Aryeh's Israel Blog

God or Religion - what takes precedence?

2011-12-01T13:24:00.001+02:00

I found this article particularly insightful and compelling, not least in light of the internal debates here in

Israel

over various religious issues (not mentioned below). I’m not weighing in on the

presidential candidates but certainly do agree with the fundamental principle here: religion is meant to serve God and/or a higher purpose, and clearly is distorted when it seems to become MORE important than God or those moral values it is meant to promote. Or as he puts it, “the religious fanatic is the man or woman who has ceased to serve God and instead worships his or her religion…”.

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Are Mormons any weirder than the rest of us?

By SHMULEY BOTEACH
28/11/2011

I don't believe Joseph Smith found ancient tablets in upstate New York. What has that got to do with electing politicians?

I have been close to Mormons ever since my days at Oxford, when Michael Taft Benson became a member and then an elected officer of our L’Chaim Society at the University. Benson’s grandfather, Ezra Taft Benson, was the prophet of the Mormon Church at the time. Thus began a lifelong friendship that continues till today, with many visits to lecture for Mike at Southern Utah University and other mostly Mormon academies of higher learning in the majority Mormon state.

I have thus watched with mild amusement as the debate surrounding the beliefs of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have gained steam. Aren’t the Mormons weird fanatics? Should we trust people with such strange beliefs with high office?

This is an interesting question coming from my evangelical brothers and sisters whose belief that a man, born of a virgin, was the son of God, only to die on a cross, and then be resurrected. With all due respect, that’s not exactly the most rational belief, either.

The criticisms are equally interesting coming from Orthodox Jews, like myself, who believe that the Red Sea split, a donkey talked to Balaam, and the sun stood still for Joshua.

But it is equally strange coming from evolutionists like Richard Dawkins who have said, without a single shred of evidence, that life on our planet may have been seeded by space aliens. Even those evolutionists who reject Dawkins’ faith in extraterrestrial life have a belief system of their own; namely, that intelligent life somehow evolved capriciously and accidentally from inorganic matter, even though the possibility of complex organisms evolving without guidance is mathematically nearly impossible.

Julian Huxley, who stemmed from the world’s most famous family of evolutionary proponents, described the probability of the evolution of a horse thus: “A proportion of favorable mutations of one-ina- thousand does not sound much, but is probably generous... and a total of a million mutational steps sounds a great deal, but is probably an understatement....With this proportion, we should clearly have to breed a million strains (a thousand squared) to get one containing two favorable mutations, and so on, up to a thousand to the millionth power to get one containing a million.... No one would bet on anything so improbable happening...and yet it has happened!”

Yes, even men of science can believe things that can be construed as highly irrational.

NOW, DO believe that Joseph Smith found ancient tablets written in reformed Egyptian in upstate New York, that Jesus Christ appeared to the people of South America as recorded in the book of Mormon, or that when a Mormon dies he becomes a god and gets his own planet? No. Respectfully, I do not. Nor should it matter. It is what a person does, rather than what they believe, that counts. It took four years for the Dalai Lama to be identified as the reincarnation of his predecessor in a process that to Western eyes can appear highly arbitrary. Yet, the Dalai Lama remains one of the most respected men alive because of his commitment to world peace and good works.

Misguided attacks on groups like the Mormons stem from a willful desire on the part of many to fraudulently identify people with a different faith system as fanatics. Therefore, a brief discussion of religious fundamentalism is in order.

The most confusing story of the Bible involves God’s commandment to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. What was the God who would later declare that all human, and especially child sacrifice, to be an abomination, thinking?

The most insightful commentary I have seen on this story comes from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who said that the key to the story is to see Isaac not as an individual but as a religion. Who was Isaac? He was Judaism. He was the person who would continue Abraham’s belief system. With his death, everything that Abraham had taught in terms of his rejection of paganism and the belief in one God would be lost.

The test, therefore, was this: would Abraham follow God’s commandment to kill off his religion or would he put his religion before God’s will? What really mattered to Abraham? God, or Judaism? And if they were to be put in conflict, what would he choose? The religious fanatic is the man or woman who has ceased to serve God and instead worships his or her religion, turning their faith into yet another false idol. Religion is solely the means by which by which we come to have a relationship with our Creator. But when it becomes a substitute for God it becomes soulless and fanatical, seeing as there is no loving deity to temper it.

In this light we can understand why an Islamic fundamentalist is so deadly, prepared even to go against God’s express commandment not to murder. He is prepared to kill not in order to strike a blow for the glory of God, but of Islam.

Hence, our concern need not be with a person’s faith in public office. It does not matter if they are Jewish, evangelical, Mormon, or Muslim. What does matter is whether their faith is focused on relating to God and, by extension, caring for God’s children. Do they see the purpose of their high station being to promote their particular religion?

It is easy to identify the difference. People who are in a relationship with God are humble and do their utmost to refrain from judging others. Their proximity to a Perfect Being reminds them of their own fallibility, and their experience of God’s compassion leads them to be merciful and loving.

In contrast, those who worship a religion are arrogant and think they have the only truth. They are dismissive of other people’s beliefs and maintain that advancing the cause of their religion is more important than life itself. The Israeli rabbi who recently made the strange comment that soldiers should choose a firing squad rather than listen to a woman sing is a classic example of this heresy.

Those who worship religion evince the classic characteristic of cult members. Whereas a real faith system is empowering and makes one strong and capable of operating outside their own faith community, cult members can only identify with other members of their group and require the environment of the cult in order to function. They don’t have beliefs. Rather, they take orders.

I see none of these characteristics in Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman – who graciously hosted me along with my guest Elie Wiesel at the governor’s mansion in Utah a few years back – or any of my countless other Mormon friends. All should be judged on their merits as people and politicians, whatever their faith and whatever their beliefs.

The writer has just published of Ten Conversations You Need to Have with Yourself, (Wiley), and will shortly publish Kosher Jesus. Follow him on his website www.shmuley.com and on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=247327

2011-11-06T10:27:00.001+02:00

For all those who don't understand ENGLISH, this is a pretty funny, short video about English Accents:

'B+' on democracy, 'D'- on Israel-Arab conflict

2011-05-20T12:22:00.014+03:00

Truth is there's something for everyone in President Obama's MidEast speech: support for reform, commitment to Israel, Palestinian state, opposition to Iran & Syria.

But at base two things must be recognized: They're beginning to understand democracy; they still don't understand the Arab-Israeli conflict.

First, the Obama administration understands the issues relating to the desire for freedom in the Middle East, including the dangers - and should get credit for supporting and promoting democracy and reform in the region. Obama has started to talk the talk - not only applauding, but demanding that regimes in power, including Syria and Iran, stop killing their people and start responding to the legitimate demands of the governed. And walking the walk - in steps, and a bit late, but still important - by giving massive aid ($2 billion in funds and debt-forgiveness to Egypt alone!). What a message to the protesters in Syria and Yemen (and Gaza and Iran): overthrow your governments and not only will you be free, we (the West) will help you financially. That's worth an A. Telling Syria to stop repressing its people, and voicing support for all those struggling for freedom everywhere, is worth an A+.

His verbal support for 'universal' freedoms is important; but he needs to be more pro-active, and his call for 'reform' in Syrian and insistence on respect for 'universal rights' in Iran, were weak and passive. And the fact that he didn't even mention Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Lebanon is irresponsible and short-sighted. For all this, he deserves a B-. So put together: B+

Second, it's clear the Obama administration still doesn't get the Arab-Israeli conflict. They're learning - not only history and law, but the importance of nuance and language - and Obama's references to Israel as a Jewish State and national homeland for the Jewish people, to Hamas and its rejection of Israel, and to Palestinian (and others') efforts to delegitimize Israel, are important landmarks demonstrating this. President Obama would get an A for this. And his little-noticed reference to the Palestinians 'walking away from negotiations', thereby signalling that he recognizes, and holds them accountable, that they have made excuses for refusing to return to talks, is worthy of an A+.

And while many are suggesting that his reference to '1967 lines' is problematic, I somewhat disagree, and rather agree with Jeffrey Goldberg that there's little new here; as a 'basis' this has been understood for decades, and the words 'with agreed swaps' is code for negotiating the towns and neighborhoods which the Bush letter acknowledged - and all negotiations as well - are realities on the ground' which will be under Israeli sovereignty in the end. I could tweak the sentences to better reflect reality, and/or Israeli preferences, but that's not the point. And none of this, nor the below, has any bearing on whether one supports immediate withdrawal from the disputed territories (Judea/Samaria, the "West Bank") or eternal Jewish control of them; this is not about politics, this is about logic, history, law and morality.

No, my main and significant disappointment with President Obama's speech, and the reason I note they still don't understand the conflict, is the framing he sets, and the suggestions he offers as next steps.

As so many do - wrongly, based on a combination of visceral support for the 'underdog', mis-reading of history, politically-led misunderstanding of international law, and mostly the success of Palestinian propaganda permeating public discourse - Obama views "the occupation' as the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East, and that Israel is 'in the wrong' at base, and his speech repeatedly reflects this, from references to Palestinian suffering to territory to effects on other countries in the region. He remains captive to the idea that this conflict is a border conflict, rather than a national conflict where one nation - the Arab nation and Palestinians in particular object to and refuse to accept the existence of the Jewish nation in this land.

But more, Obama opined that starting with borders and security, we could move on to what he called "emotional" issues, Jerusalem and refugees. Here too he misstepped, not recognizing Israel's absolute right to Jerusalem (under law* and history, not as a 'pro-Israel' stance), and not calling clearly for Palestinian refugees to return only to a Palestinian state. And moreover, he could have used this platform both to note the fundamental responsibility of the Arab world FOR those refugees, and to recognize the similar number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands (who have never been compensated nor recognized, but rather were simply absorbed into their country as so many millions of other refugees were over the past half-century).

All this deserves at least a C.

But here's the rub: he didn't even mention, let alone focus on, the real primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East, the continual rejection of any Jewish connection to this land, and hence of the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, by a century of Arab, Muslim, and then Palestinian leaders. This is what makes this a national conflict, not a simple border dispute; this is where the Obama administration once again has flunked the class.

Obama himself said, " people -– not just one or two leaders -- must believe peace is possible." But he did not note - nor insist - that Arab leaders, and in particular Palestinian leaders, have continually taught their people that peace is not only not possible, but not desirable with Israel and the Jews. In fact, instead, he repeated the old mantra (and not very strongly at that) that Hamas (or Hizbollah, or Al Quaida, take your pick) are the bad guys, rejecting Israel's existence, instead of boldly demanding of Palestinian and all Arab leaders to finally accept Israel, as a Jewish state, and to cease attacking Israel and the Jews not only with missiles and bombs and threats of destruction but with textbooks and speeches and TV shows and statues dedicated to 'heroic martyr' terrorists.

This is not propaganda; had Obama and his advisors taken the time to notice, the events of Sunday underscore this very fact. Demonstrations on May 15, the date of Israel's founding, commemorated/mourned by Arabs (Palestinian and other) as "the Catastrophe", were organized throughout the region. These are not against 'the occupation'. (Were they so, they would be held on June 4 or 6, ie. commemorating Israel's advance into the territories.) In fact, in the disputed territories and Palestinian Authority (Judea/Samaria, the "West Bank") protests were decidedly muted - as most Palestinians living in the territories are aware that they are on their way to establishing a State there, are ready to live with Israel in peace, and are interested in protesting mainly against their own corrupt and authoritarian leaders. The demonstrations which made the news (and in which people were injured and killed, mostly by Lebanese forces it turns out) were on the borders of Israel, not in the "occupied" areas - and the calls were for Israel's destruction, not withdrawal from the territories.

President Obama does get that in a non-democracy, leaders focus on an external enemy to justify their own repression - he referred to Arabs' criticism of Israel being their only 'free speech'. He just doesn't get that this focus on Israel and the Jews as being responsible not only for all Palestinian suffering but for all the ills of the region (and often the world) is coordinated and propagated and allowed by all Arab and Muslim regimes, to a greater or lesser degree, and not at all least by the Fatah 'moderate' leadership of the PLO and PA. And he doesn't get that this - and nothing Israel actually does, even when it makes mistakes - is the real thing preventing peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.

This is the crux of the matter; these are the facts, and they are not disputed at all by the majority of Arabs and Muslims and especially their leaders, with a few enlightened and courageous exceptions. The Obama administration doesn't get it; they deserve an F, and to be kicked out of the class.

Had the Obama administration understood this, they could and would never focus on 'borders and security' as the first steps in any potential renewal of the 'peace process'. Nor would they ignore the demands of the quartet for Hamas to recognize Israel, renounce terror, and abide by earlier agreements - none of which Obama mentioned. Referring to Hamas, while ignoring the evidence that Fatah and Hamas (and the rest of the Arab world's leaders) are different only in style and degree, he says Palestinians have to find a 'credible answer' to the question "How can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist?" But he offered no demand for what that answer is, which goes directly to the heart of the matter. You can't; America wouldn't; Israel won't, either.

The larger picture is still clear: Israel has negotiated, and continues to call for a return to talks, with those Palestinians who at the very least make the pretense of accepting our right to be here and renouncing violence, and who at least seem to be more interested in creating their own state than destroying ours.

Unfortunately, even a 'peace agreement' and the establishment of a Palestinian state in most of the disputed territories, won't bring real peace to our region; only leaders and people in the Muslim and Arab world who truly want peace, and not merely a pause in the centuries-old war against the Jews, can make that happen.

If the Obama team wants to really help bring peace to this area, they have a great deal of homework to do. Otherwise, they're receiving a D-, and are pretty close to failing the class.

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*Professor, Judge Schwebel, former president of the International Court of Justice in the Hague writing inWhat Weight to Conquest [1994]:

"(a) a state [Israel] acting in lawful exercise of its right of self-defense may seize and occupy foreign territory as long as such seizure and occupation are necessary to its self-defense;

"(b) as a condition of its withdrawal from such territory, that State may require the institution of security measures reasonably designed to ensure that that territory shall not again be used to mount a threat or use of force against it of such a nature as to justify exercise of self-defense;

"(c) Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully [Jordan], the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense [Israel] has, against that prior holder, better title."

"As between Israel, acting defensively in 1948 and 1967, on the one hand, and her Arab neighbors, acting aggressively, in 1948 and 1967, on the other, Israel has the better title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem."

Taking back the banner of Human Rights - Sharansky article in NY Times May 17

2011-05-17T12:43:00.002+03:00

A Moment of Moral Clarity

By NATAN SHARANSKY

How many protesters must a regime murder before it is no longer fit for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council? How many thousands of dissidents must it jail? How many acts of international terrorism must it instigate?

The line is invisible — but Syria, having too openly crossed it, has now been forced to vacate its candidacy in the May 20 elections to the council.

It is good that Syria has been removed, just as it is good that Libya has been suspended from membership.

But what was Muammar el-Qaddafi’s blood-soaked regime doing on a human-rights body in the first place? What separates it and Syria from Cuba, China and the other dictatorships that make up the council majority and brazenly sit in judgment on the human-rights record of others? Why has the free world remained largely silent? In the run-up to the elections, such questions are more urgent than ever.

Something very important and very dramatic is happening in the Arab-Muslim Middle East. The peoples of the region are deciding to stop living in fear, and are risking life and limb to rid themselves of one seemingly immovable autocracy after another.

In so doing, they are simultaneously repudiating the unspoken agreements that the West has reached over the years with their dictators, agreements that bartered the people’s freedom for a facade of stability.

But while masses of people in the Middle East are demonstrating in the streets for freedom, the free world itself, led by the United States, has responded in classic realpolitik fashion, calibrating its response to each regime’s perceived chances for survival.

This is understandable. After so many years of supporting Hosni Mubarak, it was difficult to acknowledge him for the corrupt dictator he always was. After convincing itself that Bashar al-Assad was a reformer, a White House wishing to engage the regime on “the day after” was incapable of saying what Syrians already knew: that he was a barbaric tyrant and murderer.

But silence and confusion have exacted a price. To the people in the streets, to the millions who have crossed their own line from fear to freedom, the signal has been sent that America is not with them, that the world’s beacon of freedom is indifferent to theirs.

In the face of regime turmoil, many have insisted that Washington must choose between the two stark alternatives of engagement and disengagement. This is a fallacy. Engaging with a dictatorial regime and engaging with its people are two different things, and the same goes for disengagement. The United States engaged with and subsidized the dictatorship in Cairo, and America is cordially hated by Egyptians; the United States and the mullahs in Tehran could not be more disengaged, and America is loved by the Iranians.

When Ronald Reagan pronounced the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the partisans of Western engagement were horrified, but throughout that evil empire Reagan’s truth-telling brought courage to dissidents and a surge of hope to hundreds of millions desperate to escape the bonds of a fear-permeated society.

Reagan did not thereupon cease negotiating with the Kremlin. At the same time, however, his administration encouraged the struggle of ever-growing numbers of Soviet and East European dissidents — with results that, starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, shook the world.

There may be no evil “empire” in today’s Middle East, but there are more than enough evil regimes to go around. It is past time to start delegitimizing them. What, indeed, must a dictator do to lose the respect of the international community, or to trigger action against him?

It is not a matter of sending troops — another straw man. It is a matter of saying, not softly but loudly and in the clearest possible terms, that those who violate the human rights of their people cannot be our partners in building a world safe for human rights.

It may be necessary to deliberate the pros and cons of engaging with a dictatorial regime, but there is no need to deliberate engaging with its people.

To those millions crossing, or waiting to cross, the line into freedom, we can send a simple but thrilling message of support and solidarity: We are with you. No dictator is a legitimate representative of his people. “Human rights” are not a phrase to be cynically parroted by the world’s worst violators sitting on a grotesquely misnamed Human Rights Council, but a real and universal criterion of decency. We are with you.

At this moment of moral clarity, when the free world is being challenged to cease turning a blind eye to tyranny, surely it is not too much to affirm full-throatedly the aspirations of the Arab and Muslim peoples to live in freedom, to choose their own governments, to be protected in their right to dissent, and no longer to be ruled by guns.

At the very least, we, who would never choose differently for ourselves, owe this much to them, and to ourselves.

Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet political prisoner, is chairman of the Jewish Agency and the author, most recently, of “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.”

Converted to the Conversion Bill

2010-07-22T10:11:00.001+03:00

Converted to the Conversion Bill

By Aryeh Green

I’m a moderate, traditional Jew. I’ve been following and supporting the progress of Natan Sharanky’s efforts to find a solution to our society’s conversion issues for over a decade, and was very excited when the Neeman Commission proposed its conversion courts. Here was a moderate, practical, Halachic forum to move quickly ahead to enable the conversion of immigrants from the FSU (and others!) who have thrown their lot in with the Jewish people by coming to live in (and defend, and die in) the Jewish State. Over the past two weeks, I have given talks at and spoken to Jewish leaders and communities in 8 cities across America – and I am quite frustrated at the misunderstandings rampant, and even more so at the unnecessary wedge being driven between non-Orthodox Jews abroad and Israelis (of all sorts).

Even if (if) the Rotem conversion law was perhaps flawed before the recent excising of the section affecting the Law of Return – and I’m not sure it was all that bad – at this point I suggest simply that all who care for Judaism and Israel simply announce ‘victory’ and support it. All of us – Reform and Conservative rabbis and leaders in the US, modern Orthodox leaders there and in Israel, and all the rest of us who crave a ‘normal’, classical approach to Judaism – can feel satisfied that, with the amendment separating this internal-affairs bill from any treatment of conversions abroad and the ‘who is a Jew’ issue regarding the law of return, this is an effective and long-overdue bill.

Personally, I wish Rotem would have waiting until Sharansky (now head of the Jewish Agency and specifically tasked by the prime minister recently to help iron out an agreement) had been allowed to negotiate a solution. Politically, Rotem deserves our wrath. But the law is a good one, one which actually promotes the kind of more open, welcoming, tolerant Judaism and a cessation of control by the ultra-Orthodox which the non-Orthodox streams have been supposedly seeking for years. I’m not sure Sharansky’s efforts wouldn’t have led to the same law, or one very similar.

Those Diaspora leaders declaring that this law is “divisive” should be told in no uncertain terms: they are the ones who are causing a potential “schism” in the Jewish people, rather than blaming this law for it. They were successful in removing the offensive elements of it – now it’s time to declare victory and move on.

A close reading of the law (which it appears many Reform and Conservative leaders have not done, it seems, if judged by their rhetoric) demonstrates it does exactly what it’s supposed to: enable local, community rabbis to streamline the conversion process and to make it more welcoming, and, while Halachic of course, easier. The law, while codifying certain elements of Israeli practice already in place, allows much more freedom for more ‘modern’ rabbis like Shlomo Riskin and the Tzohar moderate rabbinical movement to move ahead with the conversions of FSU immigrants who want them – not to mention many others. This can – and in practice will – break the monopoly over conversions of the Haredim.

The Jerusalem Post editorial was inaccurate; it said the bill would give “the haredi-controlled chief rabbinate ‘responsibility over conversions’”. It already has that, even if not codified in law. Of course we should support it – it’s (part of) what we’ve been working towards for decades. (Yes, it’s a partial solution, but it’s a beginning. And mainly, it’s finally an answer to the issue of immigrants from the FSU who aren’t Jewish and want to be but either who won’t convert through the Rabbinate or whom aren’t being accepted by that Rabbinate.)

Moreover, we must understand the significance of rhetoric and the language used in debates like these. Those abroad who suggest that this law would be ‘divisive’ or ‘destructive’ (as did the recent Post editorial) are mistaken, as it does nothing to affect conversions abroad. It is they who are stoking the fires of division and a crisis in Diaspora-Israel relations. These leaders are making this a discordant issue when in fact they should be celebrating it as the first step towards liberalizing Judaism in Israel ever, and towards eliminating the control of the Haredim over our Judaism.

We – all of us who look to a more moderate version of Judaism which is open and liberal (dare I use that term, as an “Orthodox” Jew practicing what some might call “classical” Judaism?) – should simply claim victory with the recent amendment. We should explain to the liberal streams abroad just why this is a good law, even for them and their interests. The SF Jewish newspaper, The J Weekly, wrote that the bill puts more power over conversion into the hands of Israel’s Orthodox-dominated Rabbinate. This is incorrect, that power exists there today and it is strangling the Neeman and Druckman – and Riskin and Tzohar rabbis – approach to conversions. This bill will enable local rabbis to take the power away from the haredim, including the more modern, tolerant rabbis. The Diaspora leaders who’ve led this fight, for years – Reform, Conservative and otherwise – can be justifiably proud of it, and of their success in removing the one, small, admittedly mistaken clause which was offensive.

I propose we declare victory with the recent changes, support the bill and its liberating effect on conversions in Israel and its ending of Haredi control and coercion – ‘we’ including the Diaspora leaders who can now climb on board, communicating this clearly, and as forcefully as they’ve opposed it – to their flocks.

The writer is director of MediaCentral (www.m-central.org), and was an advisor to Natan Sharansky as Diaspora affairs minister. He has been talking to Jews across America since July 8, including in Portland (Ore.), San Francisco, Mountain View (CA), Aspen, Rochester (NY), White Plains, Manhattan, and Washington DC. Much of the above is a distillation of these conversations. (aryeh@m-central.org)

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=182160

Where is Orthodox aliya?

2009-05-06T15:25:00.001+03:00

I have been asking this question for years; as usual, Michael Freund puts it more articulately than I:

Where is Orthodox aliya?

By Michael Freund

THE JERUSALEM POST – May. 5, 2009

Earlier this year, a crisis erupted among American Orthodox Jewry, one that sent shock waves hurtling from coast to coast.

At the speed of broadband, word spread quickly from one community to another about the budding calamity, which threatened to cast a pall on Jewish life as we know it. Various organizations rushed to issue statements, the Internet was abuzz with rumors and parents from Staten Island to Seattle naturally went into a panic.

And just what, you might be wondering, lay at the heart of all this drama? Well, it had to do with raisins.

Yes, you read that correctly: raisins.

On January 27, New York's K'hal Adath Jeshurun, a prominent Orthodox congregation also known as KAJ, published a statement billed as an "important kashrus notice," which warned readers in grave and no uncertain terms that "due to bug infestation, no raisins of any brand... may be used at the present time, whether eaten plain or used in cooking or baking." The notice was then hoisted onto the Internet, setting off alarm bells for many Jews because of the Torah's prohibition (in chapter 11 of Leviticus) regarding the consumption of insects.

Obviously, the blanket nature of the ban imposed by KAJ was unnerving, and left many observant Jews wondering if they could still reach for their Raisin Bran in the morning.

But the chaos was short-lived. The tempest in a teacup, or shall we say the racket in a raisin box, quickly proved to be overblown.

As the predicament reached a fever pitch, the venerable Orthodox Union stepped into the fray and reassured the raisin-eating Jewish public "that raisins packed and stored under normal industry conditions do not pose a halachic infestation concern and may be consumed without further checking on the part of the consumer."

The Vaad Harabanim of Queens, an esteemed rabbinical body, also calmed the waters when it declared that the problem of infestation concerned raisins being sold by three specific companies and was not an across-the-board problem.

Now don't get me wrong. I am all in favor of the meticulous observance of Jewish law, which dictates how I live my life from the moment I awaken until I go to sleep. And the Torah's ban on eating bugs or insects is in fact quite serious, with the Talmud in Tractate Makkot (16b) noting that it can involve numerous prohibitions.

But this entire incident says a lot about the present state of American Orthodoxy, where a welcome trend toward greater observance nonetheless often leads people to lose sight of some larger and no less compelling issues of paramount importance.

IT IS TRULY wonderful that Orthodox Jews in America are sincerely concerned about upholding the intricacies of Jewish law. Maintaining the integrity of Halacha and preserving the rites and practices of our ancestors is what Judaism is all about. But what I fail to understand is the selectivity which many American Orthodox Jews seem to apply in this regard.

On matters great and small, from Sabbath observance to raisin infestations, it is common practice for religious Jews to ask their local rabbi a question seeking halachic guidance on how to proceed. This is done to ensure that the demands of Jewish law are being met.

But I have yet to meet an observant Jew in New York, London or Paris who has bothered to ask their rabbi a similar question about whether or not they should live in the Diaspora or make aliya. If a person is committed to living according to Halacha, how is it possible not to ask one's rabbi a question of such paramount importance? This "oversight" is especially difficult to grasp given the significance which Jewish sources attach to living in Israel.

The Sifrei on Deuteronomy, for example, states unequivocally that "dwelling in the Land of Israel is the equivalent of all the mitzvot in the Torah." And the Talmud in Tractate Ketubot declares that "he who lives in the Land of Israel is akin to one who has a God, while he who lives outside the Land is similar to one who has no God."

Centuries later, Nachmanides, the great medieval commentator, ruled unambiguously that the commandment to live in Israel is incumbent upon every Jew, and applies even if the land is under foreign control. The Pitchei Teshuva, in his 19th century commentary on the Shulhan Aruch, notes that all the earlier and later authorities agree with Nachmanides that there is a positive Torah commandment to live in Israel.

Israel is described in the Bible (Deuteronomy 11:12) as the land "which the Lord your God cares for; the eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year." And, as the Ohr Hachaim noted in the 18th century, "There is no joy other than in residing in the Land of Israel."

In light of all this, one can not help but wonder: Why isn't there large-scale Orthodox aliya? Sure, Orthodox Jews are said to make up the bulk of new immigrants arriving here each year from the West. But the numbers remain small - just a few thousand annually - and most religious Jews in the Diaspora seem content to remain where they are.

This situation brings to mind the words spoken by Joshua to the people of Israel more than 3,000 years ago, when he asked, "How long will you be remiss in coming to possess the land which the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given to you?" (Joshua 18:3).

Indeed, it has never been easier to move to Israel, now that we have been blessed with the existence of our own sovereign and independent Jewish state.

I don't mean to stand in judgment of anyone's personal decisions. But I do mean to suggest that Orthodox Jews in the West at least need to start asking themselves, and their rabbis, the question. After all, if they seek halachic guidance about what they put in their mouths, isn't it time they also ask about where they put their lives and bodies as well?

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710872635&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull.

Waltz with Bashir - Dirty Dancing against Israel

2009-02-22T22:12:00.004+02:00

[It's been a while since I've posted; and this wasn't even written by me. But Katie wrote a strong condemnation of the extremely damaging repurcussions of the movie "Walt with Bashir" so I wanted to get it up here. Published on The Jewish Week on February 18.]

Please, No Oscar For `Waltz With Bashir'
by Katie Green

Jerusalem -- The other night, I watched on TV as various leaders in the Israeli film industry partied at an event held in honor of Ari Folman's documentary, "Waltz With Bashir".

"Wouldn't it be great if we got the Oscar?" asked a beaming Channel 2 presenter after the footage was shown.

My answer is that, no, it would not be great. It would be terrible. This film has done enough damage already, and after the Oscars it is going to do a lot, lot more.

The film is by any standards a magnificent piece of art. If Ari Folman had climbed into a time machine, gone back 20 years, and taken a professional cameraman with him into the Lebanon war, he could not have come back with more emotive and meaningful material than what he has recalled from memory and projected onto the screen. And his film is a work of great emotional depth and sensitivity. For the purposes of internal national debate, this is a film that every Israeli should see.

However, a glaring omission is immediately apparent at the film's beginning, which intensifies as it progresses: no reason, rhyme or context is given for the war. No enemy is depicted to speak of.

Although the faces of Israeli friends, soldiers, therapists and politicians are lovingly illustrated in close-up all the way through the film, the enemy being engaged has no name and no face. Only once in the film is a teenage boy with an RPG on his back, brought into focus, and it is not clear who he belongs to, or what he is fighting for.

The eerie backdrop against which the film plays out is that the enemy hardly exists at all, or that he is a figment of the Israeli imagination. Soldiers are cut to pieces by sniper fire, but who are the snipers? Gunmen shoot down from balconies and roofs, but which army or political faction do they represent? Palestinian terrorists are sought in streets, orchards and refugee camps but why are they relevant to Israel, if they are operating in Lebanon? A viewer who knows nothing of the background to this conflict could be forgiven for believing that thousands of Israeli soldiers simply woke up one morning and decided to go to Lebanon to kill people.

For this reason quite a lot of Israelis have serious issues with his film and do not think it should be screened at all, let alone win an Academy Award. A friend of mine who watched the film at Cinemateque Jerusalem overheard viewers in the rows behind her say they were appalled by the film's lack of context. An Australian Christian told me even more bluntly, "The film confirms for Australians what they already know: Israelis are warmongering murderers."

Ari Folman must have known when he made "Waltz with Bashir" that films do not get screened in a vacuum. This film is up for an Academy Award at a time when virulent hatred of Israel, constant comparisons between the IDF and the Nazis, purposeful omission of the moral and military background to our wars, and a deliberate disregard for our civilians and their safety, have begun to flourish across Western Europe, Scandinavia and North America. The film plays into the hands of the worst of our detractors, depicting us as mindless invaders who care little for human life.

The success of the film can therefore not be wholly attributed to its brilliance as a piece of art. It is linked to the delighted glee with which those who hate us take it as evidence of our perfidy. Perhaps Mr. Folman did not understand this when he made the film. Israeli filmmakers are after all remarkably naive when it comes to how Israel is perceived abroad and the power of the new malice that has been unleashed upon Israelis and all Jews everywhere.

Many will argue that Folman's creativity should not be hampered by political and cultural considerations. I say this is nonsense. All of us who function in the adult world, have to weigh up the implications of everything we do before take a course of action. None of us are exempt from this arena of human ethics. Not even documentary film directors

And why is there an ethical question here? Because Israel is, in this decade, not just fighting a war with Hamas, a war with Hezbollah and by extension a war with Iran. It is fighting a war of ideas. A war in which it is being depicted as the sole cause of misery and suffering in the Middle East, a war in which the justification for its existence has been called into question. A war which is being felt by every European Jewish schoolgirl who is no longer safe coming home on the bus, and every American Jewish student coping with hostility and violence on campus. Even if Ari Folman cares nothing for these things, they will affect him in the end anyway. By the time the next generation of Israeli kids in Folman's family is considering their options for university, most of the campuses in Europe will be probably out of bounds to them. And it will only be a few years before Mr. Folman himself, as an ex-fighter of the IDF, will be prosecuted for war crimes if he so much as touches down in a British airport.

We will be debating over the next decade whether Ari Folman has, with his film, done his country a great service or caused it irreparable damage. My vote is for the latter. With all due to respect to him as the gifted filmmaker he is, it would have been better for him to deal with his Lebanon ghosts in the psychotherapist's office. I am not being sarcastic or disparaging here, God Forbid. As I have both a son and a daughter now serving in the IDF, no one could be more respectful (and more fearful) of the emotional damage done to Mr. Folman than I.

But if I could meet him in person I would ask him if the artistic expression of his feelings on film are worth all the rage and hatred that will be stirred up against Israel as a result.

Katie Green is an independent film director in Israel.

A Story for Yom HaZikaron/Yom Ha'atzmaut - By Katie Green

2008-05-12T17:14:00.002+03:00

A STORY FOR YOM HAZIKARON & YOM HA’ATZMAUT

I would like to share with you a “coincidence” that happened in our family just before Pesach, as I believe the story has relevance to Yom Ha’atzmaut and the miracle of our living here. The hours of Yom HaZikaron will are dark ones, so I am hoping this story will offer some comfort.

A few weeks ago, I got a phonecall from my parents’ friend Becky. Becky is now in her seventies, but my family first came to know her in 1939 when she and her parents and sister fled Germany and came to live in rented rooms on the upper floor of my grandmother’s house. My grandparents lived in Stamford Hill, London, which even then was a very Jewish area, but my grandparents were not observant Jews, not even traditional Jews. My grandpa had a grocery store and I am not even going to tell you what kinds of foods were for sale in that shop!

My grandparents loved the refugee family living upstairs, and a warm friendship sprung up between them. Similarly, my father who was then seven years old and had no sisters, welcomed little Becky, also seven, and included her in his circle of friends. But although my father bestowed upon Becky the gift of friendship, Becky had an even greater gift to bestow upon him, the gift of Yahadut.

Becky’s family were devoutly religious and staunch Zionists. Every Shabbat, Becky dragged my father to the local shul for Bnei Akiva meetings. (In those days, Bnei Akiva was called “Torah Ve’Avodah”). What did my father learn at these weekly meetings? It was not much, but it was everything. A little of the weekly Torah portion, some geography and history of Palestine, a few songs, a few dances.To this day my father loves to sing those Zionist songs of the 1940's, songs about clearing away the rocks in the Galilee, songs of the muscled young pioneers working in the fields. My father became a dentist and never did get to Israel himself, but you can see when he sings those songs today, how he would love to have drained a swamp or two.

My father's introduction to a Bnei Akiva altered his life forever. He developed a longing to become religiously observant. After the war was over in 1945, and when Berlin was divided into four parts, my father would listen on the radio to the Jewish army chaplain of the American forces stationed in Berlin. This Rabbi, whoever he was, sang the entire Seder service on radio about a week before Pesach. My father memorized the tunes to "Ma Nishtana" and "Dayeinu", and held the first family Seder in his home when he was about fourteen.

Becky and her family emigrated to the newly formed Jewish State in 1948. Although they could not attend each other's weddings, Becky and my father stayed in touch over the years. To this day, Becky and her husband Walter run a Judaica store in Haifa. My parents visited Becky on their first trips to Israel in 1968 and 1969, and the two families have visited each other on many occasions since. Becky and Walter's children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren are all living in Israel.

Becky's son Abie was one of the earliest settlers of Karnei Shomron, where he and his wife bought their home about twenty years ago.A few weeks ago, Abie's son looked around him at Friday night minyan to see if there were any soldiers who would like to be invited for Shabbat dinner. Soldiers from the nearby base are always welcome at the table of Karnei Shomron families. Abie's son approached a young soldier and asked him if he would like to come back with him for Friday night dinner. This soldier was my son, Yonatan.

That evening at Shabbat dinner, my father's grandson and Becky's grandchildren sat around the table together,laughing and talking and singing zmirot. Never at any point did they make the connnection. It was only after Shabbat, when Abie was on the phone to his mother, that Becky said: "This boy has an American father and an English mother? His name's Yonatan and he lives in Bet Shemesh? I think I know who this must be!"I didn't want to tell Becky, when she phoned me with such excitement in her voice on Motzei Shabbat, that her "clues" fit the description of about a hundred boys living in the Bet Shemesh area! It was irrelevant, anyway. Bckey's sixth sense had told her that this was Peter's grandson, and indeed it was.

Yonatan was invited again to Abie's homefor Shvi''i of Pesach, and this time was Becky was there. You can imagine what a very festive meal that was.

On that same shvi'i of Pesach, my daughter Moriyah spent the afternoon taking her group of twelve year old Ethiopian girls. Moriyah is a madricha in the special snif set up by Bnei Akiva for Ethiopian children. What does Moriyah teach her chanichot on Shabbat and Chag afternoons? A little of the weekly Torah portion, some geography and history of the Land of Israel, a few songs and dances.

It is not much, but it is everything.

Chag Ha'atzmaut sameach to all the family of Israel, and may we blessed with peace and besurot tovot.

Katie

Holocaust Remembrance Day - A Personal Perspective

2008-05-02T16:40:00.000+03:00

My wife Katie wrote this for Holocaust Remembrance Day (May 1 ’08) and I thought it worth sharing. I stood on our balcony with my daughter Michal that morning as the air-raid siren brought us to a stand-still. We listened to it as the birds, apparently unaware of the tradition to stand silently, sang and flew all around the garden – and as I looked out over the hills and valleys and houses around us, I thought “this is the best way to memorialize the millions – making Israel a vibrant, passionate testimony of ‘never again’….”

---------------

MRS. H.

It is Yom HaShoah today - Holocaust Day.

Last night I lit a memorial candle and placed it in my kitchen window. My tiny street was completely dark. The light from the candle flickered and bounced over all the doors and windows of the houses opposite. Such a little light, for such a big thing.

I grew up in a community almost entirely comprised of German Jews. They were refugees who came over to England either before the war, or after it. The surnames of my little friends at shul were all German names: Frei, Beigel, Faber, Nussbaum, Hirsch, Schwarz, Felsenstein.

I knew, internalized long before the story of the Holocaust had been verbalized to me, that the people I davvened with in shul had undergone unimaginable suffering. Some of then had been orphaned as children, and had arrived in England on the Kindertransport. Some had been in the worst of the concentration camps as teenagers. Most of my friends at shul had no grandparents. Most of them were named after their grandparents.

But the person who attracted my attention in shul was Mrs. H. Mrs. H., a very attractive woman with an impressive black sheitl, had two adopted children. This was unusual in those days. There were a good number of childless couples in the community then - it was before the days of fertility treatment. But not many religious couples adopted. It was difficult to find Jewish children available for adoption, and the adoption of non-Jewish children was a halachically complicated process.

Infertility is an agonizingly private issue, but everybody knew why Mrs. H. couldn't have children of her own. She had been experimented on in the camps. She was a teenager at the time, fifteen or sixteen years old.

Every week in shul I looked and looked at Mrs. H., who sat at some distance away from me and my mother. Mrs. H. had a grave, quiet face. She was a devout woman who prayed with composure and focus. For 51 weeks of the year Mrs. H. was always there, in my peripheral vision, taking three steps back, three steps forward into G-d's presence at the beginning of the Amida prayer.

On one day of the year, Yom Kippur, Mrs. H. moved into central view. On that day Mrs. H. was no longer quiet. Her suffering was terrible to behold. She wept and wept, was bent double with weeping. As a small child I watched her. To this day I remember the feeling of my mother's hand on my head, tilting it downwards towards my siddur, teaching me that people's tears on Yom Kippur are their own affair. But I did not feel that Mrs. H.'s tears belonged only to her. Even then, at ten years old, I understood that her tears belonged to all of us.

The English are restrained and polite about grief. Don't shout, don't scream, don't sob. And if you are an observer of grief, don't look, don't touch and don't give away that you have noticed, as this would be an invasion of privacy.

In all the years that Mrs. H.'s body crumpled agianst the mechitza with weeping, I don't recall that anyone ever reached out to her. No one hugged her and no one held her. "I want to give her a cuddle", I used to say to my mother. "Can I go across and cuddle her?"

"No, darling, you can't", my mother would reply. "I'm not sure how she would feel about it." And indeed. It would not have been the done thing.

I think that Mrs. H., stored somewhere deep in my hard disc, is one of the reasons I'm living in Israel today. Israel is that one big hug I could never give to Holocaust survivors. It's also the hug I give to myself, as I walk across Safra Square on a beautiful Jerusalem day - Holocaust Day - in May. I look up at the huge flagpoles of the Jerusalem municipality and I see that they are flying at half-mast.

Half-mast for you, Mrs. H.. And all the other women of the Shoah.

Bush's Mideast U-Turn - By Natan Sharansky and Bassem Eid

2008-02-11T16:44:00.000+02:00

Bush's Mideast U-Turn

By BASSEM EID AND NATAN SHARANSKY
Wall St. Journal - February 11, 2008; Page A19

On June 24, 2002, President Bush presented his vision for an Israeli-Palestinian peace. That we both would have greeted Mr. Bush's speech with the same enthusiasm may come as a surprise.

One of us is a former Soviet dissident who spent nine years in the Gulag and, after joining his people in Jerusalem, spent a decade in Israeli political life, serving as a cabinet minister during most of that time. The other is a Palestinian who has devoted his life to exposing human rights abuses perpetrated against his people, regardless of whether the government committing those abuses was Israeli or Palestinian. One is a Jew convinced of his people's just claim to the Land of Israel. The other is an Arab convinced of his people's just claim to the same land.

Yet while we have real disagreements that would make an historic compromise very difficult and painful, we are fully in agreement that the only path to peace lies in building a free Palestinian society -- a path Mr. Bush boldly laid out in his historic speech.

Unfortunately, encouraged by short-sighted Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the Bush administration, now entering its final year in office, has resuscitated the failed policies of the past that have brought nothing but tragedy, terror and war and that have only pushed peace further away.

The real breakthrough of Mr. Bush's vision five-and-a-half years ago was not his call for a two-state solution or even the call for Palestinians to "choose leaders not compromised by terror." Rather, the breakthrough was in making peace conditional on a fundamental transformation of Palestinian society: "I call upon [Palestinians] to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. . . . A Palestinian state will never be created by terror -- it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism."

Many critics argued at the time that linking the peace process to a transformation of Palestinian society was a radical departure in peacemaking. It was. And it was long overdue.

What had guided policymakers for the previous decade was the idea that a "moderate" Palestinian leader who would fight terror and make peace with Israel needed to be "strengthened" at all costs. Yasser Arafat was their moderate. He was given territory, weapons, money and a warm diplomatic embrace.

Completely ignored was what was happening within Palestinian society. As Arafat was hollowing out civil society, handing control of the economy to corrupt cronies, squirreling away billions of dollars into his private accounts, trampling on the rights of his own people, and using PA-controlled media and schools to indoctrinate a generation into a culture of hatred, the international community's bear hug only tightened. Indeed, Arafat's emerging dictatorship was seen as an asset in the peace process. Here was the "strong" leader, it was argued, who could make a deal. Nothing should be done to weaken him.

Mr. Bush's speech was supposed to change all this. It was supposed to shift the focus to where it should have always been: on helping Palestinians build a decent society that would protect the rights of their own people and promote peace with its neighbors. It was supposed to begin the hard work of helping Palestinians reconstruct their civil society, build a free economy, establish real courts, reform their security services, and revamp their educational system.

President Bush deserves much credit for placing a spotlight on the issues of democracy and human rights and for his firm belief that the advance of freedom is critical for international peace and stability. He made this idea a focus of his second inaugural address and reiterated it last June in Prague at a conference of dissidents from around the world. Last month, President Bush did not flinch from speaking about freedom and human rights in the heart of Arabia.

But the past few years have shown that when it comes to dealing with Israelis and Palestinians, the vital link between freedom and peace is almost entirely ignored. True, the administration is not doing anything against the wishes of the current Israeli and Palestinian leadership. But just as the Oslo peace process of the 1990s was a disaster that Israeli and Palestinian leaders wholeheartedly embraced, the current peacemaking round will prove equally disastrous because it ignores what is most important.

Rather than begin the long and difficult process to transform Palestinian society and ultimately pave the road to peace, the administration has consistently supported quick and foolish solutions: from crafting a "road map" that only paid lip service to reform; to backing a unilateral disengagement that by its nature ignored Palestinian society; to pressing for snap elections that preceded rather than followed reform and thereby brought Hamas to power.

When Arafat passed from the scene, we hoped that the Bush vision would finally be given a chance. But all that has happened is that President Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen) and Prime Minister Salam Fayad have become the new "moderates" who need to be strengthened at all costs. Rather than establish a clear link between support for the PA and reform, and openly embrace the genuine Palestinian reformers who are the democratic world's true allies, Abu Mazen is promised billions despite having done nothing. With the media entirely under his control, incitement continues and no one raises serious objections. He is, we are told, too "weak" to take action.

A few weeks ago, in a meeting with a high ranking official responsible for European foreign policy, one of us (Mr. Sharansky) spoke about the need to support the work of the other (Mr. Eid) in promoting democracy and human rights in the Palestinian territories. After the European leader expressed his deep commitment to peace, democracy and human rights, he asked the all important question: "What is his [Mr. Eid's] relationship to Abu Mazen?" After hearing that it was strained because of constant criticism of Abu Mazen's failure to reform, the official's enthusiasm quickly evaporated. "That will be a problem. We cannot do anything that will undermine Abu Mazen." This new-old attitude reminds one of the absurdity of those who refused to support democratic dissidents behind the Iron Curtain because they were undermining their leaders.

President Bush should spend his final year in office helping Palestinians begin the transformation of their society so that the vision he once spoke of so eloquently will have a chance to come to fruition some day. We have wasted too much time strengthening leaders and reaching for the moon. Let's start strengthening Palestinian society and begin a real peace process once and for all.

Mr. Eid is executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Mr. Sharansky is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies.

'Miracle Girl' - On Rachel Sharansky's Wedding - by Katie Green

2008-01-14T10:09:00.000+02:00

MIRACLE GIRL

There are weddings and weddings in our lives. The weddings of ourselves, our relatives and our friends, and one generation later, the weddings of our children and our friend's children, which of course, are even more poignant than our own. There are the regular, every day, run of the mill weddings, the weddings where we ate too much or the music was too loud or we sat next to somebody's Relative From Hell, and then there are the other weddings - the one or two weddings, which for the rest of our lives, we will never forget.

The wedding of Rachel Sharansky, the eldest of Natan and Avital Sharansky's two daughters, and Micha Danziger, a new immigrant from the United States, was one of those weddings.

The Sharansky wedding at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel last Friday morning was never going to be, never could be, in any sense a normal wedding. During the coffee and cake reception before the ceremony, I observed among the hundreds of people there, two distinct groups: the young people who were simply happy to be participating in the celebration and who had little idea of the historical significance of the event, and the older people who had taken part in the drama of the Refusenik struggle and for whom Rachel's wedding was the grand finale and closing chapter of that astonishing narrative.

My husband I wandered over to an alcove in the reception area to congratulate the bride. Rachel, more than radiant, more than happy, positively sparkled with her enjoyment of the day. Her lovely face, with its expression of intelligence, warmth and humor, looked up smilingly at every guest without a trace of nervousness of self-consciousness. The thought crossed my mind, as I stood at a distance where I could just enjoy looking at her, that this magical person very nearly did not come to be. In the configuration of the universe as we knew it in the early 1980's, the chances of there being a glowing Rachel Sharansky standing here in her wedding dress in 2008, were statistically very small indeed. All of us who participated in the demonstrations of those years, remember perfectly well, that whether Natan was in solitary confinement or on hunger strike or doing both together, there were times when we very nearly lost him.

On one memorable occasion I remember how shocked my parents were when, twenty-five odd years ago, a group of us disrupted a concert of the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Half way through the performance, we shed our outside clothes to reveal the striped "prison uniforms" we were wearing underneath, and handcuffed ourselves to the railings of the balcony in the auditorium, yelling our Soviet Jewry slogans and shaking our fists. As the cellos and violins and violas of the Moscow Philharmonic came slithering to halt, we knew, in the dealthly silence that followed, that our Refusenik brothers and sisters would be listening thousands of miles away on the BBC World Service. It was only a few minutes before infuriated police officers arrived on the scene with large metal pincers to cut us free from the railings, but it was enough.

I speak of it now as if it were a childish prank, but it was not an easy thing to do. We were young and idealistic, but we were also nicely brought up middle-class Jewish girls and boys. We had all been taken by our parents on one Sunday evening or another to hear a concert at the Royal Festival Hall. We had learned to sit politely and not fidget and not applaud between movements. For years we had enjoyed Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saens and Schubert in this bastion of British culture, and now we were more or less spitting in its face.

The second before I had to stand up along with my friends, and shout at the top of my voice into the silent abyss of the stalls, my courage failed me and I did not think I could do it. The only thing, the only thing, which enabled me to get to my feet, was the thought of Natan in his solitary confinement cell, the thought of him never seeing Avital again. The reason why so many Jewish youth were participating in these demonstrations all over the world, was that Natan's story was not just a prisoner story, or a persecution story, or even a Jewish story. It was a love story.

And it is this love story I am thinking of as I watch Rachel laugh and talk with all her guests, before her parents accompany her to her Chupah, before she marries Micha under the Jerusalem skies. I am here with her but I am not really here at all; I have risen in one second to my feet at the Royal Festival Hall, and have screamed : "Free Sharansky!" like an animal, at the respectable Russian musicians playing classical music on the stage below.

I have always known, across all of the years, what I was shouting for that night. But today, looking at Rachel's face, at that beloved and wonderful genetic combination of Natan and Avital, today I really know.

At the wedding reception I did manage to exchange a few words with the mother of the groom, Mrs. Danziger. "It's a great day for all of us", I said and she smiled and answered, "I know it is". But I couldn't leave it there. "She's the nation's baby" I explained, trying to hold back my tears.
"She's our miracle girl".

The weather forecast for Thursday, Friday and Shabbat had been discouraging - Rain, rain and more rain. On Thursday it rained all night. But God, one of the guests at the wedding, had decided to momentarily dispense with regular weather patterns for January, and Rachel and Micha took their place under a raised outdoor Chuppah, with a stunning view of the Judean hills behind and below them. The sun shone warmly and benevolently on the hundreds of people, Russians and Israelis and Americans and Brits, members of Knesset and rabbis and journalists and intellectuals, millionaires and philanthropists and activists and chairmen of committees, family and friends and very young babies and old age pensioners, who had gathered, with upturned faces, to watch the wedding ceremony unfold. A soft breeze played across the bride's face and lifted her veil into the air, so that she looked, for a moment, like a floating figure from a Chagall painting.

"Sometimes a place is named for its future", said Rabbi Moti Elon who was the officiating Rabbi. "Kibbutz Ramat Rachel was named for you, Rachel. It was named for you to get married here."

When it was time for the groom to break the glass, Natan took the microphone to say a few words.

"I'd like to say something about why we are breaking this glass" he said, alternating seamlessly between English and Hebrew.

"Thirty-four years ago, in a Moscow apartment, Avital and I stood under a sheet held up by four boys, for our own Chuppah. There were barely enough people to make up a minyan. We had never been to a Jewish wedding before, and we had no understanding of what to do. We mouthed the words that the Rabbi told us to say, without knowing their meaning. But the breaking of the glass, this we understood very well. We had one challenge, and the challenge was very clear to us. We knew that we had to get to Jerusalem. No matter what it would take, no matter how many years, we had to get to Jerusalem and build a home there. And this is what we did."

"So now you are standing under the Chuppah Rachel, a child born in Jerusalem, overlooking Jerusalem, the first sabra in our family, marrying Micha, the first Oleh Hadash from his family. And this begs the question: Why should we break the glass at all? We are here, after all. Jerusalem has been rebuilt, and it is a vibrant city.

But the reason we are breaking the glass is this: the challenge that faces you, Rachel and Micha, is different to the challenge that faced us. You will make a home in Jerusalem, yes, but you must simultaneously have your feet on the ground, building a Jerusalem shel mata, a physical Jerusalem, while always keeping an eye on the Jerusalem shel ma'alah, on what it means, on what it represents. It will be your mission, and the mission of all your generation, to defend Jerusalem, to protect her, to keep her safe. And I think that your challenge may, in the end, be even more difficult than ours".

It will rain later, but not yet. I am standing in the sunshine, listening to Natan, looking at Avital, and glorying in Rachel, who has pushed her veil away from her face, so that she can see better, and hear better, everything that is going on at her wedding. She looks up at her tall, straight, young husband and smiles, and all of us watching her feel, that this is the just kind of person to whom we can entrust the future of Jerusalem.

Mazal Tov on your wedding Rachel Sharansky. Mazal Tov, miracle girl.

[Katie Green, Aryeh's wife and an independent film producer and director, is head of PR at the Ma'aleh Film School, Jerusalem.]

Sharansky: Mobilize now - save the world

2007-02-13T04:00:00.000+02:00

[From The Jerusalem Post, 11 February 2007]

Just over three years ago, at the first-ever global forum on anti-Semitism organized by the State of Israel, the essential task was to define the beast - the new anti-Semitism. Since then, as the fourth such global gathering meets this week, efforts to incorporate the "three-D" distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel and the new anti-Semitism - demonization, double standards and delegitimization - have become part of international documents and discourse.

These and other accomplishments, as important as they are, have been dwarfed by the quantum leap anti-Semitism itself has taken. It has leapfrogged from isolated attacks against Jews to incitement to genocide - the actual elimination of the Jewish state.

This shift has come in the form of a pincer movement. On one side, we have the Iranian regime, which is denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map" while racing to develop the physical means of doing so. On the other side, we have what is, in effect, international silence in response, coupled with growing willingness to discuss Israel's existence as a mistake, an anachronism, or a provocation.

We must recognize the fact that though sympathy for Iran's expressed goal of Israel's destruction is hardly mainstream, the idea of a world without Israel is more acceptable in polite company, the media and academia today than Hitler's expressed goal of a Europe without Jews was in 1939.

Given this situation, it should be clear that we are beyond the stage of definitions. The Jewish world now must mobilize at a level no less than during the struggles to establish the State of Israel and to free Soviet Jewry. It is this latter struggle that presents the most potent model for action today.

Though both sides of the genocidal pincer are in quite advanced stages of development, the Jewish world remains mired in pre-mobilization debates reminiscent of the early stages of the Soviet Jewry struggle in the 1960s. This may be hard to recall in light of the subsequent success, but back then a debate raged among Jews over whether a campaign to free Soviet Jewry was "too parochial," and whether being out front risked making it too much of a "Jewish issue."

BEFORE THESE internal debates were resolved the Soviet Jewry effort could not be regarded as a movement, capable of attracting allies and moving governments. Nor were such debates easily, or ever fully, put to rest.

As late as 1987, when the by then mature and powerful movement organized the largest-ever Soviet Jewry rally on Washington's mall to coincide with Mikhail Gorbachev's visit, some Jewish leaders wondered if the community could be mobilized, and if such a rally would be counterproductive. They warned that only a few thousand souls would brave the winter weather, and that the Jewish community would be considered "warmongers" who were spoiling the recent warming of US-Soviet relations.

In actuality, over 250,000 people came to a rally that was pivotal in opening the floodgates, not just to 10,000 or 20,000 Jews, which seemed like a dream at the time, but to a million Jews who came to Israel over the following decade.

Since it has been a while, a reminder is in order of what full mobilization looks like.

First, as Shlomo Avineri has recently proposed, Iranian officials should get the Soviet treatment. Just as no Soviet official, including sport and cultural delegations, could travel without being accosted by protests and hostile questions, so it should be with anyone representing the Iranian regime. As in the Soviet case, such protests will not themselves change Iranian behavior, but they are critical to creating a climate that will influence the policies of Western governments.

Second, an inventory of the governments and companies that provide Iran with refined oil, huge trade deals, and even military and nuclear assistance should be taken and public pressure be put on them to end their complicity with a regime that is racing to genocide.

Third, the pension funds of US states should be divested from all companies that trade with or invest in Iran. This divestment campaign must be pursued without apologies or hesitation.

Fourth, every country that is party to the Genocide Convention should be called upon to fulfill its obligation under that treaty and seek an indictment of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the charge of incitement to genocide, which is a "punishable offense" under Article III of that treaty.

Fifth, human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which are heavily nourished by Jewish values, passion and funding, must stop squeezing both sides of the genocidal pincer. These groups must be challenged, on the one hand, to press for enforcement of the Genocide Treaty, to stand up for human rights in Iran, and to oppose and expose Iranian support for terrorism. On the other, they must stop perverting the sacred cause of human rights into a cudgel in Iran's hands against Israel. This happened just months ago when, during the Lebanon war, such groups all but ignored Hizbullah's terrorism from behind human shields and called Israel's self-defense a "war crime."

JUST AS the two sides of the pincer themselves are connected, so too must be the efforts to combat them. All the above steps concern the Iranian side of the pincer. But combating the other side, the denial of Israel's right to exist, is no less critical - and more difficult, since at times they necessitate confronting, not a rogue regime, but our own cherished institutions. On this front:

First, universities that provide chairs for professors who campaign against Israel's right to exist should be boycotted. In a number of countries, denying the Holocaust is a criminal act. In the current context, denying Israel's right to exist lays the groundwork for a second holocaust even more directly than does denying history. Therefore, the promulgation of such an ideology should be fought even by societies that justifiably revere freedom of speech.

This may seem a hopelessly difficult task, but it is not. After 9/11, one woman, a student, took on Harvard University, which was ready to accept a $10 million "gift" from a Saudi sheikh. Harvard backed down, showing that moral clarity, unapologetically and passionately expressed, can change seemingly unassailable ideas.

We must stand for a basic principle: If denying the Holocaust can land a professor in jail, denying Israel should not land him tenure.

Second, support for Israel must be demonstrated. Two decades after the massive Soviet Jewry rally of 1987, we need to return to the Mall on Israel's Independence Day in May with two messages: Support Israel and Stop Iran. It is late, but not too late, to overcome those fears of being "too parochial" that the Soviet Jewry movement succeeded in dispelling more than 30 years ago.

The fight to support Israel and stop Iran now is, if anything, less "parochial" than the Soviet Jewry movement was then. Then, the Jewish world took on a global superpower, the Soviet Union, and confronted the reigning American foreign policy paradigm - detente - with a very different one: linkage of trade to human rights.

Then, we successfully argued that the freedom to emigrate was not just a Jewish concern, but a universal one, and we were more right than we knew. The Jackson-Vanik amendment and the Helsinki Accords were critical factors in triggering the internal collapse of the Soviet empire. This collapse not only freed millions of Jews, but all the peoples behind the Iron Curtain, and ended a half-century-old superpower stalemate that threatened the entire planet.

NOW THE WORLD stands at a no less fateful watershed. The world's most dangerous rogue regime is on the verge of obtaining the ultimate weapons of terror. Already, Iran's confidence that it will not be stopped has led to one war, last summer's war in Lebanon started by Hizbullah. Already, Iran is fueling conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza - and all this before the regime enjoys its own full, declared nuclear umbrella.

The moment before mobilization is always a lonely one, in which it seems that the obstacles to making a cause universal are insurmountable. Yet, as in the case of the Soviet Jewry movement, we are not alone. We are surrounded by potential allies who may not themselves know they are ready to join us until we create a movement for them to join.

Our leadership will give others the opportunity to act. If the Jewish world does not lead the way, who will? It is as true now as it was then; if we build it, they will come.

A decade after the wave of democracy that came with the fall of the Soviet Union, an Iranian-led wave of terror is rising that will not stop until it is stopped. Ultimately, we overcame our fear of parochialism to stand up for Soviet Jewry, and left the world a much better place for it. Now we must do the same to prevent a second holocaust, and in the process save the world.

The writer is chairman of the Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1170359835461&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

A New Approach to Media Relations

2007-02-02T20:41:00.000+02:00

“The J” – Friday February 2, 2007

An Israeli carrot for the foreign press

by aryeh green

There’s a “media war” against Israel, said many speakers at last week’s Herzliya conference in Israel. Terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas attack Israelis, using civilians as cover —- and then reap public relations benefits when Israel retaliates and accidentally kills civilians.

“The media” is, of course, not monolithic — there are bloggers and broadcasters, print and radio correspondents, anchors and interviewers, based in or visiting Israel from virtually every country in the world. Do they all hate the Jews? Are they all anti-Israel, willing pawns in Hezbollah and Hamas’ psychological warfare campaign to destroy the Jewish state?

Of course, it is not only the media. According to Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on a “popular level,” Americans deeply support Israel, but on the “elite level,” there is a “weakening” of that support.

After visiting dozens of universities over the past three years, former Knesset member Natan Sharansky has quipped that “campuses have become ‘islands of Europe’ in America” with virulent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric accepted as the norm among faculty and students.

And as attorney Alan Dershowitz notes. even some U.S. leaders are “giving legitimacy to arguments that undermine Israel. Until now, such arguments have only been heard from extreme right and left,” he declared.

These facts should worry us all. A generation ago, European opinion elites in the media and universities began the process of accepting the “Palestinian narrative” and demonizing Israel and its leaders; today most European leaders, nursed on images of imperialist, racist Israel as the world’s worst human rights violator, view Israel as inherently evil, and thus view the questioning of Israel’s legitimacy as a reasonable part of public discourse.

With Israel’s existence up for debate, calls for its dismantling are not beyond the pale; and sincere demands for the elimination of a U.N. member country can’t be of only passing concern to all civilized nations.

When Israel’s anti-terrorist security barrier, 97 percent of which is a chain-link fence, is termed and photographed as an “apartheid wall” in the media and academia, we should worry. When Israel’s defensive military operations are condemned for accidental deaths of innocents while Hezbollah and Hamas’ targeting of Israeli civilians (and cynical use of their own civilians as “human shields”) are ignored by the media, the United Nations and human rights groups, we should be very worried. And we should truly be worried when Israeli leaders are depicted as Nazi baby-killers while Holocaust-denier Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (leader of the terrorist organization Fatah with its Al-Aksa Brigade and Tanzin military wings, who last month called on his followers to turn their guns on Israel) is called a “moderate,” as are the dictatorial rulers of the countries supporting the leading publishers and promoters of anti-Semitism in the world, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

What conclusions are being reached by the media-consuming public and college students who will be the next decades’ leaders? We need only to look at the appeasement policies of Europe towards the Islamo-fascists of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, and the prevailing European attitudes toward Jews and Israel and America, to see the results in real-time.

I am not by any means diminishing the very real hardships that Palestinians suffer under both the strictures of Israel’s efforts to protect its citizens and the oppressive authoritarian rule of their own leaders. But there is a difference between picturing Israel as taking difficult decisions while sometimes making mistakes as it balances security needs against Palestinian humanitarian needs, and presenting Israel as injuring and tormenting Palestinians for no reason, stealing “their” land and denying their “human rights.” This is the difference between fact and fiction; between reality and politics; between truth and promoting another agenda.

The media is the lens through which policy-makers and the public view issues about which they have no first-hand knowledge. So the media must be our first and primary focus if we are to address this crucial imbalance.

It is not enough to merely criticize the world’s media for being “biased” against Israel; proactive steps can be taken to help journalists see the whole picture and report the stories fairly.

Previous approaches to Israel’s “hasbara” (public relations) efforts have been, as the Hebrew word implies, attempts to “explain”, to tell “our side of the story” and to put across certain “messages.” Israel strives for peace; Israel has benefited the Palestinians; Israel is America’s ally in the war against terror.

A second approach has been to criticize the media and academia for a lack of balance. The drawbacks of both these approaches — which are certainly an important element in any defense of Israel — is that they are too shrill for credibility. Journalists and professors, when presented with an “explanation” or a critique of their bias, dismiss the correction as biased or politically-motivated.

But there is an objective reality that can be researched and reported, fairly, by the media and academia. I am convinced that accuracy is Israel’s best ally, and that we must help journalists to achieve their own goals of understanding and reporting the facts and providing insightful analysis.

Though many arrive in Israel with misconceptions and pre-conceived notions, simple observation of the actual state of affairs as they are is the best — and most effective — antidote, not strident and lengthy lectures on this or that “talking point.” The history of the region, the geography, the cultural and political milieu is right in front of them — they just need a credible helping hand to see it.

And they are, on the whole, open and accepting of such a service-oriented, gentle approach. The demand exists. As Simon McGregor-Wood, ABC News Middle East Bureau Chief and chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Israel, stated at the opening of MediaCentral, a new project in Jerusalem, “visiting foreign journalists always need good help. This can be a confusing place to work, where efforts to report the story accurately, are constantly undermined by attempts to influence our reporting.

If MediaCentral can offer journalists balanced and neutral assistance, we will succeed. Journalists are bombarded with unsolicited material, most of it, with an agenda, seeking to pull them one way, or another. We need access to everyone, and every shade of opinion. We need to talk to the newsmakers, and also to the people whose voices are rarely heard,” McGregor-Wood added.

The majority of foreign journalists serving in Israel do not hate Jews or Israelis; but they don’t know a great deal about them or about Israel either. There is — everywhere — a symbiotic relationship between the media and the authorities and society in which they function.

Journalists receiving incredible hospitality and help from the Palestinian Authority and its supporters — there are at least 12 official or semi-official well-funded NGOs serving the media in the disputed territories — are inclined to relate more sympathetically to their hosts. It’s time for Israel to use the carrot, rather than the stick, in our relations with the international media.

Whether discovering the acclaimed new Israeli film “Sweet Mud” — the first-ever Israeli film to be accepted to the Sundance Festival competition and Israel’s entry for the best foreign film Oscar — or witnessing Arab democracy activists interacting with Israelis, whether meeting “average” Israelis informally over a beer or learning about how Israel is the only nation on the planet increasing its forest acreage rather than decimating its natural forests, foreign journalists in Israel are open to a new approach.

Aryeh Green, who grew up in San Francisco and studied at U.C. Berkeley, is director of MediaCentral, a Jerusalem center providing support services for journalists based in or visiting Israel and the territories, and is an adviser to Natan Sharansky. He lives and makes wine in Beit Shemesh, Israel.

Aryeh Green will be speaking at a number of events in the Bay Area, including at the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley (Tuesday, Feb. 6 at the American Legion Hall, Santa Clara, at 7 p.m.) and at DeAnza College, the University of Santa Clara and U.C. Santa Cruz on Thursday, Feb. 8. For more information call (415) 336-7831.

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/31533/format/html/displaystory.html

A Lebanese Journalist's Perspective on the Hizballah-Israel Conflict

2006-08-21T17:13:00.000+03:00

This may well be the most important article on the Hizballah/Israeli conflict to date. Worth reading through all the way. The writer is not Israeli, nor Jewish, nor pro-Israeli or pro-Jewish. Just Lebanese and honest. And certainly pro-truth and pro-freedom, especially Lebanese freedom via a continuation of the Cedar Revolution. Published in TNR (The New Republic) Online via the Metula News Agency.

The most hypocritical people on earth
Sunday 30 July [ 21:23:00 BST]
By Michael Béhé in Beirut
[Translated from the French by Llewellyn Brown]

The politicians, journalists and intellectuals of Lebanon have, of late, been experiencing the shock of their lives. They knew full well that Hezbollah had created an independent state in our country, a state including all the ministers and parallel institutions, duplicating those of Lebanon . What they did not know – and are discovering with this war, and what has petrified them with surprise and terror – is the extent of this phagocytosis.

In fact, our country had become an extension of Iran , and our so-called political power also served as a political and military cover for the Islamists of Teheran. We suddenly discovered that Teheran had stocked more than 12,000 missiles, of all types and calibers, on our territory and that they had patiently, systematically, organized a suppletive force, with the help of the Syrians, that took over, day after day, all the rooms in the House of Lebanon. Just imagine it : we stock ground-to-ground missiles, Zilzals , on our territory and that the firing of such devices without our knowledge, has the power to spark a regional strategic conflict and, potentially, bring about the annihilation of Lebanon .

We knew that Iran , by means of Hezbollah, was building a veritable Maginot line in the south but it was the pictures of Maroun el-Ras and Bint J'bail that revealed to us the magnitude of these constructions. This amplitude made us understand several things at once : that we were no longer masters of our destiny. That we do not possess the most basic means necessary to reverse the course of this state of things and that those who turned our country into an outpost of their islamic doctrine's combat against Israel did not have the slightest intention of willingly giving up their hold over us.

The national salvation discussions that concerned the application of Resolution 1559 and which included most of the Lebanese political movements were simply for show. Iran and Syria had not invested billions of dollars on militarizing Lebanon in order to wage their war, simply to give in to the desire of the Lebanese and the international community for them to pack up their hardware and set it up back home.

And then, the indecision, the cowardice, the division and the irresponsible behavior of our leaders are such that they had no effort to make to show their talent. No need to engage a wrestling match with the other political components of the Land of Cedars . The latter showed themselves – and continue to show themselves – to be inconsistent.

Of course, our army, reshaped over the years by the Syrian occupier so it could no longer fulfill its role as protector of the nation, did not have the capacity to tackle the militamen of the Hezb [ hezb-Allah : the party of Allah. Translator's note]. Our army whom it is more dangerous to call upon – because of the explosive equilibrium that constitutes each of its brigades – than to shut up behind locked doors in its barracks. A force that is still largely loyal to its former foreign masters, to the point of being uncontrollable ; to the point of having collaborated with the Iranians to put OUR coastal radar stations at the disposal of their missiles, that almost sunk an Israeli boat off the shores of Beirut . As for the non-Hezbollah elements in the government, they knew nothing of the existence of land-to-sea missiles on our territory… That caused the totally justified destruction of all OUR radar stations by the Hebrews' army. And even then we are getting off lightly in these goings-on.

It is easy now to whine and gripe, and to play the hypocritical role of victims. We know full well how to get others to pity us and to claim that we are never responsible for the horrors that regularly occur on our soil. Of course, that is nothing but rubbish! The Security Council's Resolution 1559 – that demanded that OUR government deploy OUR army on OUR sovereign territory, along OUR international border with Israel and that it disarm all the militia on OUR land – was voted on 2 September 2004.

We had two years to put implement this resolution and thus guarantee a peaceful future to our children but we did strictly nothing. Our greatest crime – which was not the only one! – was not that we did not succeed but that we did not attempt or undertake anything. And that was the fault of none else than the pathetic Lebanese politicians.

Our government, from the very moment the Syrian occupier left, let ships and truckloads of arms pour into our country. Without even bothering to look at their cargo. They jeopardized all chances for the rebirth of our country by confusing the Cedar Revolution with the liberation of Beirut . In reality, we had just received the chance – a sort of unhoped-for moratorium – that allowed us to take the future into our own hands, nothing more.

To think that we were not even capable of agreeing to “hang” Émile Lahoud – Al-Assad's puppet – on Martyrs' Square and that he is still president of what some insist on calling our republic… There is no need to look any further : we are what we are, that is to say, not much.

All those who assume public and communicational responsibilities in this country are responsible for this catastrophe. Except those of my colleagues, journalists and editors, who are dead, assassinated by the Syrian thugs, because they were clearly less cowardly than those who survived. And Lahoud remained at Baadbé [the president of the Lebanese Republic 's palace. Editor's note]!

And when I speak of a catastrophe, I do not mean the action accomplished by Israel in response to the aggression against its civilians and its army, which was produced from our soil and that we did strictly nothing to avoid, and for which we are consequently responsible. Any avoiding of this responsibility – some people here do not have the minimal notions of international law necessary to understand! – means that Lebanon , as a state, does not exist.

The hypocrisy goes on : even some editorialists of the respectable L'Orient-le-Jour put Hezbollah's savagery and that of the Israelis on a par! Shame! Spinelessness! And who are we in this fable? Poor ad æternum victims of the ambitions of others?

Politicians either support this insane idea or keep silent. Those we would expect to speak, to save our image, remain silent like the others. And I am precisely alluding to general Aoun, who could have made a move by proclaiming the truth. Even his enemy, Walid Jumblatt, the Druse leader, has proved to be less… vague.

Lebanon a victim? What a joke!

Before the Israeli attack, Lebanon no longer existed, it was no more than a hologram. At Beirut innocent citizens like myself were forbidden access to certain areas of their own capital. But our police, our army and our judges were also excluded. That was the case, for example, of Hezbollah's and the Syrians' command zone in the Haret Hreik quarter (in red on the satellite map). A square measuring a kilometer wide, a capital within the capital, permanently guarded by a Horla army [1], possessing its own institutions, its schools, its crèches, its tribunals, its radio, its television and, above all… its government. A “government” that, alone decided, in the place of the figureheads of the Lebanese government – in which Hezbollah also had its ministers! – to attack a neighboring state, with which we had no substantial or grounded quarrel, and to plunge US into a bloody conflict. And if attacking a sovereign nation on its territory, assassinating eight of its soldiers, kidnapping two others and, simultaneously, launching missiles on nine of its towns does not constitute a casus belli , the latter juridical principle will seriously need revising.

Thus almost all of these cowardly politicians, including numerous shiah leaders and religious personalities themselves, are blessing each bomb that falls from a Jewish F-16 turning the insult to our sovereignty that was Haret Hreik, right in the heart of Beirut, into a lunar landscape. Without the Israelis, how could we have received another chance – that we in no way deserve! – to rebuild our country?

Each Irano-Syrian fort that Jerusalem destroys, each islamic fighter they eliminate, and Lebanon proportionally starts to live again! Once again, the soldiers of Israel are doing our work. Once again, like in 1982, we are watching – cowardly, lying low, despicable, and insulting them to boot – their heroic sacrifice that allows us to keep hoping. To not be swallowed up in the bowels of the earth. Because, of course, by dint of not giving a damn for southern Lebanon, of letting foreigners take hold of the privileges that belong to us, we no longer had the ability to recover our independence and sovereignty. If, at the end of this war, the Lebanese army retakes control over its territory and gets rid of the state within a state – that tried to suffocate the latter –, it will only be thanks to Tsahal [the Israeli Defense Forces. Translator's note], and that, all these faint-hearted politicians, from the crook Fouad Siniora, to Saad Hariri, the son of Lebanon's plunderer, and general Aoun all know perfectly well.

[Beirut by satellite (Google Earth)]

As for the destruction caused by the Israelis… that is another imposture : look at the satellite map! I have situated, as best I could, BUT IN THEIR CORRECT PROPORTIONS, the parts of my capital that have been destroyed by Israel . They are Haret Hreik – in its totality – and the dwellings of Hezbollah's leaders, situated in the large Shi'a suburb of Dayaa (as they spell it) and that I have circled in blue.

In addition to these two zones, Tsahal has exploded a nine-storied building that housed Hezbollah's command, in Beirut 's city center, above and slightly to the left (to the north west ) of Haret Hreik on the map. It was Nasrallah's “perch” inside the city, whereby he asserted his presence and domination over us. A depot of Syrian arms in the port, two army radars that the Shiite officers had put at the Hezb's disposal, and a truck suspected of transporting arms, in the Christian quarter of Ashrafieh.

Moreover the road and airport infrastructures were put out of working order : they served to provide Hezbollah with arms and munitions. Apart from that, Tsahal has neither hit nor deteriorated anything, and all those who speak of the “destruction of Beirut ” are either liars, Iranians, anti-Semites or absent. Even the houses situated one alley's distance from the targets I mentioned have not been hit, they have not even suffered a scratch; on contemplating these results of this work you understand the meaning of the concept “surgical strikes” and you can admire the dexterity of the Jewish pilots.

Beirut , all the rest of Beirut , 95% of Beirut , lives and breathes better than a fortnight ago. All those who have not sided with terrorism know they have strictly nothing to fear from the Israeli planes, on the contrary! One example: last night the restaurant where I went to eat was jammed full and I had to wait until 9:30 pm to get a table. Everyone was smiling, relaxed, but no one filmed them: a strange destruction of Beirut , is it not?

Of course, there are some 500,000 refugees from the south who are experiencing a veritable tragedy and who are not smiling. But Jean [Tsadik. Editor's note], who has his eyes fixed on Kfar Kileh, and from whom I have learned to believe each word he says, assures me that practically all the houses of the aforesaid refugees are intact. So they will be able to come back as soon as Hezbollah is vanquished.

The defeat of the Shi'a fundamentalists of Iranian allegiance is imminent. The figures communicated by Nasrallah's minions and by the Lebanese Red-Cross are deceiving: firstly, of the 400 dead declared by Lebanon , only 150 are real collateral civilian victims of the war, the others were militiamen without uniform serving Iran . The photographic report “ Les Civils des bilans libanais ” made by Stéphane Juffa for our agency constitutes, to this day, the unique tangible evidence of this gigantic morbid manipulation. Which makes this document eminently important.

Moreover, Hassan Nasrallah's organization has not lost 200 combatants, as Tsahal claims. This figure only concerns the combats taking place on the border and even then the Israelis underestimate it, for a reason that escapes me, by about a hundred militiamen eliminated. The real count of Hezbollah's casualties, that includes those dead in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, Baalbek and their other camps, rocket and missile launchers and arms and munition depots amounts to 1,100 supplementary Hezbollah militiamen who have definitively ceased to terrorize and humiliate my country.

Like the overwhelming majority of Lebanese, I pray that no one puts an end to the Israeli attack before it finishes shattering the terrorists. I pray that the Hebrew soldiers will penetrate all the hidden recesses of southern Lebanon and will hunt out, in our stead, the vermin that has taken root there. Like the overwhelming majority of Lebanese, I have put the champagne ready in the refrigerator to celebrate the Israeli victory.

But contrary to them – and to paraphrase Michel Sardou [a French singer. Translator's note] –, I recognize that they are also fighting for our liberty, another battle “where you were not present”! And in the name of my people, I wish to express my infinite gratitude to the relatives of the Israeli victims – civilian and military – whose loved ones have fallen so that I can live standing upright in my identity. They should know that I weep with them.

As for the pathetic clique that thrives at the head of my country, it is time for them to understand that after this war, after our natural allies have rid us of those who are hindering us from rebuilding a nation, a cease-fire or an armistice will not suffice. To ensure the future of Lebanon , it is time to make peace with those we have no reason to go to war against. In fact, only peace will ensure peace. Someone must tell them because in this country we have not learnt what a truism is.

Note :
[1] Michael Béhé is alluding to the book Le Horla , by Guy de Maupassant [Editor's note].
http://www.freefreedom.org/library-lebaneon-english.htm
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Free Freedom!

2006-08-21T16:02:00.000+03:00

Below is a clarion call, from a grassroots level, to rise up against the plague of terror enveloping the world today. Everyone who really cares for a peaceful world should sign up.

Once again, it seems clear: no peace in the Middle East is possible until all of Israel's neighbors live in free, open, tolerant societies; only democracy can bring real peace and security to Israel and the region. Those who trumpet the call to "Free Palestine" are correct: we need to free Palestine and the Palestinians, not from Israeli control but from the dictatorial and repressive leaders and terrorist regimes which retard their progress and prevent peace from emerging.

Only then will we be able to help - yes, even encourage - a Palestinian state to be born, living alongside Israel in harmony. Ditto a free and open, democratic Lebanon... and Jordan... and Egypt... and even, yes, Syria (see the Reform Party of Syria at http://www.reformsyria.org/).

We must use all our power - not military force - to support the real democracy activists in these societies, including financial assistance to these "dissidents" and linking all our relations, trade, economic aid, even recognition, to the extent of freedom in these societies. See Natan Sharansky's "The Case for Democracy" for more details.

A
-----------------------

Dear Friends,

This is not an advertising campaign or a sales pitch; it is a genuine call for involvement in what may help change the world we live in.

The war in the north of Israel may be on hold, but it's far from over. Fundamental Terrorism is raising its head with statements of victory.

It is here on our border today, it will be in your home-towns tomorrow, and may be in your back yard next week. Just as the world got together in a concerted effort to fight "Avian Plague" and the "Mad Cow Disease" and won, it is up to us to fight the next biggest plague that infests the world – Terrorism.

Blind to race, creed, religion, age, political beliefs or location it hits hard and painful.

If you don't take your freedom for granted ACT NOW:

Let us be responsible citizens of the world, and free the world from Terror - take your future into your own hands, enter and respond.

Ehud Segev, brother of Nimrod Segev, who fell in battle against Hizballah on August 9, 2006

www.freefreedom.org

Quck response about Israel in Lebanon

2006-07-18T23:29:00.000+03:00

[Written in reply to a suggestion made by Gershon Baskin, co-director of IPCRI, in a policy paper which can be read here]

Gershon/Hanna et al –

Something’s strange here – Kassams raining down on Israeli cities AFTER Israel left Gaza, and Katyushas in the North with attacks on Israeli patrols on Israeli territory well AFTER Israel returned behind the internationally-sanctioned border with Lebanon, and all you have to suggest is that Israel’s PM Olmert make statements and carry out these actions?

I have a better idea:

Abbas announces (without any meetings with Olmert) the release of Shavit and the 2 soldiers captured in Hizbullah’s attack in the north, the Palestinians and Hizbullah/Lebanese cease all Kassam, Katyusha, Fajar and other rocket attacks and terror attacks/attempts on civilians throughout the region, and Hamas either resigns its government seats or fulfills the demands of the international community to recognize Israel and abide by the Oslo agreements and the RoadMap, including disarming and dismantling all terror groups including Islamic Jihad, Fatah’s Al-Aksa ‘Martyrs’ Brigades and ‘Tanzin’ as well as Hamas’ own groups of course.

Then, and only then, without any ‘connection’ to the foregoing as an “exchange” but rather as the obvious, logical consequence of the Palestinians’ stopping to use terror and violence as a political tool (and as part of Israel’s obligations under Oslo and the RoadMap), Israel not only can begin releasing Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners “without blood on their hands” as per your suggestion, but can begin to stop their incursions into Gaza and Lebanon, various sorts of security checks & roadblocks & checkpoints, targeted killing of terrorist leaders, limitations on Palestinian workers in Israel and even start to dismantle the security barrier – all of which only came about as a result of Fatah & Hamas’ continual terror attacks and attempts since the early 1990’s.

Your suggestion is nothing but a face-saving way for Israel to do EXACTLY what Hamas and Hizbullah want and expect them to do: release prisoners in exchange for the kidnapping of our soldiers/civilians, and suffer hundreds of rocket attacks without a price being paid by the perpetrators or their backers (including Syria and Iran) as we have over the past year.

You of all people, professing impartiality and balance, should have been the first to put the onus of a ceasefire on Hamas and Hizbullah. You of all people know – as opposed to the twisted way this is being presented in the world’s media – that the issues here are far deeper than the kidnapped soldiers or even the Palestinians/Lebanese in prisons, most particularly with regard to Hamas’ and Hizbullah’s (and Iran’s) stated intent to destroy the Jewish State and the incessant unprovoked rocket attacks on Israel’s population centers, a situation no country in the world would or could tolerate as Israel has done over the past few months.

With warmest personal regards and deep disagreement as to your analysis of the sources of this current stage in the conflict and therefore your perscription for resolution –

Aryeh

Sharansky talks democracy with bloggers

2006-07-06T12:16:00.000+03:00

I'll admit it's been a while since I've written; too busy with personal issues like moving house and making a living. But this brought me out of my stupor, at least temporarily.

In late June ('06) Natan Sharansky spoke to leading bloggers in a conference call. For those connected to the blogosphere and who have not had the opportunity to hear (rather than read) Sharansky articulate his philosophy of freedom overcoming tyranny it's worth listening, especially to the interaction in the latter half. The audio can be heard here courtesy of Atlas Shrugs.

A comment on Israel's election & Olmert's "victory"

2006-03-29T16:10:00.000+02:00

The Definition of Real Victory

THE RESULTS are in. The pundits and parties claim a “victory” for those who propose further withdrawals from the disputed territories of Judea & Samara (the “West Bank”). Nothing can be further from the truth.

This is no “vindication of Sharon” (David Horovitz, Jerusalem Post, 29 March). It can be argued persuasively that many of the votes for Kadima, Leiberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, the new Pensioners party and the many smaller parties who did not cross the threshold for representation are in fact protest votes. Israel voted against the corruption and economic callousness of Likud, against the appeasement and economic socialism (and corruption) of Labour, against the ideological anti-religious stance of the hard-left and against the impractical inflexibility of the hard-right. And of course the majority of the electorate – of the 63% who voted, that is – voted against Kadima and Olmert by voting for other parties. 28 seats, representing less than 25% of the vote, is hardly a resounding “victory” for Kadima.

This election, like so many others in Israel’s history, was no single-issue vote for or against Ehud Olmert’s proposed additional unilateral withdrawals. Polls have shown clearly that following the Gaza withdrawal there is a wide consensus against unilateral withdrawal from more territories and the dismantling of Jewish communities there. This election does, however, reflect a more general rejection of the “Greater Israel” ideology, as Amotz Asa-El wrote (also in the Jerusalem Post) on Tuesday – but it does not reflect any consensus on how, when and where this rejection should be expressed.

This was no more a referendum on Olmert’s unilateral “convergence” program than the ’96 election was a vote for or against Oslo. In ’96 (and ’99, and ’01) even with direct elections of the Prime Minister and a clear vote for or against an individual leader and his direct representation, there were other issues at stake. Netanyahu’s election in ’96 was interpreted – because of the direct election mechanism – as a public vote to “slow down” Oslo in the face of increasing terror, but even that wasn’t a referendum on Oslo. Ironically, after the cancellation of such direct elections of the PM, in ’03 Ariel Sharon’s Likud trounced Amram Mitzna’s Labour - and this overwhelming “victory” can be interpreted as a true referendum on Mitzna’s announced policy of unilateral withdrawal, as this was the consistent and fundamental theme of the election.

In contrast, through the majority of this campaign, Kadima’s policy under Sharon and then Olmert was “no further unilateral withdrawals”. Only in the last two weeks or so of the campaign did Olmert suggest a consistent policy favoring unilateral withdrawal in his “convergence” plan, and did Kadima present a coherent platform. And even then this message was blurred by other Kadima leaders proposing negotiations or postponements and other modifications.

OLMERT NOW has two choices: follow Sharon’s (and Rabin’s) anti-democratic lead and push through existential changes to Israel’s borders just because he can; or change the flawed structure of our electoral system to better reflect the public’s true sentiments.

To become a mature democracy, Israel desperately needs two reforms: a mechanism for single-issue referenda (such as Europe employed regarding the Union), and regional representation for at least half the Knesset. These two issues of electoral reform, coupled with adjustments to a system which literally wastes thousands of votes for smaller parties, are crucial to restore confidence in Israel’s political system and leaders – a confidence which the unprecedented low voter-turnout and various protest ballots demonstrate is at an all-time low. This should be the first priority for the new prime minister who declared “unity” as his primary goal in his “victory” speech early Wednesday morning.

Ironically, these are two of the planks in the Likud platform. If Olmert and his allies celebrate their victory by joining with the Likud and other parties to strengthen Israel’s democracy by instituting such reforms, immediately, the fears of those of us who didn’t vote for them will be somewhat allayed and their ability to govern and carry out their policies will be strengthened. If they do not – civil strife beyond our imagination is almost inevitable.

Sharansky on Hamas election

2006-02-02T10:11:00.000+02:00

[For the record, I participated yesterday in a meeting with Palestinian civil-society activists evaluating the election results, and the one thing they all agreed upon was that the majority of Palestinians, including at least 30% of those who voted for Hamas in the district and national lists, recognize Israel, are against terror, and are desirous of peace. It is clear (from surveys, not gut feelings) that much of the vote was against Fatah corruption, not for Hamas. Not to be too sanguine about it: it is clear that at least 60% of those voting for Hamas are supportive of some part of their agenda. But of Palestinians eligible to vote that’s still only 40%, so it appears that a majority of Palestinians are in favor of accepting Israel’s right to exist, in favor of a peace settlement, and against terror. I’m still very afraid of the other 40%, especially the fanatics among them, but it’s a somewhat comforting sign. The question is who will emerge ascendant over the next few years. See end-note below.]
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The price of ignoring Palestinians' needs
Natan Sharansky
International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2006

Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections is the logical outcome of a "peace process" more than a decade long that completely ignored what was happening within Palestinian society.

Rather than seriously link the peace process to the building of a free society among the Palestinians, the democratic world, including Israel, turned a blind eye as Palestinian civil society was hollowed out, its streets taken over by armed thugs and its youth indoctrinated to glorify suicide bombers and despise Israel and America, Jews and Christians.

The international community repeated its shallow formula for peace like a broken record. International legitimacy, Israeli concessions and billions of dollars in aid were used to strengthen Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority - the "moderates" who had ostensibly renounced violence and accepted Israel's existence - and marginalize extremist groups like Hamas.

The Palestinian election result is the fruit of this failed approach to peacemaking, which amounted to nothing more than supporting a corrupt dictatorship. The world believed that seriously pressing Palestinian leaders to enact real reform would only weaken the Palestinian Authority internally and strengthen Hamas. The truth is precisely the opposite. By failing to insist that the Palestinian Authority dedicate itself to improving the lives of Palestinians, the United States, Israel, the EU and other players in the peace process made themselves contemptible in the eyes of Palestinians who saw their lives only getting worse.

When Arafat died, I had hopes that perhaps a new path to peace would be taken. But it was not to be. Abbas was not told unequivocally that without serious reforms, he would receive no support from the free world. On the contrary, he was given a pass when he blatantly refused to confront terror groups.

For its part, Israel's government, encouraged by the effusive praise of the international community, embarked on a foolish policy of one-sided concessions, which, as I feared when I resigned from the government last May, only strengthened the forces of terror within Palestinian society.

To the outside world, the Palestinians have now chosen the party of terror over the party of peace. But in the eyes of most Palestinians, the differences between Hamas and the "moderate" Fatah were not primarily in their views toward Israel. In fact, satellites of Fatah, such as Tanzim and the Al Aksa brigades, were no less responsible for the terrorism against Israel than were Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Indeed, the leading figure on Fatah's list was Marwan Barghouti, a man serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role in terror attacks.

No, the real difference for the Palestinians was that a Fatah-run Palestinian Authority was rightly seen as a corrupt and feckless organization that had done and would continue to do nothing to improve Palestinian lives, whereas Hamas was untainted by corruption and appreciated for providing real social services.

With the vote being a choice between corrupt terrorists dedicated only to themselves and honest terrorists who are also dedicated to others, is it any surprise that Hamas won by a landslide?

I believe that many Palestinians who voted for Hamas voted to end corruption, to restore law and order and to implement real reform; the slogan that Hamas chose in its election campaign was not "Throw the Jews into the Sea," but rather "Change and Reform." The paradox is that the only party that Palestinians see as credible on this internal reform agenda was a terror organization dedicated to Israel's destruction and which has declared President George W. Bush "the enemy of God" and "the enemy of Islam."

Now that the Palestinian Authority's corrupt dictatorship has collapsed and a terror organization riding a wave of resentment with the status quo is assuming power, the free world has an opportunity to restore moral clarity to the peace process.

The world must base their support for this new regime on two ironclad conditions. First, Hamas must explicitly abandon the goal of destroying Israel and renounce terrorism. Second, it must dedicate itself toward building a free society for the Palestinians.

For 12 years, Israel and the world have imposed the first condition and ignored evidence when it was violated. As for the second condition, not only were democratic reforms seen as irrelevant to peace, supporting a corrupt dictatorship was seen as essential.

If the new Palestinian regime does not abide by these conditions, the free world, including Israel, must actively confront it and withhold legitimacy, money and concessions. But we must also seek ways to support any Palestinian individuals and organizations that do abide by these conditions.

My fear is that the results of the Palestinian elections will discredit the whole concept of democratic reform in the Middle East. But that would be to discredit an idea without it having been tried. For all the talk of the need for Palestinian reform and democracy, the only thing that the world insisted upon was holding elections. Elections do not a make free society. Elections in a "fear society" in which there is no law and order and in which democratic institutions are nonexistent, can bring the worst elements to power.

I hope that the policy of promoting democracy in the Middle East has not been dealt a fatal blow. Like so many tens of millions of Arabs in the region, there are countless Palestinians who want a better future, and we must seek every way to work with them. If we do not, we will end up not only betraying them once again, but also endangering ourselves.

(Natan Sharansky is the co-author of the best-selling book ''The Case For Democracy'' and a candidate for the Likud Party in Israel's forthcoming parliamentary elections.)

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/01/opinion/edsharan.php

[A final note (from Aryeh): The true test of a democracy in transition is what happens in the NEXT round of elections (first, that there BE a next round). If Hamas does not deliver real benefit to its citizens, and is voted out of power by the electorate in the next parliamentary election, and enables a smooth transition – then we’re looking at a functioning democracy – though of course issues of personal freedom, freedom of the press and religion and speech and the like, remain central too. One of the discussants yesterday suggested that a Hamas government will fall in 6-9 months because it won’t be able to deliver and the population won’t accept its fundamentalist policies (internally, separating men and women in the workplace and boys and girls in schools, etc.); the sizable ‘swing-vote’ segment which elected them will turn either back to Fatah or to independent democrats. I raised the point that what happens when they fall will be our real indication of whether the norms of civil society have taken root. (And I also pressed for international support of independent democrats to be able to campaign successfully as an alternative to the well-funded Hamas and Fatah groups, a challenge which the free world has yet to meet….)]

Sharon on democracy: "I know what is good for the people"

2005-12-12T16:49:00.000+02:00

[Published in the Jerusalem Post Letters, Friday December 9]

Sharon and Ben Gurion's "great virtue"

To the editor:

The CEO of an Israeli company once told me “I know what the market needs”, rejecting the input of the regional managers gathered to help the company decide on new products and directions. Hubris, and the absence of any understanding of the need for the company to cater to its markets, led to disaster. The company collapsed.

Ariel Sharon, like the vast majority of Israeli leaders – many of whom came from military backgrounds where orders are handed down and obeyed – clearly has no understanding of democracy. “I do not know what the people want. I know what is good for the people,” Sharon quoted Ben Gurion approvingly this week, calling this Ben Gurion’s “great virtue”.

And there you have it: a democracy not “of the people, by the people, for the people” but rather led by an autocrat who is not interested in the public will. An unflattering comparison can be made with Abu Mazen’s comment the day before that he views the Fatah primaries as “guidance” but non-binding on his choice of candidates for the January PLC elections.

Which of course recalls Sharon’s ignoring the referendum he held in his own Likud party which rejected his unilateral Gaza withdrawal, not to mention Sharon’s disregarding the overwhelming mandate he received in 2002 to oppose Mitzna’s unilateral withdrawal plan.

As long as Israel’s leaders continue to define democracy as “If I have a majority I can do what I want” – from Rabin’s 61-vote passage of Oslo bought with 2 key Knesset members acting in clear conflict with the mandates they received for the Tzomet party platform, through Sharon’s firing cabinet ministers to assure a majority for Gaza withdrawal – we will all suffer from their use of legal but anti-democratic maneuvers to pursue their policies without real legitimacy.

As Evelyn Gordon pointed out earlier this week, what can we expect if we reward their reneging on campaign promises and ignoring democratic principles (and their corruption) with reelection?

This sort of hubris, and the absence of any real understanding of the social and cultural norms which form the basis for any democratic system, define ours as an immature democracy at best – and may lead to disaster in more ways than one.

Aryeh Green
Beit Shemesh

On freedom and democracy

2005-12-05T16:39:00.000+02:00

[Published by Israel 21c (www.israel21c.org) December 04, 2005]

Two weeks ago, the British magazine The Economist published a feature about democracy in the Middle East and Africa, including various predictions for the future. But the most critical finding, and the most relevant for the current round of European efforts to "move the peace process ahead", has been largely either ignored or sidelined.

The international weekly news and business magazine included its 'Index of Political Freedom' in their November 18 issue, ranking 20 countries on 15 indicators of political and civil liberties. It found a relatively wide range of democracy across the region. From Libya and Syria (at 2.05 and 2.8 respectively, on a scale of 1-10) through Sudan, Yemen and Egypt (at 4.3 each) to the Palestinian Autonomy at 5.05, Morocco at 5.2 and Lebanon at 6.55, it is clear that the Muslim countries of the Middle East vary in their openness, tolerance of dissent and political accountability. It is also clear they are far from being democratic, free societies - even the most advanced among them.

But there is one country with a rank significantly higher than that of all the others: the democratic Jewish state of Israel - rated 8.2, on a par with the most freedom-loving western countries. In fact, looking a bit deeper into the issue presents a revealing picture of the core values shared by Israel and Europe (and America) and many of the 'emerging democracies' of eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Whether on scales of women's rights, the protection of religious minorities, freedom of speech, gay rights, freedom of the press or other indices, Israel meets or exceeds the score of most countries of the Free World on virtually every standard measure of freedom and democracy. (Click here for more details on these and other figures from Freedom House.)

This fact - known but perhaps not understood by many - is one of the fundamental bases on which Israel's relations with the United States, Europe and many other countries rests. And these values are shared not merely in their implementation, but on a philosophical level as well. In essence, they are shared because they derive from a common source.

Trace back the intellectual roots of modern democratic theory, from Jefferson, Kant & Rousseau through Grotius and St. Augustine and back to Plato, and we find both specific references and general allusion to many precepts introduced to the modern world from the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition. Add to this the contribution not only of the Talmud but of Jewish thinkers over the ages (from the Rambam - Maimonides - and Ibn Ezra through Spinoza and Mendelsohn).

Note the involvement of Jewish leaders in every freedom movement from America's Civil War through the US civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the human rights movement in the USSR, to today's Jewish activists advocating for either Palestinian or Iraqi freedom or against the slaughter in Darfur. A picture emerges of a Jewish tradition where the freedoms dearest to the Western world are articulated long before they were even adopted by that western society.

Many philosophers acknowledge their debt to the ancient Hebrews - Locke and Hobbes in particular - and a former Israeli Supreme Court judge, Chaim Cohen, wrote a tract on this topic over 15 years ago. Peeling away layers of Talmudic discussions of majority rule, treatment of indentured servants and women's rights, it all comes down to the creation of humanity "in the image of God" - obliging us to treat all humans with dignity as they represent the Godliness inherent in His creation. The Mishna in Sanhedrin quotes this passage in Bereishit (Genesis) to support an argument that all people are created equal, leading to the duty of equal treatment for all.

Though created with an eye to being a socialist paradise, Israel is in no uncertain terms a shining example of the freedoms and tolerance, and people-powered democracy, which other nations aspire to. (A recent poll indicated that some 70% of Palestinians want to emulate Israeli democracy more than any other.) In fact, there are some Israelis who feel that Israel's political culture is too free, too tolerant, too critical of itself. These principles of freedom inform not only Israeli society internally, but also how the country treats others under its authority - most notably the Palestinians, as it attempts to balance its efforts to combat terror with its commitment to minimize civilian casualties and hardship.

No example demonstrates this as well as the sacrifice of 23 Israeli soldiers in the battle of Jenin in 2002. The routing of the terrorists holed up in the 4-square-block area of the Jenin refugee camp could have been accomplished by helicopter or artillery - as per NATO's tactics in Bosnia or America's in Afghanistan.

In deciding to carry out this operation with house-to-house searches, to minimize casualties among the innocent women and children held captive by the terrorists, the Israeli government exhibited the values held most dear to our Jewish polity: chief among them the preservation of life, even at terrible cost. These young Israeli soldiers' lives were sacrificed not to defend Israeli citizens, but to protect the innocents on the 'other side'.

That concern for human life is one of the many values shared by Israel and other free societies. Today's leaders of the Free World - in Europe and in America, irrespective of their political affiliation - refer to these principles frequently.

Just last week, British PM Tony Blair called for a 'Common Vision' statement to be adopted at the Barcelona Euro-Mediterranean Partnership meeting, linking relations between Europe and its southern (Middle Eastern) neighbors directly to democratic, economic and political reforms. The suggestion was, in fact, rejected by those very countries whose repression of their own peoples is just what stands in the way of true partnership - whether between them and Europe or between them and the only democratic country in their midst - Israel.

The fact that Israel is the only free nation in the Middle East must inform European policy-makers' approach to the country and the region. It should be emphasized more - especially by and to those who would come with suggestions for resolving the century-old Arab-Israeli conflict. For these shared values will be the foundation of any real conflict resolution in our region. As Natan Sharansky quotes Andrei Sakharov frequently: democracies don't make war with other democracies.

While the foreign ministers of the EU met last week in Barcelona and the European Parliament's Israel committee meets here with Israelis and Palestinians to discuss conflict resolution, it may behoove them to take into consideration the strong foundation of shared values - based on ancient tenets of our religious traditions - which should form the basis for our relationship, rather than the fleeting 'interests' related to oil or trade and the illusory 'stability' which is so often the mistaken core of Europe's approach to this region.

http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enZone=Views&enDisplay=view&enPage=BlankPage&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Views^l216

Palestinian Democracy: It's Possible

2005-09-28T08:27:00.000+03:00

[Published 28 September 2005 in Hebrew in Ha'aretz newpaper, Israel, under the title "Palestinian democracy: it's possible"; Below is the original English version from which the Hebrew was translated:]

Hillel's Strategic Alternative
By Aryeh Green

Hillel the Elder said, “What is hateful to you, do not do unto others”.

Many people, in their quest for reasonable alternatives to the ‘Greater Israel’ fantasies of the extreme right, not to mention the ‘Peace in our Time’ appeasement fantasies of the extreme left, just might agree this is the option they are looking for now that the withdrawal from Gaza is complete.

As Hillel would probably agree, the solution to the central dilemma depends on how you define the problem. If the issue is how to retain Israeli ownership over the territory and have Jews live there but deny political rights to the Palestinians also living there – we’ve defeated the purpose of the exercise. Like the potential convert who came to Hillel the Elder with the intention of tripping him up by asking (seemingly) for every Jewish law to be related while standing on one leg, this query sets up an impossible quandary. But Hillel took the question and turned it around, responding more to the question of what is the essence of Jewish philosophy rather than attempting to address his questioner’s literal query. We can do the same.

Let us instead ask the question: What configuration will allow Jews and Arabs to live side-by-side in the disputed territories, thereby offering Jews and Israelis access to our beloved heartland of Hebron, Shechem and the hills of Judea and Samaria, and at the same time offering Palestinians freedom and self-determination, even independence?

And the answer then seems obvious: let us “do unto others”. Let us help them create there what we have created here.

For over 50 years, within the borders of pre-1967 Israel, an Arab minority has lived in a Jewish democracy with full civil and political rights; more strikingly perhaps, since 1967, Arab residents of Jerusalem, for instance, have lived in the most free and open Arab society in the region, even while not being citizens of Israel. There is no reason why, in an Arab democracy, Jews and/or Israelis can’t live peacefully, as citizens or as residents. It is clear that when Palestinians are more concerned with their own freedom and prosperity than with destroying Israel and/or killing Jews, various solutions present themselves, from joint sovereignty to cross-border voting relationships, from federation to amicable neighborly relations between two states. At that stage, ideally, just as an American can live in Canada (or Israel) but still vote in US elections as an American citizen, just as a Brit can live all his adult life in southern France but remain loyal to his British heritage and citizenship, so too can an Israeli living in Palestine, and a Palestinian living in Israel, treat his or her nationality and cultural affinity as distinct from any issue of territorial sovereignty.

While esoteric, the explanation is simple. Sincere adherents to the principles of democracy in western society, including in Israel, would shudder at the suggestion to bring a foreign dictator into Israel to restore order and set us on a path to stability and prosperity. Yet this is just the scenario we created in our neighbor’s society – with the parachuting of Yasser Arafat and his cronies from Tunis into the disputed territories and the creation of the Palestinian Authority under his autocratic rule in the Oslo process.

We – with the active encouragement of successive American administrations - did to others what is hateful to us all, allowing Palestinian society to degenerate into a “chaos of weapons” (as one Palestinian democracy activist calls it) driven by a culture of hatred of Jews and Israel nurtured by official Palestinian political, religious and educational leaders, institutions and media. Yitzhak Rabin suggested at Oslo’s birth, that “without human-rights watchdogs like Betzelem, without a Supreme Court and a free press, without bleeding heart liberals,” Arafat would fight Hamas and the other terrorists more successfully than we ever could. Of course Arafat didn’t, but rather used all the resources at his command to increase his own power by encouraging ever-greater hatred of the “external enemy” – Israel. And thus we sealed our own fate, in an ironic and tragic twist of Hillel’s dictum.

Understanding this sequence of events is crucial to appreciating the only realistic alternative in response to the query most on our mind following the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza – how to solve the ‘demographic problem’ in the territory west of the Jordan river.

Last week saw the launch of the Hebrew version of Natan Sharansky’s celebrated book “The Case for Democracy”. Sharansky, with his co-writer Ron Dermer, argues eloquently that promoting democratization is not only good for the Palestinians and other Arabs but is good for Israel and the rest of the world, is possible to achieve, and is right to pursue (without resort to armed coercion). His theories have found a strong following, mostly in America, but now more and more in Europe and even among Israeli leaders, including former Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon and, perhaps, Bibi Netanyahu.

His book is an elaboration of his theories, but these ideas have very practical applications as well. In fact, just over three years ago, Sharansky provided the alternative many seek, in terms Hillel would perhaps appreciate.

His 7-point peace plan, presented to PM Ariel Sharon as well as to President George Bush in mid-2002, following the battle in Jenin, emerged perhaps slightly before its time. Like a good wine and like many good ideas, it has aged now to the point of being not only relevant, but even more robust in application.

Sharansky’s plan offered a significant and detailed prescription for resolving the conflict – leading to real peace which could (or could not) result in a Palestinian state and/or Israelis remaining in the disputed territories – already a unique idea. His program started with the dismantling of the failed PA and the establishment of a Palestinian Administrative Authority, through a coordinating body headed by the US and together with those Arab states which recognize Israel, which would administer the day-to-day activities of the areas. The plan rests on four principles (whether a reformed PA might take on this role or whether even now a replacement ‘PAA’ is still required, with the PA’s unwillingness to assert its authority):
a. Development of democratic norms of civil society among Palestinians including freedom of dissent;
b. Fighting (disarming and dismantling) terror organizations and terrorists, and cessation of incitement against Jews and Israel;
c. Building permanent housing for Palestinian ‘refugees’ and dismantling the refugee camps; and
d. Massive economic development through international aid (structured and supervised).

Here, then, is an alternative worthy of Hillel: An open, democratic, progressive and prosperous Palestinian society (3-5 years in the making, including various educational and cultural programs), wherein at the conclusion of this transition period free elections would be held – and then the democratically-elected leadership of the Palestinians would enter into negotiations with Israel’s leaders to finally resolve our conflict. No ‘Greater Israel’ ignoring Palestinian aspirations for independence; no Judenrein Palestine just waiting for the next opportunity to attack Israel and negotiate further Israeli concessions.

The question above is resolved; Hillel the Elder’s dictum is upheld; Zionism’s claims to the land of Israel are acknowledged while the Palestinian desire for freedom is respected. But such an alternative relies not only on what the Palestinians do; it requires the active encouragement and support of Israel and the entire free world, linking their aid and trade and recognition – let alone territorial concessions - to reforms in Palestinian society.

A free, open and democratic Palestinian society is the only guarantee of Israel’s security and of peace in the region - and changes the entire dynamic of conflict and negotiation. Perhaps with the launch of the local translation of Sharansky’s book, this conversation can now take place in Hebrew, and not only in English across the Atlantic, and thereby affect Israeli government policy as much as it has affected American policy.

A quick note from Gaza during the withdrawal

2005-08-21T09:28:00.000+03:00

[An email written to Katie, my wife, on August 17, from Gush Katif]

KT - It's about 1pm on Wednesday, I have a few minutes between assignments, thought I'd put a few thoughts and observations down in writing, about my activities and feelings.

From a personal perspective, my overwhelming feeling is one of pure helplessness and despair. Not, mind you, from the same sources of the many residents being evicted or those protesting the expulsion locally or elsewhere - not because I believe we should be here permanently. But because I just don't see the point, not now, not with the way things are in this region - no peace, no security, no Palestinian democracy or reform in the Pal Authority. Hamas and even Qurei in the PA say "first Gaza, then Jerusalem & the West Bank" (Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the others say "all of Palestine" of course). The timing is terrible and wrong - they killed enough of us and now we're running away. Hence my despair. My helplessness comes from our own political system's failings - Sharon was elected in direct and fervent opposition to Mitzna's campaign for a 'unilateral withdrawal' from Gaza - Sharon's slogan was "Netzarim and Tel Aviv are equal" - and so many people feel completely disenfranchised by the lack of legitimacy of the withdrawal policy. Though it followed the legal process it was and is utterly anti-democratic. But this isn't the place or time for political ramblings.

All that is at the strategic level of thought and government policy. At the personal level of feeling, my helplessness and despair are more palpable, and I assume more understandable. I stand outside Ganei Tal, where our friends Machla and Pinchas have lived and raised their family for 28 years, where we've spent almost every Shabbat Chanukah in the past two decades and many other happy times, and can't believe I'm at all involved in this operation. I certainly don't feel like I'm protecting my State or my community or my family and children, which I have always felt in over 15 years of military service. I thought I'd be able to help by offering a slightly broader perspective to the media - but I'm not sure at this point, in the middle of it. My influence is minor and tangential. I can't help Machla; even my sympathy seems pathetic. I bring a journalist to hear her story and it's clear I'm on the 'other side' even as I make every effort to get her story heard. I am far away from the minor outbreaks of violence in Neve Dekalim and therefore helpless to fulfill my other promise to myself, to step in and block police brutality if I am witness to it; perhaps today or tomorrow.

An observation: As you know, units of young soldiers who have guarded these communities continue to do so, patrolling and guarding the gates - against the danger of Palestinian Arab terrorists. These units have deep and wonderful relations with the communities they serve; families 'adopt' the soldiers and the relationship between the boys and the families are strong and emotional, lasting years after an individual soldier moves on. And now other soldiers are coming to evict these families from their homes. Sitting outside Ganei Tal, I observed a fascinating phenomenon. Adults and youth, and children, some as young as 4 or 5, demonstrated an amazing sophistication in discriminating between a "good" soldier (for lack of a better term) and those coming to throw them out. As I approach the gate, the children look at me with suspicion and hostility; a moment earlier and later, they're playing with the soldier guarding the gate. And he's the one with an M-16. (All police and soliders involved in the withdrawal in or near the communities carry no arms.) It reminds me of Yonatan at around age 5, coming up to an Israeli soldier in the street, saluting him and reciting the kindergarten-version of the prayer for soldiers of the IDF, and of the pride I always had - and you had, and, I think, my family had - of my own service. I had tears in my eyes watching the kids at the gate play with the young chayal.

But I don't want to leave the impression that the soldiers involved in this transfer operation are in any way "bad". Quite the opposite; you've seen the many images of soldiers - including officers - crying with the residents they're evicting. At this point, Wednesday early afternoon, we're still at the "talking" level in most of the communities, despite the announced deadline of midnight last night and the declaration of the initiation of the "forced evacuation" stage as of this morning. We are making every effort not to move into the arena of coercive force - though in isolated cases we must of course. And in responding to the demonstrators - as opposed to the residents - whose goal is to interfere in the process, the IDF is certainly forcing them physically onto busses and literally driving them out. About 300 were arrested in Neve Dekelim yesterday, of which about 50 will be charged formally. I wonder if some of our friends or their teenagers are among them.

A couple barricaded themselves in their house with their two kids earlier this morning, threatening violence; they were patiently and professionally talked out. Similarly a young boy on a ledge outside his home. And reports of many other instances continue to flow in to our command center, where I am now. In light of my unhappiness with the overall policy as well as the way it's being carried out on the macro-level, I am at least comforted that on the micro-level, in each individual case, great care and sensitivity is being displayed by our forces, on the whole. In fact, one of my most emotional moments so far occurred prior to the inauguration of operations, in our briefing. Every commander who spoke to us - from the head of Southern Command through the commander of the police and of course the head of the Spokespersons Unit, as well as the lower-level unit commanders and other officers, not to mention the Chief of General Staff on the radio - spoke emotionally and eloquently of this being an operation unique in the history of the IDF. Almost all mentioned that these are our brothers and sisters; that they'd been sent here by governments both Left and Right; that they embody the true spirit of Zionism. All stressed the sensitivity and empathy central to all of our activities; many used the word "love" repeatedly.

The initial operation, BTW, from Sunday through Tuesday, was called "Operation Lending-a-Hand" or, more literally, "A Hand to Brothers" ("Yad L'Achim").

On another level, logistical challenges are overwhelming and the results are unimpressive, if not disastrous (from a media perspective). I spent over 14 hours yesterday (from 2am until 4pm) with 35 increasingly hostile journalists from around the world and from every media who were placed in a 'holding pattern' in 40-degree heat outside the entrance to Ganei Tal, denied entrance to the Moshav by the community's leaders, waiting for officers to come deliver eviction notices... who never came. But the IDF operations branch didn't bother to let the Spokespersons unit know they weren't coming. On less than 2 hours of sleep, after 10 hours in the burning sun, it wasn't easy to manage the frustration and anger of the press on the bus.

More on that angle perhaps another time.

Another issue: Earlier today Palestinians fired on Neve Dekalim. You recall Sharon's declaration "we will not withdraw under fire"? Well - since no injuries were reported, the IDF is not responding. I wouldn't want to live in a society where murder, rape & robbery were punished only when successful. If there are no consequences for attempted rape/murder/robbery, what real deterrence is there? Our strategic position having been decimated by this withdrawal, now our tactical position becomes weakened at every passing moment. Sorry for the pessimism; I think it's justified.

One more little thing, just to give us perspective. I played with Efrat's little 2-year-old, Shalem, in Machla's living room, surrounded by boxes, while Machla spoke to the reporters. We haven't seen her since Moriyah's Bat Mitzvah - you can't believe how similar she looks to Efrat - whom we met, of course, at that age exactly. She (Shalem) is a bright, cheerful, friendly ball of laughs; I bounced her on my leg - army boots are great for that at that age. She kept saying "sus!" (horse) and laughing. It wasn't only a nice break and the obvious "cycle of life" ideas going through my head. At that very point, Machla was talking to the reporters about her 25-year-old sofas, and being photographed sitting on them, and about how one the one hand she says to herself "just leave them, what do I need them for, they're so old, I'm moving on...". But then she says "These sofas are part of my life; I brought them here into my home, they're part o f me and who I am; I can't envision my living room without them." And I thought, and later told Machla, how I remember playing with Efrat, and Shaiki, and Tuli, and Merav, on those sofas. (You remember - they're pretty flat and solid and firm, great for bouncing kids on your knees.) Playing with Shalem in the same way, and the fact that Machla's taking the sofas with her, says something to me about continuity, about the flexibility of the human condition in spite of so many hardships, I don't know, it just comforted me somehow.

I can't in good conscience bring myself to think, or to feel, or of course to say to Machla or anyone, something as trite as 'life goes on' - but in a Frankel type of way, I guess I do feel that, from a Jewish perspective, even a Zionist perspective, Efrat's daughter Shalem, like our children, represent a certain staying-power, a permanence unrelated to where exactly we put down our roots.

Anyway - must finish up here. Am briefing a small group of journalists in 15 minutes and have to get up-to-date; am being interviewed by BBC radio at 3pm - tell your folks to tune in, if they want, around 1pm their time.

I send you my love - it was nice to speak to you this morning.

Aryeh

The “Gulf” in Zionism

2005-08-03T10:13:00.000+03:00

“Fragmented beyond repair,” wrote Gershon Baskin in the Jerusalem Post July 26 about Israeli society. He may be right; he is dreadfully wrong as to the nature of the problem. Saying his worldview is “different” from the settlers’, Baskin purports to represent true Zionism. In fact, he betrays the very essence of our Zionist principles. He represents, in effect if not intention, the “post-Zionist” anti-Jewish ideology preferred by Israel’s enemies.

Baskin decries the settling of thousands of Israelis – observant and non-observant – in the areas Israel has administered since June 1967. He writes of “saving Zionism from those who have tainted the noble aspects of its cause since 1967” with no recognition of two critical facts: That cause, in all its “aspects”, is the same as it was in Herzl and Ben Gurion’s days; and the vast majority of “those” settlers were sent by their Zionist leaders, Left and Right, to fulfill the Zionist mission: settling the land and claiming sovereignty over it.

Baskin writes: “Zionism is not about occupying the West Bank and Gaza,” and “continuation of the settlement enterprise is an act of suicide for the Zionist dream.” People may disagree as to the political correctness or feasibility of “the settlement enterprise” in the disputed territories, but Baskin and others like him twist history and ideology when they suggest that settling the Land of Israel is anything other than the most basic means and goal of Zionism.

A Zionist believes in the Jewish right to the Land of Israel. Quirks of history dictated the provisional borders of the State of Israel. Zionist leaders accepted the UN Partition Plan of 1947 reluctantly, not as the fulfillment of the dream to create a Jewish State in all of the Land of Israel, but as the best they could get. Neither the Partition borders, nor the eventual armistice lines of 1949, were seen as permanent borders. It was the beginning of the fulfillment of the Zionist dream -- not the end.

The Jewish claim is based on legal and historical foundations including the Balfour declaration, the League of Nations Mandate to Britain, and Israel’s acquisition of the territories in a war of defense as defined by the UN Charter, over and above the continued Jewish presence in the area for over 3500 years and the moral and religious underpinnings often cited. If in response to practical and political realities over the past century Zionist leaders have made territorial compromises, that claim remains legitimate, despite not being pursued.

This includes accepting the unilateral decision by Great Britain to create an Arab state in eastern Palestine in 1922, TransJordan; accepting the UN’s recommending another Arab state be established in western Palestine with Partition in 1947; and relinquishing control of the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria including Hebron and Shechem, cities of our Patriarchs, as part of the Oslo process in the 1990’s.

A true Zionist acknowledges this reality even though he or she may agree to waive that right in favor of a competing Palestinian claim. While not asserting our claim to the Land of Israel, we do not surrender it. The “close settlement” of the Land of Israel was and is a defining theme in Zionism. Yet Gershon Baskin and others (including most of the world) view this land as the Palestinians’ – calling it “their” land. True Zionists, if they have any intellectual integrity, recognize and publicly affirm the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel, rather than accepting and strengthening the use of biased terms for the disputed territories like “occupied territories”.

Judea and Samaria, the “west bank of the Jordan river”, has had no legal sovereign accepted by the UN or the western world since Britain renounced its mandate in 1947. Israel has at least as powerful a claim to these territories as do the Palestinians, who did not exist as a separate Arab “nation” until at least the founding of the PLO in 1964. If we Zionists don’t remind the world of this fact, even if we support the Palestinians’ claim, how can we expect others to recognize our sacrifice or acknowledge our own legitimacy?

Baskin says “the Zionist enterprise is at risk as long as we continue our occupation and domination over the West Bank and its people”. In fact, the Zionist enterprise is at real risk when “Zionists” reject its essence. If Gaza and Hebron are “theirs”, illegally “occupied”, then so are Haifa, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Jerusalem and all the rest of Palestine -- which is precisely what Hamas claims, as do many of our “moderate” Arab neighbors and PA textbooks and media. The Israeli “occupation” ended in 1995 with the implementation of Oslo II, by which time 98% of Palestinians were under PA rule.

The original goal of Zionism -- the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel -- was achieved in the last century. The fundamental ideology of Zionism -- the Jewish claim to this Land and the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish State, in whatever borders are eventually agreed upon with our neighbors -- is under attack around the world, not least by the Palestinians, and by a loud and influential, if small, minority in Israel. It is this battle against those who deny legitimacy to Israel as a Jewish State which will determine the strength of Israel and the Jewish people in the 21st Century. In Israel, those who wish to see Israel lose its Jewish identity and Zionist ideals are called “post-Zionists”.

Baskin’s demagogy* targeted at “the settlers” and his rejection of the settlement idea reveal the true nature of his Zionism. He certainly claims to be a “real” Zionist -- just within the ’49 armistice lines.

Like Baskin, I came to this country over two decades ago from the USA, and brought many of my American values with me. As a Zionist, I am committed to the strengthening of Israel as a Jewish state and I assert the Jews’ right to live anywhere in the Land of Israel -- even if the actualization of that right is not possible. I also happen to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, which I advocated as early as 1989 in these pages, before even the Labour party accepted its inevitability. But my advocacy of a Palestinian state is conditional on the Palestinians’ and other Arabs’ acceptance of Israel -- de jure, not de facto.

And my support rests on that Palestinian state being free, open, and tolerant and protective of its Jewish minority. This too is a Zionist stance: If Gaza and Hebron are not under Jewish sovereignty, Jews should at least be able to live there without fear. Any other approach is not Zionist. Suggesting, as the world (and Baskin, it seems) does, that an emerging Palestine must be Judenrein, is anti-Zionist -- and irrational.

Baskin may be correct, we Jews in Israel are somewhat fragmented. But not between Right and Left, or between more-observant and less-observant. We are divided between Zionists and Post-Zionists, and following this withdrawal from Gaza our debate – and the world’s debate with us – will be along these lines. True Zionists will be judged not by their advocacy of a “Greater Israel” or of greater territorial concessions to the Palestinians, but by their commitment to Jews’ right to live in the Land of Israel, and Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State.

-----

* Baskin blames “the settlers” for fragmenting Israeli society, equating them with right-wing religious extremists -- deepening the rift while pretending to lament it. He demonizes them with casual references to violence, whereas the reality, recognized by the media and authorities, is quite the opposite -- including multiple instances of restraint in the face of police brutality. He suggests that Islamic terror awaits “provocation” from Israeli settlers, whereas Israel and the world has seen the rise of Islamic terror based on anti-Semitic and anti-western religious themes entirely independent of the acts of religious or other settlers.

Referring to the opposition bumper-sticker slogan "Jews don't expel Jews," Baskin suggests it implies “that Jews may expel non-Jews.” This more reflects his twisted perspective than the intent of the opponents of the Gaza withdrawal and the understanding of the majority of Zionists and Israelis. The slogan refers to the others -- the many others, including our current Arab neighbors and those around the world who would see us pushed into the sea -- who have expelled Jews (or tried to) throughout the centuries. Few settlers or Zionists, and certainly no leaders, “believe they can subjugate the Palestinians” as Baskin asserts. Most wish nothing more than to live in peace and prosperity with our Arab neighbors, and the vast Israeli consensus agrees to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel -- which in fact Oslo was meant to lead to, had the Palestinian leadership been more interested in gaining independence than in attacking Israel.

A Different View of the Withdrawal from Gaza ("Disengagement") - By Katie Green

2005-07-29T09:00:00.000+03:00

ORANGE
By Katie Green
[The Jewish Chronicle - UK - July 29, 2005]

My neighbour Debby has been selling orange ribbons. One shekel for an orange ribbon to tie to the antenna of the car, and thus identify with the residents of Gush Katif, who will be evicted from their homes on August 15th.

We see a lot of orange in the streets these days: orange ribbons on lorries and bicycles, orange ribbons tied to briefcases and handbags, to hats and belts and babies' buggies. Children from the religious youth movements and older people in their fifties who are against the withdrawal from the Gaza strip, have been sporting orange T-shirts with the slogan 'Jews don't expel Jews'.

"What have you done with the colour orange?" groans a secular left-wing radio host on IDF Radio. "You religious people, your colour is brown, or beige at the very least. Leave orange alone. It's ours."

When we pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, the term used in Hebrew was Nesiga, which translates as "withdrawal". However, the term used for the projected August disengagement, Hinatkut, seems to have caused confusion among the public, the media, and even among government officials. Hinatkut derives from the word Nituk - a sharp, swift cessation of something, as when one's electricity has been cut off. Nituk implies not only the act of disconnection, but also the consequent isolation of what is left behind: a human being who will not communicate with others, or a child who cannot relate to his peers is described as Menutak.

A second, more complex form of the word being used more and more in the media is Hitnatkut, (note the extra 't' in the first syllable), the reflexive form, rather than the passive. This, says Re'uma Yitzhaki, chief linguistic advisor to Israel's Channel 2 television and radio, is incorrect Hebrew. She feels that this version of the word implies that the process of disengagement is mutual and is being enacted by both parties (Israeli and Palestinian) simultaneously, whereas in fact, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon opted for unilateral disengagement precisely because he felt that there was no party for peace and no one to talk to. Alternatively, the Oxford Hebrew-English dictionary describes Hitnatkut as cutting oneself off, which is possibly a more correct interpretation, since the process is definitely one which Israel has instigated for itself, within itself.

The grammatical confusion over how to describe the eviction of the Gush Katif families from the Gaza Strip perhaps belies the perplexity and inner turmoil both of the Israeli population and its leaders. Disengagement is not only taking place between the Jewish State and the Palestinian population of Gaza. It is also taking place between two distinct populations of Jews. Disengagement is perceived, among the public at least, not only as something we are doing to others, but also as something we are doing to ourselves.

I didn't buy Debby's orange ribbon for my car, for a number of reasons. I have never felt comfortable with the profusion of car stickers and slogans that have been used in my country in the twenty years I have lived here. I don't think that the very complex Israeli reality in which we live can be condensed down to a few silly words or even to a particular colour. The only time I was ever tempted was after Yitzchak Rabin's assassination, when the car-sticker "Shalom, Haver" (Goodbye, friend) proliferated on the streets. That slogan had been coined by an outsider, President Clinton. In the general election following Rabin's death, Leah Rabin, his widow, stated unequivocally in a television interview that if the Likud won the election, she would pack her bags and leave the country. The day after the Likud's victory, stickers appeared on hundreds of cars bearing the slogan: "Shalom, Leah."

Overall, I have been in favour of the disengagement. I simply did not see the Katif communities as viable and defendable - around ten thousand Jews living among more than a million Arabs seemed like a physical impossibility to me. I asked myself if I wanted my son, Yonatan, to risk his life defending these settlements. Yonatan, who joins the army next year, has been going to interviews in the air force and in army intelligence. His dream is to serve in an elite commando unit. In one interview, an officer asked Yonatan whether he would disobey orders if ordered to evacuate a settlement.

"The army is the army and you do what you're told" Yonatan replied. "But I have my red lines. Will you ask me to evacuate Jews from Jerusalem? I won't do it."

This, of course, it what lies at the root of the raw emotion surrounding the Gaza withdrawal. What will result from it? Hope or chaos? Will there be disengagements from the West Bank, from the Golan Heights, from eastern Jerusalem? How many Jewish families? How many Jewish homes? Will it be worth it? We look into the crystal ball and we cannot see.

Those of us who have supported the expulsion of the Katif families until now, have always hoped that, despite the obvious sufferings of those to be uprooted from their homes, jobs and communities, the dividends in peace will make it all worthwhile. If there is to be a Palestinian State, then we must start somewhere and Gaza seems to be the best place to start. The poverty and hopelessness of Gaza Palestinians, the life they live governed by roadblocks and economic shortage, has been of serious concern to many Israelis. If the disengagement will bring confidence to the Palestinian community, if such a practical and committed step by Israel will make us feel we are not trapped in eternal deadlock; if Gaza Palestinians will then have opportunities for self-government, development, health and education undreamed of in previous decades, and if indeed, the Gaza withdrawal is the first step to peace in the region, then we will all most probably agree twenty years from now, that the human tragedy of the Katif settlements was a price that had to be paid.

But what about the need to build confidence in the Israeli community? Bruised and bereaved by the relentless bus bombs and café-bombs of the intifada (imagine London' s underground bombings repeated every few days, for four years), some of us fear that the Gaza withdrawal will be perceived by Palestinians as a reward for a vicious and murderous campaign. What if the scenario of the future is the opposite of that described above? It is at least as likely. Arms and weapons being rushed into Gaza port by sea andair? A proliferation of mini-militias, each competing with the other in extremism, fanaticism and incitement? The squandering of millions of pounds in international aid and wide-scale corruption, so that the lives of ordinary people show no improvement? After the disengagement in August, we Israelis, and Palestinians too, will have everything to gain, and everything to lose. Nobody knows which of the two scenarios will unfold.

Recently, I visited Ganei Tal, one of the Katif settlements, with my husband and three children for the weekend. The first thing that struck me, as we crossed the Kissufim checkpoint and drove into the strip, is how big it is. Both the Israeli and international press have related to the disengagement as if it pertained to a few streets or a village here and there. In fact, the strip is about 223 square miles in size, with twenty-one separate Jewish communities. I recommend perusal of Israel's foreign ministry website (www.mfa.gov.il) for a detailed map of the Strip and its settlements.

My friend Machla lives in Ganei Tal with three of her four children. We came to spend Shabbat with Machla, to pay our respects to the life she has built and nourished there for 30 years, and to bid goodbye to her home, a place where we have been cherished and entertained as guests for over two decades. Machla worries about the future. She is a secondary school history teacher in her mid-fifties, and is unlikely to be employed elsewhere after she leaves the Gush. The compensation package she (and all residents) will receive is still under negotiation.

After careful consideration, many Ganei Tal families have decided that in conscience, they really cannot pack up their belongings and therefore cooperate with the process they so viscerally oppose. When the soldiers come to Machla's home to evict her, every last book will still be on its shelf, every piece of clothing still in the wardrobe, and every teaspoon in its kitchen drawer. At some later point, teams of soldiers will presumably pack the belongings in containers and ship them to warehouses.

In Ganei Tal and in a number of other settlements, hundreds of families have received no information about re-location. Residents rely on the newspapers, and on rumours, to try and gauge where they will be moved after disengagement. Caravans? Hotel rooms? Absorption Centers? Youth Hostels? Nobody knows. Even those who have resigned themselves to disengagement and who have applied formally for caravans, do not feel confident that they will receive them. "The feeling is that the system is making lots of noise, but in actuality there is no one to talk to", says a Gan Or resident in an interview with Haaretz newspaper.

The general public, too, have been spared details on the subject. Three weeks before the date, one would expect to see television anchor men and women standing in front of newly assembled caravan parks for the dispossessed, reporting on the final destination of these ten thousand people after they have been moved. But there is a dearth of information. Some caravans have been shipped to the Nitzanim nature reserve in the south of the county, but not nearly enough to house the number of families leaving Gaza. Many caravans have not even been connected yet to the electricity grid, water mains or sewage system. Either planning has gone terribly awry, or the details have not been released to the media in an effort to confuse and undermine the settlers themselves.

On the Saturday afternoon of our weekend visit, my husband and I took a walk through the Moshav. We wandered along the beautifully manicured gardens and sumptuously planted flowerbeds. Huge shade trees, planted as tiny saplings, lined the narrow paths. A group of about seventy teenagers sat on the grass by someone's house, listening to a talk about the weekly Torah portion. The large modern synagogue, situated at the entrance of the Moshav, began to fill with men and women arriving for Mincha, the afternoon service. I watched them through the window as they swayed gently back and forth in prayer. Later, for supper, Machla served us the red, green, orange and yellow peppers grown in her own hot-houses.

On Saturday night we drove back to our home town of Bet Shemesh. In the car we were all subdued. I thought about Gush Katif produce we may never see in our supermarkets again: lettuce, tomatoes, dill, parsley, coriander, celery, spring onion, peppers, and many types of flowers - all miraculously grown in the sand using technologies unimagined and unconstructed by any other community in the world.

I thought about the soldiers at Machla's door on August 15th, the bulldozers ripping up the synagogue at Ganei Tal. The irony hit me hard. So many of us moved to Israel so that nobody would throw us out from anywhere, ever again. At the time of the Gulf War in 1991, my parents and other family members urged me to bring the children over to England, just to stay safe for the duration of the war. Something in me baulked at this. "Not this time" I said to them. "No more running. No more hiding. Israel is the last stop."

And here we are, evacuating our own. Never will Israel experience it's schizophrenic nature as it is destined to do on August 15th: it's own daughters dragged from their houses like cattle, its own sons dressed in police and army uniform, barking orders and avoiding eye contact.

I ask myself: How small does Israel need to be to please everyone? What will satisfy the Palestinians, much less the world, as to our intentions for peace? Which Jewish families are next on the list for resettlement? And if Arab families must also be uprooted to achieve the two-state solution, will this be acceptable too in the eyes of the international community?

These were my doubts and my questions as we drove in the quiet and the dark back to our home. When we arrived, I noticed that the light was still on in Debby's kitchen window. I bought an orange ribbon and tied it to the antenna of my car.

I have decided that, whatever the result of the evacuations, I will never, ever belittle the physical and mental suffering of the Gush Katif residents, all invited legally by a succession of Labour and Likud governments to make their homes in the Gaza strip over the last thirty years. They deserve my empathy and respect at the very least - two things that are in short supply, judging by the statements coming from the government and the media. 'Jews don't expel Jews', says the latest bumper sticker put out by the pro-disengagement lobby. 'They just move them around a bit'.

Katie Green is a film director and producer and freelance journalist – and is Aryeh’s wife.

The Mundane Dilution of the Jewish State - 27 Feb 05

2005-02-28T13:07:00.000+02:00

The attorney-general, mid-level IDF brass and faceless bureaucrats in the
education ministry nonchalantly weaken the Jewish identity of Israel - and
therefore her raison d'etre

The Mundane Dilution of the Jewish State

27 February, 2005

Israel is a Jewish State.

Or is it?

Recently we have witnessed a number of disturbing events reflecting a
growing trend to 'de-Judaize' our culture and society. True, our calendar
and language certainly reflect Jewish roots, and our place in the hearts of
many Jews around the world strengthens the impression. Yet for those who
care and take pride in the Jewishness of Israel, these latest incidents
should be seen as 'warning shots across the bow' and as calls to immediate
action.

In his book "The Jewish State - The Struggle for Israel's Soul" (2000),
Yoram Hazony describes the intellectual struggle between those opposed to
the very idea of a 'Jewish' State, led by Martin Buber, and those favoring
Herzl's original idea, led by David Ben Gurion. Alarmingly, Hazony's book
details how Buber and his school were in many ways victorious, as the State
of Israel lost various manifestations of its Jewish identity over the past
half-century. Today we are seeing the results of this trend in even more
disconcerting ways, as the natural effect of this philosophy 'trickles down'
into mundane decisions taken by mid-level bureaucrats as almost a matter of
course.

A few weeks ago, in a seemingly unconnected series of events, we were
treated to three expressions of this trend in quick succession. These
examples demonstrate the degree to which Buber's anti-Jewish
"universalistic" approach to the State and its organs has been accepted by
decision-makers at all levels. A review and brief analysis of them
highlights the danger and the depth of the crisis facing us.

Attorney-general Menachem Mazuz recently announced a change of policy
regarding JNF lands administered by the Israel Lands Authority, and has been
praised and condemned in equal parts by the spiritual descendents of Buber
and Ben-Gurion. The interesting aspect of this decision lies less in its
acceptance of the petitioner's claims - reasonable from the standpoint of
any non-discriminatory Western legal basis - than the process which brought
it about. Mazuz apparently sat with the heads of his office, officials from
the ILA and representatives from the JNF - and together they decided that
the policy of selling JNF land only to Jews is not defensible in the court
of the Jewish State.

That the JNF - whose initials stand for "Jewish National Fund" lest we
forget - was established to reclaim land in the Land of Israel for the
Jewish people is not contested. The question raised in this case - whether
such discriminatory practices are acceptable in Israel - highlights both the
complexities of the JNF's relationship with the State, as well as the
State's relationship with its Jewishness and with the Jewish people who are
not citizens of the State.

The solution proposed - compensating the JNF with State lands whenever it
sells land in its holdings to non-Jews - simply skirts the main issue: Can a
democratic country discriminate in favour of one segment of its population
and remain truly democratic? It would seem, from examples in Europe (where
Christianity is in the main the State religion of most countries) and the US
(where 'affirmative action' is an honored concept) that it is indeed
possible for a free country to espouse equality while also protecting and
promoting the interests of one group over another.

In the US, in fact, affirmative action is really simply another name for
compensatory discrimination in favour of one segment of the population to
counteract the effects of historical injustices against them - in this case,
African Americans. One could certainly argue that the historical injustices
done to the Jewish people, from the Roman dispersion through the Spanish
Inquisition and the Holocaust to the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from Arab
countries in the past century, might justify a similar approach here. But
the accepted wisdom, reflected in the decision of Mazuz & Co., is that
democracy (as they understand it, and as Buber interpreted 'universal
values') trumps Jewish interests and identity.

Similarly, the IDF decision regarding disbanding Hesder units (combining
Yeshiva learning with active combat duty in homogeneous units) reflects a
growing trend to reject the Jewish aspects of state institutions in favour
of the more palatable 'normal' trappings of a 'state of all its citizens.'
Hazony provides sufficient evidence of the IDF turning its back on its
Jewish role and history, including turning the 7-page code entitled "The
Spirit of the IDF" into a "'profound code of ethics'" which in fact includes
no reference to "the Jewish State, the Jewish people, the land of Israel, or
anything else to hint at the Jewish national identity." in any of its eleven
"values" and thirty-four "basic principles".

It certainly is in keeping with this drift towards secular universalistic
humanism to choose, at the level of the IDF Manpower command, to break up
what is known as one of the army's most highly-motivated and
highly-performing units. Announced only two days prior to the JNF decision,
here also the process is more important than the policy itself. This was
clearly not a strategic decision taken by the political echelon at the
defense ministry after long consideration (and discussion with the leaders
of the Hesder programs or social/community leaders).

Neither was it a calculated decision to disband all such organic units and
to disperse soldiers who until now served in what OC Manpower Elazar Stern
called "ideological frameworks". As Rabbi David Stav, head of the Petach
Tikvah Hesder Yeshiva noted, the IDF has not decided as a whole to take
"similar action against the special Beduin, haredi or Kibbutz units, only
against the national religious Zionist units." IDF officers at the
operational and directorate level discussed and decided on this historical
alteration of long-term IDF and national policy, announced almost
off-handedly in the middle of a busy news week. (Whether this plan relates
in any way to the proposed disengagement and the propensity of
religiously-observant soldiers to oppose disengagement is irrelevant, at
least with regard to the method of decision-making and launching the
policy.)

The IDF's attitude towards Hesder units - viewing the added element of their
Jewish content as somehow threatening or undesirable - is shared, it seems,
by nameless bureaucrats in Israel's education ministry. Just a week before,
the education ministry was embroiled in controversy over a report in
Ha'aretz newspaper that the ministry does not recognize immigrants'
university degrees if they included credit for Yeshiva study. That this
policy is transparently ridiculous is clear when put into the context of the
numerous degrees bestowed by the same leading universities which include
various credit-earning activities - such as foreign study abroad, volunteer
work, and social or 'experiential' activities. This writer earned credits
towards his BA from one of America's leading universities for Zen Buddhist
'sitting', researching fraternity drinking parties, and a very enjoyable six
months spent in England 'studying' between motorcycle tours of Europe.

That such a policy could be agreed upon by mid-level functionaries in the
education ministry in such a blatantly anti-Jewish manner is as
transparently objectionable. The education ministry of the one Jewish state
in the world accepts Columbia degrees which include credit for volunteer
work in Ecuador and Harvard degrees which include credit for Native American
folk-dancing, not to mention my UC Berkeley degree as described above, but
not the same degrees if they include credit for (rigorous) study in an
advanced institution of Jewish learning in Israel - called a Yeshiva for
overseas students.

At issue here is more than the specific matters under review. These three
examples - and the many similar, seemingly minor decisions taken without
public fanfare - are not strategic policy decisions at either the cabinet
level nor Knesset level. Nor are they taken as a result of research and
analysis by prominent think-tanks or public-policy fora. These are
bureaucratic decisions with far-reaching implications, often made on the
basis of partial information, on prejudiced approaches to law and society,
and on acceptance of supposed 'western norms' without reference to the
special circumstance of Israel as the world's only Jewish state.

This is not the place to argue in detail the relative merits of each
decision - and each has, in fact, been argued in these pages in the past few
weeks - though I've offered a few perspectives to help clarify the issues.

This article is an attempt to point out the insidious, virtually subversive
nature of the decision-making process, and of the acceptance of this
'universalistic' anti-Jewish mind-set.

At the end of his book, Hazony notes that "a state is not a material object"
but rather is "an idea" which is at base a "matter of culture". He stresses
that when the people cease to believe in the state, when their culture
depletes their willingness to make efforts and sacrifices on behalf of the
state, "it is only a matter of time before the entire construct proves as
shallow as is the belief in it". Like the Soviet Union, or Czechoslovakia,
or Yugoslavia, a state "need not be defeated militarily to be defeated"; it
may be destroyed merely "on the battleground of ideas."

Today, here in Israel, whether in the university environment where Israel is
attacked mercilessly as the root cause of all evil in the region by some
professors; in the media where observant Jews are castigated for their
dedication to the Land of Israel and the Torah of Israel; or in the social
milieu where it is deemed acceptable to demonize Jewish symbols and actions
even at the highest levels of the cultural and political elite, the idea of
a State for the Jews, as well as a Jewish State, is being assaulted as never
before. More important, as the examples related above show, it is no longer
Buber (or Sarid, or Lapid) who are assailing the Jewish character of the
State. It is nameless bureaucrats at every level of the apparatus of the
State, and named second-level functionaries who cannot by any stretch of the
imagination be called "leaders", who as a result of decades of post-Zionist
rhetoric have so accepted Buber's main thesis that their decision-making is
simply a natural extension of this acceptance, without their even knowing
it.

It is high time, as Hazony concludes, for the strengthening of the idea of
the Jewish State, the legitimacy of the Jewishness of our State, by our
leading thinkers and writers and "men of spirit". Not only to justify the
Jewish nature of our country legally, morally and socially, but to provide
the foundation for the next generation of Israelis to proudly bear the
banner of Israel - The Jewish State.

[The writer is a senior advisor to Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister for
Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs.]

The Mundane Dilution of the Jewish State - 27 Feb 05

2005-02-27T15:17:00.000+02:00

The attorney-general, mid-level IDF brass and faceless bureaucrats in the
education ministry nonchalantly weaken the Jewish identity of Israel - and
therefore her raison d'etre

The Mundane Dilution of the Jewish State
By Aryeh Green
27 February, 2005

Israel is a Jewish State.

Or is it?

This article is an attempt to point out the insidious, virtually subversive
nature of the decision-making process, and of the acceptance of this
'universalistic' anti-Jewish mind-set.

The writer is a senior advisor to Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister for
Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs.

"Measure Palestinian Freedom, not Summits" - Article by Natan Sharansky - THE JERUSALEM Post 26.11.04

2004-11-28T15:06:00.000+02:00

Measure Palestinian freedom, not summits

[The peace process will fail again if it is not linked to real democracy and human rights]

By NATAN SHARANSKY – Nov. 25, 2004

The death of Yasser Arafat has once again placed the search for peace at a crossroads. Ten years ago, policymakers took the wrong road, believing that peace could be made with a dictatorship. Today, we must instead embrace a peace process that is anchored in the expansion of freedom within Palestinian society.

The temptation to return to the Oslo formula will be very great. Today, many hope to identify a Palestinian strongman as quickly as possible who can prevent chaos, rein in the extremists, and reach a deal with Israel. Similarly, many view the upcoming Palestinian elections as an opportunity to legitimize a Palestinian leadership that could quickly be "strengthened" by Western and Israeli largesse.

This was exactly the misguided approach to peace that failed so miserably over the last decade. According to the logic of Oslo, a "moderate" like Arafat should be embraced and empowered by the free world so that he would be strong enough to fight terror and reach an agreement with Israel.

Unfortunately, little attention was paid to how Arafat ruled. In fact, far from being considered an obstacle to peace, Arafat's repressive rule was seen as facilitating peace. As prime minister Yitzhak Rabin put it only days after Oslo was signed, Arafat would fight Hamas "without a Supreme Court, without human rights organizations, and without all sorts of bleeding-heart liberals."

What was not understood then, or often even now, is that a non-democratic Palestinian regime will, by its nature, always threaten Israel. Non-democratic regimes always need to mobilize their people against external enemies to maintain internal stability. This is why the regime in Egypt, having lost Israel as a political enemy by signing a peace treaty, sponsors what is perhaps the most rabid anti-Semitic incitement on earth. That is also why the Saudi regime funds a Wahhabi fanaticism at home and abroad that is terrorizing our entire world. And that is why the Palestinian Authority used all the resources, not to improve the lives of Palestinians but rather to strengthen hatred toward Israel.

It is time to explore the road not taken, a road that could make all the difference.

Toward the end of the Cold War, the free world began to link its policies toward the Soviet Union to human rights within that nation. Rather than focus on what Soviet leaders had to say about the West, the focus turned to how the Soviet regime was treating its own subjects.

THE JACKSON Amendment, for example, linked most favored nation trade benefits to the Soviet Union to that regime's respect for its citizens' right to emigrate. By focusing attention on a concrete right that was easily measurable, the Jackson Amendment proved a highly effective means of measuring the degree of freedom within the USSR and, as a result, Soviet intentions.

We, too, should seek to find concrete means to determine whether Palestinians are making progress on democratic reforms, so we can link our policies directly to such reforms. In addition to the obvious need to preserve the Palestinians' right of dissent - the quintessential mark of a free society - there are other reliable measures of the new leadership's commitment to reform.

First, that leadership can finally seek to end the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live in refugee camps. Four generations of Palestinian refugees have been used as pawns in the Arab world's struggle against the Jewish state. These refugee camps should be dismantled as soon as possible and the refugees resettled in decent housing.

A leadership that is willing to end the fantasy of destroying Israel and begin to actually improve the conditions in which Palestinians live should be embraced by the free world with a new international Marshall Plan that can put an end to a shameful humanitarian disaster.

Second, the new leadership can stop poisoning Palestinians to hate Jews and the Jewish state. Textbooks where Israel does not appear on the map and PA-controlled television programs where kindergarten children beckon their classmates to follow the path of suicide martyrdom should be replaced with an educational system that promotes peace.

Third, the new leadership can expand economic opportunities for millions of Palestinians. For a decade, Arafat hollowed out Palestinian civil society and crushed its middle class. He monopolized basic industries, controlled work permits in Israel, as well as the distribution of international aid. A test of the new PA will be whether it, unlike Arafat, is willing to embrace joint ventures that strengthen the Palestinian middle class while inevitably lessening the control the new regime has over its subjects.

Finally, a new Palestinian leadership that is committed to reform will be our partners in fighting terror, for as long as terror continues no reform will be possible.

We should be under no illusions about the upcoming Palestinian elections. The winner of these elections, like the elections that were regularly held in the Soviet Union, will not have anything to do with democracy. The winner will be chosen well before Palestinians go to the polls.

Free elections can only be held in a free society where people can express their views without fear of being punished, let alone killed. Indeed, free elections are never the beginning of the democratic process but one of its crowning achievements.

Still, whoever emerges from the elections in January should be given an opportunity to win the trust of the free world, including Israel. How can a new Palestinian leadership win our trust? Simple. By trusting its own people.

If the new Palestinian leadership seeks to build a democratic society, then the free world should support and encourage each step along the way. Such a leadership should be provided with international legitimacy, money and, yes, territory. But if the new leadership is not interested in building a democracy, then it should be given no legitimacy, no money, and no concessions.

The formula for peace is simple: Embrace leaders who embrace democratic reform and reject leaders who don't.

In the last 10 years, the state of the peace process was measured largely by whether summits were being held, negotiations were being conducted, envoys were being sent to the region, or concessions were being made. According to these criteria, the peace process was either moving forward or stuck in neutral. But I measured the state of the peace process by the degree of freedom within Palestinian society. By that standard, the peace process was almost always in reverse over the last decade as a fear society descended on the Palestinians.

In the weeks, months, and years ahead, those who want to know the state of the peace process might want to tune out all the chatter and ask themselves one question: Is there more freedom today within Palestinian society than there was last week, last month, or last year? If the answer is yes, then we will truly be moving down the road to peace.

[The writer is minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs, and author of the just-released book The Case for Democracy.]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1101356019897&p=1006953079865

"In Democracy He Trusts" - Article from the "J" - San Francisco

2004-11-18T15:00:00.000+02:00

In democracy he trusts

S.F. native sees opening of Arab society as vital to Israel

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

Natan Sharansky and Aryeh Green bumped into each other at a virtually abandoned Israeli beachside hotel nearly 20 years ago.

The famed Russian dissident loved to swim in the ocean — but he was a weak swimmer. And Green, a San Francisco-born, U.C. Berkeley-educated Israeli, was a former lifeguard.

Fast-forwarding to the present, Sharansky is Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs. And Green is one of his top advisers and a key figure in Sharansky’s Yisrael B’Aliya political party.

Green, who dropped in on his hometown last week for a series of speeches, finds himself straddling a number of competing beliefs. The kippah-wearing dual citizen and former rabbinical student describes himself as a “lifelong lefty.” And yet, his party caters largely to Russian emigres who, to put it extremely mildly, are not.

What’s more, he and his liberal Berkeley friends are having a harder and harder time talking about Israeli-Arab relations.

Green, 41, an affable man with rapid diction that seems to have been ever so slightly influenced by his British-born wife, is fond of Soviet physicist and social activist Andrei Sakharov’s observation that democracies rarely make war upon one another.

Israel is a democracy. Its neighbors are not.

“I bought hook, line and sinker into this as I helped write the [party] platform. The only guarantor of Israeli peace and security is the opening of Arab society,” he said.

“The real solution to this kind of problem is not going to be resolved by handing back this territory or that territory. It can only be resolved by reaching the position where two societies learn to live with each other and accept each other’s right to exist. And that’s only going to happen when Arab society becomes open, free and democratic … with rights for religious and sexual minorities.”

Yet, after four years of terrorist warfare and incitement in the Arab media, Green believes his fellow Israelis are not in the right place, emotionally or otherwise, to accommodate even a willing Arab peace partner. That will have to change.

“Israeli society is not at the point yet where it can look at the Palestinians, the Arabs, and desire friendship and a relationship,” he said.

“Israeli society does get up every morning and reach for that kind of relationship. I don’t want to be misconstrued and say that Israeli society is racist and we all hate Arabs. But liberal, multicultural love for the other should be the basis of relations with our neighbors and that is something we have to work towards.”

So, in many ways, Green sees the departure of Yasser Arafat — “being rid of all the baggage he carries as the terrorist father of violent Palestinian struggle for independence” — as a chance to move toward a more liberal, democratic Palestinian government.

“That is my hope. What do I expect? Chaos,” he said, glumly.

“We’re talking about the possible ‘Lebanization’ of at least Gaza if not all the Palestinian-administered territory. I’m not sure how long it’s going to last, but it’s not going to be a short time.”

And, even without the possible ensuing chaos, conditions in the territories are incredibly depressing for Green. As a soldier during the first intifada, he describes Palestinian-Israeli interactions as “almost a game, a lethal game.”

“There was a resentment of the Israeli presence in the territories. So they’d throw rocks at us. They wanted us out of their lives. I’m not passing judgment. They’d throw the rocks. We’d shoot rubber bullets above their heads. They’d run away. We’d come back,” he said.

“Now, they have guns and rockets and they want to kill us.”

Green blames Arafat and the Arab media for turning the 12-year-old rock-thrower of 1990 into the 26-year-old suicide bomber of today.

It’s a hard time for Green to remain optimistic, but he always has Sakharov’s mantra to give him hope.

“Democracies do not make war with democracies,” he said with a nod. “Democracies do not make war with democracies.”
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j.

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/24110/format/html/displaystory.html

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Copyright J, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California

A note from Katie on Arafat's Death

2004-11-14T23:17:00.000+02:00

From my wife Katie (nee Wagerman, originally from London), written to friends and family. Pretty self-explanatory, thought I'd share it here as well.

Sunday, 14 November 2004

To all my dear family and friends abroad,

I have been following the news reports of Arafat's death on Sky news, CNN, and BBC World and all I can say is I'm appalled to watch the world's Western leaders making statements over what an "icon" and a "symbol" Arafat was. This man practically invented modern terrorism - hijackings, the targeting of women and children, bombings of bus-stops and cafes, suicide bombings, the lot.

He did indeed put Palestinian nationalist aspirations on the map, but only so long as Palestinian statehood could be achieved alongside the total annihilation of Israel. He founded the PLO three years before the 1967 war, (a war started by five Aab nations to wipe Israel off the face of the earth) so please don't talk to me about occupation. Arafat's stated and singleminded objective was to wipe Israel off the map years before 1967, when there was no West Bank, no occupation, and when Israel was nine miles wide.

Do you know what I felt when Arafat died? I felt like it was a victory. Arafat and his minions murdered thousands of people, many of them children and innocent civilians, and by blocking peace and negotiation at every turn, he caused his own people untold suffering. And now it's 2004, and he's dead and we're still here. He failed in his objective. His last big push for fame and intransigence has been the second intifada, an intifada which has been disastrous for the Palestinian people, not to say for the thousands of Israeli civilians he had killed. A lot of Palestinian people are out on the streets today weeping for Arafat - and a lot of them aren't. Suicide bombings. Was that really the most that Arafat had to give to history in the 21st century? Was that really it?

Do you know what is amazing about the Israeli people? Their incredible restraint. Arafat has been a symbol of suffering and hatred for us for so many years. You could forgive Israelis for dancing in the street when he died. But there was nothing. I read all the time about attacks on Moslems, both physical and verbal, that go in the US and the UK. Moslems on the street don't get attacked here. Not even the morning after a bombing. Instead, on the night of Arafat's funeral, which was also the ending of Ramadan, Malcha shopping mall in Jerusalem was packed with Arab Moslem families doing their shopping and eating at all the restaurants. I know because I was there. Nobody looked as if they were mourning. They all looked as if they were there for the same reasons as Aryeh and I were, to catch a movie and grab someting to eat at Pizza Hut.

Here's to better times for all of us. Arafat has gone, but not Arafat's culture, the culture of hatred, incitement, rejectionism, feudalism, and financial corruption that he has left behind him in every Palestinian office and every classroom - that will take much longer to eradicate. It will all depend on the courage of his successors, may God give them strength. Meanwhile, we are left with a billion missing EU and UN dollars that flowed into the coffers of the Palestinian Authority and were never heard of again (I take that back, $100,000 dollars a month did go to paying for Suha Arafat to live in a Paris hotel). While Arafat was in power, not one new school desk, not one new hospital bed, appeared anywhere in the West Bank. Where did that money go? You could ask David and Nava Applebaum, but they won't be able to hear you. They were blown to pieces the night before Nava's wedding at the Hillel Cafe bombing.

So next time you hear about what an icon Arafat was, please keep in mind what he was for me and my countrymen - a champion of unneccessary suffering and death. Fifty six years ago, the UN voted that a Palestinian and Jewish State should exist alongside each other in the middle east; Israel accepted the resolution and the Palestinians rejected it and decided to go to war instead. Where is Israel today and where are the Palestinians today? I pray for the sake of every Palestinian and every Israeli that there are some brand new leaders waiting in the side-lines. We sure as hell need them.

As for me, it goes without saying you won't see me dancing in the street after Arafat's death. But that doesn't mean I don't want to.

Katie

A View from the Inside

2004-09-28T14:29:00.000+02:00

Since I have little time myself to write with any real clarity, I am sharing this lucid description of the Middle East today, which I think is required reading. -- A

HAIM HARARI, a theoretical physicist, is the Chair, Davidson Institute of Science Education, and Former President, from 1988 to 2001, of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

During his years as President of the Institute, it entered numerous new scientific fields and projects, built 47 new buildings, raised one Billion Dollars in philanthropic money, hired more than half of its current tenured Professors and became one of the highest royalty-earning academic organizations in the world.

Throughout all his adult life, he has made major contributions to three different fields: Particle Physics Research on the international scene, Science Education in the Israeli school system and Science Administration and Policy Making.

A View from the Eye of the Storm

Talk delivered by Haim Harari at a meeting of the International Advisory Board of a large multi-national corporation, April 2004

As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological "entertainment" in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part of the world from which I come.

I have never been and I will never be a Government official and I have no privileged information. My perspective is entirely based on what I see, on what I read and on the fact that my family has lived in this region for almost 200 years. You may regard my views as those of the proverbial taxi driver, which you are supposed to question, when you visit a country.

I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some personal thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch upon it only in passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the broader picture of the region and its place in world events. I refer to the entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab, predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also significant non-Moslem minorities.

Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never been the central issue in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is.

The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel.

The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel.

The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel.

Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel.

Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of Israel.

Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel.

The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel.

The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine would have existed for 100 years. The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the U.S. and almost as large as the EU before its expansion. They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe.

These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers. The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World 150 years ago.

Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission. According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates. The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline. And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves.

Do I say all of this with the satisfaction of someone discussing the failings of his enemies? On the contrary, I firmly believe that the world would have been a much better place and my own neighborhood would have been much more pleasant and peaceful, if things were different.

I should also say a word about the millions of decent, honest, good people who are either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew up in Moslem families. They are double victims of an outside world, which now develops Islamophobia and of their own environment, which breaks their heart by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that the vast silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the incitement but they also do not stand up against it. They become accomplices, by omission, and this applies to political leaders, intellectuals, business people and many others. Many of them can certainly tell right from wrong, but are afraid to express their views.

The events of the last few years have amplified four issues, which have always existed, but have never been as rampant as in the present upheaval in the region. These are the four main pillars of the current World Conflict, or perhaps we should already refer to it as "the undeclared World War III".

I have no better name for the present situation. A few more years may pass before everybody acknowledges that it is a World War, but we are already well into it.

The first element is the suicide murder.

Suicide murders are not a new invention but they have been made popular, if I may use this expression, only lately. Even after September 11, it seems that most of the Western World does not yet understand this weapon. It is a very potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact is relatively minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of suicide murders within Israel in the last three years is much smaller than those due to car accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than many earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than all the Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya-based Moslem suicide murderers since that conflict started. Saddam killed every month more people than all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition occupation of Iraq.

So what is all the fuss about suicide killings? It creates headlines.

It is spectacular. It is frightening. It is a very cruel death with bodies dismembered and horrible severe lifelong injuries to many of the wounded. It is always shown on television in great detail. One such murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can destroy the tourism industry of a country for quite a while, as it did in Bali and in Turkey.

But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and no preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western World.

The U.S. and Europe are constantly improving their defense against the last murder, not the next one.

We may arrange for the best airport security in the world. But if you want to murder by suicide, you do not have to board a plane in order to explode yourself and kill many people. Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting to be checked by the airport metal detector? How about the lines to the check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front of every train station in Spain and the terrorists will get the buses. Protect the buses and they will explode in movie theaters, concert halls, supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall and there will always be a line of people to be checked by the guards and this line will be the target, not to speak of killing the guards themselves.

You can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by preventive and defensive measures and by strict border controls but not eliminate it and definitely not win the war in a defensive way. And it is a war!

What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else.

It has nothing to do with true fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown himself. No relative of anyone influential has done it. Wouldn't you expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if this is truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren't they interested in the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women, naive children, retarded people and young incited hotheads. They promise them the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.

Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair. The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there. There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly more despair in Saddam's Iraq then in Paul Bremmer's Iraq, and no oneexploded himself.

A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.

The only way to fight this new "popular" weapon is identical to the only way in which you fight organized crime or pirates on the high seas: the offensive way. Like in the case of organized crime, it is crucial that the forces on the offensive be united and it is crucial to reach the top of the crime pyramid. You cannot eliminate organized crime by arresting the little drug dealer in the street corner. You must go after the head of the "Family".

If part of the public supports it, others tolerate it, many are afraid of it and some try to explain it away by poverty or by a miserable childhood, organized crime will thrive and so will terrorism.

The United States understands this now, after September 11. Russia is beginning to understand it. Turkey understands it well.

I am very much afraid that most of Europe still does not understand it. Unfortunately, it seems that Europe will understand it only after suicide murders will arrive in Europe in a big way. In my humble opinion, this will definitely happen. The Spanish trains and the Istanbul bombings are only the beginning. The unity of the Civilized World in fighting this horror is absolutely indispensable. Until Europe wakes up, this unity will not be achieved.

The second ingredient is words, more precisely lies.

Words can be lethal. They kill people. It is often said that politicians, diplomats and perhaps also lawyers and business people must sometimes lie, as part of their professional life. But the norms of politics and diplomacy are childish, in comparison with the level of incitement and total absolute deliberate fabrications, which have reached new heights in the region we are talking about.

An incredible number of people in the Arab world believe that September 11 never happened, or was an American provocation or, even better, a Jewish plot.

You all remember the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mr. Mouhamad Said al-Sahaf and his press conferences when the US forces were already inside Baghdad. Disinformation at time of war is an accepted tactic. But to stand, day after day, and to make such preposterous statements, known to everybody to be lies, without even being ridiculed in your own milieu, can only happen in this region. Mr. Sahaf eventually became a popular icon as a court jester, but this did not stop some allegedly respectable newspapers from giving him equal time.

It also does not prevent the Western press from giving credence, every day, even now, to similar liars. After all, if you want to be an antisemite, there are subtle ways of doing it. You do not have to claim that the Holocaust never happened and that the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem never existed. But millions of Moslems are told by their leaders that this is the case.

When these same leaders make other statements, the Western media report them as if they could be true.

It is a daily occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and dispatch suicide murderers, condemn the act in English in front of western TV cameras, talking to a world audience, which even partly believes them. It is a daily routine to hear the same leader making opposite statements in Arabic to his people and in English to the rest of the world. Incitement by Arab TV, accompanied by horror pictures of mutilated bodies, has become a powerful weapon of those who lie, distort and want to destroy everything.

Little children are raised on deep hatred and on admiration of so-called martyrs, and the Western World does not notice it because its own TV sets are mostly tuned to soap operas and game shows. I recommend to you, even though most of you do not understand Arabic, to watch Al Jazeera, from time to time. You will not believe your own eyes.

But words also work in other ways, more subtle. A demonstration in Berlin, carrying banners supporting Saddam's regime and featuring three-year old babies dressed as suicide murderers, is defined by the press and by political leaders as a "peace demonstration". You may support or oppose the Iraq war, but to refer to fans of Saddam, Arafat or Bin Laden as peace activists is a bit too much.

A woman walks into an Israeli restaurant in mid-day, eats, observes families with old people and children eating their lunch in the adjacent tables and pays the bill. She then blows herself up, killing 20 people, including many children, with heads and arms rolling around in the restaurant. She is called "martyr" by several Arab leaders and "activist" by the European press. Dignitaries condemn the act but visit her bereaved family and the money flows.

There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called "the military wing", the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now called "the political wing" and the head of the operation is called the "spiritual leader". There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by Western media.

These words are much more dangerous than many people realize. They provide an emotional infrastructure for atrocities. It was Joseph Goebels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. He is now being outperformed by his successors.

The third aspect is money.

Huge amounts of money, which could have solved many social problems in this dysfunctional part of the world, are channeled into three concentric spheres supporting death and murder. In the inner circle are the terrorists themselves. The money funds their travel, explosives, hideouts and permanent search for soft vulnerable targets.

They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers, all of whom make a living, usually a very comfortable living, by serving as terror infrastructure.

Finally, we find the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance. This circle operates mostly through mosques, madrasas and other religious establishments but also through inciting electronic and printed media. It is this circle that makes sure that women remain inferior, that democracy is unthinkable and that exposure to the outside world is minimal. It is also that circle that leads the way in blaming everybody outside the Moslem world, for the miseries of the region.

Figuratively speaking, this outer circle is the guardian, which makes sure that the people look and listen inwards to the inner circle of terror and incitement, rather than to the world outside. Some parts of this same outer circle actually operate as a result of fear from, or blackmail by, the inner circles. The horrifying added factor is the high birth rate. Half of the population of the Arab world is under the age of 20, the most receptive age to incitement, guaranteeing two more generations of blind hatred.

Of the three circles described above, the inner circles are primarily financed by terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also by Iraq and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes. These states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe havens of the wholesale murder vendors. The outer circle is largely financed by Saudi Arabia, but also by donations from certain Moslem communities in theUnited States and Europe and, to a smaller extent, by donations of European Governments to various NGO's and by certain United Nations organizations, whose goals may be noble, but they are infested and exploited by agents of the outer circle.

The Saudi regime, of course, will be the next victim of major terror, when the inner circle will explode into the outer circle. The Saudis are beginning to understand it, but they fight the inner circles, while still financing the infrastructure at the outer circle.

Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably on their loot. You meet their children in the best private schools in Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers. The Jihad "soldiers" join packaged death tours to Iraq and other hotspots, while some of their leaders ski in Switzerland. Mrs. Arafat, who lives in Paris with her daughter, receives tens of thousands dollars per month from the allegedly bankrupt Palestinian Authority while a typical local ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade, reporting to Arafat, receives only a cash payment of a couple of hundred dollars, for performing murders at the retail level.

The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total breaking of all laws.

The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of law, including international law, human rights, free speech and free press, among other liberties. There are naive old-fashioned habits such as respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies and not using children as human shields or human bombs.

Never in history, not even in the Nazi period, was there such total disregard of all of the above as we observe now.

Every student of political science debates how you prevent an anti-democratic force from winning a democratic election and abolishing democracy. Other aspects of a civilized society must also have limitations.

Can a policeman open fire on someone trying to kill him?
Can a government listen to phone conversations of terrorists and drug dealers?
Does free speech protect you when you shout "fire" in a crowded theater?
Should there be death penalty, for deliberate multiple murders?

These are the old-fashioned dilemmas. But now we have an entire new set.

Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage?
Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital?
Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages?
Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their targets?
Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly?
Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children?
Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital?
Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children?

All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same, while the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts butcontinues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as a great dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain or France would have done, in such a situation.

The problem is that the civilized world is still having illusions about the rule of law in a totally lawless environment. It is trying to play ice hockey by sending a ballerina ice-skater into the rink or to knock out a heavyweight boxer by a chess player. In the same way that no country has a law against cannibals eating its prime minister, because such an act is unthinkable, international law does not address killers shooting from hospitals, mosques and ambulances, while being protected by their Government or society.

International law does not know how to handle someone who sends children to throw stones, stands behind them and shoot with immunity and cannot be arrested because he is sheltered by a Government. International law does not know how to deal with a leader of murderers who is royally and comfortably hosted by a country, which pretends to condemn his acts or just claims to be too weak to arrest him. The amazing thing is that all of these crooks demand protection under international law and define all those who attack them as war criminals, with some Western media repeating the allegations.

The good news is that all of this is temporary, because the evolution of international law has always adapted itself to reality. The punishment for suicide murder should be death or arrest before the murder, not during and not after. After every world war, the rules of international law have changed and the same will happen after the present one. But during the twilight zone, a lot of harm can be done.

The picture I described here is not pretty. What can we do about it?

In the short run, only fight and win. In the long run only educate the next generation and open it to the world. The inner circles can and must be destroyed by force. The outer circle cannot be eliminated by force. Here we need financial starvation of the organizing elite, more power to women, more education, counter propaganda, boycott whenever feasible and access to Western media, internet and the international scene. Above all, we need a total absolute unity and determination of the civilized world against all three circles of evil.

Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my alleged role as a taxi driver and return to science. When you have a malignant tumor, you may remove the tumor itself surgically. You may also starve it by preventing new blood from reaching it from other parts of the body, thereby preventing new "supplies" from expanding the tumor. If you want to be sure, it is best to do both.

But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise, you have to realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more years. In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the terrorist regimes, so that no Government in the world will serve as a safe haven for these people. I do not want to comment here on whether the American-led attack on Iraq was justified from the point of view of weapons of mass destruction or any other pre-war argument, but I can look at the post-war map of Western Asia.

Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter being a Syrian colony. Perhaps Sudan should be added to the list. As a result of the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them. Iran is encircled by Afghanistan, by the Gulf States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union.

Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries.It is not surprising that Iran is so active in trying to incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq. I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.

In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is Iran and its regime. It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and to expand in all directions. It has an ideology, which claims supremacy over Western culture.

It is ruthless.

It has proven that it can execute elaborate terrorist acts without leaving too many traces, using Iranian Embassies. It is clearly trying to develop Nuclear Weapons. Its so-called moderates and conservatives play their own virtuoso version of the "good-cop versus bad-cop" game. Iran sponsors Syrian terrorism, it is certainly behind much of the action in Iraq, it is fully funding the Hizbulla and, through it, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it performed acts of terror at least in Europe and in South America and probably also in Uzbekhistan and Saudi Arabia and it truly leads a multi-national terror consortium, which includes, as minor players, Syria, Lebanon and certain Shiite elements in Iraq. Nevertheless, most European countries still trade with Iran, try to appease it and refuse to read the clear signals.

In order to win the war it is also necessary to dry the financial resources of the terror conglomerate. It is pointless to try to understand the subtle differences between the Sunni terror of Al Qaida and Hamas and the Shiite terror of Hizbulla, Sadr and other Iranian inspired enterprises. When it serves their business needs, all of them collaborate beautifully.

It is crucial to stop Saudi and other financial support of the outer circle, which is the fertile breeding ground of terror. It is important to monitor all donations from the Western World to Islamic organizations, to monitor the finances of international relief organizations and to react with forceful economic measures to any small sign of financial aid to any of the three circles of terrorism. It is also important to act decisivelyagainst the campaign of lies and fabrications and to monitor those Western media who collaborate with it out of naivete, financial interests or ignorance.

Above all, never surrender to terror.

No one will ever know whether the recent elections in Spain would have yielded a different result, if not for the train bombings a few days earlier. But it really does not matter. What matters is that the terrorists believe that they caused the result and that they won by driving Spain out of Iraq. The Spanish story will surely end up being extremely costly to other European countries, including France, who is now expelling inciting preachers and forbidding veils and including others who sent troops to Iraq. In the long run, Spain itself will pay even more.

Is the solution a democratic Arab world? If by democracy we mean free elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel, exposure to international media and ideas, laws against racial incitement and against defamation, and avoidance of lawless behavior regarding hospitals, places of worship and children, then yes, democracy is the solution.

If democracy is just free elections, it is likely that the most fanatic regime will be elected, the one whose incitement and fabrications are the most inflammatory. We have seen it already in Algeria and, to a certain extent, in Turkey. It will happen again, if the ground is not prepared very carefully. On the other hand, a certain transition democracy, as in Jordan, may be a better temporary solution, paving the way for the realthing, perhaps in the same way that an immediate sudden democracy did not work in Russia and would not have worked in China.

I have no doubt that the civilized world will prevail. But the longer it takes us to understand the new landscape of this war, the more costly and painful the victory will be. Europe, more than any other region, is the key. Its understandable recoil from wars, following the horrors of World War II, may cost thousands of additional innocent lives, before the tide will turn.

An Inaugural Tirade - The War of Words in the Arab-Israeli Conflict

2004-08-08T16:21:00.000+03:00

Welcome to my Blog about life in Israel, with comments and analysis from a personal perspective.

Having set it up, I realized I have to post something to launch the thing; yet with my daughter's Bat Mitzvah around the corner and pressing work issues pending, there's little time to compose. So for a first posting, I'm sharing a note I sent the other day to a pro-Palestinian friend. I invite you to peek; I've changed the names and affiliations to protect the guilty. :-)

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Dear ----:

In light of and following our meeting and conversations, I’m glad to be on your email list and to read your reflections. A mild reproach, permit me, on this latest one calling for prosecution of Arnon Sofer for "incitement" in an interview where he talked about killing Palestinians:

Sofer (irrespective of whether I agree with his analysis) writes, in the context of a prediction regarding what may or will happen following disengagement from Gaza, that there will be a “terrible war”. He states, therefore, that “if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill….” It’s a prediction, not a call for murder akin to the “Kill Jews wherever you find them” real incitement to murder from Muslim Imams. Moreover, it’s a lament, as is clear from the next sentence – asking how will the boys “be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

There IS some incitement among Israelis, and this must be fought with all legal and political means; but this isn’t an example, and it confuses real incitement to violence and murder with analysis and qualms about the violence.

I would welcome, on other issues, an opportunity to better understand your perspective, as two of your postings have raised my eyebrows recently. Though of course intelligent people can disagree on the best avenues towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians, I must say I was greatly surprised by your choice of language (as we both know, this conflict is as much a battle of words as it is anything else).

You call for a cessation of violence, for instance, from territories Israel withdraws from, in another of your postings. This explicitly condones the murder of Jews and Israelis from territories Israel does not withdraw from, which even the most passionate supporters of Palestinian independence cannot advocate if they condemn terrorism and violence against citizens. (I am not making an argument for or against attacks against Israeli soldiers, another discussion.) There may be other issues you and I would argue vehemently over, but this single one cries out for disavowal, or it seems to me you stand to lose your credibility in the eyes of those who truly seek the welfare of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, rather than the former over the latter.

Since I’m writing, I’ll mention the other issue - your use of the words “cycle of violence” is a second example, from a different posting. I believe we’d agree that both Israel and the Palestinian Authority and community in general share responsibility for the difficulties between us. Yet the international media use the term “cycle of violence” to imply that the current war which began in September 2000 is “just a continuation” of some mutual animosity which has plagued the Arabs and Jews since the nineteenth century. I believe you and I would also agree that this is a warped view of this conflict – not that I or you absolve Israel of all responsibility, not in the least; merely that we are aware of the historical fact that the Arabs have rejected Israel by word and deed, and initiated violence, in a way and to an extent entirely different than anything Israel has done.

Thus “cycle of violence” is a keyword for shared culpability, leading to no need to hold the PA accountable to its own people (or Israel, or the international community backing the PA) for its support/encouragement of – and even carrying out, via Fatah’s Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade and the Tanzin – terror attacks.

Well – at the outset here I wrote that I’d like to hear your perspective; didn’t intend to pound you over the head with mine or to write at such length. But here I’ve given you a few issues to ponder and to respond to :-).

Truly, the “cessation of violence from territories relinquished by Israel” is the central issue; if you’d like to share my thoughts with your list, please feel free, together with your reply.

I look forward to speaking or writing further with you on these and many other issues.

Warmest regards –

Aryeh