Items in the news

Although I haven’t had much chance to blog in the last few weeks, I have seen some very interesting stuff in the news that has provoked thought.  Below are some of the items I’ve come across.

I wasn’t sure if or how to respond to Israel Apartheid Week elsewhere in the world.  I would foam at the mouth, but then stop and remember that there are some people you can’t convince of anything, who have decided that Israel is a reincarnation of South Africa.  Or something.  When I remember what South Africa was like, and I look at Israel, I’m inclined to channel Inígo Montoya from “The Princess Bride” and say, “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  But then Dore Gold, one of my favorite people in Israeli public affairs, came along with an article that exposes the “hidden agenda” behind Israel Apartheid Week.  In short, “what underlies the Israel Apartheid Week campaign is not international law, but rather a highly politicized interpretation of Israel’s history in which the Jewish people are viewed as a colonialist movement that recently came from Europe to usurp lands from the indigenous Palestinian population, rather than the authentic claimants to sovereignty in their historical homeland.”  He also rightfully points out that “[t]he resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict will not be reached by just waging historical debates, but by mutual recognition and accommodation. Israel Apartheid Week is not about respect for human rights; it is an incredibly hypocritical initiative that ignores the apartheid practiced by the Palestinians themselves, who make the sale of land to Jews punishable by death. It is also not a movement dedicated to making peace, but rather to denying the historical rights of the Jewish people. The answer to the challenge is to expose the true intentions of its backers, who clearly seek to dismantle the State of Israel and deny its people their inherent right of self-determination.”  Go, Dore, go!

I was pleased to hear (on the AP wire) of the release of British journalist Paul Martin after 25 days in the clutches of Hamas.  His “crime”?  He “was working on defaming the image of the Palestinian people by saying that they smuggle weapons through tunnels,” says a Hamas spokesman who styles himself “foreign minister.”  In other words, Martin was planning to print the truth.  Martin was also working on a story about Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields.  Tsk, tsk.  A journalist print the truth about Hamas?  What can he have been thinking?

The Irish have arrested seven Muslims allegedly linked to an assassination plot to kill Swedish artist Lars Vilks, whose 2007 sketch of Muhammad depicts the prophet’s head sitting atop the body of a dog.  This, of course, resulted in al-Qaeda putting a $100,000 price on Vilks’s head.  Of course, there isn’t enough money in the world to slap a price tag on the head of every Muslim who claims that Jews are descended from pigs and monkeys.

I nearly fainted dead away when David J. Forman, whose opinion pieces I nearly always disagree with, took both Israelis abroad (whom he insists should NOT be extended the right to vote remotely in Israeli elections) and liberal American Jews (who blame Israel for not meeting their wishes, expectations, and dreams of what a Jewish State should be) to task in the last two weeks.  While Forman does his share of complaining about Israel, at least he lives here.

It must be difficult enough to be a stand-up comic, but Canadian Jewish comedienne Judy Batalion had it particularly rough in her story of how she was booed offstage in a cabaret show in London’s West End when, gearing up for an identity joke, she began by saying, “I’m a Jew.”  Batalion writes, “It wasn’t the first time my tribal identity had been an issue with stand-up in Britain.  I had been told by industry-folk to ‘go back to New York,’ ‘change your style’ and even ‘marry a non-Jew so your kids will be better looking’…  [But] it was producers who had suggested I add this joke acknowledging my race, because that’s what audiences would be wondering about when they saw me.  But never before had I been responded to in public by a visceral, unabashed syllable.  This was a place where it was all right to boo a Jew.”  She observes that “in a country obsessed with identity politics, I had the wrong one.”  Nothing funny about that.

Israel’s Channel 2 has a new series called “Hahatufim” (The Kidnapped) about three soldiers taken prisoner in Lebanon who are returned after 17 years (two alive, one dead) in a prisoner exchange.  The drama begins at the point when the media in REAL kidnappings and prisoner exchanges leaves off—when the prisoners (if they’re alive) and their families and begin to rebuild their lives.  The creators of the series interviewed former Israeli prisoners of war, and the families of soldiers whose fates are still unknown in an effort to capture their experiences as honestly as possible.  Needless to say, this subject hits a raw nerve in Israeli society, and while some families (including the Shalits, whose son Gilad is still in a basement in Gaza somewhere) are hopeful that it will raise awareness and activism to get the soldiers back at any cost, others doubt the power of art (if television can be called “art”) to move a society to action.

VP Biden’s response to Israel’s plans to build in Jewish Jerusalem was not only a dramatic and overblown performance; he also put all of the onus for “trust-building” on Israel.  What is he encouraging the Arabs to do to build trust with Israel?  Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza have restrictions put on importation of building materials that could help them build their economy.  Why?  Because they have a nasty habit of using building materials to build explosives and rocket launchers.  They have poor access to water and water treatment methods which could be alleviated by the building of proper treatment facilities, but Israel won’t let those materials into Arab territory.  Why?  See previous response.  Arabs could go far in building trust with Israel by 1) accepting that Israel is here to stay and isn’t going anywhere, and that genocide (which they keep promising in Arabic, even as they accuse Israel in English of stalling the peace process) is a big no-no; 2) stopping the teaching of Jew-hatred in their schools and the incitement of violence against Jews—and I’m talking about “moderates” like Abbas and Fayyad here, not just Hamas; and by 3) showing a willingness to partner with Israel in developing their own society to make them ready for a state of their own, if that is ever to come to pass.  It’s time to show some willingness to drag themselves out of the Middle Ages and into the modern world where they say they want to take their rightful place, and to do this, THEY need to take measures to build trust with Israel.  Stand With Us has a very good response to the US’s behavior since Israel’s announcement to build more housing IN ISRAEL.

The Post ran a lengthy interview with a Lebanese-born Arab who spent several years of his childhood in a house his family built in the German Colony of Jerusalem.  Interested in what this Arab had to say about living in British Mandatory Palestine and how, according to the headline, he “speaks pragmatically about the future,” I read it carefully.  The Lebanese-born Arab who calls himself a “displaced Palestinian” thinks in much the way I would expect him to.  He believes he has been unjustly denied the right to return to the house his family left in 1948 before the Arabs attacked the Jews in an attempt to annihilate them and take over all of former British mandatory Palestine.  He sees Jews in the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood, who are just now reclaiming properties that were Jewish before 1948, as given an unfair privilege by the State, one he believes Arabs should be extended as well.  When reminded that the Arabs themselves created their own displacement by declarations of war, he responds, “Does that mean that if the Nazis won World War II the stealing and destruction of Jewish property was justified?”  He compares Israel with Nazis elsewhere in the article, ignoring the fact that the Jews did nothing to threaten the stability (much less the existence) of Germany, and that the Nazis were the unprovoked aggressors, thieves, and genocidal maniacs—none of which describes the Jews in 1948.  This Arab is just as single-mindedly bent on recovering his property, for whose loss be blames Israel, as any other Arab in the same situation.  Where he is a little more pragmatic is when he admits that repatriation of Arabs is not practical, and that the real solution lies in compensation.  But he is still blinded by Arab propaganda, his emotions, and a severely impaired ability to keep the historical facts straight (something I’ll blog on soon) when he says that “The establishment of the State of Israel by force which caused the displacement of Palestinians and the destruction of pre-1948 Palestine was a moral outrage, but it’s history.”  Well, almost.  And this is a pragmatic Arab.  Just think what the not-so-pragmatic ones are like, and you have Israel’s “peace partner.”

Robert S. Wistrich’s new book, A Lethal Obsession, attacks anti-Semitism through his analysis of “how patterns and themes repeat themselves with depressing regularity,” and a well-documented claim that “anti-Semitism is not, as is conventionally believed, the sole preserve of the European nationalist Right.”  Ben Cohen, who reviews the book, writes, “Actually, anti-Semitism is politically and theologically promiscuous, at home among Christians and Muslims as well as socialists, royalists, anarchists and fascists.  In that regard, one of the book’s most compelling chapters concerns the anti-Semitism that prevailed in the Soviet Union, involving the domestic persecution of the Jewish community alongside a global campaign, at the UN and other forums, against what was euphemistically called ‘international Zionism.’”  And while contemporary Leftists may shrink from many of the vile epithets used by unabashed Jew-haters of the past, and “insist that their opposition to Zionism and Israel is based instead on anti-racism … Wistrich debunks these semantic games.  Whether they like it or not, what the advocates of an Israel boycott share with Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the belief that Israel is singularly, as Wistrich puts it, ‘an organic obstacle to peace and progress.’”  I’m fascinated when a book like this comes out that seems to hit the nail on the head about the nature of anti-Semitism.  I just wish the “educated,” “progressive” people who embrace that obsession would read these books (and be shocked at their own hypocrisy) rather than the Jews themselves—who are not the problem.

And finally, as the slow, steady destruction of the antiquities underneath the Temple Mount continues at the hands of Jerusalem’s Muslim Wakf, and Jewish building in Ramat Shilo gets international condemnation, one small ray of light shines through: the rededication of the Hurva synagogue in the Old City.  Destroyed by the Jordanians when they bombed the entire Jewish quarter after securing the Old City in the 1948 war, the jagged, hollow shell stood for over 60 years.  Now, literally from the ashes, it is completely rebuilt.  The first time I saw the Hurva under re-construction two years ago, I got chills down my spine.  So many antiquities and holy places have been left in ruins, and with the restored Jewish quarter surrounding it, I had assumed that it would be left as a monument to a gone-by Jewish presence in the city, like the remnants of the Cardo and the First Temple Era city wall that were excavated after 1967.  It would be hard to imagine a more life- and land-affirming endeavor than this one, and the Post has a very nice editorial discussing the synagogue’s history and the meaning of its rededication this week.  It should be noted, too, that the building that went into restoring this shul has garnered no opposition 0r condemnation from the world despite the fact that it is just as much on the other side of the Green Line as Ramat Shlomo where the much ballyhooed 1,600 housing units will be built.  Just thought I’d mention that. Here are a couple of pictures to put the project into perspective.  The Hurva before reconstruction:

And with the facade complete:

Takes my breath away.

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