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From Ha’aretz:

White House trying to restart Mideast peace talks based on Obama guidelines

Israeli and Palestinian representatives have been holding separate talks in Washington, as part of an American effort to restart direct negotiations and thereby forestall a Palestinian bid to obtain unilateral UN recognition as a state in September, according to a source at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.

Why am I suspicious when they suggest that it’s necessary to hurt Israel in order to save it?

The ‘1967 plus agreed swaps first’ plan would likely be as bad or worse than a unilateral declaration of independence by the Palestinians:

1. It drops UNSC resolution 242’s idea of defensible borders in favor of cleaving as closely as possible to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines.
2. It introduces the new idea that there is fixed amount of land due to the Palestinian Arabs, equivalent to the area of Judea/Samaria, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem.
3. In practice, it precludes Israel from retaining the Jordan Valley, necessary for its security.
4. It takes away all leverage for Israel on the issues of Jerusalem and Arab refugees, supposedly to be discussed after the withdrawal.
5. It does not include recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
6. It does not include the release of Gilad Shalit.

The main difference that I can see between this and a unilateral declaration is that Israel would be agreeing to it beforehand! It would not bring about a true “two-state solution” because it does not guarantee an end to Arab claims on Israel (refugee ‘rights’) and on its capital, Jerusalem. If these issues are deferred until after Israel has surrendered the territories, what motivation do the Arabs have to give Israel anything on them?

This is supposed to ‘forestall’ unilateral actions by the Arabs, but all the US has to do to prevent ‘Palestine’ from being admitted to the UN is use its veto in the Security Council. I doubt that it is even possible to prevent a (non-binding) resolution in the General Assembly if the Arabs want one, no matter what the US does or what concessions Israel agrees to.

This is nothing more but an escalation of the pressure that has been on Israel since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970’s to get out of the territories. The difference is that the Obama Administration has given up trying to credibly pretend that it cares about what ultimately happens to Israel.

I have an idea: why not take as a starting point a proposal in keeping with international law and prior resolutions, which would include:

1. Defensible borders.
2. Recognition as a Jewish state.
3. The release of Gilad Shalit (and not in return for a bunch of murderers).
4. An agreement on Jerusalem that leaves holy places under Israeli control.
5. An end of all Arab claims on Israel, including refugees.
6. An end to terrorism against Israel.

Such a proposal is not unreasonable, in light of the legal history of the territories starting with the League of Nations Mandate which called for ‘close Jewish settlement on the land’, and including the relevant Security Council resolutions and the real principles of international law (not the ones invented by the Arabs and friends).

Polls show, over and over, that the American people overwhelmingly support the Jewish state. US policy was never as wholeheartedly supportive of Israel as that, mostly because of the pro-Arab tendencies of the State Department, and the influence of Saudi Arabia via oil interests and pre-bribed public officials.

But now this administration, in accordance with the ideology of the President and his chosen advisers, has decided to shift policy even more, to what is essentially an anti-Israel position. And it is trying to force it down Israel’s throat.

What’s worse, it’s doing it at a time of unparalleled danger for the Jewish state.

Update [1610 PDT]: And now the Palestinians have adopted the Obama formulation as a precondition, just like the settlement freeze! Gee thanks, Barack.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Obama Administration

President Obama said in his May 19 speech, that

President Assad now has a choice:  He can lead that transition [to democracy], or get out of the way.

Since then, security forces have murdered even more Syrians, including the well-documented case of a 13-year old boy who was brutally tortured to death.

Yesterday, Syrian buses transported rioters to the Israeli border in the Golan. They were paid to be there and to throw themselves at the border, with promises to pay even more to the families of any who were killed. Syrian TV reported that 19 (some reports say 23) were killed by Israeli soldiers, and the US media dutifully repeated this. But all we know for certain is that some rioters were killed when their Molotov cocktails ignited a brush fire which caused old, unstable Syrian mines to detonate.

Assad is trying to use the old trick of  deflecting opposition to his regime by creating anger against Israel. But it isn’t working. Anti-Assad dissidents know who is killing, raping and torturing them, and it isn’t Israel.

Here is a video of Syrian security men planting weapons and ammunition on the bodies of protesters that they’d just killed. I won’t embed it, but if you have a strong stomach you can see it here.

So you would think that by now the Obama Administration would be calling for Bashar al-Assad to be thrown out and prosecuted as the mass murderer that he is. Not quite. Here is the statement by Secretary of State Clinton on Thursday (remember, last month she famously referred to Assad as a ‘reformer’):

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday the international community needs to be more united in pressuring the Syrian government to end its lethal crackdown on demonstrators. Clinton says the legitimacy of President Bashar al-Assad’s government has “nearly run out.”

Clinton says a Human Rights Watch report this week, framing Syrian actions against protestors as crimes against humanity, is in line with the State Department’s own reporting on the events.

She is lamenting the lack of an international consensus for stronger steps against the Assad government, including a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Damascus…

“If he cannot end the violence against his own people, take meaningful steps to start a process of reform, then he needs to get out of the way. And every day that he stays in office and the violence continues, he’s basically making that choice by default,” she said.

One gets the feeling that someone else is perpetrating the violence! How many chances are we going to give this butcher?

But suggestions abound that the US is going easy on Assad to … get ready … help Israel, which supposedly wants Assad to stay in power! The Zionist conspiracy, apparently, is pulling strings at the friendly State Department, as well as influencing friendly Russia and China to oppose sanctions in the Security Council. Sure.

The administration is hanging on to Assad for its own mysterious reasons, and it’s not Israel’s fault. Here is a letter published today in the Wall St. Journal:

For the second time, a recent Journal article (“Syrian Violence Tests U.S.,” page one, June 3) asserts that Israel has expressed fears of instability in Syria if leader Bashar al-Assad is overthrown. I emphatically denied this the first time (“U.S. Seeks to Raise Heat on Syria,” page one, April 25) and categorically deny it again. Israel has expressed no such concerns. Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region. The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel’s fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.

Ambassador Michael Oren
Israeli Embassy
Washington

Technorati Tags: Syria, Assad, Israel

Rabbi Daniel Gordis has written again about rabbinical students who can’t see the difference between Israel and its enemies. He’s “rendered speechless” by an email to students at a rabbinical school that included this:

For Yom Ha-Zikaron, our kavanah [intention] is to open up our communal remembrance to include losses on all sides of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. In this spirit, our framing question for Yom Ha-Zikaron is this: On this day, what do you remember and for whom do you grieve?”

I don’t blame him for being speechless. Actually he’s not — he has plenty to say about it. He mentions the fact that these students don’t remember a time when there wasn’t a state of Israel, don’t grasp the possibility that Israel could cease to exist, and don’t understand Israel’s importance to Jewish life in the Diaspora.  But then he puts his finger on the central issue:

This new tone in discussions about Israel is so “fair,” so “balanced,” so “even-handed” that what is entirely gone is an instinct of belonging—the visceral sense on the part of these students that they are part of a people, that the blood and the losses that were required to create the state of Israel is their blood and their loss.

Judaism’s commitment to particularism may be based in instinct rather than ratiocination, but it need not be mindless. No thinking Zionist ought to deny that Israel is deeply flawed or that its leadership makes grievous mistakes. Israel, like all free societies, needs internal criticism in order to improve. The right of these rabbinical students to criticize Israel is not in question. What is lacking in their view and their approach is the sense that no matter how devoted Jews may be to humanity at large, we owe our devotion first and foremost to one particular people—our own people.

Gordis points out that, despite rules about the need to treat the stranger (ger) among us fairly, Judaism takes the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ very seriously (in fact the injunction to treat the stranger fairly proves this):

What these students did not learn on their Jewish journeys, because they were not raised that way, was the instinctive Jewish sense that Judaism is, at its core, still a matter of “us” and “them.” To this generation’s students, that claim strikes a horribly discordant tone. To be sure, Jewish tradition is extraordinarily nuanced and generous when it comes to the question of how Jews are to treat non-Jews. But it is a simple matter of fact that Jews have always been taught to care, first and foremost, for other Jews.

Why is this? The first reason is that the Torah is a book about the relationship between God, the Jewish people, and the Land of Israel. Of course it matters if someone is a Jew.

And the second one is the Jewish experience through centuries of Diaspora, the need to remain a people despite persecution. I grew up in a household with immigrants from a place where Jewish life, to borrow Hobbes’ words, was often “nasty, brutish and short.” To them, everything was divided between Jewish and non-Jewish.

This isn’t an easy argument to win with someone educated in an American university in the last 40 years or so. They are taught that the highest ethical value lies in universalism — understanding, engagement (Gordis talks a lot about this), communication, openness, acceptance, multiculturalism, diversity are good. Particularism, orthodoxy (upper- or lower-case ‘o’), moral judgments about cultures, separatism, borders, patriotism, homogeneity, tribalism are bad.

There are lots of internal contradictions in this position. For example, take the most universalist American academic and suggest that his child, or even his cousin’s child, should be the subject of a dangerous experiment that might help find a cure for a plague that kills, say, hundreds of thousands of black Africans every year. Humans are primates and some degree of tribalism is built into them; it’s just a question of where they draw the line.

Consider also that among Israel’s enemies are found some of the most tribal and chauvinistic peoples imaginable, peoples who are generally remarkably intolerant of anyone who is different from them in any way, intolerant on the basis of gender, clan, color, religion, etc. But we are not permitted to think that these cultures are morally inferior — which raises the question of where we get the authority to condemn intolerance in our own culture.

But don’t bother. Gordis is frustrated in trying to get through to these rabbinical students and (worse) their teachers, and I’ve had the same experience. A few years ago I wrote from Israel to friends in the US and tried to express the feeling of belonging that I experienced there, despite the real differences between American and Israeli cultures, differences which often gave rise to dislike or distrust. I wrote about the feeling that I needed to defend these Jews and they would defend me because we were all members of a  people. A people needs to stick together.

Other things being equal, I said, I should come down on the side of the Jew in a conflict between Jews and non-Jews.

They were annoyed. There is no reason for me to feel differently toward someone because he is a Jew, rather than an Arab or a Norwegian, they insisted. That’s a kind of racism, they said.

This is a very deep-seated issue, one of the deepest. Everyone has general moral principles from which they reason out particular decisions (when they do try to reason morally as opposed to simply rationalizing their felt needs and wants). The choice to accept or reject the principle that who a person is can be relevant to our treatment of him is fundamental to one’s moral system.

Gordis thinks he knows why so many American Jews take a different path than that of traditional Jewish ethics:

All this is simply a reflection of the decreased role of “peoplehood” in Judaism. What we are witnessing is a Protestantization of American Jewish life. By and large, today’s rabbinical students did not grow up in homes that were richly Jewish. More often than not, these students came to their Jewish commitments as a result of individual journeys on which they embarked. They sought meaning, and found it. They sought prayer, and learned it. Their Jewish experience is roughly analogous to a Protestant religious awakening. The Protestant religious experience is a deeply personal one, not a communal one. Worship in the Protestant tradition is about reaching for the divine, while in the Jewish tradition, it is no less about creating a bond with other Jews. In Protestant liturgy, history is almost absent, while in the Jewish prayer book, it is omnipresent. The replacement of communal faith by personal journey among today’s young Jews is a profound reflection of the degree to which Christianity has colored their sense of what Judaism at its very core is all about.

So these Jews are closer to the principles found in the Gospels than they are to the Torah, despite the fact that they are studying the Torah. Why? Because years of exposure to popular culture (including Hollywood movies made by Jews!) has inculcated them with the principles of Christian morality first.

They are also far from the persecution that characterized the Diaspora until the golden age for Jews in post-1960 America (and today in the ‘Tel Aviv bubble’). Combine these factors with the previously-mentioned failure to grasp the precariousness and importance of the existence of the Jewish state, and you get what rendered Gordis speechless:

Young Jews that can’t tell the difference between Israel and her enemies.

Technorati Tags: Jews, Daniel Gordis, ethics

Today is Jerusalem Day, 28 Iyar. Jerusalem Day commemorates the reunification of Jerusalem in June, 1967. Today, also, almost no political leader in the world outside of Israel thinks Jerusalem should stay unified. Maybe the reason is that after 1967, Israel didn’t take complete control of the Temple Mount, the central feature of Jerusalem and the holiest place in Judaism.

Here is a post I wrote a few years ago about a man who was there in 1967, and his prayer book. It’s worth a look.

***

This statement was released by Hamas on the occasion of Jerusalem Day:

[We call] for abolition of “Jerusalem Day” and its removal from Israeli calendars, because it is a false holiday commemorating a false event. What is called “The Unification of Jerusalem” was in fact but the creation of a regime of occupation and oppression over the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. It is the rule of police which resorts to the shooting of live ammunition on the streets and resorts to electric shockers against peaceful demonstrators, the rule of settlers who expel Palestinian families from their homes in the middle of the night. Jews were given access to the Western Wall, but inhabitants of the Occupied Territories — Muslims as well as Christians — were denied access to their holy places in Jerusalem. Jerusalem Day is a major holiday for extreme nationalists and racists, settlers and provocateurs. The vast majority of Israeli citizens, including the Israelis living in Jerusalem itself, vote with their feet and stay away from the events of the Jerusalem Day, rightly considering them as a nuisance rather than a holiday.

Oops — it wasn’t Hamas. It was “Gush Shalom,” which means “peace bloc,” an Israeli organization founded by 87-year-old Uri Avnery, the extremist’s extremist, in 1993 to oppose “the repressive measures introduced by the new Labor party government headed by Yitzhak Rabin.”

Avnery has an interesting history. He came to Israel with his family from Germany in 1933, and was a member of the Etzel (“Irgun”) from 1938-42, fought and was seriously wounded in the War of Independence. It was pretty much all leftward after that.

Uri Avnery meets with Arafat in Beirut, 1982, in violation of Israeli law.

Avnery’s Gush Shalom calls for an end to ‘occupation’, removal of all settlements, recognition of a Palestinian ‘right of return’ (somehow in a way which will be harmless to Israel), transfer of all of eastern Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, to the Arabs, etc. It often joins anti-Israel demonstrations, like the weekly riots at Bili’in.

Avnery has clearly devoted his life to his cause, which today seems to be very close to the Palestinian cause — although he seems to think it doesn’t contradict the continued existence of Israel, even the continuation of Jewish lives in Israel. It’s strange.

***

Before independence, eastern Jerusalem had numerous Jewish neighborhoods, including the Jewish Quarter of the old city, as well as mixed areas. All Jews living in them were expelled at gunpoint by Jordanian troops in 1948. Mahmoud Abbas declared last week that there will be no “Israeli presence” civilian or military in the Palestinian state; in December 2010, he was even more specific, saying,

We have frankly said, and always will say: If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it.

Some have insisted that this isn’t a description of a racist state because he said ‘Israelis’ and not ‘Jews’. But given that he considers Arab citizens of Israel ‘Palestinians’, it’s easy to see what he means: he wants to re-institute the Jew-free Jerusalem of the Jordanian period. Do you think they will allow us to visit the kotel [Western Wall]? I doubt it.

***

Here’s some more Arab wisdom about Jerusalem from Abbas Zaki, former PLO Ambassador to Lebanon:

With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.

Pay attention.

Technorati Tags: Jerusalem, Israel

Who do the territories belong to?

In Hebrew, with English subtitles. Definitely worth your 6 minutes.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Judea and Samaria