With all the talk about #FakeNews recently, there's one piece of #FakeNews that's been accepted as truth for the last 24 years, because the Israeli government was foolish enough to accept it. I saw this on Facebook:
Judith Bergman on "fake news"...
"In all the talk about 'fake news'
Israel is missing an opportunity by not calling out the fakest of the
fake news, namely the professed existence of a Palestinian Arab people.
Palestinian Arab officials themselves have admitted that the professed
Palestinian identity is fake, an invention for the political and
tactical purpose of defeating Israel.
In a 1977 interview with Dutch newspaper Trouw, PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said:
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian
state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of
Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference
between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for
political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a
Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit
the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism".
Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security Fathi Hammad
made it clear that nothing has changed since 1977. This is what Hammad
said when he was interviewed on Al-Hekma TV in March 2012: “Brothers,
half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.
Who are the Palestinians? ... We are Egyptians…”
Why is the world -
and parts of the Israeli establishment - obsessed with establishing a
Palestinian Arab state, funnelling billions of taxpayer dollars into
that enterprise, if the Palestinian Arabs themselves readily admit that
their professed identity is fake? To begin with, the 'Palestine
industry' has become a flourishing business that would put many people
out of business if peace were to actually break out."
The reason the Israeli establishment accepted the existence of a 'Palestinian people' is that in 1993, Israel's Left saw the Messiah of 'Peace' and his name was 'Palestinian.' I've been railing about this stuff for years.
But most of the Israeli establishment - including our Prime Minister - won't admit this. If they admitted it, they'd also have to admit that there's no 'two state solution' and admitting that would be admitting that everything they've done for the past 24 years has been misguided and wrong. So the #FakeNews continues to be treated as real.
Moroccans say ISIS doesn't speak for us, support Zionism(!), offer (metaphorical) sex to Kurds fighting ISIS
MEMRI posts two videos showing how Moroccan activists are opposing ISIS. The first one is just called 'Not in my name: Moroccan campaign against Islamist extremism.'
Let's go to the videotape
In the second video, a female activist of the Amazigh movement defends Zionism and explains her (metaphorical) offer of sex services to Kurds fighting ISIS.
Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi is attacking a recent statement by US President Barack Obama to the New York Times as "dangerous" because in it According to Ashrawi, "speaking about the Jews' return to their land" is "extremist Zionist ideology."
Alan Johnson talks about how the world treats the 'Palestinians' like infants, giving them a free pass on all their bad behavior.
In part, because an anti-Zionist mindset that has taken root in the
West, and at its heart is unexamined assumption – that Israelis and
Palestinians are different kinds of people. Israelis have
agency, responsibility and choice, Palestinians do not. In short, the
world treats the Palestinians as children – ‘the pathology of paternalism’ it has been called.
The unarticulated assumption of anti-Zionism is that Palestinians are
a driven people, dominated by circumstances and moved by emotions;
qualities associated with the world of nature. Israelis are the opposite; masters of all circumstances, rational and calculating; qualities associated with the world of culture.
This dichotomous thinking has three bad consequences.
First, by granting only one side to the conflict agency and
responsibility, the dichotomy distorts key events of the conflict (e.g.
the war of 1948, the collapse of the Camp David peace talks in 2000,
Gaza after the 2005 disengagement). The Palestinians are cast as passive
victims; a compelled people (Haaretz writer Yitkhak Laor claims the second intifada was “instigated” by … Israeli policy); a duped people (activist Tikva Honig-Parnass writes of “Barak’s pre-planned collapse of the Camp David talks in October 2000”); and a people beyond the reach of judgement.Academic Jacqueline Rose views
Palestinian suicide bombers as “people driven to extremes” and argues
that Israel has “the responsibility for [the] dilemma” of the suicide
bomber.
Second, the dichotomous understanding of Palestinians and Israelis
distorts our understanding of Israel’s security. The threats Israel
faces are discounted and the security measures taken by Israel reframed as motiveless and cruel acts. For example, the writer Shlomo Sand argues
that Israel falsely “portray[s] itself as a persecuted innocent” and he
claims that this portrayal, not real threats, has given Israeli society
“a well of deep-seated collective anxieties.” Ilan Pappe, an Israeli
academic now teaching in the UK, claims
that “Zionists” are “[c]ompelling a nation to be constantly at arms” by
stimulating “continual angst” through the abuse of Holocaust memory. He
dismisses “useful fabrications about Israelis suffering under intense
rocketing” as a “fantasy of apologists.” For the anti-Zionists, then,
Israel’s concern with security is either a pathology (an unconscious
psychological condition Israelis cannot break out of) or – this a
contradiction, note – a case of manipulation (a conscious political
ploy).
The third consequence of this dichotomous thinking about the nature
of the two peoples is the infantalisation of the Palestinians: they
remain perpetually below the age of responsibility; the source of their
behaviour always external to themselves, always located in Israel’s actions.
What Johnson seems to miss is that the anti-Zionists that he cites are not 'Palestinians' but Israeli Jews, most of whom spent many years sucking at the teat of the State of Israel's publicly funded university system. You can add to the list of things that the 'Palestinians' are incapable of doing 'thinking for themselves.' They are even dependent on Israel for the intellectual backup for their Jew hatred.
Johnson, however, comes up with this sentence, which seems totally out of place with the rest of his column.
Of course, Israel has to compromise and divide the land, making possible a Palestinian state.
No, we don't. In fact, we already gave up 78% for a 'Palestinian state' known as the 'kingdom of Jordan.' If even Johnson, who actually gets the fact that the 'Palestinians' are unwilling and incapable of taking responsibility for themselves, still comes up with a line about Israel having to make possible a 'Palestinian' state, it's difficult to find anyone who is capable of drawing the proper conclusions about our conflict.
Geert Wilders on Europe: Israel is the litmus proof
Dutch politician Geert Wilders spoke in Los Angeles on Sunday and gave a brilliant speech about the future of Europe. You can find the full speech here. I'd like to share one part of it with you (Hat Tip: Herb G).
In the coming weeks and months, I will try to see as many patriot
leaders in Europe as possible. And I always ask them for their views on
Israel. Because Israel is the litmus proof.
The Jewish people did exactly the opposite of what the Europeans did
after the Second World War. They drew the right conclusion. They
realized that without a nation-state of their own there could be no
safety for their people.
Without a nation-state, without self-governance, without
self-determination there can be no security for a people nor
preservation of its identity. This was the insight that led the Zionists
to strive for the re-establishment of the state of Israel. Theodore
Herzl said that there had to be a Jewish state in order to ensure – I
quote – "a new blossoming of the Jewish spirit." – end of quote.
Indeed, a soul needs a body. The spirit of a people cannot flourish
outside the body of the nation-state. The nation-state is the political
body in which we live. We must preserve and cherish it. So that we can
pass on to our children our national identity, our democracy, our
liberty.
My friends, what we need today is Zionism for the nations of Europe.
The Europeans need to follow the example of the Jewish people and
re-establish their nation-state.
And that, my dear friends, is why every patriot, apart from being a
democrat, by definition also has to be a true friend of Israel. A
patriot cannot be anti-Semitic.
My friends, the great Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky said about the
Jewish people: "We do not have to apologize for anything. We are a
people as all other peoples; we do not have any intentions to be better
than the rest. We do not have to account to anybody. We are what we are,
we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to." –
end of quote.
...
Let us emphasize this commitment to the resurgence of our national
pride with a symbolic gesture. Let us do so by endorsing the Jewish
nation-state and move the embassies of our countries from Tel Aviv to
Jerusalem. Let us fly the flags of all the free and proud nations of the
world over embassies in Jerusalem, the only true capital of Israel and
the cradle of our Judeo-Christian civilization.
Israel deserves our support. Not only because it is the frontline
against the totalitarian threat of Islam, but also because it shows how
important it is for a people to have its own homeland.
Is aliya worth the sacrifice of the relatively easy Jewish life in the United States (in particular) and in some other western countries? What would Israel be like if all the people who talk about aliya (immigrating to Israel) actually did it?
When I left yeshiva here in 1980 to return to the US, I don't think there was a single member of my group who hadn't vowed he was coming back. When I came back a year later, having overcome what most in my generation considered the biggest hurdle to aliya (I had found a mate who was also committed to aliya), I sat in someone's living room on the yeshiva campus and was harangued for half an hour about how I'd 'never make aliya.' The Israeli who accompanied us on the trip was in shock: 'But he married someone who also wants to make aliya.' And the response: 'If I had one agora for every American who sat in that chair and told me they'd make aliya, I'd be a millionaire.'
I would estimate that 25-50% of my 'foreign' yeshiva colleagues now live in Israel. And I know of at least two 'American Israelis' among my yeshiva colleagues who moved back to the US, leaving their parents here.
An ideal, yes. Am I going? No. This is the response I give. It is
also the response I have received, time and time again, in return.
I don’t usually let the contradiction and inconsistency of this reply
bother me. The response has enabled me to affirm my unwavering
allegiance to the dream of Israel while simultaneously excusing my
decision to stay here. Though we usually strive to achieve ideals,
somehow we are okay with leaving the dream of aliyah respectfully untouched. Israel has become more a statement of ideology than a plan of action.
But sometimes the disingenuousness does bother me.
...
When we think about the aliyah question, do we do so within
the context of sacrifice? Israel is a country built upon sacrifice. We
acknowledge and celebrate this sacrifice when it comes to others:
Soldiers who gave up their lives. Friends and relatives who gave up
homes, jobs, and the smaller comforts of living in the States. But when
it comes to our jobs, our plans, our comforts, our homes, the
question immediately becomes more grey. When it comes to our own lives,
we hold sacrifice at arms length – even with libi ba’mizrach swinging around our necks and Israeli flags spotting our dorm room windows.
The inconsistency between thought and action is uncomfortable, when
we pause to consider it. We sacrifice for other ideals. Why not this
one?
I am often harangued by commenters from the US who try to claim I'm not Zionist enough (some of those comments don't make it through moderation). I live in Jerusalem. Where do you live?
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Sunday, September 23.
1) I knew he couldn't do it twice in a row
Thomas Friedman's previous column, Look in your mirror was an excellent must-read.
His latest, Hard Lines, Red Lines and Green Lines is not.
Friedman gave examples of leadership and lack of leadership. (In short,
leadership is demonstrated by adopting policies Friedman approves of.)
Among those leaders he found lacking - no surprise here - was PM
Netanyahu.
Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel has been loudly demanding
that America publicly draw a “red line” in respect to Iran’s nuclear
program that would delineate exactly when the U.S. would launch a strike
against Tehran. Bibi is Winston Churchill when it comes to demanding
that the U.S. draw red lines, but he is a local party boss when America
asks him to draw a “green line” delineating where Jewish settlements in
the West Bank will stop and a Palestinian state might start. Oh, no!
Can’t do that, Bibi tells American officials. “I would lose my
coalition.” So America is supposed to risk a war with Iran, but Bibi
won’t risk anything to advance a deal with the Palestinians that might
create a little more global legitimacy and sympathy for Israel, and
America, in the event of a war with Iran. Thanks a lot.
Netanyahu didn't exactly not risk anything to make peace. He froze
settlement expansion for nine months. And got nothing from Abbas.
During this time Mr. Abbas has mostly refused negotiations with
Israel, citing as a pretext the continued construction in Israel’s West
Bank settlements. Israel has offered the Palestinian Authority a number
of concessions in exchange for renewing the peace process, including
prisoner releases and a potentially lucrative natural gas concession.
But Mr. Abbas has not agreed.
The other problem with this paragraph is Friedman's line about "America
is supposed to risk a war with Iran." This is a misrepresentation
common to the New York Times. Netanyahu isn't asking the United States
to risk war with Iran, but rather to be clear about its "red lines" to make war with Iran less likely.
Following a column which he researched and presented straight unadorned
facts, Friedman reverted to type: use a series of pithy, but empty word
associations to masquerade as analysis. So for those who were worried
that Thomas Friedman had been abducted by aliens and replaced with a
logical, look-alike android, you have nothing to fear.
Israel Matzav critiques the column from a wider view.
“The idea of pushing on the Israelis to give something up to get the
Palestinians to act is the worst idea in the world,” Romney said.
“I’m torn by two perspectives in this regard,” he said at a
$50,000-per-plate fund-raising dinner in Boca Raton, Florida, on May 17.
“One is the one which I’ve had for some time, which is that the
Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that
the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”
But if he is elected president in November and finds himself in
negotiations over a future Palestine on Israel’s borders, Mr. Romney may
find that his comment at a campaign fund-raiser — captured on video —
that “there’s just no way” a separate state can be workable could
undermine his effectiveness in bringing the two sides together. And any
dealings with the mullahs of Iran may not be facilitated by his
description of them, in the same video, as “crazy people.”
To prove the difficulty a President Romney would have with the Palestinians, Sanger provided a quote from a Hamas spokesman.
The Palestinians, not surprising, had a different view. Yehia Moussa,
a Hamas official in Gaza, argued that the United States had “never been
suitable” as an arbiter in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute because it
instinctively sided with Israel.
“We are sensing a new pattern of alliances among the Zionist lobby and
the rightist Americans who believe in Zionist legends and predictions,”
Mr. Moussa said. “Romney is part of this.”
Hamas, of course, doesn't believe in peace with Israel, but for the New
York Times, Hamas is a credible interlocutor for the Palestinians. But
note that Moussa's statement is categorical. In other words he doesn't
believe that President Obama, either, has been a "suitable arbiter"
either.
Mr. Romney’s frank remarks, which undercut even Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s public endorsement of “a solution of two states for
two peoples: a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state,” seemed to
break from decades of official American foreign policy. Since before
the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Republican and Democratic
presidents have thrown their weight behind the effort to secure Israel’s
future as a democratic state with a Jewish majority by creating a
second state for up 2.5 million Palestinians who have lived under
Israeli military rule for more than four decades.
Critics of the two-state solution, however, have argued in recent years
that Israel’s determination to hold on to large settlement blocks in the
West Bank has made the creation of a viable Palestinian state there
almost impossible.
The vast majority of Palestinians, of course, haven't lived under Israeli military rule since late in 1995.
It's the failure of the Palestinians to build a sustainable
infrastructure - preferring instead to seek international pressure on
Israel - that makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state
nonviable.
In the course of his post, Mackey quotes Edward Said, Yousef Munayyer,
Ali Abunimah and the "news blog" +972. In other words Mackey's sources
are almost exclusively those who believe that Israel is illegitimate.
Finally, Shmuel Rosner weighed in with Romney and His Palestinian Problem. Even after allowing that Romney's statements reflect the majority views among Israelis and Palestinians and ...
But that is treading into slightly different territory than just
gauging the prospects for peace; it’s about guessing, much as Romney has
done, at the Palestinians’ intentions. And those, like the intentions
of any vast group, can be difficult to assess. According to one poll
last year, Palestinians support negotiations with Israel, but by a
“2-to-1 margin they also oppose the two-state solution that’s been the
stated goal of negotiations,” with most preferring “ending up with a
single state” instead. Given many Israelis’ objection to that outcome,
to some people, the Palestinians’ preference hardly seems compatible
with peace.
Another way of interpreting this data (no matter how much Rosner seeks
to explain it away) is that currently the Palestinians as a whole are
not much interested in peace - certainly not the kind of peace that is
said to be the goal of the American government, meaning two states for
two peoples. That being the case, isn't Romney just stating a truism?
Still Rosner manages to fault Romney for that too.
Romney’s take on the Palestinian problem is far from extraordinary.
But by stating his views so bluntly — and before a bunch of Jewish
voters in Florida — he has seriously harmed his ability to talk to the
Palestinians. Should he be elected an unlikely peace would become even
more unlikely.
The bluntness is the problem?
Did the friendliness of President Obama to Palestinian nationalism make a
difference? In an article (oddly seeking to absolve Abbas of
responsibility for the failure to make peace, blaming President Obama
instead) Mark Landler of the New York Times wrote last year:
But Mr. Abbas has lost faith in Mr. Obama, Palestinian officials
said, and after four face-to-face meetings and many regular telephone
calls, there is now little contact between them. ... Among Palestinians, the disappointment is all the more acute because
their hopes for Mr. Obama were so high. Judging by Mr. Obama’s
background, temperament and worldview, Palestinians expected him to
bring a new focus to the peace process and a greater sympathy for the
Palestinian cause. It did not go unnoticed that he is friends with a
prominent Palestinian-American scholar, Rashid Khalidi.
Rosner can speculate that Romney's stance, if he's elected President,
will make it harder for him to get the Palestinians to make peace, but
experience shows that even with a President willing to engages the
Palestinians on their own terms, there is little willingness for them to
make peace.
But why not turn this around? Why not ask why Abbas, knowing that he may
not have as much sympathy from the White House come January 21, won't
be more forthcoming in making peace with Israel now? Clearly, the
current situation doesn't seem to concern Abbas much.
The subtext of all three of these articles is telling. All three
effectively give the Palestinians the veto over what is an acceptable
offer from Israel.
The ambivalence toward modernity that torments Muslims is unlikely to
abate. The temptations of the West have alienated a younger generation
from its elders. Men and women insist that they revere the faith as they
seek to break out of its restrictions. Freedom of speech, granting
license and protection to the irreverent, is cherished, protected and
canonical in the Western tradition. Now Muslims who quarrel with
offensive art are using their newfound freedoms to lash out against it.
These cultural contradictions do not lend themselves to the touch of
outsiders. President George W. Bush believed that America’s proximity to
Arab dictatorships had begotten us the jihadists’ enmity. His military
campaign in Iraq became an attempt to reform that country and beyond.
But Arabs rejected his interventionism and dismissed his “freedom
agenda” as a cover for an unpopular war and for domination.
President Obama has taken a different approach. He was sure that his
biography — the years he spent in Indonesia and his sympathy for the
aspirations of Muslim lands — would help repair relations between
America and the Islamic world. But he’s been caught in the middle,
conciliating the rulers while making grand promises to ordinary people.
The revolt of the Iranian opposition in the summer of 2009 exposed the
flaws of his approach. Then the Arab Spring played havoc with American
policy. Since then, the Obama administration has not been able to decide
whether it defends the status quo or the young people hell-bent on
toppling the old order.
The embattled "liberals" in the region were awakened to the truth of
Mr. Obama. He was a man of the status quo, with a superficial knowledge
of lands beyond. In Cairo, he had described himself as a "student of
history." But in his first foreign television interview, he declared his
intention to restore U.S. relations with the Islamic world to "the same
respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as
recently as 20 or 30 years ago."
This coincided, almost to the day, with the 30th anniversary of the
Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power in Iran. That "golden age" he sought
to restore covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of
Beirut to the forces of terror, deadly attacks on our embassies, the
downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and more. A trail
of terror had shadowed the American presence.
Yet here was a president who would end this history, who would withdraw
from both the "good war" in Afghanistan and the bad one in Iraq. Here
was a president who would target America's real enemy—al Qaeda. "Osama
bin Laden is dead," we've been told time and again, and good riddance to
him. But those attacking our embassies last week had a disturbing
rebuttal: "Obama, we are Osama!" they chanted, some brandishing al Qaeda
flags.
4) At last Zion - again
The editors of Jewish Ideas Daily have reprinted a 14 year old Charles Krauthammer article, At Last Zion with the following introduction:
Nearly 15 years ago in the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer wrote
that “the end of Israel means the end of the Jewish people.” His
reasons are perhaps even more relevant in today’s atmosphere of nuclear
threat than they were when the article was first published. The essay
is reprinted here by permission of the author. —The Editors
Krauthammer's central thesis was this:
Whatever identity or identities are ultimately adopted by Israelis,
the fact remains that for them the central problem of Diaspora
Jewry—suicide by assimilation—simply does not exist. Blessed with this
security of identity, Israel is growing. As a result, Israel is not just
the cultural center of the Jewish world, it is rapidly becoming its
demographic center as well. The relatively high birth rate yields a
natural increase in population. Add a steady net rate of immigration
(nearly a million since the late 1980s), and Israel's numbers rise
inexorably even as the Diaspora declines. ... A century ago, Europe was the center of Jewish life. More than 80
percent of world Jewry lived there. The Second World War destroyed
European Jewry and dispersed the survivors to the New World (mainly the
United States) and to Israel. Today, 80 percent of world Jewry lives
either in the United States or in Israel. Today we have a bipolar Jewish
universe with two centers of gravity of approximately equal size. It is
a transitional stage, however. One star is gradually dimming, the other
brightening. Soon an inevitably the cosmology of the Jewish people will have been
transformed again, turned into a single-star system with a dwindling
Diaspora orbiting around. It will be a return to the ancient norm: The
Jewish people will be centered—not just spiritually but physically—in
their ancient homeland.
Great video from Michael Coren: Unabashedly pro-Zionist and pro-Israel
This is an awesome report which starts from the International Olympic Committee's refusal to hold a moment of silence at the Olympics' opening ceremony for the eleven Israelis who were murdered in Munich 40 years ago.
Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Daphne Anson).
US Jewish Federations dropping 'Zionism' from major global planning document
Writing at the Jewish Press, Lori Lowenthal Marcus reports that the Jewish Federations of North America have removed the word 'Zionism' from a global planning document.
The JFNA's Global Planning Table is the mechanism by which JFNA and Federation leadership come together to determine the allocation of dollars for new Federation initiatives outside of the United States. The Report issued by this collaborative is considered a building block of the allocations decision making process, and it was the call to include Zionism in the recent report that was rejected. The Global Planning Table page of the JFNA website does not include either the term Zionism or Israel.
Richard Wexler, former chair of the Chicago Federation and national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal in the late '90's, revealed yesterday, July 26, that JFNA's leaders have rejected the inclusion of the term "Zionism" in their Global Planning Table Work Group Report because the term "is too controversial."
In 2008 Wexler stepped down from his position as chairman of the United Israel Appeal, a subsidiary of what later became the JFNA. He also was one of the architects of the merger of United Jewish Communities, the umbrella group for the local Federations. Even while in a leadership position, however, Wexler was critical of the management culture, writing in his blog "UJ Thee and Me" that "criticism is not merely ignored, it is not tolerated."
Some fear the JFNA move will be seen as a watered-down acceptance of the notion that Zionism is to blame for the problems in the Middle East, or at the very least an effort to hold at arms length the idea that Jews are entitled to a national homeland.
After the article was printed (and despite repeated attempts to contact them before it was printed), the Federation issued the following statement:
After this story was published, JFNA officials issued a statement sent to Federation executives and others, by Kathy Manning, Chair, and Jerry Silverman, President/CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America:
On July 27, 2012, Lori Lowenthal Marcus wrote accusing the Jewish Federations of North America of moving away from its support of Israel and Zionism. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ongoing support of Israel is fundamental to Federations and to JFNA. Our system sends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to Israel to support the vulnerable, to assist in education programs, to help new immigrants, to assist in job and skills development, and to provide concrete expressions of solidarity during Israel's darkest hours. We connect American Jews to Israel and Israelis by supporting birthright and other youth and young adult programs, community and national missions to Israel, and innovative partnerships between our communities and Israeli communities. We are proud to be holding our 2013 General Assembly in Israel, where we will have an opportunity to highlight the important work we do with our partners in Israel."
Note that they don't deny the substance of the story, namely that the word Zionism was removed.
It's a video by Im Tirtzu about the centrality of Jerusalem to the Zionist cause. Subtitles by Elder of Ziyon, translated by Nevet Basker of BroaderView,org .
Here's a summary from session that took place while I was watching Caroline Glick, Naftali Bennett and David Makovsky.
Peter Beinart, the former editor of The New Republic, and Abe Foxman, Director of the Anti-Defamation League, headlined a panel at the 2012 Israeli Presidential Conference that discussed the evolving relationship between Israel and World Jewry. They were joined by Pierre Besnainou, Chair of the Israel Diaspora Paradigm Committee, Alana Newhouse, Editor-in-Chief of Tablet Magazine, and Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic.
The panel was highlighted by a heated debate over the status of relationship between Israel and World Jewry, and its ability to maintain its previous levels of closeness.
Beinart stated that the relationship is at risk of crisis largely because of a lack of willingness by the leadership of U.S. Jewry to deal openly and honestly with Israel. "What alienates young American Jews is the fact that they see Israelis criticizing Israeli policy, but they don't hear the same candor from American Jews."
Several panelists challenged Beinart's perception of a crisis, with Alana Newhouse warning of the consequences of "crying wolf," and worrying that the talk of an emergency could become "a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"My love and support for Israel is unconditional, it does not depend on the Israeli acceptance of my ideas," said Foxman, who was critical of Beinart's attacks on Israeli policy. "My Zionism is not in crisis because my Zionism is not conditioned on an idealized view of what I'd like Israel to be."
All panelists agreed that the Diaspora community needed to focus more on Jewish education and introducing young Jews to the importance of Israel, with Wieseltier lamenting U.S. Jewry's reliance on Israel for its Jewish identity.
"Israel was not created to relieve U.S. Jewry of the burden of creating its own identity," said Wieseltier. "In so far as the weakening affiliation is real, a moment of truth is arriving for American Jews and we can finally see what kind of Judaism U.S. Jewry is capable of."
Even the mainstream Jewish leadership seems to be tiring of Beinart's message.
In the opening minutes of his address, Beinart berated the government for assisting in the construction of a cultural center in Kiryat Arba, which he dubbed “one of the most radical and remote settlements in the West Bank.”
Radical? But wasn’t it endorsed by a revered Labor leader, the author of the policy of “territorial concessions,” as a “place to which we have returned never to leave”?
Indeed, wasn’t it David Ben- Gurion who in 1970 declared, “We will make a great and awful mistake if we fail to settle Hebron, neighbor and predecessor of Jerusalem, with a large Jewish settlement, constantly growing and expanding, very soon.”?
So what makes Kiryat Arba “radical” – established as it was in the era of Labor-hegemony, years before a Likud-led government was conceivable, in an era when Zionism was presumably still true to its liberal-humanistic principles, allegedly so dear to Beinart’s heart?
Moreover, what makes it “remote”– barely 24 km. from the Malha shopping mall in Jerusalem, roughly the same distance from London’s Whitechapel to Heathrow Airport – and considerably less than the distance from the US Capitol to Dulles International Airport in Washington? How “remote” is that?
...
Nowhere could the unfortunate audience get the sense that “radical, remote” Kiryat Arba was created under the Labor Party, and situated so close to Israel’s capital that both could easily fit within the confines of many Western cities. Nowhere could they get the sense that the development of the Jewish presence in Hebron was not some deranged initiative of renegade right-wing religious radicals, but a reflection of the vision of the founders of state – even those who embraced the “land-for-peace” formula.
It is thus a great pity that Gordis did not seize the opportunity to rectify this – along with many other contextual lacunae and factual lapses in Beinart’s presentation. After all, as one of participants remarked, she came because “as a Jew invested in Israel, I thought it’d be an opportunity to educate myself.”
And there was much need to “educate” the attendees in light of Beinart’s cavalier attitude toward the truth – with regard to both what he said and what he didn’t.
Elder of Ziyon picks up on one of Gordis's lines to suggest a "tweet" to promote a true understanding of Israel and its history.
Challah Hu Akbar picked up on a line stated by Beinart, but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I agree with Challah's friend who's quoted. Israel's critics, like Beinart, often mis-characterize statements and events in order to create a framework for criticizing Israel.
This is kind of astonishing. This shouldn't be a debate at all. Beinart represents a fringe viewpoint in America generally and the Jewish community specifically. If he hadn't taken an anti-Israel stand, no one would pay attention to him. But it's been a good career move for Beinart. He got a book deal and gets to edit columns (mostly) devoted to bashing Israel at the Daily Beast.
According to BookScan, the respected service that tabulates point-of-sales purchases of books at stores around the nation, Beinart’s much-hyped effort is a flop. Reliable sources tell us that BookScan, which is believed to capture the figures that represent about 60 percent of the book buying in the nation, has tabulated that as of this week Beinart had only sold 2,845 copies of The Crisis of Zionism. Because books that sell thousands more than that number are considered by publishers to be busts, Beinart’s ballyhooed cri-de-coeur must be considered a colossal flop. And considering that Beinart is believed to have received an advance of several hundred thousand dollars for it, one imagines that the brass at Times Books — the partnership between Henry Holt and the New York Times that published Crisis — are kicking themselves for being duped into believing the market for post-Zionist carping extended beyond the tiny group of people who will buy anything that takes a dim view of Israel. Crisis’s current Amazon rating is 2,530. That might not be considered embarrassing for a run-of-the-mill non-fiction book. But it’s a terrible ranking for a book whose author has been feted on broadcast and cable networks in the kind of public relations blitz orchestrated by his publisher normally reserved for a blockbuster.
If I wrote a book and benefited from the level of promotion that Peter Beinart enjoys, I probably could sell 2,845 copies too!
Emanuele Ottolenghi quotes a strong argument against the demographic argument made by Beinart (and many other critics of Israel.)
Demographic developments undoubtedly are a source of long-term Israeli anxiety. But they are not the type of immediate threat that spurs risky political decisions. Moreover, the binary choice Palestinians, Americans, and even some Israelis posit—either a negotiated two-state outcome or the impossibility of a Jewish, democratic state—assumes dramatic and irreversible changes that Israel would not be able to counter. Yet Israel possesses a variety of potential responses. Already, by unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, former prime minister Ariel Sharon transformed the numbers game, effectively removing 1.5 million Palestinians from the Israeli equation. The current or a future government could unilaterally conduct further territorial withdrawals from the West Bank, allowing, as in the case of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s West Bank government, or compelling, as happened in Gaza, large numbers of Palestinians to rule themselves and mitigating the demographic peril. The options, in other words, are not necessarily limited to a two-state solution, an apartheid regime, or the end of the Jewish state.
The insidious Israel Lobby has struck again. It somehow managed to infiltrate the United Methodist Church and convince the Methodists, by an overwhelming 2-to-1 margin, to vote against ending investments in companies involved in Israel’s enforcement of its control of the occupied territories. According to the New York Times, the Methodists’ decision follows similar repudiations by the Lutherans and Episcopalians.
One might have expected the Times to emphasize the lopsided nature of the vote and consider what it might say about the way Israel is perceived by American Christians. Instead, it buried any mention of the 2-to-1 margin until the penultimate paragraph, after devoting considerable ink to a wider discussion of the BDS (boycott/divestment/sanction) movement. The movement, we should add, has been remarkably unsuccessful.
Even the margin was reported in the context of the BDS movement:
In two separate votes, divestment was defeated by a 2-to-1 ratio. Susanne Hoder, a Methodist from Rhode Island and a spokeswoman for a group for divestment, the United Methodist Kairos Response, said: “Though we did not get the decision we hoped for, we have succeeded in raising awareness about the persecution of Palestinian Christians and Muslims. We have awakened the conscience of the churches and pointed out the inconsistency between our words and our actions.” Ms. Hoder said that four geographic regions, or “annual conferences,” of the Methodist Church — Northern Illinois, California Pacific, New York and West Ohio — had already voted to pull out their own investments. “We expect that more United Methodist conferences will do this,” she said.
Prisoner complaints, Rudoren writes, also are aimed at Israel's use of renewable periods of administrative detention without actual trial. But this is a tactic not unknown in the West, including the United States, when resort to full trials would jeopardize valuable intelligence sources inside terrorist camps. In the meantime, the prisoners in Israeli jails have access to their own lawyers and to reviews by Israeli courts. In fact, as Rudoren eventually acknowledges, two hunger strikers just appeared before the Israeli Supreme Court to challenge their detentions. So much for how Israel treats prison inmates. And what about all those non-violent tactics embraced by the Palestinians? Again, readers have to wait until they get to the jump page to find that 300 women marched in Ramallah, chanting "Down with the olive branch, long live the rifle." Not exactly a call to non-violence. But Palestinian sins are regularly forgiven in the pages of the New York Times. And what about the extent of this new, supposedly "non-violent" movement spawned by the hunger strikers? Again, readers have to slog through lots of hype and puffery before Rudoren admits that "so far, the solidarity demonstrations have been small."
In other words, this is not a news article but a work of political propaganda that could have been produced by a Palestinian public relations firm or an American Jewish group that acts as a Palestinian public relations firm. The purpose of this article is not to report or explain what is happening but to elicit sympathy and support for — shall I say it? well, it happens to be true — terrorist murderers or would-be murderers who were foiled despite their best efforts. Let me again add that there is nothing “liberal” or “conservative” about these facts. Nothing at all. Pretending otherwise is another propagandistic thought-control effort to get people to deny reality in the guise of opposing horrible right-wingers. It comes from the type of people who can ignore the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and other places in the Middle East while fabricating and highlighting claims that Israel is making Palestinian Christians flee.
4) An observation The three items above show a disturbing trend among a certain segment of the intellectual and journalistic elite in this country. Regardless of their shallowness or shabbiness criticisms and condemnations of Israel are taken as a sign of one's moral seriousness and sophistication. When the critic, like Peter Beinart, claims to be a Zionist the argument is prized even more.
Rabbi Meir Kahane was right: Do you really expect the Arabs to sing a national anthem about Jewish yearnings?
Rabbi Meir Kahane used to warn that one day the Arabs would rise up and refuse to sing Israel's national anthem since they have no use for the yearning of a Jewish soul. That day has already come. So instead of facing up to that reality, our Leftists are trying to change it.
The Leftist 'Jewish' Daily Forward commissioned Neshama Carlebach (who reads this blog, if I'm not mistaken, and in whom I am deeply disappointed) to make up a politically correct version of HaTikva, our national anthem. Basically, the politically correct version removes all Jewish content except for the word Zion at the end (and the fact that Jerusalem is not referred to as al-Quds at the end). It's an Israeli anthem - not a Jewish one.
For those who don't want to hear a woman singing even on tape, you can just watch the English subtitles - the changes are highlighted and obvious.
Let's go to the videotape.
Are we a Jewish country or are we a 'country of all its citizens'? If this anthem is adopted, we take a symbolic step toward the latter.
The current focus of [post-Zionist] attack is the wording of the national anthem, “Hatikva,” which Haaretz tells us, “ignore[s] the existence of an Arab minority in the State of Israel – a minority for whom this land is also their land.”
According to the paper, “No Arab citizen who had any self-respect, political awareness or national consciousness could sing these words without committing the sins of hypocrisy and falsehood.”
Elsewhere, we are told why this is so: “Independence Day is not a holiday for Israeli Arabs. Sixty-four years ago, they lost their land and their national honor.”
I am trying to get my head around this. Is one of the nation’s major newspapers really calling on the public not only to understand the sorrow the Arab minority feels that the genocidal attempt of its ethnic-kinfolk to obliterate the Jewish population failed, but to take far-reaching steps to accommodate this sadness?
Really?
How are we to assuage their melancholy at having “lost their land and national honor” in their failed Judeocidal effort? Are Jews really expected to forgo the victory and to suppress the expression of their national identity to alleviate the discomfort of the defeated? One cannot but wonder what the consequences would have been had the fortunes of war been reversed? And how are we to restore their “national honor” (much less their ‘land”) – or to compensate them for their loss – without de-Judaizing Israel and deconstructing the Zionist ethos.
But that is what the post-Zionists are really aiming at. However, to achieve this goal of dismantling the status of Israel as the nation-state of the Jews, they first have to achieve an intermediate goal: to decouple Israel from its Jewishness, to denude, and then break, the bond of kinship between the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
Hence the assault on the Jewish emblems – first the anthem, next the flag, then the Law of Return. After all, why should the Jewish Diaspora have unfettered access to the country and not the Palestinian diaspora?
This is a question the post-Zionists – and Haaretz – will doubtless be raising soon in editorials.
The last two posts have dealt with the treatment of women, and this one is a good summary. If you are a woman, would you rather live in Israel or in an Arab/Muslim country?
Let's go to the videotape - and then you can decide (Hat Tip: MFS - The Other News).
Perhaps someone should forward this video to Mona Eltahawy.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
