattered over the bed of the wadi; beside them lie a few dead birds and rodents. Ahmad says he thinks they're coated with poison—a repeat of the episode three years ago when settlers from Chavat Maon spread poison through the fields in Twaneh, just down the road. Later we hear that children from Tuba saw several young people from Maon spreading the suspicious maize last evening, the whole length of the wadi. Carefully, we collect samples, which we will have tested in Jerusalem. We mark the many sites with piles of stone, and we send word to the other shepherds to keep their sheep away from this wadi, the main access route to the village.

Morning pastorale. To our left, above us, the cow-barn; to our right, the well-appointed houses of Maon. We follow the goats and sheep through the dry bed; they are chewing furiously, a silent symphony, under the shepherds' gaze. We meet Ahmad's brother Khalid, among others. I sit down on a rock; there is time to chat a little. Ahmad is twenty-two years old. Married? I ask. Not yet. Maybe soon. How soon? Who knows, perhaps a few weeks from now. To whom? Is there a bride? Yes, there is a woman he loves, in Lebanon. This sounds unlikely. Has he studied, thought about going to university? No. He points to the sheep. The Tuba people have no money, only these few animals to keep them going. Soon, when the summer intensifies and the green is gone, life will be precarious again, even more precarious than now. Does he come here day after day? Yes, he does. He comes with the flock, and most days the settlers descend from Maon, beat him up, and chase him away. He points uphill, and we can see that Maon has us in its sights. Someone is studying us through binoculars. A car, probably the security vehicle of the settlement, rattles along the top of the ridge. They are very bad people, Ahmad says. They want to hurt.

Still, he is nonchalant, insouciant, smoking the cigarettes he's been gifted by Amiel; every once in a while, he moves—with astonishing grace and swiftness—to turn a sheep back from the slope, to shape and mould the grazing mass. He seems subtly alert to the physical presence of each of his animals, some hundred in all; he holds them in his mind even as he sings a few snatches of song, teases us for our broken Arabic, tries to fill in the contours of some mental picture of our urban world, so remote from his. He accepts us as if we were simply another piece of this jagged landscape of thorn and stone and grass, with the occasional eagle overhead, and the dark perimeter of his enemies a mere 200 yards away, riding the hill.

I soak in the sun. I am in mourning. On Sunday Gerald died, a friend of infinite closeness; he was 63. Cancer ate through his body with lightning speed—a mere six weeks ago he was vigorous and apparently well. A man of total integrity, a fighter, a Jew of the old school, religious, a humanist, dedicated to doing what was just, and to peace. I cannot understand why I am drinking in this sunlight and tasting the dry wind from the desert and the mingled smells of cigarette smoke and sheep 3dung and wildflowers, and he can no longer feel. I puzzle at this with my mind, sadness welling up through my veins. I turn back to Ahmad with a question. And then they are upon us.

We expected it, after all. A group of settlers is racing downhill toward us, crying out their throaty battle-cries—not words but grunts and hisses and clicks and, from time to time, a menacing scream. There are three in the lead: one in sandals, long white shirt, long blond hair, wild eyes, the mandatory fringes of his under-Talit dancing as he runs; a second with face masked by a black cloth, leaving only a slit for the eyes; a third more heavy-set and ungainly. Behind them, still high on the hill, are more. All right, I say to myself, ready to act, eager to protect: Gerald, this one is for you.

We fan out over the hilltop as the Palestinians cluster with the herd in the wadi below us. We try, at first successfully, to block the settlers' access. They weave around us among the stones, cursing now and crying: "Ufu mipo, Get the hell out of here." We cut them off, again and again, but still they are starting to close in on our friends. Somewhere my mind registers the fact that, for once, they are not carrying guns. On the other hand, a handful of soldiers, armed to the teeth, are also fast approaching from the direction of Maon—a sergeant and several privates. The settlers reach the bed of the wadi and, circling past the shepherds, begin driving the sheep before them, out and away.

We invoke the "law," for what it's worth: these shepherds have the right to graze in this wadi, there's a document signed by the Matak, the senior officer in this area….But the sergeant is scornful of such niceties. "Don't talk to me," he says, "and don't tell me what to do." To his privates, he remarks with derision: "Look at them, it's like kids in elementary school." To us, after a moment's reflection, walking fast, he says: "I don't incline to either side here. Get out." And who are we to tell him that his very presence, guns and all, is what allows these settlers to go on living in Maon and Susya and Carmel—that it is he, by sustaining them here, who allows them to prey upon the shepherds, to beat them and humiliate them and steal their land? I know he won't listen, I swallow my words.

Amiel sends me to stand on the other side of the herd, to keep them from running away as the settlers want them to. I'm not so good at masterminding sheep. In fact, these sheep seem to me imbued with a Zen-like emptiness; they ebb and flow, responding rapidly to the rough shouts of the settlers, who are poking and pushing them toward the end of the wadi, and then, in sudden reversal, to the shepherds' commands to turn back. Every few seconds a fuzzy wave of sheep and goats washes across the wadi floor in some new direction, uphill and down, northward or southward, lapping at the grey boulders, trickling past the whole surreal congregation of helmeted soldiers and settlers in their Sabbath white and the impassive shepherds and our now furious activists. In the midst of these ovine eddies and riptides, there is a steady stream of invective flowing toward us: "You filthy Nazis," the settlers scream, and so on, the usual remarkably unimaginative pastiche. The blond one, his face contorted, grotesque in hate, suddenly rushes down the slope and smashes into Amiel. "Did you see that?" I say to the sergeant. "Arrest him! Look who's being violent here." "Don't tell me how to do my job," says the sergeant, bored, detached. "I told you not to talk to me."

And so it goes, for I don't know how long. Minutes pass. One of the settlers lashes out at Efrat; Amiel, ever chivalrous, rushes in to defend her. "We have the right to hit them, that's what the Torah says, doesn't it?" one settler shouts to his friend, obviously an authority on Biblical hermeneutics. Still busy containing the sheep, I manage somehow to reflect on what I'm feeling. I wonder, for example, if there is hatred in my heart. I scan my innerness as best I can: no trace of hate this time. No fear either. Perhaps, by now, after so many of these clashes, I'm inured. But I'm definitely a person who can hate, that I know. I repeat the scan. There is fierce anger, no doubt about that. Also, I am ashamed to report, something verging on contempt. I see their eyes, almost beyond the human; I hear the crude insults they are shouting; I sense the primitive splitting of the world, the terrible shallowness of mind and heart, the tribal lust for blood, the smugness, above all the frightened, impoverished manhood of the bully. OK, so I feel contempt. I wish I could work myself up to something better, but it probably won't happen today.

By now the settlers have been joined by their security officer, carrying an M-16. Definitely not a friendly presence. He ardently hopes, so he tells us, that our Palestinian friends will stab us in the back when we're asleep. He's pretty sure that they do this regularly. Meanwhile Efrat, delicate, focused, and wonderfully self-possessed, has had enough, and she says to him in crisp rapid-fire, each syllable ringing out distinctly in the desert air: "Maybe you're a killer, too. We don't know. What we know for sure is that you're a thief." "A thief?" he replies, rising to the bait, "at least I care about the Jews, and I'm prepared to give my life for my country." "I hope you won't have to do that," I say to him, breaking my own firm rule: don't engage in banter with the enemy. It never does any good. He turns to me. "And you," he says, livid with hatred, "would you give your life for this country?" "Most definitely not," I answer. I really don't like the idea. In fact, standing there amidst the sheep, I find it hard to think of a worthy enough cause. Is there such a thing? I ponder the problem. Flags, postage stamps, and Independence Day parades are clearly out. My children, grandchildren, friends, my students—yes. No question. But for a state? Maybe, I think to myself, a little whimsical, I'd risk it for the sake of some amorphous notion of integrity. In order to do the decent thing. In order to feel again the strange, unexpected, utterly intoxicating feeling of being free, truly and deeply and shockingly free, that I'm becoming aware of at this moment as the sun burns through my skin.

The soldiers stand more or less between the warring camps; our settler foes are but a pace away. It is Shabbat, almost noon. Amiel deliberately, with excruciating precision, lights a cigarette—almost as serious a crime, in the settlers' eyes, as befriending a Palestinian; a violation of God's commandment for this day of rest. (What rest?) They watch him in disgust. Though I don't much like smoking and usually feel unwell afterwards, I briefly consider whether, under present circumstances, to light my own cigarette might be the Jewish thing to do, an affirmation that God exists.

Amiel is more angry, I think, than I have ever seen him. He is a one-man peace movement, single-handedly keeping alive an ongoing course of weekly protests against the route of the Separation Wall in the Bethlehem area, south of Jerusalem. Some years ago, settlers shot him during the olive harvest in the north; he survived. Somehow today the brazen foolishness has gotten under his skin. I can understand his rage. On the way down, in the minibus, I asked him how he imagined things here, in the territories, in five years' time. "More of the same," he said cooly, "only much worse."

More News from Hebron

On one side of Hebron, the police allow settlers to attack leftwing activists. See Meron Rapoport's article here. That is nothing compared to what the IDF is doing elsewhere in Hebron....

Last month Gideon Levy wrote a long piece in Haaretz about the IDF's war against the Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron. Basically, the IDF wants to destroy the ICM charities, which provide important social services. The stated aim is to undermine Hamas, but since these groups are not affiliated with Hamas, the real aim -- admitted by the IDF -- is simply to destroy Islamic charities to make way for Abu Mazen and the PA, who have been talking about alternative social services (but not providing any).

Richard Silverstein had a good post on it last month at Tikun Olam here.

Of course, one would assume that Israel, as an occupying power, would at the very least pick up the tab and support all the institutions and schools whose funding they have cut. Of course, that is not likely. Better to simply send the kids on the streets, where they will become suicide bombers, blow up Jews, and then give Israel more justification for taking land on the West Bank.

No, I don't believe that the IDF thinks that diabolically. It barely thinks. That's just what happens.

Anyway, this item below is from the Palestine News Network. Thanks to Miriam Adams for giving me a heads-up about it.

Hebron / PNN - Israeli forces stormed the sewing factory of the Islamic Charitable Society in Hebron Saturday morning.

The Israelis issued a mandate in the occupied southern West Bank city that the employees must evacuate within two days. Ownership will be overtaken and the Israelis will close the factory.

A number of workers report that Israeli soldiers also stormed the house of the operator which is also an orphanage. Israeli authorities are confiscating the orphanage and closing it as of 28 April for three years.

Israeli soldiers threatened personnel and workers that if they maintained a presence after this date, they would be arrested for five years.

It is noteworthy that Israeli forces stormed the orphanage and sewing factory weeks ago, detained workers and confiscated equipment. The same situation occurred in the charitable bakery.

The factory opened in 1985 and supplies clothing for more than 4,000 orphans, while other pieces are sold in the markets bringing in needed revenue.

The Israelis have been widely condemned for such a blatant attack on the Palestinian people, leading to student demonstrations and statements by political parties. “This is considered a crime against property, facilities, and charities, yet the international community has remained silent,” the People’s Committee stated.

The campaign to save the orphans and charitable institutions has appealed to human rights and humanitarian organizations for assistance.

Confrontation between Activists and Settlers in Hebron

Y-Net is reporting that around 50 leftwing activists who were on a weekly tour given by "Bne Avraham" organization had a confrontation with ultra rightwing settlers. According to the activists, the settlers attacked the group without any provocation. According to the settlers, the very presence of the group in Hebron constituted a provocation.

Y-Net also reported that the activists complained that the police stood by and did nothing to help them.

Bne Avrham's tours, which are open to all visitors, are the best way of seeing the effect of the Hebron "Jewish" settlers on the Palestinian residents. This week's tour was a rather large one, perhaps because of the publicity surrounding the publication of the "Breaking the Silence" booklet about soldier abuses in Hebron. (See post below)

If videos of the settler violence and the police inaction become available on youtube, I will publish the links.

"Breaking the Silence" Publishes New Booklet of Soldier Testimonies -- Hebron

I wish I could bring you a more cheerful post on the first day of hol ha-moed (intermediate days) of Passover, but what is cheerful about Hebron, the heart of darkness of the Israeli Occupation?

"Breaking the Silence"'s new booklet of soldier testimonies about human rights abuse is well-worth reading. An English translation is found here. Please download the pdf file and send it around to people you know (especially the local branch of the Federation people planning the Israel@60 celebration.)

The launch of the booklet was accompanied by a report on Channel 2 News, that you can watch here. It has been picked up so far by Ynetnews, and the Independent. The Ynetnews piece has the predictably "talkbacks", reactions ranging from surprise, dismay, to justifications and hatemongering. I am always interested in reading the people who are finding this stuff out for the first time and seem genuinely shocked.

The Walla news website reported that anonymous hackers broke into the "Breaking the Silence" website Friday night, wiped out the content, and posted their own criticism of the organization. For the report see here. The website is up and running.

Frankly, most Israelis don't care. The army will say that these are a few bad apples, if they say anything. It will be news for a day. There is always the hope that publicizing these stories will result in other soldiers coming forth and testifying. When BTS has a few thousand testimonies, then that may move something. But I don't think so. The truth is that Israelis don't know what it is to be humiliated, or to be occupied -- they have never had that experience in the sixty years of the State. They know fear, and they know mourning, but they don't know the loss of dignity brought about by having their lives controlled permanently by an enemy army. Some of the older Israelis who came from Europe had a taste of this, but not for 40 years. For the younger Israelis, it is simply the way things are. Except for a few righteous people in Sodom.

One reaction you hear from some solders is, "I was in Hebron for six months, and I never saw or did anything like this." You know what? I don't believe that anymore. I think people may not have seen some of the worst excesses described here. But the problem is that what many soldiers see as normal occupation duty (call it "deterrence" if you like), is illegal according to the rules of military occupation and international convention. When your senses are deadened by being in the military, you don't think about what you are doing till later, if then.

As I have written before, even if one buys the stupid line that the IDF is the most moral army in the world (a self-serving and empty statement that is made only by the IDF and its supporters and by nobody else), then that self-styled "moral army" perpetuates immoralities and war crimes on a daily basis -- because, as some of the more thoughtful talkbackers wrote, the occupation of a civilian population renders it inevitable. You can't have it both ways -- if there is an Occupation, you must be immoral. And since Israel has the longest Occupation in modern times (excluding the Chinese occupation of Tibet), it inevitably has the longest term of immorality as an occupying army -- even if it is not raping and hatcheting the Palestinians.

Observing Passover When Still Enslaved -- A Response to Rabbi Arnold J. Wolf's "Liberation and Obligation"

Note: This post is dedicated to my former Hillel rabbi, Rabbi Arnold J. Wolf, one of the first American Jews to challenge the consensus thinking on Israel, and a simply wonderful human being. Arnie has written a piece called Liberation and Obligation in which, in his typical fashion, he balances the liberation of the Palestinians (i.e., the end of the occupation) with the obligation of both sides "to recognize the humanity of the other, and work together toward their mutual freedom, their mutual obligations." Balancing liberation and obligation is a life-long theme of Rabbi Wolf's work, and, to my knowledge, is a cornerstone of his own take on Torah. But it is also, in this context, a caution to the Jewish left to balance its criticism of Israel's morality and concern with the suffering of the Palestinians, with the recognition that the Palestinians are no less morally obligated -- and that Israelis are no less deserving than they are to be free from fear and terror.

This is my response to his essay.

For some time I have been thinking of what a "Palestinian Haggadah" would look like. The Haggadah is the book read around Jewish dinner tables on Passover that recounts the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and celebrates their future homecoming: "This year we are here; next year we will be in Jerusalem."

I stopped the project for two reasons.

First, while the parallels were painfully apparent (compare Pharoah's, "Come, let us deal wisely with them, or else they will multiply and in the event of war, they will also join themselves to those who hate us, and fight against us..." with the interminable Zionist discussion of the "demographic problem"), the differences are real, and the project counterproductive. True, a "Palestinian Haggadah" may be instructive for us Jews; it may help to "circumcise the hearts" of those of us who have been made "hard-hearted" by our own tribalism and post-Holocaust traumas. But most Jews I know really aren't interested in having their hearts circumcised by reading parallels between the oppression of the Gazans by Israel and the Israelites by Pharoah.

Still, were this difficulty surmountable, there is another, more powerful reason for abandoning the idea: The Haggadah celebrates liberation, but the Palestinians are still oppressed. How do you celebrate the Feast of Freedom when you are still enslaved?

The answer, according to the Bible, is that you observe Passover before you are free. You unite as a people while you are still under enslavement -- indeed, your sense of national identity comes to you partly as a result of that enslavement. You celebrate yourselves as a people, you remember happier days, you resolve to press onward with your liberation and never to despair: "This year we are here. Next year we will be in al-Quds".

That is my modern reading of the very first Passover, described in Exodus 12, which was celebrated shortly before the exodus. The Israelites were commanded to sacrifice and to eat the pascal lamb, and to prepare themselves for leaving Egypt, while the Lord was striking for them the firstborn of the Egyptians. They were commanded to repeat the ritual year after year, and to tell their children not that it was because the Lord had liberated them from slavery -- for He had not done that yet -- but because He had killed the first born of the Egyptians and had "passed over" the Israelites (whence the name, "Passover".) They were to celebrate their own salvation as well as the mass killings of their Egyptian oppressors -- a harsh celebration, no doubt, yet befitting an oppressed people that had only recently entered into a covenant with God, a people who, like people everywhere, were concerned first and foremost with their own situation; a spiritually impoverished people, no doubt, but desparate for their own freedom, and conditioned by their slavery.

To judge such a people from the mountain top of Sinai, and what is worse, to condition their liberation on their being able to give assurances that they will not rise up against their oppressors (who may actually have their own good reasons for continuing that oppression) is simply unfair -- unless you make the same requirement of your own people.

Of course, no people is given carte blanche to act in any way that it sees fit. We are all of us after Sinai, Jerusalem, and Mecca, and, for that matter, after Noah, and after the Geneva conventions. There are standards to which decent states must conform. If I don't spare myself or my people moral criticism, then who am I? But if I only single them out for such treatment, then what am I?

But there is a progression: first national consciousness and national struggle,then national liberation and the hope for true freedom and security, and then -- and only then, the acceptance of the law and obligations of states. Before Sinai can occur, there had to first be a people (Passover celebrated in Egypt), then a liberated people (Passover celebrated after Sinai), and only then, a nation that takes its place with other nations (Shavuot celebrated after the Giving of the Law).

I repeat what I have said before. The State of Israel was not born as a result of a peace agreement with the natives of Palestine or the surrounding nations. You can see this as a reason to oppose the legitimacy of Israel -- many do. But progressive Zionists don't. They argue for Israel's legitimacy, despite the fact that it came into existence by a unilateral declaration of independence in the midst of an inevitable war, which both sides prepared for and fought. (I am not suggesting that progressive Zionists did not criticize Jewish behavior during the war. But they believed, and believe still, that the declaration of independence without the agreement of the Palestinian Arabs was just.) For progressive Zionists to have one standard for Jewish liberation and another standard for Palestinian liberation is inexplicable to me.

And yet...must the Palestinians win their state in the same way that the Israelis won theirs? Is there no better way? Can such states, born in violence without any agreement, be truly viable? Wouldn't it be better for all us -- Palestinians and Israelis -- to be in the mindset of Sinai rather than in the mindset of the Egyptian enslavement?

If there is another way, then it is when human beings realize that they must bind together to prevent injustice and the oppression. That is our agenda now, and that is our agenda first. Justice now, peace as soon as possible thereafter.

I believe that we will all, one day, get to Sinai, and I hope that we shall all listen to the voice coming from Sinai then.

But now our discourse should focus freedom and liberation -- for them and for us -- from the inequities and injustices of the last sixty years.

A happy and healthy festival of freedom to us all

Yishar Kokheha, Amos! And God Bless You, Jimmy!

When the Jews and the Palestinians have been liberated from their respective neuroses and nightmares,

When the generation of the Six-Day War has passed,

When the only people in Israel who buy into the volkish myths of political Zionism are the religious zionists, and a few ethnocentrists from the former Soviet Union,

When no serious Israeli intellectual, or progressive intellectual in the world, falls for the Israel-as-victim line,

Then part of the responsibility will be due to the courageous publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, whose newspaper has fought tirelessly to expose the moral hypocrisy, shame, and, most importantly, hard-heartedness of an apathetic Israel that reeks of moral chauvinism.

The "non-Semite" who has arguably saved more Jewish and Arab lives than any person in modern history -- Jimmy Carter, of course -- deserves much more than a Nobel peace prize.

He deserves the gratitude and respect of every single Jew and Arab in the world today.

That he is villified by most Jews can only be called, to paraphrase the orthodox Jewish philosopher, Eliezer Berkowitz (in another context). "Hitler's posthumous victory."

God bless you, Amos. God bless the person who wrote the editorial. And, zakhur le-tov, God bless the indefatigable Sol Salbe, for pointing out the editorial to me.

Please read it below or here

Our debt to Jimmy Carter

The government of Israel is boycotting Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, during his visit here this week. Ehud Olmert, who has not managed to achieve any peace agreement during his public life, and who even tried to undermine negotiations in the past, "could not find the time" to meet the American president who is a signatory to the peace agreement with Egypt. President Shimon Peres agreed to meet Carter, but made sure that he let it be known that he reprimanded his guest for wishing to meet with Khaled Meshal, as if the achievements of the Carter Center fall short of those of the Peres Center for Peace. Carter, who himself said he set out to achieve peace between Israel and Egypt from the day he assumed office, worked incessantly toward that goal and two years after becoming president succeeded - was declared persona non grata by Israel.

The boycott will not be remembered as a glorious moment in this government's history. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian missions, to peace, to promoting democratic elections, and to better understanding between enemies throughout the world. Recently, he was involved in organizing the democratic elections in Nepal, following which a government will be set up that will include Maoist guerrillas who have laid down their arms. But Israelis have not liked him since he wrote the book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid."

Israel is not ready for such comparisons, even though the situation begs it. It is doubtful whether it is possible to complain when an outside observer, especially a former U.S. president who is well versed in international affairs, sees in the system of separate roads for Jews and Arabs, the lack of freedom of movement, Israel's control over Palestinian lands and their confiscation, and especially the continued settlement activity, which contravenes all promises Israel made and signed, a matter that cannot be accepted. The interim political situation in the territories has crystallized into a kind of apartheid that has been ongoing for 40 years. In Europe there is talk of the establishment of a binational state in order to overcome this anomaly. In the peace agreement with Egypt, 30 years ago, Israel agreed to "full autonomy" for the occupied territories, not to settle there.

These promises have been forgotten by Israel, but Carter remembers.

Whether Carter's approach to conflict resolution is considered by the Israeli government as appropriate or defeatist, no one can take away from the former U.S. president his international standing, nor the fact that he brought Israel and Egypt to a signed peace that has since held. Carter's method, which says that it is necessary to talk with every one, has still not proven to be any less successful than the method that calls for boycotts and air strikes. In terms of results, at the end of the day, Carter beats out any of those who ostracize him. For the peace agreement with Egypt, he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life.

(P.S. from Jerry -- the situation in the West Bank, of course, is not apartheid -- that is an insult to apartheid -- but much worse. At least in apartheid, black South Africans were not as restricted in movement as were the Palestinians. Both groups, of course, were considered to be culturally and morally inferior to their overlords. No, the proper word is not "apartheid", but rather, hafradah had-tzedatit, which may be roughly understood as "limiting the freedom of the untermenschen to protect the well-being of the ubermenschen")