Having taken a forced vacation of two weeks from blogging, I am a little behind in commenting on the headlines of the past few weeks. But here are a few headlines about which I have found something to say:
UNIFIL finds 20 Katyushas ready for launch. After three years of “monitoring” that’s it? And what exactly have they been doing up there? It turns out they’ve been staying out of populated areas, only making the occasional foray into unpopulated areas to look for weapons caches and rocket installations. Guess they didn’t pay much attention during the Second Lebanon War and the recent Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, when weapons were cached and rockets and mortars launched out of densely populated areas. I think if I sent my four-year-old up there, she’d have found more, but hey, it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?
Natan Sharansky named new head of the Jewish Agency. I could kiss whoever did this (and Sharansky himself for taking the job). At last a real Zionist to head the Sochnut! Let’s just say I hope for better things than when Avrum Get-out-of-Israel-while-you-can Burg was the head. Sharansky is a hero, a Russian immigrant, a strategist, a Great Brain and somehow, though I can’t explain it, I have an strangely firm sense of confidence in short, round-faced, balding men. I think he’ll be great.
Building freeze in settlements will improve lives of Palestinian Arabs. Right? Wrong! It will deny livelihood to 12,000 Arabs who work for Jewish and Arab contractors building homes in the settlements. These Arabs are not necessarily happy about new Jewish building, but they’re responsible enough to admit that they must feed their families. Arabs are the first to admit that their own “government” is doing nothing to offer them alternative work. Besides (and I’ve heard this before), as far as they’re concerned, these homes could someday be Arab homes.
Arab Palestinian intransigence leads to better “peace” offers. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat recently crowed (that was the word the journalist chose) that Palestinian Arab stubbornness and intransigence in peace negotiations with Israel is highly effective. Instead of walking away when a generous offer is refused, Israel keeps coming back with a better one. I couldn’t agree more. I wonder, would the Arabs rethink this strategy if Israel were to offer them less and less? Probably not.
Arab refusal to recognize the Jewish State at the heart of the continued conflict. A few months ago, I wrote a post about how Israel should stop worrying about its acceptance by the surrounding Arab states. Then Saul Singer published a piece in the Jerusalem Post called “The Great Arab Refusal” that actually argues convincingly that this is the root of the problem of peacemaking in the region. Singer writes that “the claim of a ‘right of return’ embodies the Arab attempt at obtaining a 22nd state without accepting the single Jewish one. If Palestinians have a permanent ‘right’ to move to Israel, in what sense have they accepted Israeli sovereignty? How can they claim a right to move to Israel while not only denying the right of Jews to move to Palestine, but assuming that it must be ethnically cleansed of all Jews?” Singer writes what he thinks Obama SHOULD have said in Cairo: “‘End the conflict. Who is stopping you? If you truly accept Israelis, talk to their leaders, stop denying their history and connection to the land, you will have a Palestinian state faster than you can shake a stick.’ I understand that Obama thinks that the harder he pressures Israel on settlements the more likely the Arabs are to cooperate. But this is exactly backward. Direct pressure on Israel is always taken by the Arabs as an excuse to do nothing.”
Blaming the world’s tragedies on women’s immodest dress. It seems it’s not only the Israeli Jewish world that is obsessed with modesty. Modesty Blasé, an English blogger, writes that the Eleventh Plague has hit the London Jewish neighborhood of Hendon. Women’s dress is not only blamed for diminishing the holiness of a shul, it’s also being held responsible for springing three drug-smuggling yeshiva boys from a Japanese hoosegow. Women have been requested to take written pledges to improve their modest dress, sending their vows to the hand-wringing mother of one of the juveniles delinquent. There are also suggestions for how women’s behavior can be altered to make it more modest, including not eating or drinking in public (because we all saw the eating scene in Tom Jones and know what eating in front of the opposite sex can lead to), and fitting their shoes with rubber soles (to make it easier to sneak around men without their noticing). MB refers to her neighborhood as Hendonistan; is the Jewish community there really so different from the Muslim one, where women are walking around in jilbabs and hijabs and jimbobs and whatnot?
Despite all but one of these headlines being a real downer (Go Natan!), I’m still optimistic. I believe with absolute faith that, while Israel will probably keep hacking off pounds of its flesh to try to appease the rest of the world, it will stop when it gets to the heart. I believe that Jewish intransigence will continue to prevent Israel from making a lasting, disastrous agreement with the Arabs. I believe that one day the Arab Palestinians will wake up and see what a shameful waste their existence has been since 1948, will tar and feather their utterly useless leadership, and will sit down at the negotiating table ready to do what it takes to get a home for themselves. And I believe that one day, the scales will fall from the eyes of the medieval, chauvinistic elements of the Jewish world, and they will pull their heads out of their nether regions and realize that it is injustices like child and spousal abuse, protecting husbands who refuse to give their wives divorces, and persecution of converts that keeps the Messiah from coming, not the length of a woman’s sleeve or how much of her hair is hidden.
Call me naive, but if I don’t believe things can get better, then why bother?
Wonderful conclusion, with a great coverage of all the topics covered above!
I meant references to all the topics covered above, sorry.
It was once put that Israel is the only country that after winning war, has the terms of peace dictated to it. We need to get over our Stockholm’s Syndrome and finally face up to the fact that the Arabs want us dead – “Drive them into the sea!” And even if they don’t want us dead, they still – by their admission – see no difference between Yesha and Tel Aviv, no difference between a “settler” and a leftist. If so, then peace negotiations are largely pointless in any case. See http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.com/2009/07/israeli-conflict.html But perhaps I am wrong; perhaps there *is* a chance at peace. But this chance exists only if Israel stands up for itself and stops selling itself out, stops degrading its own dignity. The Arabs won’t respect us enough to have peace, if they see we are willing to sell all our land, our culture, our heritage, and our identity, in return for an ephemeral peace and some McDonald’s.
Oh, but regarding tzniut: Shimshonit, we’re already Reform, or did you miss that news report? ;) See http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132217, http://www.kolech.com/blog.asp?id=35&postid=1256, both referencing a certain Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira of the Haredi-wannabe Mustardniks, who says MO is Neo-Reform. If so, then let’s just cut to the chase, and not only ignore tzeniut, and also start cooking pork chops on Shabbat while dressing scantily. But seriously, Rabbi Shapira shows he has no knowledge of German-Jewish history, as I write at http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.com/2009/07/hardal-rabbi-criticizes-non-haredi.html.
I hope your optimism is well-founded. G-d’s Messianic promise means that somehow, everything will turn out okay, but I haven’t been able to figure out. I suppose, though, that our present crisis isn’t any worse than Shabbatai Zvi or the Hurban or Chemielnitzki, so I guess that if we got over those, we’ll get over all this as well.
Ilana-Davita: Thank you for the compliments.
Michael: I did happen by your blog and see that we’re the New Reform. That makes me three times Reform (1. Dutch Reform–a few generations back, 2. Reform Jewish, and 3. Reform-Modern Orthodox). I liked your response to that bizarre accusation.
The Jews seem to get over everything, eventually. The more of our history I learn, the more I see we got over. Met a Phoenician lately? A Babylonian? An Assyrian Greek? How about a Cossack or a Roman? (Roman Polanski doesn’t count.) I’m tellin’ ya, we’ve gotta be the most optimistic people in the woild.
I share your optimism. Things might look bleak in many ways, but the Jews have been through worse, and with time things always change. I definitely have to read Modesty Blase’s post though.
I don’t know if we’re optimistic, or just stiff-necked. I think that every time catastrophe comes, we’re actually as pessimistic as possible. Actually, that might also be why we’re still around; we actually were concerned about our problems! “Don’t worry, be happy!” was not in our Shabbat zemiron/bentscher.
Anyway, I like your last observation, about, “And I believe that one day, the scales will fall from the eyes of the medieval…”. I’m reminded of the following: http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2009/06/the-evil-of-agudath-israel-of-america-123.html.
Oh, but I want to add one more thing to the list of idiotic Israelinesses: every student in my yeshiva must do after-meal cleanup about once a month or so. So two days ago, the guy comes at 11 am and says I have duty *that day*. I happened to be sick, so I told him “no”. So today, he comes again, *five minutes* before lunch ends, and tells me I have cleanup today. So I just left the lunchroom. He comes up to my room and tells me how no one else in the yeshiva has a problem being told on such short notice. So I told him all the Israelis are apparently idiots. I told him that normal people put up a written schedule and are informed one or two weeks, if not a month in advance. My yeshiva in fact used to have a written schedule for cleanup, except they never filled it in. So the guy tells me that if they inform people of their duty more than about one day in advance, they’ll forget about it. As for writing a schedule, he said, no one will read it. (I told him that if they wrote one, people might actually read it, but he insisted that – apparently it is some sort of immutable part of the fabric of Israeli cognition – that no one would ever read a written schedule.) Idiots. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel obligated to abide by what necessitated by idiocy. If the Israelis are illiterate and have long-term memories of one day, that isn’t my problem. However, I do have cleanup duty tomorrow, with only one day notice, because the guy wouldn’t leave my room until I told him I’d show up tomorrow for duty. I may despite this nonsense, but I’m at least honest enough to abide by my promise, even if it was coerced.
[…] either. Twelve thousand Arabs rely on construction in the settlements to make their living. (I blogged about this previously.) How is freezing settlement growth going to help feed them and their […]