Jacob's Voice

Parsing Obama's Speech

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:19:07 -0400

Algemeiner (March 28, 2013)

Anyone inclined to fantasize prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement because President Obama inspired students with his Jerusalem speech might take a deep breath and remember recent history. Especially once popular Israeli journalist and TV commentator Ehud Ya’ari enthusiastically declared that Obama was “a new Clinton.”

Intended as laudatory, the Clinton comparison might better be taken as a cautionary warning. It is now almost twenty years since the famous handshake on the White House lawn with a beaming President Clinton embracing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat. A year later Rabin and Arafat were honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, while Clinton was widely praised as a noble peacemaker.

But within less than a decade the Oslo accord had unraveled. Israelis riding buses and dining in restaurants were blown up in hideous attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers. After Arafat launched the second intifada, more than seven hundred Israeli civilians were murdered in terrorist attacks.

Fast forward to Obama in Jerusalem. Rather than address the Knesset, where he could be heckled by Israeli law-makers duly skeptical of American presidents bearing olive branches, he chose the more welcoming audience of Israeli university students. Not, to be sure, from every university. Students from Israel’s newest academic institution, located in the flourishing settlement of Ariel, were not welcome.

But in a sharp departure from his Cairo speech in 2009, when Obama relied on the Holocaust to validate Israeli claims to their homeland, he seemed to have learned that “next year in Jerusalem” expressed quite ancient yearnings. He cited “faith in God and the Torah,” “centuries of suffering and exile,” “a longing to return home” and “freedom in your own land” as the historic, religious and ideological underpinnings of Jewish statehood.

Then he addressed the generation of young Israelis who yearn for peace now. “Given the demographics west of the Jordan River,” he asserted, “the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.”

That, however, is a false equation. Jews comprise two-thirds of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. There is no ticking demographic time bomb. With or without a Palestinian state Israel will remain both Jewish and democratic. But given the dangers currently lurking on its borders with Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Egypt, the last thing it needs is a West Bank Palestinian state likely to be instantly gobbled up by Hamas or Hezbollah.

Obama implored Israelis to recognize “the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice.” Citing “the foreign army” that occupies “Palestinian” land (actually the Jewish biblical homeland); “settler violence” (invariably in response to Palestinian attacks); and the unfairness that “a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own” (only because her leaders, as Abba Eban memorably observed, have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace), he affirmed that “Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.”

If that phrase sounds familiar, it should. In The Jewish State (1896), Theodor Herzl wrote: “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil.” Obama parroted the Palestinian inclination to frame their national aspirations in Zionist language.

Perhaps because Israelis (for good reason) expected little from Obama, they seemed enraptured by his speech. The headline in Israel’s largest daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, proclaimed that “Israel is in Love.” An Israeli engineering student was delighted that “President Obama talked to me” and to students who merely want “to live our lives in peace and to prosper.” The president, a law student claimed, had infused young Israelis “with spirit and hope.” Another appreciative listener noted that his “inspiring idealistic vision” was “bravely related to the immorality of the continuing Israeli occupation.” A business student understood that the president “wanted us, the younger generation, to pressure our government in order to make peace with the Palestinians.”

“Political leaders,” Obama observed, “will never take risks if the people do not push them.” Netanyahu can be pushed. Elected prime minister in 1996 as a sharp critic of the Oslo accords, he capitulated to American pressure to expand their scope. He agreed to the confinement of Jews living in the ancient biblical city of Hebron to a tiny ghetto, with the power of the Israeli army to protect them severely limited. His abject apology (not coincidentally, just before Obama left Israel) to Turkish President Erdogen for the Mavi Marmara episode, when Israeli naval commandos were attacked at sea while enforcing the Gaza blockade, reveals his pliability under pressure.

Obama may have finally recognized the ancient and enduring attachment of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland. But his hostility to the Jews who live there was palpable. Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu’s new right-wing Cabinet minister, responded pointedly: “There is no occupation in one’s own land.” Settlement, after all, has always inspired Zionist dreams and defined Israeli reality.

Bon Voyage: President Obama in Israel

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Algemeiner (March 14, 2013)

In anticipation of President Obama’s forthcoming visit to Israel The New York Times published three “Op-Ed” columns in a single day (March 13) assessing the dim prospects for Middle East peace – and, to be sure – holding Israel responsible. Even if “Op-Ed” refers only to location (adjacent to the editorial page) rather than to policy (deviating from the editorial position), this was an unusual, but hardly random, concentration of journalistic firepower.

With his characteristic airy detachment, columnist Thomas Friedman seemed to applaud Obama’s belated realization that given current realities on the ground, “benign neglect” toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is preferable to active intervention. After all, as Friedman correctly notes, “the most destabilizing conflict in the region is the civil war between Shiites and Sunnis,” not the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Furthermore, the obstacles to an Israeli-Palestinian peace are, at least at the moment, insurmountable. Why? Because Israeli settlers and Hamas rockets make it so. Note the moral equivalence.

Nonetheless, Friedman prepared questions for the President to ask Israeli officials – but not Palestinians in Ramallah. How can “your relentless settlement drive” fail to undermine Israel as “a Jewish democracy” and further “delegitimize” Israel worldwide? Shouldn’t Israel “be constantly testing and testing whether there is a Palestinian partner for a secure peace” – as though Israel had not repeatedly done that ever since the Oslo Accords were drafted. Finally (“as a friend”), Friedman wanted to know whether Israel even has a long-term strategy for peace.

Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit pointedly declared the “Old Peace” of Oslo to be dead. Waves of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, Yasir Arafat’s refusal to accept generous Israeli peace terms at the Camp David summit in 2000, and destruction during the Arab Spring of the “corrupt yet stable tyrannies” (especially Egypt) that had supported peace with Israel.

But Shavit is optimistic about the prospects for a “New Peace.” The Arab awakening, in conjunction with the “social justice protest movement” that emerged in Israel in 2011, promises “a pragmatic, gradual process” leading to peace based on mutual respect. The burden, to be sure, is on Israel, which must implement a “real” settlement freeze. Settlers, he recently wrote in Haaretz, “occupy Israel.”

Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi wants President Obama to guide a peace process that any Palestinian would applaud: an end to Israel’s “intransigence,“ “illegal” settlements, “apartheid-style wall,” and “ghettoization” of Palestinians, with a government “hellbent on territorial expansion.” The Israeli “occupation” must end, and settlements must be removed. What Palestinians must do is not mentioned.

From quite different perspectives Friedman, Shavit and Khalidi reach the shared conclusion that surely pleases Times editors: the absence of peace is entirely Israel’s fault. And, no surprise, Jewish settlers are primarily responsible. Not a word about the Palestinian terrorism that led to the “apartheid-style wall” separating Israel from the West Bank. Nor about Israel’s 10-month settlement freeze two years ago that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pointedly ignored. Nor about the vast Hezbollah accumulation of rockets in south Lebanon that probably exceeds what Hamas has stored in Gaza. Nor about the absurd claim, echoed by Khalidi, that “5 million” Palestinians live “in a state of subjugation or exile” for which Israel implicitly bears responsibility.

It is highly unlikely that the Times would publish three op-eds in a decade, no less in a single day, that even mention, no less defend, the right of “close settlement” west of the Jordan River enjoyed by Jews ever since the League of Nations approved the Mandate for Palestine nearly a century ago. That right has never been repealed. Or that UN Resolution 242 following the Six-Day War called upon Israel to withdraw its military forces from “territories,” not from “the” territories or “all” the territories that it had gained from Arab aggression. Or, even in passing, that there already is a state (named Jordan), with a Palestinian population majority, in Palestine as originally defined by the League of Nations. Or that settlement in the Land of Israel is what Zionism has always meant. The Times might even permit recognition that the largest Jewish settlement in the Middle East, endlessly calumnied, is the State of Israel.

Wailing at the Western Wall

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 09:48:07 -0500

For nearly twenty-five years an organization known as Women of the Wall has struggled, in the words of its mission statement, “to achieve the social and legal recognition of our right, as women, to wear prayer shawls, pray, and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall.”

Their challenge to guidelines set by the Ministry of Religious Authority, the government agency charged with supervision of Jewish holy sites, has periodically roiled Israeli society. A decade ago the Supreme Court upheld the right claimed by Women of the Wall to pray and read from Torah in the women’s section of the Western Wall plaza.

Within a year, however, unrelenting ultra-Orthodox opposition prompted the Court to reconsider. In a 5-4 decision it upheld the government prohibition on women wearing tallitot or tefillin, or reading Torah, in the public (but gender divided) plaza adjacent to the Wall. The Court required the government to provide a suitable alternative site where such religious observance, and mixed gender prayer, would be permitted. That site, around the corner of the Western Wall, was an ancient gateway to the Temple Mount known since the mid-19^th century as Robinson’s Arch.

A fragile status quo emerged. For Rosh Hodesh services at the beginning of the new month, Women of the Wall convene for public prayer in the Western Wall plaza. But for the Torah service they are required to move to Robinson’s Arch, where they can wear tallitot and tefillin and pray with men. In recent years, under the leadership of Anat Hoffman, Women of the Wall have challenged this arrangement. Members have been arrested and fined for wearing a tallit under their coat, holding a Torah, singing out loud, and “disturbing public order.”

Ms. Hoffman, raised in Israel as a self-described “totally secular Jew,” discovered Judaism as a student at UCLA where she attended the Westwood Free Minyan, known for its liberalism and feminism. She returned to Israel determined to become ”a religious-pluralism activist.” After serving on the City Council of Jerusalem she focused her activism on the Orthodox monopoly on religion in the Israeli public sphere. The Western Wall, she declared, “is way too important to be left to the Israelis.” As Hoffman conceded: “This did not evolve here in Israel, this is an import from abroad.”

In October Hoffman was arrested at the Wall for audibly reciting the Shema prayer while wearing a tallit. In an interview she disclosed that police “checked me naked, completely, without my underwear… . They put me in a cell without a bed, with three other prisoners including a prostitute and a car thief… . I laid on the floor covered with my tallit.” News of her arrest and mistreatment provoked furious condemnation by Jewish liberals, especially women, who pounced on the opportunity to denounce religious Orthodoxy and gender discrimination – and castigate Israel - in one fell swoop.

Enter The New York Times, whose Jewish problem is at least as old as its Sulzberger family ownership and whose discomfort with Israel dates virtually from the birth of the Jewish state. During the last week in December the Times twice devoted its lead “International” story to women’s prayer at the Western Wall. Both articles were written by its new Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, whose identification with Women of the Wall was palpable.

She described a “tearful” Bonna Devora Haberman, an immigrant from Canada and one of the organization’s founders, who was enraged when a police officer tried to prevent her from carrying a tallit in her knapsack on her way to pray at the Wall. (A photo of her encounter by the veteran Times photographer in Israel, doubtlessly arranged in advance, accompanied the story.) A California student “wept” when asked to relinquish the tallit woven by her mother for her bat mitzvah.

In both Rudoren articles diaspora “outrage” over religious restrictions on women was linked to Israeli settlement policy (which the Times relentlessly opposes) as a primary source of increasing American Jewish disaffection with the Jewish state. But even Zionism, to say nothing of religious Orthodoxy and Jewish settlements, has long been a problem for liberal American Jews.

A century ago, upon becoming the leader of the American Zionist movement, Louis D. Brandeis (confessing “I am very ignorant of things Jewish”) insisted upon the compatibility of Zionism with American liberalism. Anything less would provoke dreaded allegations of divided loyalty. Ever since, American Jews have demanded that Zionism express American liberal values with a Hebrew accent.

Gender equality is, of course, a worthy goal. So, too, is religious freedom, which surely includes the freedom of worship even for ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. Religion and gender can be a volatile mix, not only in Judaism (as any Muslim could testify). Jewish women who encounter problems worshipping as they wish at the Western Wall might try praying in the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque. Now there would be a story worthy of exaggerated press coverage.

Irony: the Women of the Wall web page features a brief video of several women entering the nearby police station after their recent refusal to comply with the rules for prayer. They ignored the mezuzah on the doorframe. The only woman who touched it reverently was the policewoman.

Middle Eastern Tunnel Vision

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 14:26:00 -0500

The Algemeiner(December 7, 2012)

Imagine: until the Holland Tunnel was completed in 1927 New York and New Jersey had not been contiguous (defined in Webster’s as “have contact with”). Who knew?

The current Middle Eastern equivalent, generating worldwide outrage, is the projected loss of “contiguity” between the northern and southern West Bank if Israel proceeds with its recently disclosed plan to develop the hilltop area known as E1, between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim to the east. If implemented, furious critics allege, it would bisect the West Bank and doom any prospect of Palestinian statehood.

The Israeli plan has been endlessly excoriated since its announcement following the recent General Assembly vote to admit “Palestine” as a “non-member observer state”. The New York Times, in particular, has been relentless.In a front-page article (December 1), Jodi Rudoren proclaimed the plan a “surprise” that came as a “shock,” revealing Israel’s intention to wage “diplomatic war” over the future of the West Bank.

That was only the beginning. In a subsequent editorial (December 4) the Times lacerated Prime Minister Netanyahu (but not Palestinian Authority President Abbas) for a plan that could “doom the chances for a two-state solution” (which the Palestinians have rejected ever since the UN partition proposal of 1947). The E1 plan was “particularly disturbing” because it “would split the northern and southern parts of the West Bank.” Contiguity would be forever shattered.

The barrage increased a day later. Thomas Friedman ominously warned that “a huge bloc of settlements in the heart of the West Bank” (3000 housing units had been mentioned) would “sever any possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.” Even Maureen Dowd, not known for her Middle East expertise, inserted in her column about Hilary Clinton a denunciation of Israel for its “brazen and counterproductive action.”

But the “contiguity” complaint is a sham, no matter how frequently it is reiterated. Haven’t critics heard of tunnels? Two centuries ago the Swiss built a 10-mile-long railroad tunnel through the Alps. Israel has a network of highway tunnels in the mountainous Haifa area. Hamas in Gaza is renowned for its tunnel links to Sinai. One need not be a rocket scientist (pun intended) to anticipate that development of E1 will include a tunnel to connect the northern and southern West Bank – also known as Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, where 350,000 Israelis now live.

Critics also need a history lesson. The E1 area, comprising 4.6 square miles of Israeli state-owned land, belongs to Maale Adumim. E1 land is located inside Area C where, under the Oslo II Accords, Israel retains zoning and planning powers. Every prime minister since Yitzhak Rabin has supported its development. If there is any threat to contiguity, wrote Nadav Shagrai in Haaretz (2009), it comes from continuing illegal construction on E1 land by both Palestinians and Bedouin.

The contiguity indictment complements the endlessly reiterated, but also false, allegation that Israeli settlements not only doom Palestinian statehood but also violate international law. Israel has legal claims dating back to 1922, when the League of Nations guaranteed to Jews the right of “close settlement” west of the Jordan River. This right was preserved under Article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

Jewish settlement since Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War does not violate international law because no foreign entity previously held legal sovereignty over the West Bank. Nor did Israel coercively “transfer” anyone to that territory, prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). Settlers have merely followed the precedent set by generations of Zionist pioneers.

The looming crisis is not E1 but Israel’s increasingly precarious security situation. To be sure, Operation “Defensive Pillar” effectively shut down, at least for the moment, the decade-long rain of Hamas rockets. But Hamas, whose charter calls for the obliteration of Israel, has already begun to rebuild the tunnels that facilitate the flow of Iranian weapons into Gaza.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah is generously supplied with even more destructive Iranian missiles. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has vowed “open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.” Given Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to eliminate Israel “from the pages of history,” the menace to Israel from the east, especially given recent signs of political instability in Jordan, should not be taken lightly.

These geopolitical dangers are downplayed, if not ignored, by Israel’s critics. Currently obsessed by a tiny tract of land east of Jerusalem, years away from development, which can be traversed through a tunnel or bypassed by a highway, they incessantly berate and delegitimize Israel for settlements that under international law it has every right to build.

As one Israeli succinctly described the current squabble: “We will build and the world will scream.” That noise is the predictable side effect of tunnel vision.

Israel Returns Fire

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:06:05 -0500

American Thinker(December 3, 2012)

One day after the United Nations General Assembly recognized “Palestine” as a “nonmember observer state” – a status that it shares only with the Vatican - an actual state responded. The Netanyahu government quickly fired a shot across the bow of the Palestinian Authority for its decision to court the United Nations rather than negotiate with Israel, announcing that it is authorizing the construction of 3000 housing units in East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Even more brazenly, it intends to proceed with plans for zoning and development in a barren area known as E-1, between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim to the east, on the road to Jericho.

Like Captain Renault in “Casablanca,” liberal pundits were “shocked, shocked” to realize that the words of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the General Assembly and the votes of its members could so quickly be trumped by the Israeli government. According to The New York Times (in page 1 coverage that read like an editorial), Israel’s response was a “surprise” that came as a “shock.” It indicated the determination of the Jewish state to wage “diplomatic war” over the future of 4.6 square miles of barren landscape with nothing on it but a police station and some Bedouin shepherds.

There is no denying the strategic importance of E-1. Its development would create a seamless corridor between Israel’s capital and Ma’ale Adumim, a hilltop community in the Judean desert inhabited by nearly 30,000 Israelis. That would effectively divide the West Bank, with Ramallah and the north linked to Bethlehem and the south only by a highway. Two days after the UN decision, the Israeli Cabinet unanimously rejected it: “The Jewish People have a natural, historical and legal right to its homeland with its eternal capital Jerusalem,” while Israel “has rights and claims to areas that are under dispute in the Land of Israel.”

Indeed it does. Millennia of Jewish history in the ancient homeland prompted the League of Nations, ninety years ago, to assure Jews the right of “close settlement” in the land west of the Jordan River. That right has never been rescinded. It could have been overridden in 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition what remained of Palestine after the East Bank had become Jordan. But the Arab nations refused to permit a Jewish (or, indeed, Palestinian) state, however tiny, to exist in their midst.

Perhaps the time has finally come for Israel to claim in full its settlement rights in Judea and Samaria under international law. Ample justification has been provided by legal experts Eugene V. Rostow (who helped to draft Security Council Resolution 242 after the Six-Day War), Stephen Schwebel (for nineteen years a judge on the International Court of Justice), and scholars Julius Stone and Howard Grief, among others.

To be sure their arguments are not likely to persuade Israel’s liberal critics. Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg recently accused Israel of “colonizing” the West Bank “in destructive, and self-destructive, ways.” The appropriate Palestinian remedy, he suggested, was not UN recognition but a demand for the right of occupied Palestinians to vote in Israeli elections. That, presumably, would force Israel to recognize Palestinian statehood in the West Bank. But Palestinian “shortsightedness,” he conceded, would once again be likely to yield to Israeli “intransigence.”

CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria, praising Goldberg’s absurd “one-state” proposal, urged Palestinians to develop “a strategy that is geared more directly at persuading, convincing, cajoling – or perhaps even pushing” Israel to make the necessary concessions for Palestinian statehood. That should not be too difficult. As Prime Minister Netanyahu declared in his opening remarks to the Cabinet meeting: “There will be no Palestinian State until Israel is recognized as a Jewish State, alongside a resolution to end the conflict.”

Israel’s E-1 development proposal is a necessary reminder to Palestinians, and to the international agencies, media and academic experts, and “human rights” organizations that support their cause and defame Israel at every opportunity. It properly asserts, on a tiny geographical scale, the legitimate claims of the State of Israel – grounded in Jewish history, international law, and Zionist settlement, - to the Land of Israel. It also is a reminder that Palestinian statelessness is a direct consequence of sixty-five years of Palestinian obduracy.

The E-1 plan, which the United States has blocked for nearly two decades, may turn out to be little more than an Israeli warning to Abbas for attempting another end-run around direct negotiations. But continued Palestinian intransigence, ratified by the UN, could prompt Israel to develop the crucial space between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. That would facilitate the geographical unity of biblical Judea and Samaria with the Jewish state. Settling the land of Israel, after all, is what has defined Zionism for more than a century.

Palestinian Sound and Fury

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 09:33:00 -0500

The Algemeiner(November 29, 2012)

Today, November 29^th, marked the 65^th anniversary of UN Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab (not “Palestinian”) states. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, desperately trying to reclaim the limelight from Hamas after its fanciful claim of a Gaza “victory,” was expected to request his consolation prize from the General Assembly, welcoming the Palestinians as a non-member observer state, with the Vatican as its solitary partner.

But a General Assembly vote would be a hollow gesture. While it might be considered a promotion from the mere observer status the Palestinians have held since 1974, it is a nebulous title nowhere mentioned in the UN Charter. Any attempt to revive the authority of UN Resolution 181, wrote international law expert Julius Stone more than three decades ago, is “an undertaking even more miraculous than would be the revival of the dead.” But Abbas needed to say more to bolster the deflated image of the Palestinian Authority.

As Arab delegates enthusiastically cheered Abbas, they might have recalled their own role in dooming Palestinian statehood. In 1947 Zionists exulted over Resolution 181, the fulfillment of the 2000-year-old dream of the Jewish people to return to their ancient homeland and rebuild their shattered nation, even within truncated, porous, and precarious borders.

But Arab states showed no regard for a “Palestinian” people deserving a state of their own. They launched an invasion to eradicate the fledgling Jewish state and carve up the territory to suit their own wishes. King Abdullah of Jordan seized land from Palestine that became known as the “West Bank” while Egypt gobbled up Gaza.

Nineteen years later, confronting another looming attack from Arab states, Israel won a stunning victory in six days. Jerusalem and the biblical homeland were once again theirs. By now, 350,000 Israelis live in Judea and Samaria, as they have every right to do under international law that eighty years ago, under the auspices of the League of Nations, assured Jews the right of “close settlement” west of the Jordan River.

Ever since, Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” (as Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban memorably quipped). Rejecting any possibility for their own statehood that required recognition of the State of Israel, they have preferred to lament the Naqba, the 1948 tragedy of their defeat and dispersion, rather than become state-builders.

Mahmoud Abbas’s General Assembly speech was mostly familiar boilerplate. Recognition of Palestine would represent “a victory for truth, freedom, justice, law, and international legitimacy.” All blame rests upon Israel, for its “colonial military occupation of the land of the Palestinian people” and its “brutality and racial discrimination.” The only unexpected insertion was his announcement that he had submitted an application for the admission of Palestine as a “full member.” But that requires unanimous Security Council approval, which the United States is unlikely to support.

The young men in Ramallah who gleefully display signs proclaiming “The State of Palestine” are likely to discover that little has changed. Words in New York are not facts on the ground until the Palestinian Authority negotiates an agreement with Israel that recognizes the existence and borders of the Jewish state. The lurking presence of Hamas, still pledged to the annihilation of Israel, will not be easily ignored. Perhaps Abbas should make peace with Hamas before he negotiates with Israel.

If Palestinians settle for non-member observer state status “Palestine” can pursue legal action against Israel in the International Criminal Court. But Israel, like the United States a decade ago, recognized the ideological and political bias of the ICC and withdrew from its jurisdiction.

The lingering question is whether the Palestinians can heal their own internal divisions and finally, after 65 years, accept the reality of Israel. Can they finally relinquish their identity theft from Jewish history and develop an independent Palestinian identity?

Ever since 1948 Palestinians have constructed their identity on the foundation of Jewish history, archeology, texts, holy sites and, of course, land. Ironically, even as Israel was targeted for incessant Palestinian terrorist attacks Zionist state building inspired Palestinian emulation. November 29^th hardly was a random choice by the Palestinian Authority. It is, after all, the day when Israelis celebrate international recognition of their right to establish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel – not in the land of Palestine.

Ehud Barak's Tangled Legacy

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:46:00 -0500

The Algemeiner (November 28, 2012)

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak - heroic military commander, failed politician, and bane of Jewish settlers – has announced his intention to resign from public office after the January election. Having severed his roots in the Labor Party, and with his tiny Independence Party unlikely to win enough votes to return him to the Knesset, Barak chose to call it a career – maybe.

Renowned as Israel’s most decorated soldier, Barak achieved military distinction as head of the Special Forces unit Sayeret Matkal that conducted commando attacks against terrorists during the 1970s. In its most stunningly successful raid, leaders of the PLO and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were tracked down and killed in Beirut in retaliation for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. (The film “Munich” captured the heroic audacity of the mission.)

Barak’s subsequent service as military chief of staff proved to be his launching pad to politics in 1995, when he became Prime Minister Rabin’s Minister of Internal Affairs. Three months later, after Rabin’s assassination, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs, then leader of the Labor Party and, in 1999, he defeated incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu to become Prime Minister.

But Barak, like Rabin before him and his successor Ariel Sharon, demonstrated that military victories do not guarantee political success. Indeed, his brief term in office – the shortest of any Israeli prime minister – was a dismal failure. Ending Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, he opened the way for Hezbollah to become entrenched on its northern border, where it remains. Reiterating the standard left-wing trope that if Israel retained the territories that it won in the Six-Day War it would become either a bi-national or apartheid state, Barak chased peace negotiations with Yasir Arafat’s PLO.

Imagining that Palestinians were prepared for “a durable and lasting peace” with Israel, Barak participated in the Camp David summit fiasco, where Arafat rejected his astonishing offer to divide Jerusalem and relinquish 92% of biblical Judea and Samaria. One year later, after the eruption of the Second Intifada, Barak was resoundingly defeated by Ariel Sharon.

As Defense Minister (since 2007), Barak approved the destruction of Syria’s nuclear reactor, presided over Operation Cast Lead, and authorized the recent assassination of Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari. But his evident animosity to settlers repeatedly turned Jews against Jews. He supported Netanyahu’s capitulation to President Obama with a ten-month settlement freeze, even urging a two-month extension to further appease the President. Under Israeli law the Defense Minister must sign permits for Jews to purchase property in Judea and Samaria. In an interview earlier this year he boasted: “Not a single new settlement has been built in the last three years since this government is in power.”

Barak’s unrelenting hostility to settlers, and his determination to override their legal rights of property ownership, was most evident in Hebron. He repeatedly stymied efforts to rebuild the ancient Jewish community that was brutally destroyed during the Arab pogrom of 1929. As Prime Minister he had refused to issue building permits that his predecessor had authorized. As Defense Minister, he twice mobilized the army and police to evict residents from apartments on land purchased by a Jew in 1807. Referring to Hebron Jews as “cancerous tumors,” he pledged to “uproot this evil from our midst.”

In 2008, months after Jewish families moved into a building purchased from a willing Palestinian seller, the Defense Minister fulfilled his promise. Despite a video of the transaction that showed the seller receiving and counting his money, a cassette recording of his confirmation of the sale to a friend, and affirmation of the legality of the purchase by police investigators, Barak remained adamant.

Convinced that the presence of Jews in Hebron represented “attempts by small groups of radicals to undermine the authority of the state,” he ordered hundreds of soldiers and border police to storm the building and evict its residents. Two months ago a Jerusalem court finally upheld the legality of the purchase and ordered the government to return the property to its rightful Jewish owners.

At the moment Ehud Barak’s illustrious career in military and public life seems to be nearing its end. But come January, once the election results are in, a call from Prime Minister Netanyahu to return to the Defense Ministry just might be irresistible. Israeli politics has more encores than a rock concert.

Who Won?

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:41:08 -0500

New York Sun(November 27, 2012)

Who won the Gaza war? According to the prevailing media narrative, besieged innocents in Gaza bravely withstood the withering weeklong Israeli rocket barrage until Egyptian President Morsi mediated a cease-fire. End of story, except for the largely unnoticed detail that under Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood before his recent ascent to power, Egypt has been the major conduit for Iranian weapons into Gaza.

For more than a decade southern Israel has been under incessant attack. In Sderot, 24,000 Israelis, predominantly immigrant families from Morocco and the Soviet Union, have lived in constant danger and unrelenting fear. Air-raid sirens punctuated their lives, providing less than half a minute to seek safety in bomb shelters. It is little wonder that nearly three-quarters of the population suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Despite Operation Cast Lead, launched by Israel four years ago to halt the steady rain of missiles and rockets from Gaza, Hamas was undeterred. This year alone, more than 7000 rockets fell on southern Israel, until Prime Minister Netanyahu finally decided to respond. Hamas weapon sites, as always embedded in civilian neighborhoods, were bombed. But tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers, positioned at the border, were not ordered to attack even as rockets fell on Ashdod, Ashkelon, Beer Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Israel, according to Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor, had applied force “in a very moderate and measured way.” That offered little solace to Israeli civilians, who have every reason to expect, based upon past experience, that the current lull is only temporary. By a 49-31% margin, according to a Ma’ariv poll, Israelis preferred to continue the military operation rather than accept a cease-fire. By not fighting to win, Israel enabled Hamas to lead Gazans in celebration of their “great victory for the people of Palestine.”

Journalists who for years had paid no attention to besieged Israelis were mesmerized by the fortitude of Gazans. Three CNN reporters in Gaza, led by Anderson Cooper, provided constant updates on the suffering of Gazans but little was said about the role of Hamas in provoking the conflict. Christiane Amanpour conducted a fawning interview with Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniya, enabling him to stipulate “peace terms” that would return Israel to its vulnerable pre-1967 borders. In Israel there was only Wolf Blitzer, who underplayed rather than underscored the human toll from incessant Hamas attacks.

Jodi Rudoren, the new Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, was mesmerized by the “Pride and Sacrifice” of Gazans in celebrating the disaster provoked by their leaders. No absurd claim – not even “for the first time, the Israelis are hiding, not us” - eluded her gullibility. After the fighting ended she remained ensconced in Gaza and provided a platform for a wealthy businessman and cactus grower who could not explain to his puzzled children “why Israel attacks us.” Neither, it seemed, could Rudoren.

Netanayhu’s refusal to launch a ground attack contributed significantly to the plausibility of Hamas’s “victory” preening. Hamas played its cards well, gaining undisputable supremacy over the Palestinian Authority with its militancy, holding out long enough to generate pressure for Israel to desist before attaining its objectives, and securing Egypt and Turkey as its patrons.

After the cease-fire Israel eased restrictions on Gaza fishermen and farmers, while Hamas continued to receive military supplies from Iran. Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar explained: “We have a right to take money and weapons from Iran. They give to us for the sake of God.”

Netanyahu’s strategy of buying time has its benefits – and perils – for Israel. It can be argued, as critics on the left reflexively proclaim, that Israel must either be prepared to negotiate peace with Hamas or endure renewed missile attacks. But since Hamas has yet to relinquish its expressed determination to destroy Israel, and shows no sign of doing so, that remains a beguiling fantasy. Any hope that Egypt might continue to be a peace broker may have been dashed on the reality of renewed street protest in Cairo over President Morsi’s declared intention to undermine judicial authority.

Ever since 1948 Israel’s security has depended upon its ability to win wars, not please its peace advocates or appease its enemies. Now as then, Israel is surrounded by Muslims who remain determined to destroy the Jewish state within any boundaries. For Israelis to have faith in their government, it must be prepared to protect them, even if that requires deployment of the Israel Defense Forces. That may be the enduring lesson of Operation Pillar of Defense if – as seems likely - the pillar once again crumbles.

Land for Peace - or War?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:55:46 -0500

American Thinker (November 20, 2012)

The final casualty in the current Gaza war may be the endlessly repeated mantra: “Land for Peace.” For forty-five years, ever since its stunning victory in the Six-Day War, Israel has confronted insistent demands to return the conquered Sinai to Egypt, the Golan Heights to Syria, and relinquish its own biblical homeland in Judea and Samaria for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979 marked the first step toward implementing that beguiling vision. Then, in 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew the Israeli civilian and military presence from Gaza, the 25-mile long strip that runs along the Mediterranean coast between Egypt (which occupied it between 1949 and 1967) and Israel.

Eight thousand Israelis were removed from their homes, which – along with their synagogues – were dismantled or demolished. Only the innovative and productive greenhouses were left behind to benefit the local Arab residents, who immediately destroyed them. Two years later Hamas became the ruling authority in Gaza and the rest, we might say, is tragedy.

Recent events in Gaza demonstrate the folly of pursuing the mirage of “land for peace,” which Hamas has now effectively demolished. After a year in which 700 missiles terrorized civilians in nearby Negev communities, Israel finally had enough. With unprovoked rocket attacks increasing, it launched Operation “Pillar of Defense,” conducting a precision air strike that killed Ahmed Al-Jaabari, commander of the Hamas military, and targeted its underground launching sites. Those who had celebrated the American assassination of Osama bin-Laden could hardly complain.

Within days, more Hamas missiles and rockets – more than 1000 by Monday - had landed in and around Beer Sheva and Ashkelon and, for the first time, the environs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Israel’s Iron Dome interceptions reduced civilian casualties, but Israeli lives remained precarious. It became evident that Hamas enjoyed an abundant supply network for sophisticated weapons and technology that originated in Iran and then made their way through Sudan and Egypt, across the Sinai and through tunnels to Gaza, where Hamas, guided by Iranian experts, prepared them for launching.

As Israeli soldiers readied for a military invasion to destroy Gaza weapons caches, predictable outrage arose from the usual sources. Even as Hamas rockets were falling, tolerance for Israel’s justified response to unprovoked attacks on its civilians began to fray. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called upon Israel – not Hamas – to exercise “maximum restraint.”

All too predictably, Israel – which failed dismally to make its case to world opinion for Operation Cast Lead four years ago – now was castigated for making it too effectively. Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg decried the “Hamasization of Israel’s public relations campaign.” It included the viral Facebook graphic “What Would You Do?” showing the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower under missile attack. While Hamas launched rockets into Israel, Israel was lacerated for its “tacky” bombardment of social media and reliance upon Twitter hashtags (#Pillar of Defense) to challenge its critics.

Not surprisingly, The New York Times editorialized (November 15) its august displeasure with the Israeli response. To be sure, it conceded, “no country should have to endure the rocket attacks that Israel has endured from militants in Gaza.” But then it chastized Israel for responding in ways that could not advance its “long-term interests,” provoked “new waves of condemnation” from Arab states, and diverted attention from the far more serious danger of Iranian nuclear weapons (which the Times had previously criticized Israel for threatening to destroy). Enumerating what Israel “could have” done to please Times editors, it cited the necessity of “serious negotiations” with the Palestinian Authority (which has rejected any negotiations for more than a year) for “a durable peace agreement.” That, of course, would require the relinquishment of even more land for (less) “peace.”

Left-wing American and Israeli groups such as J-Street and Americans for Peace Now relentlessly proclaim the necessity of a “two-state solution,” while endlessly castigating Jewish settlers as “obstacles to peace.” But with a Palestinian/Hamas state on Israel’s eastern and western borders, Hezbollah to the north in Lebanon, and Iran looming ever more menacingly to the east just beyond an increasingly unstable Jordan, Israel’s security would be in dire jeopardy.

Given these grim realities, now on full display in Gaza, “Land for Peace” is nothing but a recipe for the annihilation of Israel.

Netanyahu's Settlement Jungle

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 19:54:05 -0500

American Thinker(October 28, 2012)

The issue of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, continues to roil Israeli politics. According to worldwide conventional wisdom, settlements built since the Six-Day War on land that previously had been known as Jordan’s West Bank violate fundamental principles of international law.

But conventional wisdom, according to the recent report of an Israeli commission chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, is wrong. “According to international law,” the report concluded, Israelis enjoy “the legal right to settle in Judea and Samaria and the establishment of settlements cannot in and of itself be considered illegal.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s announced intention to seek ministerial approval for the Levy Report instantly stirred the wrath of those on the political left, who dismissed it as “a transparent elections scheme” and accused the government of planning “an infestation of illegal settlements to annex territories.” Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that government adoption would cause “diplomatic damage to Israel and deepen its isolation in the world.” (Barak’s palpable hostility to settlers was demonstrated when he ordered the forcible eviction of Jews from property they legally owned in Hebron, an order recently overturned in court.) But Alan Baker, one of the authors of the Levy Report and former legal adviser for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, dismissed Barak’s reasoning as “nonsense.”

The Obama administration, ever eager to soothe Muslim sensibilities, also was not pleased. A State Department spokesman declared that the United States rejects “the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.” UN Ambassador Susan Rice reiterated that the United States would not recognize Israel’s settlement claims.

Yet the Levy Commission had merely reiterated a ninety-year-old principle of international law. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, adopted in 1922, recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and guaranteed their right of “close settlement.” Even after British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill partitioned Palestine to provide Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with his own East Bank kingdom, Jews retained the internationally guaranteed legal right of “close settlement” west of the Jordan River. That right has never been rescinded.

Settlement critics invariably cite Article 49 of the Geneva Convention (1949), prohibiting the “forcible transfers” by an Occupying Power of its civilian population to occupied territory “for political and racial reasons.” Article 49 was inspired by the brutal population transfers conducted by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. Israel has never forcibly transferred anyone to a settlement. Indeed, settlements were voluntarily established, over government objections and threats of expulsion. International law expert Julius Stone decried attempts to portray it as “an obligation on the State of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein.”

After the Six-Day War, UN Security Council Resolution 242 permitted Israel to administer its newly acquired territory until “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” is achieved. Even then, Israel would only be required to withdraw its armed forces “from territories” — not from “the territories” or “all the territories.” Resolution 242 imposed no restriction on Jewish settlement west of the Jordan River, guaranteed under the Palestine Mandate forty-five years earlier.

Legions of settlement critics have asserted that under international law Israel is a “belligerent occupier,” without sovereignty over territories whose future must be decided by international agreement. But the Levy Commission rejected that argument, concluding that because no state had territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in 1967 (Jordan’s occupation after 1949 was not recognized as conferring sovereignty), Israel cannot be considered a “belligerent occupier.” Accordingly, Jews enjoy the legal right to live there.

Learning of Netanyahu’s plan, a Palestinian Authority representative insisted: “We will not sign any peace agreement if there is a [single] settlement on Palestinian land.” That, however, raises another interesting question: Where is “Palestinian” land? Archeological discoveries – coins, pottery, seals, inscriptions (many bearing the name YHWH, the Israelite God) – confirm a sovereign Jewish presence in the Land of Israel for one thousand years preceding the Common Era. Indeed, Roman coins bearing the words “Judea Capta,” minted after the capture of Judea and the destruction of the Second Temple, poignantly testify to the loss of Jewish national sovereignty that would endure for nearly nineteen hundred years. By contrast, no evidence of an identifiable (or self-identified) “Palestinian” people predates the twentieth century.

Despite Netanyahu’s proclaimed intention to seek Cabinet approval for the Levy Report, the Prime Minister quickly backed down after Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, yielding to pressure from Kadima Party chairman Shaul Mofaz, indicated his own strong opposition to consideration of the Report until after the election. Once again, Netanyahu – playing both sides of the issue for maximum political advantage - yielded to pressure from settlement opponents. If he wins reelection in February he might try to remember that the largest Jewish settlement in the Middle East, routinely delegitimized in the international arena, is the State of Israel.

Who is (isn't) a Refugee?

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:33:00 -0400

The Algemeiner (October 3, 2012)

In December 1949, seven months after the fledgling State of Israel was granted membership in the United Nations, the UN established the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA). Intended as a “temporary” agency, its sole purpose was to provide aid to a vastly inflated number of 860,000 Palestinian “refugees.” (Their actual number, according to historian Ephraim Karsh’s meticulous research, was between 583,000 and 609,000). A “refugee” was defined as any person “whose normal place of residence was Palestine” between June 1, 1946 and May 15, 1948 “and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.

Twenty-five years later, after the UN proclaimed Zionism as “racism,” it also recognized “the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted.” A Palestinian “refugee” was then redefined to include “descendants of fathers fulfilling the definition.” The UN thereby created a permanent cohort of impoverished, stateless and dependent people. Jordan had already stipulated that Palestinian refugees in its West Bank (where most lived) were citizens of the Kingdom. But Syria and Lebanon (like Egypt and now Hamas in Gaza) have cruelly preserved their degraded status in squalid neighborhoods without citizenship rights, the better to stoke the fires of hatred against Israel for the Palestinian “refugee” problem that by now the passage of time has all but obliterated.

In addition to the estimated 30,000 actual Palestinian refugees from sixty-five years ago who are still alive, UNRWA provides the protective cover of international legitimacy for 5 million “refugees” (by definition an ever-growing number) to assert claims on Israeli land that they never inhabited. Indeed, there now are nearly as many UNRWA employees, whose jobs depend upon the perpetuation of Palestinian refugee status, as there are genuine Palestinian refugees. To date the United States alone has contributed $4 billion to preserve their refugee status. No other group of “refugees” enjoys such generous benefits. All others fall under the jurisdiction of the UN High Commissioner of Refugees, which appropriately decided that refugee status ends with acceptance by a host country.

What about Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, who confronted hostile rulers and angry mobs before and after the establishment of Israel? In Iraq, where Jews had enjoyed productive, often prosperous, lives ever since the Babylonian exile, the spread of Nazi hatred in the 1930s exploded in the 1941 pogrom known as the Farhoud. Nearly two hundred Jews in Baghdad were murdered and many hundreds were wounded by Arab mobs incited by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Hussayni, who had taken refuge there after wreaking similar havoc in Palestine.

By 1947 nearly one million Jews living throughout the Arab world, from Algeria to Yemen, were endangered by surging Muslim fury. Within two years 800,000 had fled from their homes to safety in Israel, which absorbed more than 500,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and to Europe and North America. The value of their abandoned property vastly exceeded claimed Palestinian losses. Nobody cared. By now the United Nations has passed more than one hundred resolutions concerning Palestinian refugees, but not one focusing on Jewish refugees. There is no UNRWA for them. Seven Jews now live in Iraq; one hundred each in Egypt and Syria, and 4000 in Morocco (compared to 75,000, 30,000 and 265,000 respectively in 1948).

A belated (and hotly debated) effort is being made to rectify the imbalance. Justice for Jews in Arab Countries (JJAC) recently convened in Jerusalem to spark an international campaign “to ensure that Justice for Jews from Arab Countries assumes its rightful place on the international political agenda and that their rights be secured as a matter of law and equity.” Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon has brought the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries to the United Nations, claiming that they are entitled to restitution for their property losses.

Far more remarkable than millions of invented Palestinian refugees receiving UNRWA largesse is the even larger number of Jewish refugees from Arab states who, along with their children, have rejected perpetual dependence and special pleading to build fulfilling lives elsewhere. Indeed, a Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat Gan (Israel) opposes the effort to equate Jewish and Arab refugees as a politically driven effort to offset Palestinian claims, rather than a genuine attempt to rectify individual losses. The son of once prosperous Iraqi Jews explained: “It’s not part of the family heritage that we’re waiting to regain what we left behind … . The best asset I can get is that we’d have peace with Iraq,” thereby enabling him to visit his ancestral home.

The likeliest scenario, however, is that UNRWA, with international collaboration and bountiful financial support from the United States, will continue to invent, inflate and degrade Palestinian “refugees,” who seem content to retain their dependence to stoke hatred of Israel. Meanwhile the descendants of Jewish refugees from Arab countries will continue to build new lives and prosper in the adopted homelands that Arab persecution drove them to embrace.

When is a House a Home in Hebron?

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 16:28:17 -0400

The Algemeiner (September 19, 2012)

Seven years ago New York businessman Morris Abraham, through an intermediary and after prolonged negotiations, purchased a four-story building from its owner for nearly one million dollars. With expansive views of the surrounding hills, the valley below, and the city beyond, it could be renovated to provide a comfortable residence for Jewish families.

Abraham was attracted to the location because his paternal great-grandfather and members of his mother’s family had lived in the nearby city until 1929, when they barely escaped with their lives during a barbaric Arab pogrom in which sixty-seven Jews were ruthlessly slaughtered. Survivors were evacuated by British soldiers, leaving the city judenrein for the next fifty years.

The city is Hebron. There the first plot of land owned by the Jewish people in their promised land, purchased by Abraham from Ephron the Hittite, became the burial place for Sarah. Known as Me’arat haMachpelah, it also became the gravesite for Abraham, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Hebron was where King David ruled for seven years before relocating his throne to Jerusalem, known as its “sister” city.

The building purchased by Morris Abraham for the community occupied a commanding site overlooking Hebron. It is adjacent to the main road, known as the worshippers’ path, leading down the hill from Kiryat Arba into Hebron to the Machpelah enclosure. Three years earlier twelve Israelis had been murdered nearby in a deadly terrorist attack.

As word of the acquisition spread through the community hundreds of residents, joined by yeshiva students, arrived to explore the building and dance in celebration. After extensive renovations, eight Jewish families moved in. Israeli soldiers arrived to protect them, staking out an observation post on the roof to provide security. Court-ordered investigations documented the legitimacy of the purchase; the Palestinian owner had been filmed receiving and counting his money. Learning of the transaction a Hebron Arab told an Israeli journalist: “If the Jews really did buy it, all the more power to them. But we will find the seller and chop him up into tiny pieces.”

Despite primitive living conditions during a brutally cold winter – unheated rooms with plastic sheets for windows – the residents of Beit HaShalom (House of Peace) endured. But Defense Minister Ehud Barak, disregarding the purchase and sale agreement and the video that documented the sale, relentlessly pursued their expulsion, which the Supreme Court authorized. The banishment of Jews from Hebron, long pursued through Palestinian terror attacks, had become Israeli government policy. Morris Abraham, noting that anywhere else such a purchase would be recognized as legitimate, despaired of “Israeli democracy.”

Barak was unrelenting. In December 2008 six hundred Israeli border police and soldiers, using stun grenades and tear gas and acting under his orders, stormed Beit Ha Shalom and dragged the resident families from their homes. Despite the violent expulsionsthe Hebron Jewish community remained resilient and persistent, pursuing their legal case in court.

Last week the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court upheld the legality of the Beit Ha Shalom purchase and ordered the government to return the property to the Hebron Jewish community within thirty days. “We have received a wonderful Rosh Hashanah present,” exulted community spokeswoman Orit Struck.

Not so fast. According to Israeli law the Defense Minister must sign permits for Jews to purchase property in Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people where 350,000 world-despised “settlers” live. To date, however, Ehud Barak has demonstrated stubborn unwillingness to permit Jews to purchase property in Hebron. A veteran Labor Party politician, he refuses to recognize that Jewish settlers are following in the footsteps of his own ideological predecessors by settling the Land of Israel. That, after all, is what Zionism is all about.

And, according to the conclusions recently drawn by the Levi Commission (comprising two former Supreme Court judges and an international law expert), Jewish settlements do not violate international law. Indeed, their legality is affirmed by ninety years of international law that guarantees to Jews the right of “close settlement” everywhere west of the Jordan River.

Since the recent court decision, Likud government ministers and Knesset members have urged Barak to authorize the return of Jews to their homes in Beit Ha Shalom. The Defense Minister “has the obligation to right the wrong that he created,” announced Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz. According to MK Tzipi Hotovely, a rising star in the Likud Party, “Buying land in the land of Israel is making Zionism a reality.”

In the end, it is for Prime Minister Netanyahu to make certain that the recent judicial ruling is upheld and enforced. Surely a prime minister who can stand up to the American president can instruct his Defense Minister to enforce the law – or quickly find a replacement who understands Jewish history and obeys Israeli judicial rulings.

Stirring the Pot on Settlements

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:18:20 -0400

The Algemeiner(September 10, 2012)

“Israel’s Settlers Are Here to Stay,” Danny Dayan’s recent New York Times op-ed (July 25), has provoked a revealing kerfluffle among self-appointed monitors of Israel’s moral demise.

It quickly elicited Seth Mandel’s Commentary critique of Dayan’s “Wrongheaded Proposal” (July 26); a swipe from Thomas Friedman warning (yet again) of the danger posed by settlements for “Israel’s future as a Jewish democracy” (July 31); Zvika Krieger’s lengthy Atlantic diatribe against “Dani Dayan’s War” (August 3); and an error-riddled Times interview with Dayan by Jodi Rudoren (August 17), its novice Jerusalem bureau chief.

Dayan, chairman of the Yesha Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, performed a remarkable feat. Not only did he sound eminently reasonable, even moderate (especially for a “settler,” generally presumed to be a menacing zealot); but uniting Commentary and The New York Times, on Israel no less, surely is deserving of attention.

Dayan, a secular Israeli, did not rest his claim for settlement legitimacy on biblical sources of divine promise, nor on international law (about which he is, regrettably, conspicuously silent). Rather, he asserted: “Israel legitimately seized the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria in self-defense.” Therefore, its “moral claim” is “unassailable.” Presumably, had Jordan not attacked the Jewish State forty-five year ago during the Six Day War, Israel would have no legitimate claim on its biblical homeland.

Dayan’s analysis of the settlements as permanent communities rests largely on demography. There are more than 350,000 Israeli settlers; their growth rate is 5 per cent. Their continued Jewish presence “in all of Judea and Samaria” is, therefore, “an irreversible fact.” He might have mentioned, for comparative purposes, that the Israeli percentage of the total West Bank population is roughly the same as the percentage of Israeli Arabs living within Israel’s recognized pre-1967 borders.

In his subsequent Times interview, Dayan offered a more spiritual justification for settlements. “You cannot maintain a Jewish soul of a community if you detach it from history,” he said, cautioning that “If Israel detaches itself from Hebron and Bet El and Shilo, it will become an empty society.”

He also presented an explicit and challenging vision of the future, which has incurred the wrath of resolute defenders of the currently conventional “two-state solution.” In their scenario, most settlements will be shut down, most settlers will leave – by force if necessary – and, with minor land swaps, Israel will retreat to its pre-1967 “Auschwitz” borders (as Abba Eban described them). A Palestinian state will be planted between its eastern border and the Jordan River.

Dayan imagines a different two-state solution some time in the indeterminate future. Jordan, which already has a Palestinian majority population, will become the Palestinian state, with West Bank Palestinians (who were, indeed, Jordanians until 1967) as its citizens. Jordan and Israel would jointly govern the West Bank, with “shared responsibilities for two peoples between two states.” Jewish settlements would remain in place. More precisely stated, with a lot of unmentioned history to support his claim, Jordan is “Palestine.”

For a proposal that has been lacerated as “immoral,” “unreal,” and “terrifying” – and, on the J Street website, as “delusional,” “morally bankrupt,” and “fanatical” – Dayan’s vision is merely a moderate restatement of what the League of Nations decided ninety years ago.

With the Ottoman Empire in tatters after World War I, the League, citing “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” recognized it as the site of “the Jewish National Home.” The right of “close settlement of Jews on the land” was assured.

Palestine was partitioned in 1922, at the instigation of British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, to provide Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with his own kingdom on the East Bank of Palestine (re-named Trans-Jordan and then Jordan). The right of Jews to “close settlement” west of the Jordan River was retained. Never rescinded, it remains the international legal authorization for more than one hundred Jewish settlements.

Dayan’s critics seem ignorant of, or oblivious to, Jewish settlement rights under international law. In the Atlantic, Krieger, senior vice president of The S. Daniel Center for Middle East Peace, castigated him for trying to revive the “’Jordan is Palestine’ meme.” But it is not merely a “meme”; it is an accurate statement of what international law long ago provided and still protects.

Mandel, assistant editor of Commentary, seemed most concerned that Dayan’s ideas are “detrimental to the American foreign policy doctrine [i.e. national self-determination] that results in such steadfast American support for Israel.” His apprehension reflects the continuing concern of many American Jews, ever since Louis D. Brandeis asserted the compatibility of Zionism and Americanism a century ago, lest support for Israel be seen to compromise their loyalty to the United States.

Mandel mistakenly attributes to Dayan an insinuation that “Palestinians should be a permanently stateless people.” To the contrary: under Dayan’s proposal Jordan would – and geographically, demographically, historically and legally should – be the site of their national home. Mandel incurred appropriately sharp criticism from Commentary readers for undermining Israel’s legitimate claims. Like Dayan’s other critics, he fails to grasp that Jewish settlements, according to ninety years of international law, are legal.

Indeed, the recent report of the Levy Commission, comprising two former Israeli judges (including one from the Supreme Court) and an international law expert, properly concluded that the State of Israel is not an occupying power in Judea and Samaria. They recognized that Jews have had the internationally guaranteed legal right to “close settlement” west of the Jordan River ever since 1922.

Inevitably, Dayan was too moderate for religious Zionist settlers, for whom biblical imperatives are paramount, and far too zealous for Jewish liberals, who tremble lest they be judged guilty by association with such “obstacles to peace” and nests of zealots as they are convinced the settlements represent. But Palestinians have hardly been tumbling over each other since the Six Day War to reach a peace agreement with Israel based on the conventional two-state solution. Indeed, given their incessant refusals, it just may be time to take them at their word and consider alternatives.

It is worth noting that the largest and most reviled Jewish “settlement” in the Middle East, with its very right to exist incessantly challenged by Palestinians and their legions of allies, remains the State of Israel. But settlement in the Land of Israel, the promised homeland of the Jewish people, is what Zionism has always been about and why, after nineteen centuries, there finally is a reborn Jewish state.

Jewish Settlers and The New York Times

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 14:06:00 -0400

The Algemeiner (July 27, 2012)

Dani Dayan’s New York Times op-ed (July 26), “Israel’s Settlers Are Here to Stay,” was an eyebrow raiser. The return of Jewish settlers to Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, has long irritated Times editors and columnists. Indeed, their discomfort with the Jewish state, reflecting the Jewish assimilationist preferences of the Sulzberger family, is as old as Israel. For the Times it doesn’t get much worsethan passionate Zionists inhabiting and defending the Land of Israel.

Only a few days before Dayan’s op-ed was published, a Times editorial warned that an “expanding” Palestinian population is “hastening a day when Jews could be a minority.” The danger to Israeli democracy from erroneous presumptions about Palestinian demography is a well-worked theme among critics of Jewish settlements. The only problem is the absence of supporting evidence.

Within Israel’s recognized pre-1967 borders live 7 million citizens, 20% of whom are Arabs. Judea and Samaria are inhabited by 1.6 million Palestinians and 350,000 Jews. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, therefore, two-thirds of the population is Jewish. Given declining Arab and rising ultra-Orthodox birthrates (which also trouble the Times), Israel is in no foreseeable danger of losing its Jewish numerical majority or its democratic base.

Dani Dayan is a secular Jew who moved from Argentina to Israel as a teenager and became active in the settlers’ cause. After serving as a major in the IDF he was a high-tech tycoon, eventually selling his software company to participate in the work of the Yesha Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, the settlers’ highly effective lobby. Now its chairman, he guides Yesha’s efforts to persuade the predominantly secular Israeli public “to understand the historical link we have to the territories.”

Unraveling the conventional wisdom of a “two-state solution,” with Israel retreating from its post-1967 borders, defines Dayan’s current challenge. He is trying to convince Israelis (and Times readers) that Jewish settlements are vital to Israel’s interests. He grasps the importance of Judea and Samaria for the preservation of Jewish identity, noting that “King David never walked in Tel Aviv, but he did reign in Hebron.”

In his Times op-ed Dayan wrote: “Arabs called for Israel’s annihilation in 1967, and Israel legitimately seized the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria in self-defense.” Therefore, Israel’s “moral claim to these territories, and the right of Israelis to call them home” is “unassailable.” To relinquish this land “in the name of a hallowed two-state solution” would reward those who have “historically sought to destroy Israel.”

Dayan anticipates that a massive influx of Palestinians from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, where they have been degraded and confined as refugees for six decades, would transform any new Palestinian state into “a hotbed of extremism.” A Palestinian state, he warns, would (like Gaza) become a “launching pad for attacks on Israel.” His recommended alternative is to expand Jewish settlements – not as “a theological adventure” but as “a combination of inalienable rights and realpolitik.”

But Dayan’s insistence on Israel’s “moral claim” to Judea and Samaria, even if grounded in God’s promise of the land to Abraham and the history of ancient Jewish commonwealths in Judea and Samaria, is unlikely to persuade Israel’s critics. Indeed, the very next day the Times (perhaps to make amends) printed only critical letters in response to Dayan’s op-ed. A PLO representative warned that the choice for Israel is “either settlements or peace.” A good liberal suggested that the two-state solution rejected by Dayan is “the only possible way to preserve the Jewish and democratic principles on which Israel was founded.” A Judaic scholar accused Dayan of “ignoring both demography and democratic values.”

But for those who do not wish to rest Israel’s legitimate claims to Judea and Samaria on divine promise, historical rights, or reflexively challenged “moral” claims, international law, which Israel is incessantly accused of violating, should be consulted. Ironically, it offers the most compelling source of legitimacy for Jewish settlements.

The League of Nations Mandate, drafted at the San Remo Conference in 1920 and adopted unanimously two years later, recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.” It guaranteed to Jews the right of “close settlement” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – in Judea and Samaria no less than within what would define Israel’s boundaries between 1949-1967.

That right has never been rescinded. Indeed, Article 80 of the United Nations Charter explicitly protects the rights of “any peoples” and “the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” Known as the “Palestine clause,” it assured that Mandatory guarantees of Jewish settlement west of the Jordan River would remain in force.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, approved after the Six-Day War, permitted Israel to administer Judea and Samaria, the land that Arab aggression had returned to the Jewish people, until “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” is achieved. Even then (and it hardly seems iminent), Israel would only be required to withdraw its armed forces (nothing was said about civilians) “from territories” – not from “the territories” or “all the territories” - that it administered. The missing “the” was intentional, assuring that legitimate Israeli land claims in Judea and Samaria had not been abrogated.

Dayan’s soft “moral” justification for Jewish settlements is not likely to persuade their legions of critics. Perhaps that explains why the Times printed it. No one should hold their breath until the Times acknowledges that settlements are legal according to ninety years of international law supported by an impressive array of international legal scholars. Even Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has already pledged to relinquish “land for peace,” might be persuaded.

The State of the Jews

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 14:18:40 -0400

The Algemeiner (July 19, 2012)

The worrisome state of the Jewish people these days has little to do with anything intrinsic to the State of Israel, the thriving, vibrant, and solitary democracy in the Middle East. Rather, as Edward Alexander writes in the Introduction to The State of the Jews, his selection of trenchant essays and reviews spanning the last decade, it is attributable to “the role played by Jews in the war of ideas against the state of the Jews.”

Alexander, professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington (who also taught for many years at Tel Aviv University), does not suffer liberal fools gladly. It was, he reminds us in his scrutiny of the Victorian background of anti-Semitism, the writer George Eliot who suggested back in 1878 that liberals have a “Jewish problem.” To be sure, not only liberals. The Fagin of Oliver Twist, after all, was the direct literary descendant of Shakespeare’s Shylock.

Alexander’s scathing scrutiny of English literary anti-Semitism befits a professor of literature whose powers of critical analysis expose “the enormous role of English Jews in the current war of ideas (and agitprop) against Zionism and Israel’s existence.” Yet he also illuminates the complementary Victorian phenomenon of “British Philosemitism,” a now bygone sympathy once expressed by Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour (of Declaration fame), and Winston Churchill.

It is a chilling contrast, as Alexander notes, with the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rants by contemporary British academics: philosopher Ted Honderich, who proclaimed that Palestinians have “a moral right to their terrorism”; Jacqueline Rose, who condemned “those wishing to denigrate suicide bombers and their culture”; and Oxford poet Tom Paulin, who urged that Jewish settlers “should be shot dead.”

As Alexander makes clear, the history, politics and literature of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are inextricably interwoven. Along the way, he moves deftly from the history of Commentary magazine to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s invented story (predictably featured in The New York Times) about his family’s “expulsion” from Palestine that never happened. He eviscerates Barack Obama’s “artful theft of the Jews’ sad history” in his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention and his “engagement” with Islam five years later in Cairo when, as president, he challenged the legitimacy of Jewish settlements and obscenely compared “more than sixty years” of Palestinian suffering to the Holocaust.

Alexander’s most scathing analysis focuses on academic anti-Semitism and the collaboration of Jewish liberals in the demotion of Israel to the fetid sewer of illegitimacy until recently reserved for Nazi Germany and South Africa. The chapter titles alone are eye-catching: “Professors for Suicide Bombing”; “Poetaster of Murder” (Tom Paulin); “Afrocentrism, Liberal Dogmatism, and Antisemitism at Wellesley College” (my own academic home for forty years).

“Hitler’s professors,” he notes, “were the first to make anti-Semitism both academically respectable and complicit in crime.” But hardly the last. Their contemporary emulators, liberally (of course) sprinkled throughout British and American academic precincts, have provided “grotesque apologetics” for Arafat, bin Laden, Hamas and Hezbollah. The “new anti-Semitism,” he writes, has transformed “the pariah people into the pariah state.”

In “The Antisemitism of Liberals” Alexander explores the “ideological violence” of “the new Jew-hatred,” which “is the work primarily of leftists, battlers against racism, professed humanitarians, and liberals (including Jewish ones).” His own sharp condemnation of those he labels “liberal antisemites,” whose “liberal dogmatism” makes them into “accessories before the fact of Ahmadinejad’s plan ‘to wipe Israel off the map,’” will surely stir the wrath of any liberals who might encounter his critique of their own distinctive brand of intolerance.

But Alexander, a keen reader and adept textual critic, has far more to offer than justifiable wrath over the liberals’ betrayal of Israel – and, too often, their own Judaism. His concluding essays cover a wide range of Jewish angst and self-flagellation. He deftly analyzes (Jewish) critic Lionel Trilling’s sharp rejection of “the suggestion that he might be a Jewish writer.” He precisely locates Cynthia Ozick’s fiction within German Jewish history in the Nazi era and in post-Holocaust Europe. He carefully explores Saul Bellow’s explanation of the silence of Jewish writers (himself included) during the Holocaust. And he deftly analyzes poet Abba Kovner, the paradoxical Zionist who led the resistance fighters in the Vilna ghetto and survived to castigate Israelis who scorned Diaspora Jewry.

Edward Alexander’s critical appraisal of “the state of the Jews” reinforces his place of primacy in the continuing war, waged by far too few of our academic or intellectual colleagues, against Israel. He actually believes that ideas are vital weapons in this struggle, and his cogent essays demonstrate why they are.

The Legality of Israeli "Occupation"

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:24:00 -0400

(New York Sun, July 11, 2012)

With startling clarity an Israeli legal commission, chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levy, has declared: “According to international law, Israelis have the legal right to settle in Judea and Samaria.” Challenging settlement critics inside Israel and worldwide, it asserted that international laws of “occupation” are not applicable “to the unique and sui generis historic and legal circumstances” of Israel’s presence in these territories, where Jews returned after the Six-Day War in 1967 and more than 300,000 Israelis now live.

Those “historic and legal circumstances” are well known and everywhere disregarded. Judea and Samaria comprised the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, where the tombs of their patriarchs and matriarchs are located and the kingdoms of David and Solomon flourished. “The Land of Israel,” declared the Proclamation of Independence in 1948, was “the birthplace of the Jewish people” where “their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed.”

International law is more complicated but no less supportive of the right of Jewish settlement. The League of Nations Mandate, drafted at the San Remo Conference in 1920 and adopted unanimously two years later, recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and guaranteed to Jews the right of “close settlement” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

The Mandate was never modified or terminated. In the Charter of the United Nations, Article 80 explicitly protected the rights of “any peoples” and “the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” Known as the “Palestine clause,” it was drafted by Jewish representatives to assure that Mandatory guarantees would remain in force.

Jewish settlement rights were flagrantly violated when Jordan invaded Israel in 1948, occupied Judea and Samaria, and established a Judenrein West Bank. But Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War returned the biblical homeland to the Jewish people. UN Security Council Resolution 242 permitted Israel to administer the land until “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” was achieved. Even then, Israel would only be required to withdraw its armed forces (nothing was said about civilians) “from territories” – not from “the territories” or “all the territories” that it administered.

The absence of “the,” the famous missing definite article, was not an oversight. It resulted from months of diplomatic effort to clarify the meaning of Resolution 242. Eugene V. Rostow, the undersecretary of state for political affairs who was instrumental in its drafting, asserted that “the Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing population to live there.”

Settlement critics incessantly cite the Geneva Convention (1949), which assured that an “occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Adopted in the shadow of Nazi atrocities, it was intended to prevent the repetition of forced transfers of civilian populations “for political and racial reasons.” But the government of Israel neither deported Palestinians nor transferred Israelis. Ever since the first settlers rebuilt destroyed Jewish communities in Gush Etzion and Hebron, Jews voluntarily – and enthusiastically - returned to their ancient homeland.

Yet Israeli governments across party lines have been remarkably dilatory in asserting Jewish settlement rights. The pioneering settlers, after all, were religious Zionists whose passion for rebuilding Jewish communities in the biblical homeland challenged the secular politics of Israeli leaders who still depend upon a secular majority to sustain them in power.

The Levy Commission conclusions predictably enraged the Israeli left, whose incessant mantra of settlement illegality was sharply challenged. The report “gives a stamp of approval to a transgression of the law,” complained a Kadima Party Knesset member, and “badly tarnishes Israel’s image.” It “was written in Wonderland, in which the laws of the absurd rule,” proclaimed Yesh Din, which provides legal assistance to Palestinians. Peace Now complained that it was “pre-ordered” by the Right for committee members who “live in perpetual denial.”

Misconceptions that impel politically driven conclusions die hard, as The New York Times quickly demonstrated. Castigating Commission findings as “bad law, bad policy and bad politics,” Times editors stood with “most of the world” in erroneously proclaiming settlements in violation of international law. But they misapplied the Geneva Convention, which prohibits forced population transfers. They distorted UN Resolution 242 by ignoring the meaning of its precise wording: “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces,” not civilians, from “territories,” not “the” territories. And they inflated by 50 percent the number of Palestinians that Israel is “determined” to rule “under an unequal system of laws and rights.”

The final word properly belongs to Yehuda Z. Blum, former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, who declared in 1979: “Jews are not foreigners anywhere in the Land of Israel.” The Levy Commission affirmed the obvious. For that alone, however, it made history.

John Lennon the Zionist

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:05:25 -0400

The Algemeiner(June 4, 2012)

Speaking at a national security conference in Tel Aviv last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “All we are saying is ‘give peace a chance.’”

Clearly bolstered by his invulnerable 94-member Knesset majority, and perhaps psychologically liberated by the recent death of his tenaciously right-wing father, Netanyahu seems prepared, yet again, to jettison his own long-proclaimed political principles and those of his Likud party. Astonishingly, precisely when his political power has reached its apogee, Netanyahu has fully embraced the misguided warnings of his marginalized left-wing opponents, whose calls for “peace now” have long been silenced by reality.

“A peace agreement with the Palestinians,” Netanyahu said, “is necessary first and foremost to prevent a bi-national state.” But there is no such danger. Jews are a two-thirds majority west of the Jordan River, comprising pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). The Jewish birth rate has been rising while there has been a decline in West Bank Arab fertility.

Demographic expert Yoram Ettinger, formerly a Consul General of Israel in the United States, has written: “Anyone claiming that Jews are doomed to become a minority west of the Jordan River and that, therefore, the Jewish state must concede Jewish geography in order to secure Jewish demography, is either dramatically mistaken or outrageously misleading.”

That is precisely what Netanyahu claims, and seems prepared to concede. He indicated his willingness to relinquish most of Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, where more than 300,000 Israelis now live. Although Israel would retain major settlement blocs, tens of thousands of settlers living outside those blocs would confront the loss of their homes. Forced military evacuation would inevitably provoke violent and tragic confrontations between settlers and the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli prime minister envisions “a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state, and Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people.” There is only one problem, and it is as old as the Jewish state itself. Palestinians have never, since 1948, been willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. PA President Abbas still demands, as a pre-condition for peace talks, that Israel retreat to its precarious and porous pre-1967 lines (memorably described by Abba Eban as “Auschwitz borders”) and refrain from further settlement construction. Article 9 of the Palestinian Charter still asserts: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.” By “Palestine,” of course, it means all the land west of the Jordan River, including Israel.

Netanyahu was not alone in his eagerness to divest Israel of its biblical homeland. Ehud Barak, a fierce critic of settlements whose position as defense minister was saved by Netanyahu’s recent majority-enhancing partnership with Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz, proposed that Israel consider unilateral disengagement from Judea and Samaria. Mofaz, too, has recommended a massive Israeli withdrawal, with settlers forced from their homes if they do not accept financial incentives.

But evacuating 300,000 Jews from Judea and Samaria is hardly the same as evacuating 9000 Gaza settlers (who still live in temporary housing seven years later). Israel already launched one invasion (“Cast Lead”) to halt the of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel and other Negev communities – all this after Israel handed over the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. With the disengagement that Barak proposes, the entire country will be vulnerable to attack and the West Bank would instantly become a magnet for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists.

Even an Israeli government with an unprecedented political majority needs to restrain its potential for folly. Unilateral political action, after decades of Palestinian inaction, is understandably tempting. But “when we retreat or withdraw,” observed Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon wisely, “we show weakness.” That is precisely what Netanyahu, citing John Lennon as his authority, seems determined to demonstrate.

The Six Day War's Unresolved Legacy

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 18:15:00 -0400

Nearly sixty-five years ago Israel declared its independence and won the war that secured a Jewish state. But its narrow and permeable postwar armistice lines permitted incessant cross-border terrorist raids. For Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the mere existence of a Jewish state remained an unbearable intrusion into the Arab Middle East. As Egyptian President Nasser declared, “The danger of Israel lies in the very existence of Israel.”

So it was, in the spring of 1967,that the noose tightened around the Jewish state. In April Syria bombarded Galilee kibbutzim from the Golan Heights. In May Egypt ordered the removal of UN forces from Sinai and advanced its army to the border with Israel. Arab radio promised “the extermination of Zionist existence.” Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad announced: “The time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.”

Then Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, halting the flow of oil from Iran and severing its supply route to Asia. In early June Iraq joined the coalition to destroy Israel. By then nearly 500,000 enemy soldiers surrounded the Jewish state; thousands of fighter planes were poised to attack.

Apprehension of imminent annihilation – another Holocaust – swept through Israel. The army was mobilized. Bomb shelters were hastily built. Mass graves were dug. The hesitant Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, delivered a stumbling radio address that sent waves of panic through the nation. Under intense pressure to act from military advisers, he reluctantly authorized a preemptive strike.

One month earlier, on Independence Day, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook had met with a gathering of his former students at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva in Jerusalem. Like his father, the revered chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, he embraced Zionism, a commitment that marginalized the yeshiva among haredi Jews while its Orthodoxy isolated it from the secular Zionist majority.

Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda recalled his anguish in 1948 when the boundaries of war had severed the fledgling state of Israel from the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. Conquering Jordanians drove Jews from their Old City homes; their revered Hurva synagogue was destroyed; they were denied access to the Western Wall; the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives was desecrated; and Jerusalem was divided.

As his voice rose to bewail the partition of Eretz Yisrael Rabbi Kook suddenly cried out: “They have divided my land. Where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it? And where is our Shechem? And our Jericho?” No one in Israel, a student realized, spoke that way. Ever since 1948 Israelis believed that “the Land of Israel ended where the state of Israel ended.”

But for the unrelenting Arab determination to annihilate the Jewish state, those temporary armistice lines might have remained permanent borders.

* * * * *

Early in the morning of June 5, Israel launched the attack that instantly turned the tide of battle by decimating the Egyptian air force. But the transformative – and, for many, miraculous – moment came two days later. After desperate fighting in northern Jerusalem on Ammunition Hill, which claimed the lives of thirty-six Israeli soldiers, the way to the Old City was clear.

Tanks blasted open the Lion’s Gate and Israeli paratroopers poured through, sweeping across the site of the ancient Temples. Commander Mordechai Gur radioed: “Har HaBayit beyadenu” – the Temple Mount is in our hands.” An intelligence officer recalled: “Though I’m not religious, I don’t think there was a man who wasn’t overwhelmed with emotion.”

After exultant Israeli soldiers descended through the Mughrabi Gate to the Western Wall, IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren arrived with a Torah scroll. He recited the mourner’s Kaddish for fallen soldiers, followed by the Shehechiyanu prayer of thanksgiving. Then he joyously blew his shofar. Euphoric troops, suddenly experiencing the convergence of their Israeli and Jewish identities, spontaneously burst into song, prayer – and tears.

A soldier approached the Wall: “The touch of my lips opened the gates of my emotions and the tears burst forth. A Jewish soldier in the State of Israel is kissing history with his lips.”An Orthodox paratrooper wrote: “I believe that the hand of God was in my participation in the battle for the liberation and reunion of Jerusalem…. I felt as if I had been granted the great privilege of acting as an agent of God, of Jewish history.” Even a kibbutznik from the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement expressed his feelings in biblical verse: “Let us go into the house of the Lord, Our feet shall stand within Thy Gates, O Jerusalem” (Psalm 122:1-2).

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan arrived to place a note between the stones, as had been Jewish custom for centuries. He proclaimed: “We have reunited the city, the capital of Israel, never to part with it again.” IDF Commander Yitzhak Rabin praised the soldiers whose sacrifices “have brought about redemption.” It was a triumphant moment of national unity and ecstasy that Israelis have not known since.

No less astonishing than the military victory was the religious resonance of the Six-Day War – named by the staunchly secular Rabin to echo the biblical days of creation. A true sabra, an unsentimental soldier who rarely showed emotion in public, Rabin could not conceal the spiritual meaning of the war for the soldiers who fought and survived to savor their victory.

Their “sense of standing at the very heart of Jewish history,” he acknowledged upon receiving an honorary degree at the newly restored Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus, had released “springs of feeling and spiritual discovery.” The paratroopers who conquered the Western Wall, he recalled, “leaned on its stones and wept.” Their sudden surge of emotion, “powerful enough to break through their habits of reticence, revealed as though by a flash of lightning truths that were deeply hidden.”

Rabin did not identify those truths, but many thousands of jubilant Israelis experienced them in the weeks following the war. Suddenly Jerusalem and the entire biblical homeland of the Jewish people in Judea and Samaria were accessible. As Dayan proclaimed: “We have returned to the [Temple] Mount, to the cradle of our nation’s history, to the land of our forefathers, to the land of the Judges, to the fortress of David’s dynasty.”

Israelis flocked to the Kotel and to Me’arat HaMachpelah, the Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron, where Muslims had forbidden Jews from entering for seven centuries. They visited Rachel’s Tomb, outside Bethlehem, and Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus (biblical Shechem). Jericho was a popular destination. As one Israeli wrote disbelievingly to a friend: “All the things you read about in the Bible and in history become real right before your eyes.”

* * * * *

The Six-Day War, the forty-fifth anniversary of which falls next week, remains the transformative event in the history of the state of Israel since independence. But it was not only a stunning military victory. No one captured its deep spiritual meaning better than Harold Fisch, professor of English at Bar-Ilan University. It was, he wrote in The Zionist Revolution, “a truly religious moment, the experience of miracle, of sudden illumination…. We were suddenly living in the fullness of our own covenant history.” Israelis “who had never known they were Jews suddenly awoke to their inheritance.”

In a fascinating collection of postwar conversations with soldiers from kibbutzim (published in English as The Seventh Day), the meaning of return – even to deeply secular Israelis – was revealed. “When we heard of the conquest of Jerusalem,” a kibbutznik recounted, “there wasn’t a single one who didn’t weep, including me. Then, for the first time, I felt not the ‘Israelness’ but the Jewishness of the nation.” Another soldier was deeply moved when he suddenly realized that “the whole of the Promised Land is ours.” “Even though I’m not religious,” a kibbutznik recalled, “the Wall meant an awful lot to me…. It symbolizes everything.”

But not every Israeli was exhilarated. One of the interviewers, an aspiring young writer from Kibbutz Hulda named Amos Oz, would subsequently lament the triumph of “yeshiva students” over kibbutzniks. The “values, ideals, conscience, world view” he identified with secular Zionism were challenged by “victory and miracles, Redemption and the coming of the Messiah.” Oz evoked “the elusive cunning of the biblical charm” of Judea and Samaria, but he rejected the biblical homeland of the Jewish people as “Arab, through and through.”

So it was that the most wondrous moment in the history of Israel since 1948 would become – and remain – the deepest source of division within the Jewish state. Once Rabbi Kook’s students returned to rebuild Gush Etzion south of Jerusalem, a cluster of kibbutzim that had been destroyed in 1948, and to Hebron, where no Jews had lived since the devastating pogrom in 1929, the religious Zionist challenge to secular Zionist hegemony began to transform Israel.

After the war, for security purposes, the ruling Labor government scattered small agricultural settlements and military outposts on the Golan Heights and in the Jordan Valley. Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon proposed additional settlements to preserve Me’arat HaMachpelah and Rachel’s Tomb “within the boundaries of the state of Israel.” But the future of Judea and Samaria remained unresolved. That summer the Arab states declared at Khartoum: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

It took the devastating shock of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the election of Menachem Begin as prime minister four years later to galvanize the settlement movement. After thirty years in the political wilderness, Begin faced exultant supporters on election night wearing a yarmulke and reciting psalms. Asked to form a new government he went to pray at the Western Wall. For the first time Israel had a prime minister who framed his politics within the language and symbols of Judaism.

But Begin’s decision to dismantle Sinai settlements as part of the peace treaty with Egypt, and his assurance of autonomy for West Bank Palestinians, galvanized religious Zionist settlers who sensed that their opportunity might be slipping away. “No government,” declared Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the founding father of the restored Hebron community, “has the authority or right to say that a Jew cannot live in all of the parts of the Land of Israel.”

Led by Gush Emunim, the “bloc of the faithful,” and supported by Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon, settlements began to sprout in Judea and Samaria. A generation of religious Zionists, inspired by the opportunity presented by the Six-Day War to return to the ancient homeland, became the impassioned – and widely despised – settlers who would transform the geography and politics of Israel.

* * * * *

Within a decade the surge of religious enthusiasm following the Six-Day War led to the emergence of a new Israel in which right-wing politicians and national religious groups ascended to political power and, for the first time, achieved a measure of Zionist legitimacy. The “bourgeois and hedonistic metropolis” of Tel Aviv, lamented literary scholar Dan Miron, had yielded to “the stronghold of nationalism and ultra-Orthodoxy” in Jerusalem.

To Israelis on the political left, an enlightened secular nation had been overwhelmed by religious zealotry, Khomeinism, and irrationality. From the rule of law under Supreme Court justices and Labor politicians Israel became a nation ruled by the “Messianic religious fanaticism” of rabbis and settlers who gave the Jewish state a bad name in Western cultural and political precincts. By 1984 (an appropriate literary year for such dire conclusions), there were warnings on the left of Israel being overtaken by “Dark Medieval Fascism.”

By now more than 300,000 Israelis live in Judea and Samaria. Most, however, are not the fierce religious Zionists who are endlessly castigated for illegally occupying “Palestinian” land. Many residents simply wanted new homes at affordable prices within an easy commute to Tel Aviv. The two largest settlements, abutting Jerusalem, are haredi enclaves whose residents sought escape for their families from inner-city congestion. But they are all linked together as the despised “Jewish settlers” whom the world, joined by Israeli media, academic and literary luminaries, love to hate – for nothing more than their determination to build homes in the biblical Land of Israel.

Little attention is paid, in Israel or elsewhere, to the settlement rights guaranteed to Jews by international agreements spreading across forty-five years. The League of Nations Mandate of 1922 guaranteed to Jews “close settlement” west of the Jordan River. This was affirmed in Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, drafted in 1945 by Jewish representatives (and known as the “Palestine clause”). It protected the rights of “any peoples” and “the terms of existing international instruments” – an implicit reference to the Mandate guarantees.

UN Resolution 242, enacted after the Six-Day War, called only for the return of “territories,” not “the territories” or “all the territories” that Israel gained from Arab aggression – and then only upon “the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

Testifying before the British Peel Commission in 1937, David Ben-Gurion had been asked to identify the source of the Jewish claim to Palestine. He responded succinctly: “The Bible is our mandate.” Thirty years later, following the Six-Day War, he declared: “There is no redemption without extensive Jewish settlement.” But the words of the Founding Father have been ignored by Israeli prime ministers, on the left and right, who realize that weakening the settlement movement would permanently eliminate the religious Zionist challenge to their shared vision of a secular, post-Zionist Israel.

* * * * *

Ironically, the miraculous victory of 1967 that momentarily bridged the secular-religious chasm reaches its forty-fifth anniversary with Israelis more deeply polarized than ever. Whether the state of Israel will ultimately include the Land of Israel is the question that frames the wrenching struggle over Israel’s Jewish identity that remains the unresolved legacy of the Six-Day War. Did the stunning military victory in an unwanted defensive war culminate in the “occupation” of someone else’s land – or the liberation of the ancient Jewish homeland?

The euphoric national cohesion prompted by a miraculous victory forty-five years ago has dissipated. Sadly, the legacy of the Six-Day War is persistent acrimonious conflict over the meaning of Zionism and the Jewish identity of the state of Israel.

What Happened to 'Close Settlement"?

Thu, 31 May 2012 14:08:02 -0400

The Algemeiner (May 30, 2012)

No Israeli policy is more incessantly vilified than settlement in Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. Nonetheless, ninety years of international law sustains it.

In 1920 the League of Nations, building on Lord Balfour’s Declaration three years earlier, adopted a resolution at San Remo calling for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The Mandate for Palestine, approved by the League Council two years later (and by the United States in 1924), assured “the establishment of the Jewish national home” there. The British Mandatory Administration, according to Article 6, “shall encourage … close settlement by Jews on the land.”

But where was “Palestine”? To placate the Hashemite sheikh Abdullah, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill set aside the territory east of the Jordan River for the kingdom of Trans-Jordan. Reduced to one-quarter of its original size, Palestine now comprised only the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. There the right of close settlement by Jews remained protected under international law.

After World War II the United Nations superseded the League of Nations. But Article 80 of its Charter provided that “nothing in the Charter shall be construed … to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments.” Known as the “Palestine clause,” it protected Jewish settlement west of the Jordan River.

In 1947 the UN General Assembly called for the partition of shrunken Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. A non-binding recommendation without Security Council endorsement, it carried no legal authority, violated Article 80, and was summarily rejected by the Arab states.

Under the Armistice Agreement following Israel’s Independence War, the truncated partition boundaries of the fledgling Jewish state became temporary borders. But it stipulated that they did not prejudice the preexisting “rights, claims, and positions” of the warring parties.

Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War, forty-five years ago this month, restored the possibility of close settlement west of the Jordan River, in Jordan’s West Bank. UN Resolution 242 permitted Israel to administer its newly acquired territories until “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” was assured.

Even then, its carefully worded language assured that Israel would only be required to withdraw its armed forces – civilians were not mentioned – from “territories” gained in war, not from “the” territories or “all” the territories. By now, more than 300,000 Jewish settlers fulfill their Zionist commitment while simultaneously enjoying their international legal rights.

Critics repeatedly cite Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) as a prohibition on Jewish settlement. Written in the shadow of World War II atrocities, it provided that “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But their interpretation, according to esteemed international law scholar Julius Stone and Judge Stephen Schwebel of the International Court of Justice, is “a subversion … of basic international law principles.”

There was a vast difference between territory acquired through “aggressive conquest” (by Nazi Germany) and territory gained in a war of self-defense (Israel). The forcible Nazi transfer of civilian populations to work and death camps during World War II hardly was analogous to Israelis who voluntarily chose to settle in the Jewish homeland.

Yet despite nearly a century of international guarantees, never rescinded, successive governments of Israel across party lines have been indifferent, if not actively hostile, to Jewish settlements outside Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries.

Drafting the Proclamation of Independence, David Ben-Gurion ignored the San Remo authorization for close settlement west of the Jordan River, instead citing the UN Partition Resolution to justify Israel’s truncated boundaries. Benjamin Netanyahu not only has been reluctant to assert Jewish settlement rights; like his predecessors ever since the Oslo Accords (1993), he has indicated his willingness to relinquish portions of Judea and Samaria, which his Defense Minister Ehud Barak strongly advocates.

What explains this curious Israeli reluctance to assert the right of “close settlement”? It surely was the religious Zionist passion of the pioneering settlers, who remain the core of the settlement movement. Their unrelenting determination to return to Hebron, site of the burial tombs of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, and to dwell throughout biblical Judea and Samaria, has not inspired enthusiasm among secular Tel Avivians – or prime ministers. The war against Israel, sadly, is paralleled by the conflict among Israelis over their right to their own biblical homeland.

Where is Palestine?

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:47:00 -0400

American Thinker (May 13, 2012)

Palestine, variously known in history as Canaan, Judaea, Eretz Yisrael, Filastin, and Syria Palaestina, has long been a malleable geographical entity. Renamed by its successive Canaanite, Israelite, Roman, Christian, Mamluk, Muslim, Ottoman, and British conquerors, it became the revered “Holy Land” to 19^th-century Western visitors.

World War I transformed geographical nomenclature. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord James Balfour issued his famous declaration proclaiming his government’s approval for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” But where was “Palestine”?

After violent Arab riots during 1920-21, the British government attempted to mollify infuriated opponents of a “Jewish Palestine.” Winston Churchill, British secretary of state for the colonies, offered reassurance that the Balfour Declaration did not contemplate “that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a home should be founded in Palestine.”

If not “Palestine as a whole,” then where? The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, approved in July 1924, provided contradictory answers. Article 6 assured “close settlement by Jews on the land” defined as Palestine. But Article 25 retracted that assurance. In convoluted language, it declared: “In the territories lying between the Jordan [River] and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined, the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of the Mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions.”

In translation: “Palestine” was redefined to mean only the land west of the Jordan River, approximately one-quarter of “Palestine as a whole.” The remaining three-quarters were bestowed upon the Hashemite Sheikh Abdullah, son of the Emir of Mecca, for his role in the wartime Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. His kingdom would become known as Trans-Jordan.

But there was also good news for the Zionist cause. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, Jews enjoyed the internationally guaranteed right of “close settlement” — without geographical distinction between the coastal plain stretching from Gaza to Haifa, the mountain ridge of Judea and Samaria, or the Jordan Valley west of the River. No limits were imposed on the right of Jews to settle in their modern cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, or their ancient cities of Hebron and Jerusalem — or even the Gaza area, where Jews had lived for centuries.

Although the League of Nations expired in 1945, its successor, the United Nations, incorporated in its Charter protection for Jewish settlement rights. Article 80, drafted by Jewish representatives and known as the “Palestine clause,” explicitly protected the rights of “any peoples” under “the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” It thereby reaffirmed the right of “close settlement” by Jews throughout the land west of the Jordan River. That right has never been abrogated.

For a time, even prominent local Arabs affirmed “Palestine” as Zionist territory. Testifying before the British Peel Commission in 1937, a Syrian leader asserted: “There is no such country as Palestine. … Our country was for centuries part of Syria.” Palestinian Arabs continued to identify with Greater Syria and “the larger Arab people.” Shortly before the birth of the State of Israel, Arab historian Philip Hitti conceded: “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.” A PLO military commander subsequently acknowledged: “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinian, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation.”

Without a history to call their own, Palestinians have relentlessly plundered Jewish history to compensate for their missing past. So it is that their biblical “forebears” became the Canaanites; the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the ancient Jewish Temples, is their “third”-holiest site, after Mecca and Medina; Me’arat haMachpelah, built over the burial places of the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebron, is a mosque; and their Gaza flotillas are modeled on the famous Jewish refugee ship Exodus.

Where, exactly, might another Palestinian state arise? “Another,” because Jordan, constituting two-thirds of Mandatory Palestine, with a Palestinian majority population, already is a de facto Palestinian state. By any test of history or demography, Jordan is Palestine. Gaza is a Palestinian Hamas fiefdom sworn to Israel’s destruction. That makes two Palestinian states. Should any part of the West Bank ever become a Palestinian state, it will make three. That may be at least one too many.

The newly reformed Netanyahu government, which absorbed the centrist Kadima party while retaining Ehud Barak (who relentlessly undermines Jewish settlements) as defense minister, is unlikely to stand firm against Palestinian claims to Jewish land. Netanyahu’s expressed hope for a “responsible peace process” inevitably means Israeli concessions. Finally free of the shadow of his staunchly right-wing father Benzion Netanyahu, who died two weeks ago at age 102, the prime minister is likely to welcome yet another “Palestine” — this time in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people.