Pelosi's support for Israel

Life is so much easier for the hardline extremes on Israel -- for those who are inordinantly critical AND for those who will never criticize Israel for being too rigid or harsh in its policies. This JTA article of Nov. 8, on Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Speaker of the House, and her strong personal ties with Jewish friends and neighbors from childhood, provides me with a mix of feelings. First, I'm pleased that she has warm feelings toward Jews and toward Israel. Secondly, I hope that she will have the insight and skill to encourage Israel toward a genuine peace process without seeming to be a critic or opponent of Israel. Only time will tell.

"Pelosi's support for Israel is heartfelt, supporters say" By Jennifer Jacobson

Now that the Democrats have taken control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the party is expected to install Pelosi, 66, as speaker, making her the first woman to hold the position that is two heartbeats away from the presidency. Political observers say it's no surprise that the congresswoman from San Francisco considers herself close to the Jews. The daughter of Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., a former mayor of Baltimore, Pelosi grew up in a Democratic family with Jewish neighbors and friends.

"She likes to say that, growing up in Baltimore, she went to a bar or bat mitzvah every Saturday," Amy Friedkin, a former president of AIPAC and a friend of Pelosi's for 25 years, wrote in an e-mail message to JTA. Friedkin noted that there's even a soccer field in the Haifa area of Israel named after the lawmaker's family. While the Republicans had campaigned partly on the premise that support for Israel among Democrats has waned, exit polls from Tuesday's voting show that Democrats won an overwhelming majority of the Jewish vote. With Pelosi as speaker, Jewish activists and officials are confident that the U.S. Congress will remain strongly pro-Israel.

"I've heard her say numerous times that the single greatest achievement of the 20th century" was the founding of the modern state of Israel, Friedkin wrote. "She has been a great friend of the U.S.-Israel relationship during her entire time in Congress and is deeply committed to strengthening that relationship."

Sam Lauter, a pro-Israel activist in San Francisco, has known Pelosi for nearly 40 years. He was 5 years old when the Pelosis moved into his San Francisco neighborhood, he recalls. The two families lived on the same street. "She's one of the classiest," most "straightforward people you could ever meet," Lauter said. "She's incredibly loyal."

Lauter said the Pelosis used to attend the first night of the Passover seder at his parents' house. "As far as the Jewish community is concerned, she feels our issues in her soul," he said.

To illustrate his point, Lauter told a Pelosi story that has become almost legendary in the Jewish community. At an AIPAC members luncheon in San Francisco right after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Pelosi was speaking when an alarm sounded. "Everybody started getting nervous, scrambling toward the door," Lauter recalled. One person, though, was reading the words of Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, above the din. It was Pelosi.

"It actually calmed the crowd," Lauter said. "You could see people actually smiling, saying 'Wow.' " This "wasn't something done purposefully to show everyone that Nancy Pelosi supports the Jewish community," he said. It "actually came from inside her."

Lauter and others say Pelosi will have to draw on that inner strength as speaker, since Lauter predicted that she will hear from those in the Jewish community who argue that Democrats no longer support Israel the way they used to. Some Republicans, in fact, questioned Pelosi's support for Israel this summer. The congresswoman ended up removing her name as a co-sponsor from a House resolution supporting the Jewish state during its war with Hezbollah because it did not address the protection of civilians.

While Pelosi's aides said she was not going to lend her name to a resolution that did not contain a word she had written, Republicans criticized the move. "It highlights a real wave within the Democratic Party that wants a more 'evenhanded' approach on these issues, and that wants to view Israel through the same prism as we do Hezbollah," Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said at the time. "Watering down is not acceptable right now." Brooks could not be reached for comment this week.

For his part, Lauter believes the argument about the Democrats and Pelosi is false. For instance, he noted Pelosi's quick response to former President Carter's description of Israel's settlement policies as "apartheid" in a forthcoming book. Pelosi publicly announced that Carter does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel.

Rabbi Doug Kahn, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in San Francisco, also applauded Pelosi's repudiation of Carter's position. He has known Pelosi since she started representing his district in 1987. Kahn said his group has always had an excellent working relationship with her. And he praised her passion for issues that relate to equal opportunity, social justice and peace.

Kahn, echoing Lauter's point, said that Pelosi, coming from a city with such a liberal political reputation, will face challenges from the liberal segments of the Democratic Party that have criticized Israeli policies. But he is confident that Pelosi, as speaker, will be effective in persuading people with a broad range of views on the Middle East, the importance of
maintaining bipartisan support for Israel.

When it comes to Israel, "she truly gets it," said Matt Dorf, a consultant to the Democratic National Committee. She gets "Israel's value and asset to U.S. security" and its "importance as the only democracy in the Middle East."

Jewish organizational officials also commend Pelosi's record on Jewish communal issues. William Daroff, vice president for public policy for the United Jewish Communities, the federation system's umbrella group and a Republican himself, said the lawmaker has helped ensure federal funding of Jewish family service agencies and Jewish hospitals and has supported government programs and policies that Jewish organizations value, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

He also noted that Reva Price, Pelosi's liaison to the Jewish community for a year and a half, came from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella group of local community relations councils. Bringing on board such an insider was "really a masterful stroke," Daroff said. Price, he added, has done a wonderful job of playing "traffic cop" with Jewish organizations and in making sure that Pelosi's agenda is in tune with that of the Jewish community. She's been "a real champion of making sure the Jewish community is well served," Daroff said of the lawmaker. "I'm sure she'll continue to be a champion."

Gershon Baskin on new cease-fire

We pray that the new cease-fire will hold and lead to a geunine peace process. The following is the Nov. 28 edition of "This week in Israel….. Behind the news with Gershon Baskin," published in the Jerusalem Times, East Jerusalem's English-language weekly:

The Cease fire

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Israel and the Palestinians declared a bilateral cease fire. Even though, for the time being, the cease fire is limited to Gaza, it is a blanket cessation of hostilities covering all acts of aggression from both sides. This idea was presented to Prime Minister Olmert in the beginning of June 2006 by IPCRI but was summarily rejected by him for two reasons: (1) Israel would have nothing to do with an agreement that involved Hamas, and (2) because, he said, the Palestinians could not be trusted to enforce a cease fire. Olmert, at the time did say that if the Palestinians ceased their aggressive acts, Israel would have no reason to fire back. But then came the attack on Kerem Shalom and the kidnapping of Gilead Shalit and the sharp increase of Israeli aggression in Gaza leaving more than 350 Palestinians dead in the past months.

Some of the explanations for the sudden change in policy might be:

1. A Change in US policy. Following the Republican loss of both Houses of Congress and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, it has been suggested that President Bush is now going to turn his attention to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Prime Minister Olmert may have heard about this change during his recent visit to Washington and decided to take some pre-emptive steps in that direction. Press reports after the US elections profiled the new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and referred to a report that Gates was the co-author of by the Council of Foreign Relations on US policy vis-a-vis Iran. In the operative section of the report dealing with policy recommendations it was suggested that the US needs to work on isolating Iran and the best way to do that would be to strengthen US ties to moderate Middle East regimes. The report suggested that the best way to strengthen US ties in the region would be to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bush has two years left in the White House and until now he was created greater instability in the region and has helped to bring about a situation where there are at least three possible civil wars in the region (Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon).

Bush has been consulting with the closest advisors and decision makers of the administration of his father’s administration, including James Baker. Baker has been working with former Congressman Lee Hamilton on preparing a detailed report for Bush on what should be done in Iraq. Leaks from that report have already appeared in the NY Times in which Bush is being advised to open dialogue with Syria and Iran. Baker has been deeply involved in Track II meetings between Israelis and Palestinians in the past years and it is well known that he is a strong advocate of the two-state solution. He also proved when he was Secretary of State that he has no hesitations about confronting the Government of Israel head-on. Most people recall Bakers strong position against Israeli settlements and his decision to withhold US loan guarantees when the stubborn Yitzhak Shamir was Prime Minister. In his famous press conference Baker stated that if Shamir wished to speak with him, Shamir could call him "my number is 242-338" (significant numbers which are very difficult to forget!).

2. No agenda. Since the war in Lebanon this summer it has been quite clear that Olmert’s government lacks a political agenda. I have written in this column in the past that governments without an agenda and without a political horizon that provides hope to the people do not survive for very long. Olmert had continued to hope that he could revive his plan for unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank, but that has grown increasingly unpopular in Israel. Recognizing the need for a new agenda, Olmert understood that he could not present anything new without a calming of the violence and he has finally understood that a cease fire must be bilateral.

3. Pressure on the Palestinians. The massive Israeli attacks and the heavy toll on the loss of life and property have also had significant impact on the Palestinian side. People in Gaza are fed up with the situation and feel a strong need for a relaxation period.

4. Progress on the internal Palestinian dialogue. Although the Palestinians have not yet reached full agreement on a new Government, it is recognized by all parties that Ismail Haniyeh will not be the Prime Minister in the new government. This was a major hurdle to cross. There also seems to be agreement on the appointment of Mohammed Shbair as the next Prime Minister, an Islamist academic, but not a member of Hamas. The dialogue has not reached agreement on the government’s platform nor on the acceptance of the Quartet demands, but it has been agreed that President Abbas will have a full mandate to carry on with negotiations with Israel.

5. Khaled Mashal backing the cease fire. Khaled Mashal, the main spoiler until now has come out on top and the main decision maker in Palestinian politics. This is, once again, thanks to Olmert’s resistance to deal with Abbas more seriously. Khaled Mashal came to Egypt for talks with the Egyptian leadership and the Palestinian factions. Once Mashal agreed to the terms of the cease fire was it possible to reach agreement with Israel. Although Israel never negotiated directly with Mashal, Olmert’s chief of staff, Yoram Torbovich and his chief policy advisor, Shalom Turjeman were meeting regularly with Saeb Erikat and Abass’s chief of staff Rafiq Husseini.

Additionally, Israel has been in constant contact with Egyptian Security Minister Omar Suleiman and despite Suleiman’s rocky relationship with Mashal, he has the power and the ability to influence Mashal. Suleiman is on his way to Israel and Palestine to help to conclude the negotiations for a prisoner exchange that will bring about the release of Gilead Shalit. (more on this to follow).

6. The Olmert-Peretz feud. Both Olmert and Peretz are struggling to regain public confidence in their abilities to govern. Both are facing the lowest level of public support ever known by a Prime Minister and a Defense Minister in Israel. Over the past weeks, Peretz had initiated a dialogue with Abbas, much to the anger of Olmert. With a new feud between the two in place, it became clear that there would be a competition on who has the mandate to talk to the Palestinians. Although no direct meetings have yet been held, the competition between the two speeded up contacts between the advisors on both sides.

7. Marwan Barghouthi. In prison, Marwan Barghouthi has been actively engaged in internal Palestinian politics, helping to orchestrate the first tahdiya (calm or cease fire) and then leading the work on the prisoners’ document. Now, Barghouthi has been heavily engaged in the negotiations between the factions on reaching a new cease fire. Israel’s Channel 10 News disclosed last evening that Meretz MK Haim Oron (Jumas) has been deeply involved in intensive private meetings with Barghouthi for more than a year. The meetings were first authorized by Prime Minister Sharon and the by Olmert. We are sure to be seeing more of Barghouthi’s name in the press in the context of the future prisoner exchange. Now would be a very opportune time to release Barghouthi and to hope that he will capture the Palestinian leadership and lead other practical Palestinians towards new permanent status negotiations with Israel.

The hope now is that the cease fire in Gaza will hold and that it will spread to the West Bank. Israel has given a green light for the return to the West Bank of the "Bader Brigade" – Palestinian forces in Jordan loyal to Abbas. A significant prisoner release including Barghouthi and the return of the Bader Brigade will help to stabilize the Palestinian situation. What will be important is for negotiations to resume between Olmert and Abbas that will strengthen the moderates. Additionally, life must return to more normalcy in the occupied territories. Israel must agree to re-open borders and crossings, to remove check points in the West Bank and to free the hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenues that Israel is illegally holding since the elections of Hamas.

Prisoner exchange negotiations

Despite the optimism reported in the press about the negotiations and the statement of Olmert at the annual ceremony in memory of David Ben Gurion regarding a generous prisoner release, the negotiations are virtually frozen and the gaps are huge. Hamas is insisting to agree on the number of Palestinian prisoners to be released and the categories of prisoners to be included. Hamas is demanding that all of the women and minors be released (number about 400) and that an additional 1000 prisoners including those with life sentences, ill prisoners, Hamas politicians, leaders such as Marwan Barghouthi and Ahmad Saadat, and many others be included in the deal. Israel has been pressuring Hamas to submit lists of names in order to be more concrete in the negotiations. Hamas has insisted to first agree on the numbers and the categories and only then to submit the list of names. Israel has apparently agreed thus far to release between 300-400 prisoners.

Khaled Mashal and other Hamas leaders have said that they would like to end this affair as soon as possible, but that they would not compromise on the number of prisoners to be released. Mashal has said that they have patience and can continue to hold Shalit for months. Despite the political and security difficulties in releasing prisoners, I am afraid that without meeting the Hamas demands, Gilead Shalit will remain in the hands of the kidnappers for many more months. It is time to bring him home.

Gershon Baskin is the Co-CEO of IPCRI – the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. www.ipcri.org

Our Man In Baghad Returns Home

Heading back for Thanksgiving in a couple of days, after a stop in Jordan. I didn't even have time to get into trouble here. But not to worry, I'll figure a way to do so. And I'll be back in B early next year in any event. I can do much of the work from home with a daily hour Baghdad telecon, plus phone meetings with the Embassy and business center board.

A friend of mine wrote from Luanda that an average meal costs $50 and his decaying apartment $3,500/month. For that kiind of money here you can have Saddam himself serve your food (be sure to hire a taster) and clean your toilet (have your taster sit on it first).

A tragic development is that my printer no longer speaks Chinese. It has been fixed. The English voice every time I print is plain annoying.

Street smarts. While at my desk on Friday I heard a loud "WWHHHARRRRRRR!!!!" It was not a scream in pain, but a throaty burst of deep anguish. The rooms of my Kaleej hotel, like many buildings here, are set about 3 feet back from the outside wall, forming a shallow terrace. The false front, usually featuring arched openings, protects the rooms from the direct sunlight and heat. My old room overlooked a courtyard between the Al Kaleej and Ba hdad Hotels (the "g" is missing from the sign). Peppered with temporary buildings and decorated with razor wire and a stylish assortment of blast walls, the yard features five machine gun nests pointed inside. I hope nothing ever happens in the yard, these guys will shoot each other.

My new room overlooks Sadoon Street, featuring nine barricaded emplacements, all mercifully pointed outward. Once Sadoon was one of the busiest thoroughfares. At the second wwhhaaarrr!!--only one cry is too ordinary to capture attention--I rushed out onto my fourth floor terrace to see what was up. On Friday, unless you are planting bombs or are an American working against a deadline, you are in a mosque, with family, on a picnic, or just outta here. So the streets were nearly empty. I watched a dissheveled man stagger down Sadoon, arms tucked into armpits, bellowing again and again. The few people nearby did not take notice. I was too far away and walled off, and it was too dangerous for me to try to go out anyway. In less than two minutes a police van with a loud siren pulled up, grabbed him the way passing trains used to grab mail sacks off of extended hooks without slowing down, and rocketed away. Across Sadoon I saw a dad on a roof, holding his toddler son, watching it all unfold, the dad indifferent.

Electron night results. I bought a charming electric alarm clock at the PX that wakes me when it chooses and keeps time with the consistency of Bush's Iraq policy. Maybe the two are related. The problem is that its (the clock's, not the President's) back-up battery maintains the clock when the electricity cuts out, but at a more leisurely pace than Greenwich suggests. The electricity goes out 5-15 times/day, much worse than before, despite the fact that since I last was here, all but one of our old generators have been replaced by new ones. Most electrical lapses are restored promptly, but our generators have to be hand started, and sometimes in the evening or during the night the process takes a long time. Each night I try to trick the clock by advancing it the number of minutes I think it will lose. The clock is winning by losing, and I am losing by advancing. Like its relative's Iraq policy.

Noses are red, violence are blue. I got it wrong, really wrong, when I suggested that from my limited time "out" I thought things might be cooling down. Yes, there is less traffic on the streets. Because there is more terror aimed at keeping people off them. Business has largely shut down. Owners either close their shops and factories or visit them infrequently. They not only change the times and routes that they occasionally travel to work, but now they change their cars, too. Ammar's neighbor decided to go against the grain. With a couple of "friends" he discussed plans for reopening his business. He was shot the next day.

Did you know it is American policy not to count Iraqi deaths? Ammar is a Shia. He owns land away from Baghdad. Several months ago he went to see it and found that it had been usurped by people who now fish farm on it. They knew who he was. They simply warned him not to come back unless he fancied a haircut with an ax. Nor can he visit his parents' house. They are in Amman now with Ammar's wife and children. Despite the fact that the Shia and Sunni neighbors are good friends of long standing, anyone--any gardner, passer-by, maid, driver, or person with a grudge--could do him in. Ammar is a bit dramatic, but I guess that comes of being kidnapped twice.

By the way, kidnappings are up ten fold over about a year and a half ago, and that doesn't even include the recent heist at the Ministry of Education. Mohammed, a Sunni, says that delivering goods anywhere is impossible. An associate of his is a Sunni vegetable dealer. His major market always had been in a Shiite neighborhood. The associate dare not drive his produce to market now. So, he brings his vegetables to a Shia in a secret garage. The Shia buys at deep discount, transfers trucks, and takes the produce to the market. Both are at great risk. A dope deal in reverse. Raid says that the labor pool extends as far as neighborhood boundaries. You can't look for the best workers or even ones with the skills you may need, but can only hire whoever does not have to travel to work, whatever skills he may possess. The other reason things do not appear so bad is that the focus of the violence is now so internal that Americans are less a part of the picture.

Contact cement. Limited mobility and long work long together tends to set friendships quickly and fix them fast. People I could barely recall remembered me, how long I had been gone, and what I had been doing when I was here. It is less flattering than it seems. It is the environment and the limited opportunities for socialization.

Duane is one of those. We had talked for about fifteen minutes at a birthday party for an Iraqi here in May or June. Then we both left, he for an Iraqi FOB. I came back days before Duane. Duane specializes in solving problems in danger areas for Sandi. A retired Navy officer with three grown kids (two military and one studying undertaking--nice--none will ever run out of work), he has tried two HVAC businesses, real estate, and retirement. Nothing floated his boat. Now he moves form one job and company to another, at least until May. That is when Duane's wife graduates medical school in Florida, for which his contracting jobs pay. Then she will become a hospital administrator (she already has whatever other degree she needs) and he will move back. Duane has little use for American companies and even less for the Iraqis with whom he works. His life will begin again after May, so he says.

I have a friend at State, a refugee from the Big Four. By her own description a rich girl and a passionate conservative, she came to Baghdad in 2003 when ideals were high and the situation loose. She went home deflated in early '06. She could not stay away, for many of the same reasons that I came back. She is irritated all the time now. When she first came she could go out on the street, meet people, buy food and goods, even go out to eat/drink. Now she feels--and is--far more confined than I. Because she watched this place in Dante-ian descent, she understands why she cannot go out. Still, she finds the path from friendly and even hopeful relationships between Americans and Iraqis into interactions punctuated by suspicion, fear, and danger intensely depressing.

Like a lot of the "officials" here, she was indifferent not just to Rumsfeld's fate, but to pronouncements of any sort from Washington. She hopes for any change for the better, but remains skeptical that it will happen. She finds it easier to talk to outsiders than openly where she lives/works. She feels people insdie the IZ are so isolated they still don't get it. Most rotate out at the first opporunity and just haven't seen what she has.

Her conservatism is tarnished as she grows sick and sicker of our presence and of the mess we have made of our ideals and Iraqi lives. Mostly, she talks about quitting, but cannot bring herself to do it. I could repeat the story for a friend at USAID, who has finally admitted that they have done nothing in three years. She has left on an extended vacation and it is rumored she will not return--sort of like Mike, the missing scrap iron PSD.

You know, of course, that we are building the world's largest embassy in Iraq. It is almost complete--at least the outside. It has top priority as a construction project. Cutting and running under the Dems? I don't think so. With all the space in the IZ ["Green Zone"], a large source of government income for the U.S. is leasing of "villas" to corporate and other interests who want to be close to action. All straightforward venality, no corruption, I'm sure. Leave that to the Iraqis.

I've heard some novel Ministry corruption schemes, one perhaps involving several people I know. Meanwhile, out of a $34 billion budget, Iraq has about $15-18 billion unspent in 2006. Is this good or bad? I'm thinking folks here might could use it. I also calculated that given what we have spent, if we had just given $30,000 to every man, woman, and child in Iraq in 2003, we'd have been farther ahead.

What has four legs and flies? The chafing dish in the Ba hdad Hotel (most buffets are all you can eat--ours is any you can eat). Also Raqi, a two month old doberman pup that Tamra, Nael, and Jason have adopted and I named. Every time I go the the IZ, I pick up a dozen Stars and Stripes for Raqi's "trainings." I told a puzzled guard at the Embassy gate I was reading Raqi's toilet. He didn't get it, but then again he doesn't speak English. It was a blow, since I have always found that non-English speakers are my best audience. Raqi doesn't get it either. He still pees and poops on my rug.

From a moderate in AIPAC

In what would surely be to the befuddlement of Professors Mearsheimer, Walt and others who see pro-Israel sentiment as sinister ("neoconservative") and inimical to US interests, this AIPAC member critcizes AIPAC from both a pro-Israel and pro-peace point of view. The following is an abbreviated version of this Haaretz online article of Nov. 17 :

Wanted: A moderate pro-Israel lobby By Gidon D. Remba

.... AIPAC claims that it champions the policies of the elected Israeli government, whatever they may be. But it does not faithfully live up to this promise: Over the past 20 years, it has supported right-wing governments in Israel wholeheartedly, while being halfhearted, or worse, about the policies of left-wing administrations. And when Israel is ruled from the right, AIPAC's credo makes supporting Israel synonymous with lining up behind policies which many American Jews - and often the other half or more of the Israeli public - think baneful for Israel's quest for peace and security.

Indeed, AIPAC sometimes tries to be more Israeli than the Israeli government, urging American Jews and their elected representatives in Washington to oppose moderate, responsible positions on Israel, while hewing to the hardest line on the Israeli and American Jewish political spectrum.

Earlier this year, following the Hamas electoral earthquake in the Palestinian Authority, AIPAC wrote and championed a bill called the Palestinian Anti- Terrorism Act of 2006, which fortunately failed to become the law of the land. This bill called not only for sanctions against the Hamas-led PA, but for a sweeping and unprecedented boycott of Fatah and PLO officials like Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his allies in the Palestinian Legislative Council. In contrast to Hamas, Abbas advocates peace and negotiations with Israel and opposes terrorism and violence. He merits support, not sanctions....

Furthermore, the bill incorporated a laundry list of pie-in-the-sky conditions for removing the new sanctions that were unrelated to Hamas or to stopping terror. It would have blocked the United States from aiding or dealing with any part of the Palestinian leadership, even were Hamas sent packing. It deprived the president of a national security waiver (common to other sanctions legislation) for special circumstances when such flexibility is deemed essential for safeguarding American security interests. And after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict Hamas' electoral victory, the bill virtually barred the CIA from operating covertly in the Palestinian arena to gather intelligence on Islamic extremists - another blow to U.S. and Israeli national security.

The bill was so blunt an instrument it might well have strengthened Hamas, spawning greater anarchy and chaos in the West Bank and Gaza, escalating the security threats facing both Israel and the United States in the region. Indeed, the Bush administration itself strenuously opposed the AIPAC-backed House bill. It would have hamstrung U.S. efforts to ensure that Abbas "can fulfill his duties as president, prevent Hamas from taking over the rest of the PA and the PLO, and prevail in any confrontation with Hamas," according to a memo sent by the administration to Congress. Nor did the bill's follies end there.

The saga of the bill's demise has become the butt of a new controversy sparked by the initiative of three of America's leading center-left Zionist groups - Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom - and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism to explore, with philanthropist George Soros and others, the possibility of forming a moderate, pro-Israel American Jewish lobby in Washington. These groups have worked to change the terms of AIPAC's House bill, for which they now stand accused, by AIPAC partisans, of irresponsibly opposing "legislation penalizing the Palestinians for putting their government in the hands of terrorists." They came together, charge the critics, "in an ad hoc coalition to shield the Hamas-led PA from Congressional sanctions." In fact, all the groups supported sanctions against Hamas, but not the AIPAC bill's more sweeping bid to ostracize all Palestinian leaders....
Few expect AIPAC to fight for a U.S.-Israeli peace initiative involving Syria or the Palestinians when it is needed most, creating incentives for curbing Hezbollah and Hamas militants. We must, to prevent a new and more ruinous war.

A new pro-Israel umbrella group or resource center would likely work in tandem with AIPAC for the same robust American backing for Israel's military, economic and diplomatic needs, as its constituent groups have long done. But when AIPAC sabotages the mission of dovish Israeli governments, or of a U.S. president collaborating with them; when it flexes its political muscles to push Congress to adopt reckless legislation which jeopardizes the chance for a future Arab-Israeli peace; when it marches in lock step off the cliff with a pro-settlement Israeli coalition opposed even to the most cautious peace probes with Israel's Arab neighbors - a new Israel lobby could actively work to give voice to the many American Jews who see eye-to-eye with the sensible and the sane....

Gidon D. Remba, a veteran Chicago-based Israel activist, is coauthor of the forthcoming "The Great Rift: Arab-Israeli War and Peace in the New Middle East."

New Opportunities for Peace?

Unless another poster picks up the slack this week, this will be our last posting until after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. What follows are two expressions from our pro-Israel peace camp detailing a way out of the mounting dilemmas. The first is from Meretz USA board member, Arthur Obermayer, an original founder. The second, which Arthur refers to, is by Daniel Levy, a primary drafter of the Geneva Initiative, who is on leave from Israel this year in Washington, DC.

I. From Arthur Obermayer:

Although there have been many reasons during the past few months to be pessimistic about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I feel that there is a lot going on right now which may provide major opportunities for progress:

1. Israelis seem to be realizing that unilateral withdrawals do not work; negotiated agreements are necessary.
2. A new Palestinian government, whose prime minister is not part of Hamas, will provide new opportunities for negotiation. You may be aware that the designated prime minister, Mohammed Shabir, has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of West Virginia and was president of the Islamic University of Gaza and speaks English.
3. Both the Palestinian and Israeli governments are weak [virtually paralyzed -- Ed.] and a reasonable negotiated agreement would strengthen their internal positions.
4. It is clear that both Democratic leaders and the Baker/Hamilton Commission will strongly favor negotiations and diplomacy over confrontation. Daniel Levy's proposal to extend the Baker/Hamilton Commission to include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very constructive and should be supported.
5. The imposition of preconditions to negotiations are a stumbling block. Preconditions are imposed either because your negotiators are weak and will give in too easily, or because you are only willing to "negotiate" if you have won your key issues before you start.
   

There have been too many times before when the stars have seemed to be aligned just right, but maybe this time?

II. This part of Daniel Levy's article in Washington Monthly , sagely and subtly addressing the anti-Israel fervor raised by the likes of Mearsheimer and Walt, especially resonates for me:

Recently, there has been a tendency to conflate the neoconservative agenda with the Israeli interest. This is both wrong-headed and disastrous for Israel’s predicament. There is a narrative that links America and Israel’s common interests that is not of neoconservative design. The Democratic Congress needs to discover that narrative.

During the election campaign, some Democrats with Jewish constituencies did make the connection by noting that the Iraq war strengthens jihadists and emboldens Iran. Now, there’s a second sentence that needs to be articulated: American disengagement from the peace process and from its active mediating role has also been bad for Israel.

To guarantee its future as a secure Jewish and democratic state, Israel needs agreed and recognized borders. The vast majority of Israelis understand this, and the precedent was set in evacuating Gaza. Israel is now groping for a formula to part ways with the West Bank (minus the agreed mutual modifications to 1967 line), and Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem. But rather than help smooth this difficult transition, the United States merely appears uninterested.

For Democratic legislators to make this argument and to encourage a policy rethink via a Baker-Hamilton study group, the politics will also have to add up. That calculation isn’t so simple. In recent years, the GOP has made a bold play to peel off Jewish supporters and donors by citing President Bush’s strong support for Israel. Democrats may worry that establishing a commission to assess those policies might advance this GOP effort.

No doubt it will on the margins. But anecdotal and polling evidence suggest that the silent majority of the Jewish community is hungry for a progressive move to renew peace efforts and hope: Democrats would likely be surprised at just how favorably much of their Jewish base would respond to a new direction. This path also offers the chance to prevent a looming rift between the Democratic Jewish base and the progressive foreign policy community. A pro-peace process Democratic voice that is at the same time firmly pro-Israel (remember President Clinton?) could help prevent a schism between these two key constituencies. So far, however, Democrats have allowed Republicans to "out-pro-Israel" them, by failing to challenge a neocon orthodoxy that ultimately damages Israel and the United States. A large part of the pro-Israel community appears ready for this message....

How Yossi Klein Halevi Disappoints

During the 1970s, I became familiar with the young Yossi Klein, the feisty left-wing editor of the Long Island Jewish World who made aliya in 1982. Aside from adding to his name, he's since achieved status as a respected mainstream journalist and writer. Among other things, he's a contributing editor and Israel correspondent for The New Republic and the author of "Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist" -- about his time as a teenager supporting Meir Kahane -- and "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden" -- on his late '90s dialogues with Muslims and Christians in Israel and the Palestinians territories.

I heard him speak at my Upper West Side Manhattan synagogue this past Shabbat, the last of a long line of annual speakers to honor the memory of Paul Cowan, the gentle, good-hearted liberal journalist -- the author of "An Orphan In History" -- who decided to seriously observe Judaism as an adult and played a critical role in reviving this Conservative congregation (Ansche Chesed).

Klein is as powerful a speaker as he is a writer. He spoke memorably on how Cowan steered clear of political correctness by discovering the lives of people he disagreed with, getting to know their fears and pains rather than engaging in stereotypes and in easy condemnations. It is in this spirit that Klein embarked upon his quest for common ground with Muslims and Christians for his "Garden of Eden" book -- especially with Palestinian Muslims in 1998 and '99.

I respect his judgment that Islam is neither an evil doctrine as depicted by the fire-breathing right among both Christians and Jews, nor simply a religion of love as stated by (of all people) George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11 and believed by the PC-prone left. As with Christianity and Judaism, Islam contains textual references that are objectionable -- even hateful -- to modern sensibilities. As with the other two as well, Klein notes that there are statements of tolerance and universalism.

A point he made that was new to me, but clearly true, is that Islam is the only one of the three Western monotheistic faiths that was born in power, specifically through the immediate spread of an empire. This is in contrast to Judaism -- born of a small struggling people, even a faith of slaves as recounted in the Bible -- and Christianity, emerging from the sufferings on the Cross and of its earliest adherents who endured more than two centuries of persecution. What this means for us today is that Muslims see political power as a matter of right; they see it as unjust and unnatural that they've lost this status to the ascendency of the "dhimmis" (the Koran's protected minorities) of the Christian West and the Jewish State of Israel.

Klein mentioned the following Muslim argument he is familiar with: "Don't worry. We have a place for you [as a protected minority] under Islam." This medieval form of pluralism during Islam's Golden Age was better for the Jews than what Christianity provided, but is not acceptable by today's standards, because it guarantees that Jews would be constitutionally subservient to Muslims.

Klein darkly suggested that the memory of empire is probably behind the Madrid train bombings two years ago. He also recounted a Jewish-Christian-Muslim panel discussion he helped organize on the future of Jerusalem. The organizers could only find one Muslim participant (a high school principal from the Galilee) at the last minute, because it's hard to find Muslims who feel secure enough to engage in such public events; and this individual spent his time denying that the Jews ever had a Beit Migdash, the Temple in Jerusalem.

Klein's talk was even more pessimistic than this indicates; he believes that the Oslo peace process failed because the "secular elites" among both Israelis and Palestinians ignored the religious dimension. He sees a religious dialogue as essential, and -- believe it or not -- finds the only hope for peace in this context. He wishes that all Muslims were Sufis, the most open-minded variant of Islam, but joked that there's still a difference between California Sufis and Palestinian Sufis. Yet, from almost everything he said, hope is somewhere between slim and none -- since Palestinians, including the moderates, will not concede any legitimacy to Jews as a sovereign indigenous people in the Middle East.

I too regard this as a problem, but not necessarily a deal breaker. We can engage with "technical moderates" who make a peace agreement out of practical necessity and not because they understand our yearning for Zion or our need for a Jewish state as a safe haven. I also think he exaggerates the extent of this problem. I know of at least one or two Palestinians who accept the legitimacy of Zionism and I've never explicitly sought out others.

But what disturbs me about Klein's views is that he relies on this religious meta-theory for Israel's perpetual war without examining what Israel does on the ground. Klein's a moderate who does not lament his support for Sharon's disengagement from Gaza and sees a need for further withdrawals from the West Bank. He is very typical of Israeli political attitudes, a bellwether who has long voted for the winner in elections. In '92 he supported Rabin, in '96 he switched to Netanyahu, in '99 he was for Barak, in 2001 and 2003 for Sharon, and in 2006 for Olmert. He now joins with a majority of Israelis as seeing Olmert as an empty suit.

He proudly sees himself as a realist who rejects the Greater Israel fantasies of the right while also rejecting the "naivite" of the left. Not once do I recall him mentioning the option of actually engaging with Mahmoud Abbas in negotiations or of responding to, at least in terms of exploring, the Saudi/Arab League peace proposal. He now sees the prospect for a Palestinian state as nothing more than a terrorist "Hamasland." He categorically rejects the notion that if Israel withdrew to the pre-1967 borders, peace would result; he might even be right, but in prejudging the Palestinians in this way, he engages in stereotypic thinking, the opposite of Paul Cowan's empathic approach to journalism.

You would think that Klein would be humble about his political instincts, because not only has he consistently voted with the winner, but he's also consistently seen his prior choice as a mistake. One can forgive him his youthful indiscretions as a Kahane supporter and then perhaps an overly vociferous leftist before making aliya, but his political mood-swings as an adult undermine his credibility as an analyst.

I would have given him more credit if he saw how tenuous and fragile Israeli peace moves were in the 1990s. Soon after the handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993, much good will was shattered by a heinous event in February 1994. The failure of the Rabin govenment to provide redress to the Palestinians for Baruch Goldstein's massacre of 29 Muslims at the Hebron mosque was a critical moment because it gave impetus (along with another 30 or so Palestinians who were killed by police and/or soldiers in rioting that followed) to the suicide bombing campaigns of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In fact, the man who adapted the suicide belt for Palestinian use, Yihyah Ayyash -- Hamas's "engineer" -- is said to have been inspired by these events to become a terrorist. An appropriate response to Goldstein would have been for Israel to remove the violent extremist communities of settlers who spawned Goldstein from Hebron and/or Kiryat Arba. Rabin almost went that way but lost his nerve.

Furthermore, the wave of terrorism that erased Shimon Peres's 20-point lead over Netanyahu early in 2006 was a direct response to the Shin Bet "hit" on Ayyash. (Ayyash deserved to die, but it would have been wiser for Peres not to stir up a hornet's nest by killing him; Rabin -- ever the more prudent leader than Peres -- had already nixed one shot at Ayyash and probably would have vetoed this as well.)

With the election of Netanyahu, although he continued to engage in negotiations brokered by Washington, Israel had a leadership that no longer really believed in the peace process, and this made a difference. Moreover, the settlement population did famously double during the 1990s and continued to expand even under Barak, also a prime minister who departed from the Oslo timeframe and disregarded its spirit.

Obviously, I can't recount all of the misjudgments and mean-spirited policies by Israel (let alone the crimes of Palestinians), but there's plenty of explanation here that has nothing to do, per se, with religious doctrine. This is why I see Klein as mistaken in his viewpoint.

And his prognostication for Iran is both grim and laughable. In fact, I did laugh when he suggested that the only likely fix for a nuclear Iran is an Israeli attack. I am not laughing about the danger, nor of the slim prospects for the feckless international community to effectively deal with this looming crisis, but to think that Israel (or even the US, which he now discounts because of the quagmire in Iraq) could come up with a military solution against Iran's hardened and dispersed nuclear facilities seems ludicrous. In the same spirit, Klein disappoints in thinking that there really was a military solution to the problem of Hezbollah last summer or of Hamas today.

Surprising Take on 'Rachel Corrie'

The following is a somewhat abbreviated version of a New York Magazine review of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie." Rachel Corrie's story is a tragedy. She was a well-meaning naif who perished in what I fervently hope was an accident, as she sought to protect a house being bulldozed along the Egyptian-Gaza border to counter the tunneling of arms and explosives. Note the surprising revelation in the final paragraph below:

Stand and Don’t Deliver: After all the drama around 'My Name Is Rachel Corrie', what are we to make of the actual play? By Jeremy McCarter

On March 16, 2003, Corrie died horribly beneath an Israeli bulldozer, and her appropriation began. Yasser Arafat seized upon her as a martyr, and the Israeli right denounced her and the International Solidarity Movement. But Corrie had left behind some eloquent diaries and e-mails, from which actor-director Alan Rickman and Guardian editor Katharine Viner decided to fashion a script....

Corrie’s death was important, and the subject is excruciatingly important, but the play is not important. It’s a well-meaning wisp.

As Corrie describes her girlhood in Washington State, she shows a sharp eye and a flair for language. (“He pronounces his words like rubber bands stretched and snapping,” she says of a boy she likes.) Once in Gaza, she’s astute to worry about a generation of children who will grow up knowing only this violence, and she flashes a blistering eloquence in a climactic speech (forcefully delivered by Megan Dodds) in which she vents her “disbelief and horror” at the carnage.

But the play develops no cumulative power. For all the gravity of the material, her observations feel curiously weightless, offering no sense of why these bad things are happening all around her. In fact, the play is so thin that anybody who might have told Nicola not to proceed because of its politics seems misguided. For the love of John Stuart Mill, are these journal entries really damning enough to merit suppression? The e-mails of a young outsider who says “I’m really new to talking about Israel-Palestine” don’t seem terribly hard to refute, if you’re so inclined.

Corrie’s diaries are more valuable in describing a budding idealist’s growth than in bearing witness to the world’s knottiest conflict. Even here, though, unlovely notes intrude. More than once, Corrie takes an oddly detached view of Palestinian violence, doubting that it could have “any impact” on the Israelis—a surprisingly clinical tone for such a sensitive advocate of social justice, as if it’s the body count incurred in a bus bombing that matters. I didn’t pick the example at random. While Corrie was in Gaza, a suicide bomber destroyed a bus in Haifa, killing fifteen people—mainly children—including an American girl even younger than Corrie, one involved in a program to reconcile Arab and Jewish students. There’s something poignant in the ways these two sad stories parallel each other and diverge. I can even imagine a drama using their deaths to tell us something new about the conflict, or help us better understand its whole horrible complexity. This play doesn’t.

Lurie on Peace Journalism Awards

"Eliav-Sartawi Pioneers of Peace Journalism Prizes Awarded" By J. Zel Lurie, 11/15/06

I was at the United Nations early this month awarding the Search for Common Ground journalism prizes to three reporters, who, in the opinion of the judges, had advanced the cause of conciliation and peace in the international, Hebrew and Arab press in 2006. I started these prizes a dozen years ago in an attempt to get better articles into the Hebrew and Arabic press. I named them the Eliav-Sartawi Pioneers of Peace journalism prizes to honor two of my heroes, Lova Eliav and Issam Sartawi, who began talking about peace over 30 years ago in secret meetings in Europe when peace was a dirty word in Israel and Palestine.

I added a third prize for an article published in the American press on the advice of Ambassador Sam Lewis. "You are an American," Amb. Lewis told me. I felt that an American prize was somewhat redundant. Unlike the Arab press and most of the Hebrew media, American reporters and editors did not need encouragement to write favorably about Peace Now and similar movements. When Search for Common Ground took over the prizes they wisely changed it to an international prize.

This year the international prize was won by Simone Korkus, a Belgian journalist who wrote a superb article on how former Israeli and Palestinian fighters had gotten together to form an organization called "Soldiers for Peace."

The Hebrew prize was won by Bradley Burston of Haaretz. Burston, who was born in the United States, came to the UN with his lovely wife, Varda. In his acceptance speech Burston expressed my hope in starting these prizes that, despite everything, people on both sides who want peace, even if they have lost their belief in it, can triumph in the end, over their own leaders, over their own grief, over their own very profound pain.

Burston's moving address was followed a week later in Tel Aviv by Israeli novelist, David Grossman at a mass meeting attended by a hundred thousand Israelis to mark the 11th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Grossman, who lost a son in the recent war in Lebanon said: "I am totally secular, yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle. Even when many things in the reality of our lives enrage and depress me, even when reality seems like nothing but a poor parody of this miracle, I always remember."

Grossman demanded that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert not wait a single day in responding positively, instead of the negative response he uttered to Syrian hints that they begin talking. Grossman said: "When you launched the last war (in Lebanon) you did not wait one hour. You charged with full force, with the complete arsenal, with full power of destruction. Why, when a glimmer of peace surfaces must you reject it immediately?"

Last week Olmert went to Washington. He talked about war with Iran, not peace with Syria in his public statements. Iran has been using Syria to help Hezbollah and Hamas with oodles of cash and sophisticated arms. The big-mouthed little president of Iran has threatened Israel's destruction. The United States and Israel can thwart Iranian threats by detaching Syria from Iran.

I hope that secret discussions are going on in Washington on how best to talk to Syria. As the New York Times editorialized on November 15: "This is no time to invent more reasons for not talking to Syria."

Meanwhile a pollster asked Israelis who was best to deal with foreign policy. Olmert received six percent of those polled. Other ministers got two percent. All of 31 percent answered "NONE OF THE ABOVE," even though this option was not listed.

Debate at Cooper Union on Mearshimer

From the London Review of Books website:
In March this year the London Review of Books published John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay 'The Israel Lobby'. The response to the article prompted the LRB to hold a debate under the heading 'The Israel lobby: does it have too much influence on American foreign policy?'. The debate took place in New York on 28 September in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union. The panellists were Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer and Dennis Ross, and the moderator was Anne-Marie Slaughter. The event was greatly oversubscribed, so we are delighted to announce that a video of the event, produced by ScribeMedia, is now available to view online. Click here

The battlelines were drawn for the great debate: Indyk and Ross -- two Clinton-era State Department officials -- and Ben-Ami, historian and Barak government minister on one side, versus Mearsheimer and Judt, the two bad-boy professors and Palestinian-American historian Khalidi (currently out with a brand new book, "The Iron Cage," on poor Palestinian leadership decisions). Each side had its cheering section, with Israel's critics probably more in evidence.

I've written much on Judt and the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis already. Let me relate just a few observations: First of all, Indyk made a potent point at the outset that Mearsheimer and Walt are writing about a "cabal," a secretive, sinister network of influence rather than a true organizational lobby. Indyk-- backed up by Ross -- indicated that if M & W were addressing their thesis to some undue influence and bad policy initiatives coming from AIPAC, they would not be particularly opposed. But this "cabal" includes not only the neoconservatives and others who opposed all that Ross and Indyk were trying to achieve during the peace-making efforts of the Clinton administration, but Ross and Indyk and other pro-Israel peace processors as well. In fact, Mearsheimer openly accused both Ross and Indyk of being part of the "lobby."

In the meantime, Judt continued to ride his high horse. When the other side suggested that M and W were providing ammunition to antisemites, Judt shrugged it off saying that truth is truth and it doesn't matter if facts are twisted or abused for bad purposes. On the face of it, Judt is correct. What he ignores, however, is that the nasty one-sided tone of their work, including Judt's essays of the last couple of years, when combined with some poor scholarship or faulty reasoning (none of the three -- Mearsheimer, Walt or Judt -- are scholars of the Middle East), they are feeding one side in an argument, not conducting a neutral quest for truth.

Prof. Khalidi was the only one on "their" side who is an expert on the Middle East and he was not enthusiastic about the Israel lobby/ cabal thesis. He sees Palestinians and Arabs getting a raw deal in Mideast policy, but largely because of a more pervasive cultural bias rather than a conspiracy.

It did not come as a suprise that this discourse of the intellectuals had a gladiatorial or circus aspect to it. Enough cogent criticisms have been published that you'd think that Mearsheimer and Walt at least, and maybe Judt, might have temporized their views by now, but their perseverence in the face of opposition makes them feel like heroes. Despite their protestations that they are doing something risky in voicing themselves as they have, they are not really suffering. They haven't lost their cozy tenured jobs in the academy. And Mearsheimer and Walt have landed a juicy contract with a top publishing house -- Farrar, Straus and Giroux -- to advance their ideas still further. My fear is that instead of advancing honest debate, their one-sided presentations amplify the din of battle. -- R. Seliger

On Free Speech, Israel and Tony Judt

Alan Wolfe is a professor of political science at Boston College and a frequent contributor to The New Republic. His article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, "Free Speech, Israel and Jewish Illiberalism," is a complicated discussion of the issues involved in the matter of Tony Judt being excluded from one or more speaking venues. It's well worth reading, but also long, so I'm including a shortened version below. If you wish to plod through the entire piece, click on the colored web link above.

Free Speech, Israel and Jewish Illiberalism by Alan Wolfe

An accomplished European historian at New York University and director of its Remarque Institute — ... [Prof. Tony] Judt, who once lived in Israel..., has emerged as a strong critic of a Jewish state. Basing statehood on ethnicity or religion, he wrote in a 2003 article, is an "anachronism." The only possible future for Israel, he said in "Israel: The Alternative," published in The New York Review of Books, is as a binational state. For many Jews, such positions come close to denying Israel's right to exist. Why have Israel at all if it is not to be Jewish, they ask? And, given low Jewish birthrates and high Arab ones, wouldn't a binational state eventually lead to the persecution of a Jewish minority?

As the journalist Leon Wieseltier put it in the generally pro-Israel The New Republic last month: "I have never met anybody of any persuasion who believes that Judt's call for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 'Israel: The Alternative' was not a call for the abolition of the Jewish state."

Judt had been invited to speak in October on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by a group called Network 20/20, which regularly rents the Polish Consulate in New York as the site for its events. Although the Anti-Defamation League, whose leading officials view Judt as an Israel hater, denies pressuring the consulate to cancel the talk, it acknowledges having made a call inquiring about the event. That conversation, in turn, led the Poles, who tend to be very sensitive on any issues remotely touching on anti-Semitism, to cancel Judt's talk — one hour before it was supposed to take place.

In response to the cancellation, two protest letters were sent off to the ADL's national director, Abraham H. Foxman. One, organized by Norman Birnbaum, an emeritus professor at Georgetown University Law Center, called Foxman's actions "political vigilantism" and labeled Foxman himself "an adversary of our traditions." I did not sign it. As unhappy as ADL's phone call made me, Foxman is neither a person who takes the law into his own hands, as the term vigilante implies, nor, given the ADL's commendable record of combating extremism, un-American.

Moreover, the Birnbaum letter contained what I view as a serious contradiction. Ostensibly defending Judt's right to speak, its signatories also proclaimed themselves "in solidarity" with Judt, as well as with Harvard University's Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer, the international-relations scholars who wrote a controversial working paper on the influence of the "Israel Lobby" in American politics. When people proclaim they are "in solidarity" with something and someone, I hear echoes of the 1960s demonstrations in which otherwise intelligent people refused to criticize unsavory regimes on the grounds that the enemy of their enemy must be their friend. I do not consider myself "in solidarity" with the ADL or with its opponents, but as an individual free to criticize both. Foxman acted "in solidarity" with Jews, as he understood their interest. To act "in solidarity" with critics of Israel is just as objectionable. Intellectuals should act in solidarity with the truth.

I did sign another protest letter to Foxman, written by Mark Lilla, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, and Richard Sennett, a sociologist with NYU and the London School of Economics and Political Science. That one pointed out that in a democracy, the proper response to speech with which one does not agree is more speech. Lilla and Sennett took no position on the substantive issues raised by Judt, about Israel or American foreign policy; indeed, they went out of their way to bring together people who "have many disagreements about political matters, foreign and domestic." Expressed that way, their letter was signed by a number of intellectuals known for their support of Israel, including Wieseltier; two of the The New Republic's former editors, Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart; and its current one, Franklin Foer. (I am a contributing editor of the magazine.)

Not content with angering New Republic liberals, just weeks before his talk was canceled, Judt had also written an essay in the London Review of Books. "Bush's Useful Idiots" criticized "the liberal intelligentsia" for keeping "its head safely below the parapet" by not opposing more vigorously both the foreign policy of George W. Bush and Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

In this time of petitions, Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale University, and Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, neither of whom writes for The New Republic, published yet a third broadsheet in The American Prospect. With the title "We Answer to the Name of Liberals," it was mostly a defense of liberals against conservative charges that their protests of Bush's policies have made them shills for Osama bin Laden and other enemies of America. But with a subtitle of "A response to Tony Judt," this petition began by refuting the charges of liberal complicity with Bush foreign policy that Judt had made in his September London Review article. You can be against Bush's war in Iraq, Ackerman and Gitlin argued, without also having to be either for or against his support of Israel and its actions in Lebanon.

Forty-four people signed. Again, I was one of them. "True patriotism does not consist of bravado or calumny," Ackerman and Gitlin wrote. "It resides in faithfulness to our great constitutional ideals." They are right. As they pointed out, liberals are second to none in their desire to protect the United States against terrorism, but they are equally as vigilant in protecting the United States against the temptation to undermine its great commitment to freedom.

Give Tony Judt credit: He certainly knows how to start an argument. Actually, he has started two. One, concerning the future of a Jewish state in the Middle East, is, like the Middle East itself, combustible, and it is by no means clear that intellectuals in this country will have much influence on how it is ultimately resolved. That is a shame, for we need in the United States a debate about the future of Israel as robust as the one that routinely takes place within Israel itself. In "Israel: The Alternative," Judt paid particular attention to right-wing Israelis whose views, in his opinion, come quite close to fascism. But even though there is no denying that Israel, like the United States, has turned sharply to the right, must we conclude, as Judt seemed to suggest, that any state based on religion or ethnicity will ultimately be illiberal? And does it follow that if Israel is illiberal, its aggressive foreign policy will create a "disaster," as Judt put it, for a United States that allies itself with the country?

Those are questions that Americans need to ask themselves — however they answer them. But it is hard to raise them, at least in any probing way, when prominent Hollywood celebrities like Mel Gibson flirt with anti-Semitism, and when newspapers like The New York Sun, a staunch defender of Israel, routinely accuse those who criticize Zionism of being little different from Gibson. It is difficult to know why honest discussions about Israel have become so difficult to conduct. Is it, perhaps, because the rise of the Christian right, no matter how ostensibly supportive of Israel it claims to be, reminds Jews that they live in a Christian country and thereby makes them more likely to circle the wagons? Or does the reason perhaps lie in the fact that Jews have become part of America's multicultural mosaic, one more group proclaiming its identity and difference? Or perhaps it has to do with the charge made by many pro-Israel Jews that Israel is held to a different standard when it comes to judging the morality of a country's foreign policy than other states, including Israel's enemies in the Middle East? Whatever the reason, discussions of Israel in the United States resemble a shouting match filled with insult and invective more than a reasoned debate over the proper relationship between that country and this one.

For precisely that reason, the other argument Judt has started, which is whether people should be open to those whose views they find at best distasteful and at worst hateful is not, or at least ought not to be, controversial at all. Surely intellectuals, who commit themselves to arguments based on reason, should be enthusiastic in their support of open debate....

Tragedy & slaughter at Beit Hanoun

Israel's government and IDF spokespeople, Mark Regev and Col. Miri Eisen do a much better job than Ranan Gissen, their predecessor whose angry tone was literally hard to listen to, let alone the content of what he usually said. But Israel's image problem is a matter of policy as well as tone.

As Ms. Eisen indicated, unlike the Palestinians, Israel does not target non-combatant civilians and it acknowledges errors (at least sometimes) as it did in the tragic killing of 18 or more, most of one family, at Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip. And clearly, as Eisen also indicated, Israel would not be firing if Israelis were not being attacked by rockets, but this does not make it okay.

Not only are innocents killed, generally in larger numbers than innocent Israelis killed and injured by terrorists and rockets, but these actions -- especially where innocent Palestinians die-- gives rise to more rockets and an ongoing threat of terrorism. More than one survivor of Beit Hanoun said that they had not been militants, that they had nothing to do with fighting Israel, but now they wanted their revenge. Israel has returned with what began as a supposedly moderate government to a policy that relies on the use of military force while ignoring or disdaining the options of diplomacy and negotiation, which do exist -- whether we speak of Mahmoud Abbas, begging for negotiations for years now, or of the Saudi/Arab League peace proposal, or even the government of Syria suggesting renewed peace talks.

One doesn't have to agree with every word to recognize that Gazan psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj is a voice of reason and moderation:

"The campaign that should never stop" by Eyad Sarraj

I lay in a quiet hospital bed in a Tel Aviv hospital receiving treatment for a blood problem when the news from Beit Hanoun pierced the silence with its images and sounds of extraordinary pain on the faces of the dead and the living alike.

My own concerns paled into insignificance. Why was the mother who lost her child screaming so? It struck me that this mother was not yet in mourning but in the grip of an overwhelming state of fear. She knew too well how vulnerable and exposed they were and that there was no escape. She knew well that when "they" decide, they kill. The frightening ghost of death and destruction was and is still looming in our skies, threatening more loss of life and loss of hope.

The political scene in Palestine and Israel offers no solace. In Palestine, the usual old populist rhetoric was wheeled out with people calling for earthquake-like revenge, while mediocre politicians got busy trying to score public relations points over other mediocrities. They reminded me of student speakers at London's Hyde Park Corner. The exception was President Mahmoud Abbas who seemed in genuine pain and was genuinely angry. He was always committed to peace. The Israeli scene is even worse. The signs are ominous when people like Avigdor Lieberman are welcomed into the cabinet while the once promising Amir Peretz appears to have been thoroughly chewed and digested by the military establishment.

This should not be the time for mediocrity, politicking or revenge. We have wasted too much time and too many lives. This is a time to think only of how to make peace. Peace is freedom. Peace is life. Peace is dignity. It is now more urgent than ever for all those who still truly believe in peace--Palestinians, Israelis and friends and allies all over the world--to unite their efforts in order to give reconciliation and peace a chance. Now that warmongers like Donald Rumsfield are out, the rest should be pursued wherever they are and particularly in Palestine and Israel. I don't need to contemplate their paranoid question: do they want to make peace? The answer, on behalf of all people, is an unequivocal "yes." But we have to expose the foes of peace and freedom. We know how powerful the Pentagon and the Israeli war machine is. This war machine, with its hegemony over Israeli politics, is bigger than Israel itself and must be stopped. It is a tool of death and destruction.

My own concerns paled into insignificance. Why was the mother who lost her child screaming so? It struck me that this mother was not yet in mourning but in the grip of an overwhelming state of fear. She knew too well how vulnerable and exposed they were and that there was no escape. She knew well that when "they" decide, they kill. The frightening ghost of death and destruction was and is still looming in our skies, threatening more loss of life and loss of hope.

The political scene in Palestine and Israel offers no solace. In Palestine, the usual old populist rhetoric was wheeled out with people calling for earthquake-like revenge, while mediocre politicians got busy trying to score public relations points over other mediocrities. They reminded me of student speakers at London's Hyde Park Corner. The exception was President Mahmoud Abbas who seemed in genuine pain and was genuinely angry. He was always committed to peace.

The Israeli scene is even worse. The signs are ominous when people like Avigdor Lieberman are welcomed into the cabinet while the once promising Amir Peretz appears to have been thoroughly chewed and digested by the military establishment.

This should not be the time for mediocrity, politicking or revenge. We have wasted too much time and too many lives. This is a time to think only of how to make peace. Peace is freedom. Peace is life. Peace is dignity.

It is now more urgent than ever for all those who still truly believe in peace--Palestinians, Israelis and friends and allies all over the world--to unite their efforts in order to give reconciliation and peace a chance.

Now that warmongers like Donald Rumsfield are out, the rest should be pursued wherever they are and particularly in Palestine and Israel. I don't need to contemplate their paranoid question: do they want to make peace? The answer, on behalf of all people, is an unequivocal "yes".

But we have to expose the foes of peace and freedom. We know how powerful the Pentagon and the Israeli war machine is. This war machine, with its hegemony over Israeli politics, is bigger than Israel itself and must be stopped. It is a tool of death and destruction.

The Israeli political community, public and leadership alike, must know it is captive to this powerful establishment. Israelis should know that their security will only be found through strategic peace with Palestinians, and not through the power to kill, subservience to the powerful military machine or dependence on the American administration.

Responsible Palestinian leaders must make every effort to restore the Israeli public's confidence in Palestinians, lost after six years of horror and lies. They should make the effort to convince their own constituencies of the merits of peace and help shape a new culture. This should be done systematically and on all fronts. Imagine if Hamas comes out today, after all this pain, and declares a complete ban on all forms of violence. Israel must be told, by Hamas and others, that it is a country in the Middle East. And so is Palestine.

These two countries must live together or die together. Between them they have all the ingredients for prosperity and together they can help the region and the world. The world must be offered the chance to see the good Palestinian, the good Arab and the good Muslim. We must be offered the chance to see the good Jew and the well-intentioned West. It is all in our grasp but we need to take that important leap by acting now with courage and wisdom. A unified vision and strategy on the Palestinian side must lead us toward peace. Hamas is an essential part of the political map and should declare its readiness to rise to the responsibility of not only making internal reforms but, more importantly, making peace with Israel.

Hamas's rise to power was well deserved and democratic. It is tragic that Hamas was not ready for this dramatic chance, and it is tragic Hamas was never given a fair chance to govern. After months of pressure and conspiracy, Hamas is yielding to the calls of the community. Hamas should be encouraged and be engaged on all levels and all conspiracies must stop. A truly democratic culture based on the rule of law is one of the keys to peace. "

The Israeli political community, public and leadership alike, must know it is captive to this powerful establishment. Israelis should know that their security will only be found through strategic peace with Palestinians, and not through the power to kill, subservience to the powerful military machine or dependence on the American administration.

Responsible Palestinian leaders must make every effort to restore the Israeli public's confidence in Palestinians, lost after six years of horror and lies. They should make the effort to convince their own constituencies of the merits of peace and help shape a new culture. This should be done systematically and on all fronts. Imagine if Hamas comes out today, after all this pain, and declares a complete ban on all forms of violence.

Israel must be told, by Hamas and others, that it is a country in the Middle East. And so is Palestine. These two countries must live together or die together. Between them they have all the ingredients for prosperity and together they can help the region and the world.

The world must be offered the chance to see the good Palestinian, the good Arab and the good Muslim. We must be offered the chance to see the good Jew and the well-intentioned West. It is all in our grasp but we need to take that important leap by acting now with courage and wisdom.

A unified vision and strategy on the Palestinian side must lead us toward peace. Hamas is an essential part of the political map and should declare its readiness to rise to the responsibility of not only making internal reforms but, more importantly, making peace with Israel.

Hamas' rise to power was well deserved and democratic. It is tragic that Hamas was not ready for this dramatic chance, and it is tragic Hamas was never given a fair chance to govern. After months of pressure and conspiracy, Hamas is yielding to the calls of the community. Hamas should be encouraged and be engaged on all levels and all conspiracies must stop. A truly democratic culture based on the rule of law is one of the keys to peace.

Fateh and Hamas need to stand behind the leadership of Abbas who can help the nation and the region because of his unique stature, position and the worldwide respect for his leadership that is based on his strategic vision of peacemaking. It is time for action. Therefore I call upon all peace activists to grasp whatever is left of the scattered hopes for peace. Human life is precious and it is our divine duty to protect it. Returning to Gaza and "normal" life, I am determined to devote the rest of my life to the cause of peace. Peace is freedom. Peace is dignity. Peace is life.-
Published 13/11/2006 © bitterlemons.org
Dr. Eyad Sarraj is the head of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program.

Bitterlemons.org is an internet newsletter that presents Palestinian and Israeli viewpoints on prominent issues of concern. Each edition addresses a specific issue of controversy.
Bitterlemons.org maintains complete organizational and institutional symmetry between its Palestinian and Israeli sides.

Remembering Ellen Willis -- 'Anti-Anti-Zionist'

At about the same time as television journalist Ed Bradley passed away at 65, Ellen Willis, New York University professor of journalism, radical feminist and cultural critic, died on November 9, at the age of 64. A self-described "anti-authoritarian democratic socialist," her NY Times obituary notes that she was "leery of extremism" and "took some members of the American left to task for what she saw as anti-Semitism thinly veiled as political animus toward Israel." Her essay, "Is There Still a Jewish Question? Why I'm an Anti-Anti-Zionist," (included in the anthology, "Wrestling With Zion," edited by Tony Kushner and Alissa Solomon, Grove-Atlantic, 2003) is a powerful essay that's well worth the read.

BACK TO BAGHDAD, letter #1

Our guy in Baghdad is back for a second tour in economic assistance work!

Taking attendance. [La] Plus ca change . . . and so on. Think of this as an update of where I left things and people in June. My general feeling is that the streets look more normal than the news reports suggest, but this may be misleading. I hear more and larger explosions at night, perhaps because itr's true or because I am on a side of the building that makes them more audible. I also sense an increasing tension and impatience between Americans and Iraqis on both sides. However, I am not confident in these observations. I've been here too short a time and too much of it has been under confinement.

Absent. Spider, the deeply grounded and intelligent PSD [a private security contractor] who had suffered PTSD, "relapsed," becoming weirded out and generally berserk. He had to be sent away fast. Joker (Mike), the scrap iron PSD who loved classical music and wrote poetry apparently melted. He has been away over a month. He promised to return but now seems to be unreachable. David, the man-mountain who liked to weapon up and look for a good fight as a volunteer PSD even though he was a construction manager, was fired after playing PSD for a convoy near the border with Syria that may have resulted in the deaths of two Kurdish PSDs....
Sinan, the accountant/computer geek who supported his whole family and was anonymously threatened from inside the compound, has gone off to die ... of AIDS (kindly called cancer here out of respect for his lifestyle and general delicacy). Kathy, the grandma director of the food services who also threw the best parties, went home to Texas, Frances, the Indian contractor who ran the kitchen is gone but apparently not replaced....

New kids in class. James has taken Spider's role at the head of security. Like Spider, he has a strong special forces background, and came here one month after retiring from the Army. James does not seem weird enough to have a nickname or uptight enough to have the position. Even his 700 tatoos are like everyone else's--no death heads and up to inches of his body undecorated.... Noor is the Iraqi daughter of doctor/hospital owner who stays in Iraq despite being kidnapped. She outearns her doctor mother 2:1 by making travel arrangements and translating here. Kay replaced Kathy. She is always perfectly coifed and manicured, but with skin that proclaims she is either 106 or has been abusing drugs since she was a kid--probably the latter. Layla, who, like Noor I met working for others on my last tour, lived in fear for her fatherless kids and begged me to help her get them out of Baghdad in exchange for teaching me to swear in Arabic. Alas, it is a skill I have lost and must regain, as Arabic cursing is both terrifically colorful and obscene well beyond our American forms. In my limited experience, I do not even know anyone who can perform the acts I used to be able to describe. Since Layla came here she has earned enough to send them to Kurdistan, where she has some family and they are safe.

Heartwarming confirmations. When you need laundry done, the housekeepers pick it up, identify it and you, with an Arabic note on a ripped scrap of paper, and return the finished laundry to you with the slip. When I looked on the back on my slip I saw the fine prose of our 250 page Iraqi Business Center Best Practices Manual. And the State Department told us our work was useless.

I'm installed in a spiffier room than before. Pretty much like any Ritz Carlton worldwide, e.g., it has walls. Anyway, my sofa and chairs have benefitted from the death of many naugas, the room was painted during this century (or at least the last). The shower is a bit smaller than the Ritz's. It is a two foot square marked off on the bathroom floor and masked by a shower curtain the guage of the plastic bag in which the cleaners gives you back your pants. It pours into a drain in the middle of the room. Given my shape, I can only wash my stomache and butt on alternate Wednesdays.

Two people who were here before (including Sadi, the 7 of Diamonds and so far untouched, though I am thinking of ratting him out) have been promoted. In both cases, their first order of business seems to have been to install gold toilets (honest) and chandeliers (Sadi has three, talk about lipstick on a pig), plus "live-in maids." Speaking of toilets--OK, it is a phony segue--some of the rooms here have become unoccupiable, because Sandi hired and housed a bunch of Turks to exploit on a local construction projectin the IZ. Turks work cheap and Iraqis are not allowed to work in official American government areas (one of the many ways we support economic rebuilding, social equity, and good will). Since the Turks are used to a floor toilet, they ripped out and discarded the toilets that were there so that they could go directly into the sewage pipes, throwing the useless toilets into the hall. I am imagining that if that Commie Nancy Pelosi causes the U.S. to 'cut and run', Halliburton may be able to help Iraq out through porcelain and glass sales--my last investment advice.

More cultural news on entrepreneurship. Except for our team, work habits here are somewhat "relaxed." How many Iraqis does it take to change a lightbulb? Six, I think. One to give the order, one to threaten the worker's family if he does not comply, one to supervise, and one to supervise the supervisor, and one to change the lightbulb, and of course a toilet salesman for the supervisor's supervisor. Meanwhile, Jason, an American PSD, dreams of opening a Dairy Queen (which he will call Dairy King) in the Green Zone PX. It will feature his version of the blizzard, aptly renamed the sandstorm....

My first walk on Tigris--I've had only one so far--show that the green glassy river has been replaced by something that looks like the lumpy gravy remains of a bad Thanksgiving meal at a coffee shop. I am guessing the river's condition is seasonal and soon will revert. And the food, let's just say that if I stay long enough I will be able to wash my whole self in the shower at once. Anyway, that is not why I'm here. As my pal Hunter Thompson used to say, I am, after all, a professional....

Changed tone? So far, Americans seem less of a presence in Baghdad that before, actually replaced by Iraqi soldiers in many places....
Things seem to be returning to abnormal following the Saddam verdict.... The hourlong flight from Amman, including time spent waiting, took ten hours, from 4 am to 2 pm. And, of course, I worked form 2:30 to about midnight, with various drop-ins to say hi. I could not sleep, so I was up for the call to prayer at 4 am the next day. I could hear it for the first time ever in Baghdad--because there was a strict lock-down anticipating the verdict. I love the first call to prayer. Now I listen for it every morning. It is... quiet, beautiful, and eerie in a way you never quite can get used to. The lockdown and anticipation of security "issues" continued following the verdict, screwing up our State meetings. After the announcement, there was much gunplay and firing into the air. Apparently lockdown means different things to different people. There probably now are Iraqi deaths attributable to bullets falling through the top of the head. (I think Israeli conservatives bent on destroying the Palestinian population need only find ways to make them happy--they will shoot themselves to death. This probably would work better than the current policy.) Despite the curfew, people around here gathered in the streets in small knots to talk . If you watched CNN carefully, you saw my current neighborhood, literally what I see out my window. It also is well described in Packer's Assassins' Gate....

Grossman: The will to peace

We write today in the shadow of the tragic deaths of 18 Gazans from what Israel admits was an errant shell fired from a tank. Clearly, these deaths were not cold-blooded murders. Clearly, if not for the rockets continually launched against Sderot and other Israeli towns, these deaths would not have happened. But it's also clear that Israel's efforts to stop these attacks are not only not working, but also taking more innocent human lives in the process; and in killing innocents, they are also embittering their surviving relatives and other Palestinians who are resolving to strike back at Israel in suicide bombings or other acts of terror. Israel has the right of self-defense, but the methods used in Gaza have surely reached a point of diminishing returns.

In this post, our khaver, Ami Isseroff, discusses (another Meretz khaver) David Grossman's eloquent piece memorializing Rabin:

David Grossman: The will to peace
Beloved Israeli author David Grossman lost his son in the recent Lebanon war. His address to the Rabin memorial assembly was of special importance. It carries messages both for Israelis and friends of Israel, and for others.In much of the Arab world, "Zionism" is pretty nearly synonymous with evil and incompatible with peace. Grossman's speech however, is a testament that peace is an essential Zionist goal.The opening paragraphs express the feelings of all those who love Israel, and explain to those who do not understand, why we are here, why we cling to this land, and why he is moved to speak out for peace. Peace is not a gift that the Israeli left wants to give to our enemies. Peace is something that we all need in order to survive.

Click here for what Grossman said.

Hillel Schenker on Rabin

Remembering Rabin by Hillel Schenker

It's hard to believe that 11 years have already past. In Israel and Palestine, people still play the "what if" game. What if Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had not been assassinated on November 4th, 1995. It's like the "butterfly effect" on history. What if assassin Yigal Amir had followed his initial instinct and shot foreign minister Shimon Peres, who preceded Rabin down the steps of the Tel Aviv municipality?

Just as people in America ask "Where were you when you heard that Kennedy was shot?," in Israel, people in certain circles ask "Where were you when Rabin was shot?" My answer is that I was walking on my way home down King George Street in the heart of old Tel Aviv, feeling the high of being one of the over l00,000 Israelis who had just left Kings of Israel Square following the successful "no to violence, yes to peace" demonstration, which featured a very strong speech by the Prime Minister. There was a feeling that the mainstream was fighting back against the rightwing obstructionists who were trying to demonize Rabin and undermine the peace process. It was on my way home that I first heard that Rabin had been shot, more or less the same spot where I first heard six years later that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Ever since that night back in 1995, I and many of my known and unknown friends have been regular participants of the annual memorial rally, which takes place at what is now known as Rabin Square. This year was the first time since 1995 that November 4th was a Saturday evening, in a sense completing a circle.

Some people who were always at the rally, beginning with his wife Lea Rabin, and continuing with many friends, colleagues and relatives, are no longer with us. Fortunately, the ranks have been replenished by a younger generation of believers in the idea that there is still room for hope. Once again, l00,000 Israelis gathered in the square.

This year there was only one central speaker, author David Grossman, who earned the right by having his son killed on one of the last days of Lebanon War 2, as it's unofficially called around here. He said that he spoke as a man with an "overwhelming, complex yet unequivocal love of the land," whose "covenant with the land had turned his personal calamity into a covenant of blood." In today's age there is no need to repeat the speech. Unlike in 1995, it's accessible to everyone on the Internet. Everyone concerned with the fate of Israel and Palestine should read it in its entirety.

When Grossman began focusing on the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, my feeling was that he was going to call upon him to resign. But no, although the headlines in Sunday's papers emphasized that Grossman had issued a stinging critique about the "hollowness" and failure of the current Israeli leadership, his call was not for resignation, but for initiative. He called upon the prime minister to initiate talks with the Palestinians, and to respond to the Syrian president's offer for negotiations, even if they would take years.

To my mind, the most important phrase in his speech was the call to "try to shape reality, not only to serve as its collaborator." That should not only be true for the leaders, but for all of us.

When Grossman was finished, and daughter Dalia Rabin, the keeper of the family flame had her say, and the poems and songs were over, I had a feeling that the crowd, and all of those Israelis who still believe it's possible to end the mutual madness (since the entire rally was broadcast live on all three national TV channels), had been energized in a way I had no longer thought was possible.

In recent years, the annual Rabin Memorial rally is the only time I find myself singing the Israeli national anthem. Hatikva (The Hope). And this year, some sliver of hope was engendered anew. And as always, after the anthem, the crowd dispersed with the singing of the powerful anti-war song and anthem of the Israeli peace movement, Shir Lashalom, (Song for Peace), followed by the voice of John Lennon singing Imagine.

On the way home, the heavens opened and the rain poured down, perhaps shedding tears for Rabin, and maybe, just maybe, cleansing the dust and the mud that we are all bogged down in, creating the possibility for new beginnings.

And on Monday, as the scene shifts to the east Jerusalem office of the Palestine-Israel Journal, we sat together, Israelis and Palestinians, discussing what words to put on the cover of our new issue devoted to Hamas and Kadima: the new reality after the war in Lebanon. As someone said, Hamas and Kadima, the two governing parties, are part of the problem, what Grossman called the failure of leadership. In the end we decided to call the issue Hamas and Kadima: are they up to the challenge? And we will add the following words from our editorial: "Now is the time to fill the missing agendas with workable initiatives."

Alex Stein on Rabin

It’s easy to say isn’t it? That if Rabin was alive everything would be alright. His son Yuval repeated this orthodoxy today – “if he were alive today, my father would have abandoned all the political considerations and taken upon itself to save Israel from its troubles.” The best way for a politician to guarantee his/her reputation for posterity is to be assassinated. There’s nothing particularly interesting in this. It happens across the board. For some reason, we seem unable to emancipate ourselves from nostalgia. We forget all the flaws of the dearly departed, preferring to pretend that they were moral and intellectual giants who would have solved our problems with ease, had they not been cut off in their prime by the cruel assassin’s bullet.

The other curious feature of the post-assassination world is to try and pretend it is possible to remember the murdered in as apolitical manner as possible. In this case, this means vague rhetoric about ‘everyone wanting peace’, and no mention of the murderer’s name. By blotting this out, and expressing our outrage at his desire to have children, we promote him to the level of a mythical monster, sent by the Gods to destroy our hopes and dreams. That prevents us from reminding ourselves of the fact that significant numbers of people, including prominent politicians who still skulk around, happily created atmosphere in which a Prime Minister could be murdered. And that includes you Mr Netanyahu. We will not forget, and we will not forgive.

I don’t believe that if Rabin were alive today things would be hunky-dory. I also don’t accept that Oslo was a cunning plan to complete, rather than to end, the dispossession of the Palestinians. It was a flawed document, from which could have flowed a number of possible outcomes. Had Rabin lived, there is a real chance that things may have turned out better. But that’s all speculation. We will never know. But we do know that the bullets which slew Rabin were also turned against the Israeli left. To this day, there has been no recovery. The job started by Yigal Amir was finished by Arafat’s decision to launch the Second Intifada. Today, we are more marginalised than ever. Hope has given way to cynicism of the worst kind – based in racism rather than reason, falsehoods rather than truths.

So today we sang Aviv Gefen’s Livkot L’cha [To cry for you] and Shir L’Shalom [Song of Peace], rounded off with a less than rousing rendition of the Hatikvah. We fell into the anniversary trap of reflecting for its own sake, simply on account of the calendar. We remembered where we were the night he fell. I looked at the pictures of his life, focusing on the early days as a warrior. He was a handsome, famously informal man. He came from the generation that lived by the sword. Despite everything, I remain convinced that this was entirely necessary. But we will not see the likes of him again. The sole survivor from those days is Rabin’s darker shadow, Ariel Sharon, who lies in a coma from which he is unlikely to wake. The generation of the sword and the plough has given way to bourgeois apathy, in a country where apathy is an indulgence.

We are waiting for a hero. Someone with vision, someone with hope. We remember Rabin as one such man. In the confusion of thoughts induced by these never-ending anniversaries, may some clarity emerge. It seems as if Gaza is about to hot up yet again. Quiet days interspersed with violence. A letting off of steam, the lazy way to maintain stability. So Yuval Rabin’s words are not much use. Rabin is no more. May we one day be able to remember him as a human being, and not what might have been.

Speaking to progressive Zionist students

I had the pleasure and honor of participating in a panel discussion at the third annual conference of the Union of Progressive Zionists (UPZ) . Other panelists included Ameinu advocacy chair Judy Gelman, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom DC lobbyist Rob Levy, Professor Elliot Ratzman and Shana Taback, an American-Jewish activist who has worked with Betselem and other human rights groups fighting injustices of the occupation imposed upon Palestinians.

Ms. Taback is a wealth of wisdom and commitment in what she does, but she was not necessarily the best choice for that particular panel, meant to respond to questions from UPZ activists on how to respond to challenges from the left and the right. As it turns out, we were not questioned about such challenges from the right and the mainstream. UPZers exclusively asked about how to respond to left-wing critics.

Ms. Taback mentioned confronting "racism" in herself when she rode on a bus in Israel and reacted to an Arab-Muslim man reciting prayers by fleeing the bus in terror. It may have been a good thing that we didn't engage in cross discussion, but I wanted to reassure her that she was not being a "racist" at that moment. She was experiencing legitimate fear.

This might have provided her with insight on what average Israelis have been going through these last few years in sustaining terrorist attacks that have cost nearly a thousand civilian lives. This doesn't negate the fact that the Intifada has cost the Palestinians more lives, or excuse injustices perpetrated in the name of security, but it underscores how terrorism has all-but destroyed the Israeli peace camp. (I e-mailed her to this effect, but she did not respond.)

If one can only feel compassion toward Palestinians suffering under occupation, you've arbitrarily limited your most noble instincts. There is both room and necessity for peace activists to understand the legitimate fears and suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Isseroff: What Remains of Rabin's Legacy?

It's 11 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Sadly, his murderer may have a better future than his political inheritors. I don't know that I'd agree 100% with Yossi Sarid, that home-grown terrorists, such as Yigal Amir, are more dangerous than those from the outside, but it's true that they've been fatal in more ways than one. We might recall, in this vein, that Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron was the first major interruption of the Oslo peace process and probably inspired Yihyah Ayyash, the notorious "engineer" of Hamas, to invent the suicide belt. The following is Ami Isseroff's take:

Hell is indifference by Ami Isseroff

Eleven years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by right-wing fanatic Yigal Amir, Yossi Sarid, like many of us is quietly outraged. He is outraged by the fact that 30% of Israelis are willing to pardon Amir. Killing the Prime Minister of Israel is apparently an acceptable way to change the government in their view. He is outraged by the decision to allow Amir conjugal visits with his wife, Larissa Trimbobler. Sarid is right about that. He is wrong in his conclusion, that all this poses no threat to security, because you can't assassinate the same man twice.

You can assassinate the man, you can assassinate his legacy, and you can assassinate the society he helped create. The circumstances of the memorial ceremony held at the President's residence provide a bitter lesson in themselves. Most government officials cancelled their attendance because they didn't want to be seen in the company of the disgraced president of Israel, who is suspected of rape and corruption. Half the officials, beginning with PM Olmert are themselves under investigation for corruption and crimes of varying magnitude. Only one official had the decency to resign - the one accused of the most harmless offense. Haim Ramon resigned from the government because he was accused, horror of horrors, of kissing a girl against her wishes. The government remains glued to their seats despite corruption, and concludes a shameful alliance with right-wing extremist Avigdor Lieberman. The Labor party, the party of Rabin that swore to honor his memory, remains in the government, though its leader, Amir Peretz, had promissed in his usual raucous fashion that he would never sit in a government with Lieberman. Only Ofir Pines-Paz resigned.

It is all made possible because of cosmic indifference and ennui. Corruption, incompetence, a miserable economic policy, a botched war, the IDF pounding away pointlessly in Gaza, killing innocent Palestinians as well as a few terrorists, none of these seem to shake the indifference of the public. Rabin's legacy, the legacy of his generation, is being killed more by indifference then by opposition and assassin's bullets.

Not everyone is indifferent. A much smaller, but growing, number of people, those who would pardon Yigal Amir, know exactly what they want. They want a government of Yigal Amirs. They want a state and a Zionist movement founded on religious principles. They use the corruption and incompetence to make their point - that only religion can save Israeli society from mediocrity and disintegration. One day they may be the majority, and then the bored and indifferent ones will no longer be be bored or indifferent, but it will be too late.

As I walked around Rabin Square a day after the assassination, I had the feeling I was living in a nightmare. We haven't really awakened since then. We just got used to it. Hell is indifference.

Original text copyright by the author and MidEastWeb for Coexistence, RA. Posted at MidEastWeb Middle East Web Log at http://www.mideastweb.org/log/archives/00000530.htm where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Distributed by MEW Newslist. Subscribe by e-mail to mew-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by email with this notice and link to and cite this article. Other uses by permission.

Tom Segev on atrocity at Kafr Kasem

Tom Segev of Haaretz reminds us of one of the most horrible events of Israeli history. The massacre at Kafr Kasem, at the outset of the 1956 Sinai war, perpetrated against unarmed Israeli Arabs who innocently violated a curfew order that they were not aware of, is a sad and outrageous historical fact that is beyond dispute. -- R. Seliger

'If the eye is not blind nor the heart closed' By Tom Segev / Haaretz / Oct 29, 2006

Latif Dori came to Kafr Qasem this week and could barely make it down the street. The 72-year-old peace activist is considered a local hero. Whenever he comes here, passersby recognize him and want to stop him and shake his hand warmly. Passing drivers honk their horns and wave. The local council bestowed honorary citizenship upon him. He is part of the history of this village, and of the state: In 1956, Dori was the first one to record the horror stories told by survivors of the massacre perpetrated by Border Police troops.

Dori was then the secretary of the Arab Division of the United Workers Party (known by the Hebrew acronym Mapam, of which the only surviving trace is the mem ["m"] in Meretz). Someone from Kibbutz Hahorshim - Dori doesn't know who it was - wrote to the Mapam leader Meir Ya'ari and told him about the massacre. It wasn't the first time he had heard of soldiers behaving this way. Ya'ari didn't like such letters, but this time he couldn't ignore the information he had received because it was clear that something truly terrible had occurred. So he sent Dori to look into it.


It was the day after the massacre. Dori tried to enter Kafr Qasem but found it surrounded by soldiers and police officers. It wasn't until the following day that he was able to reach the village mukhtar, who didn't know much, but sent him to Beilinson Hospital in nearby Petah Tikva, where the wounded had been taken. There, among the wounded from the Sinai Campaign, Dori found the survivors of the massacre in Kafr Qasem. He took down their testimonies and had them sign them.

Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion knew about the massacre by then and was horrified; he ordered an investigation, and later arrests and a trial. But he also tried to conceal the incident. The military censor prohibited its publication, and for several weeks the story was only spread by word of mouth. Communist MKs Tewfik Toubi and Meir Wilner mentioned the massacre in the Knesset plenum and their words were stricken from the protocol. Human rights and peace activists also spread word of the story. An initial, somewhat hazy item on it first appeared in Haaretz; the full story was first published in Uri Avnery's weekly, Ha'olam Hazeh.

The testimonies collected by Dori eventually served as evidence at the trial. Dori has kept them until today. From the beginning of next week, they will be displayed at the memorial center to be inaugurated in the village, along with items of clothing and various objects that belonged to the victims, photographs, films and documents, including the protocols from the trial.

It happened on Monday, October 29, 1956, a little after 5 P.M. The Sinai Campaign began at about the same time. For several days, there had been talk that the Israel Defense Forces might stage an incursion into Jordan, apparently in order to disguise the true intent to invade Egypt. As part of the preparations, the army planned to evacuate the Arab villages in the "Triangle" area and transfer their residents to holding facilities in the center of the country.

The plan was given the code name "Mole." The Border Police had thought of an alternative plan: to block passage from the Triangle villages to deeper inside the state, and expel their residents across the Jordan. Both plans were cancelled when it became evident that the war was going to take place in Sinai. But according to writer Rubik Rosenthal, who exposed this story many years later, the expulsion plans "remained in the air."

A curfew was imposed on the villages of the Triangle; violators were to be shot on sight. Several dozen residents, including women and children, unaware of the curfew, were late in returning to Kafr Qasem. They came in groups, on foot, by truck or riding bicycles. Following their orders, Border Police troops stood them in rows and shot them to death, as they continued to arrive in group after group. The official count says that 47 people were killed that day; the monument erected in the village adds an old man who died of a heart attack upon hearing that his son was among the dead, and the unborn baby in the womb of his mother, who was killed.

Seven survivors of that day who still remember it live in Kafr Qasem today. Most of the village's 18,000 inhabitants were born after the massacre, although it has nevertheless become a component of their identity. Ayoub Ali Taha was 2 years old at the time. He remembers exactly how he learned that his father was among those killed: by his grandmother's condition. When she heard that her son had been shot to death, she went blind and became partially paralyzed; her grandson was sent to help care for her . The old woman blamed herself for her son's death: "You father wanted us to move to Saudi Arabia," she used to say over and over. "I didn't want to leave Kafr Qasem. If only I'd agreed - then he wouldn't have been killed."

When Ayoub was 7 years old, older youths asked him to help hide the yearly memorial posters that were printed - in violation of orders from the military administration. He felt that he was participating in a heroic underground act in memory of his martyred father. Ayoub's son Mohammed, an 11th-grader, is very familiar with the story; he links the massacre to the military administration to which Israeli Arabs were subject until 1966, and believes that with the Israeli democracy that exists now, it could never happen again. Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, however, says that the Kafr Qasem massacre is still going on.

Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish offered us sweets in honor of the Id al-Fitr holiday. A founder of the Islamic Movement and a resident of Kafr Qasem, he is a warm and charismatic man, and one of the main spokespersons for the Arab public in Israel. That evening, he was following the news on television; the bloody events in Gaza had him in a bleak mood. He sees a direct line from the Deir Yassin massacre to the Kafr Qasem massacre to the events of Land Day, the October riots of 2000 and all that has happened from then until today, in Israel and the territories. The massacre in Kafr Qasem gave rise to a powerful slogan, said the sheikh: "Never Again." He raised his voice and repeated the words in a rising crescendo: "Never again, never again."

Suddenly he went silent: The slogan has collapsed, he said. Unfortunately, he estimates that 40 percent of Israelis do not support coexistence between Jews and Arabs or a peace-compromise. Meanwhile, the sheikh made a calculation and found that about 15 percent of the residents of Kafr Qasem are descendants of the massacre victims, and for that he is proud of his fellow villagers.

We argued a little about this. On second thought, Darwish agreed that the Kafr Qasem massacre was nonetheless an exceptional event. It spawned a few very powerful and enduring phrases, such as "black flag," which came up during the ensuing trial - referring to a clearly illegal order and the moral imperative to reject it.

The trial was open to the public for the most part. It sparked a public discussion of basic questions of ethics and democracy. Since it happened 12 years after World War II, this discussion took place against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Judge Benjamin Halevy, who would later be one of the judges presiding over the trial of Adolf Eichmann, asked one of the defendants if he would also justify a Nazi soldier who obeyed an order. Sheikh Abdullah is appreciative of this.

Halevy felt that the order to kill residents of Kafr Qasem was "manifestly unlawful" and defined it thus: A black flag should fly over such an order, like a warning: "This is unlawfulness that pierces the eye and agitates the heart, if the eye is not blind nor the heart closed or corrupt." This was a literary definition, not a legal one. It is not sufficient, but to this day no one has come up with a better one. Hence its importance.

The eight defendants, including an officer with the rank of major, Shmuel Malinki, were given prison sentences ranging from seven to 17 years. On appeal, the sentences were reduced, and not long afterward, the men were granted clemency. An officer with the rank of colonel, Issachar Shadmi, was acquitted on most of the charges and fined just 1 grush (1 cent in the old Israeli currency), for imposing a curfew without proper authority. Malinki went on to become the security officer for the atomic reactor, and later took over a gas station. First Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan, who was initially sentenced to 15 years, changed his name to Dagan and moved to Paris, where he worked as an Israel Bonds representative.

The Ministry of Education reported this week that "the Kafr Qasem events" are being taught now for the eighth year in a row in the framework of citizenship studies, as part of a mandatory chapter entitled "Obeying the Law in a Democracy and the Issue of a Manifestly Unlawful Order." This isn't enough, says writer Oula Issa; the whole story should be a part of the history curriculum.

Latif Dori suggested to the education minister that the massacre be the subject of one home-room hour. He received a five-line reply from a ministry adviser named Fadl Ibrahim: Unfortunately, Dori's letter was not received far enough in advance; maybe next year. The ministry says that it will instruct school principals to make note of the anniversary. A spokeswoman at the Education Ministry quoted Minister Yuli Tamir: "The massacre and the subsequent trial became a foundation stone in Israeli society's national consciousness and imprinted upon generations of commanders and soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces the moral boundary by which to act." In other words, we've learned the lesson. How nice.

Actually, teacher, we haven't learned it all that well. The story has been told again and again, in newspapers, books and movies, and an answer has also been found to the question of why the Border Police officers killed dozens of villagers: No, not only because they obeyed a manifestly unlawful order, but also because they hated Arabs. The IDF explains to many of its troops what a manifestly unlawful order is, and in the past 50 years Israel has not had another Kafr Qasem massacre. Who knows - it may have happened once in a while that someone remembered Kafr Qasem at the right moment and restrained himself. Council head Sami Issa believes that to this day there are government officials who, because of the massacre, display a special sensitivity toward his village; Border Police usually stay outside the village.

But not every soldier hears during the course of his service that there are orders that must not be carried out; the IDF does its best to wear down any conscientious objection; soldiers shoot at Palestinians as part of the routine of the occupation; police officers working in Arab communities in Israel sometimes have a light hand on the trigger; Avigdor Lieberman is in the government.

In Kafr Qasem, they feel that the state still needs to take moral responsibility for the massacre. Here is an opportunity for a historic gesture of decency and reconciliation, in the form of a statement by the president, the Knesset Speaker, or the prime minister. But no such statement has been forthcoming. Council head Issa isn't surprised: "Israel missed out on the country's Arabs," he says. Up until a few years ago, the council used to invite government representatives to take part in the yearly memorial ceremony; usually, they didn't come. This year, they were not invited.

Small rays of hope amid the gloom

I. From Gershon Baskin, as rightist Avigdor Lieberman enters the government:

The Labour party central council voted overwhelmingly in favor of staying in the government and sharing the decision-making table with Lieberman. Only Minister of Science, Culture and Sport, Ofir Pines-Paz resigned from the government in protest. I strongly admire Ofir’s courageous decision and support his bid to take over the leadership of the Labour party, however I think that the Labour party should not leave the government. The Labour party should begin to implement government decisions on the dismantling of illegal outposts that would force Lieberman to resign from the government. Amir Peretz should immediately meet with Palestinian President Abbas, even if Olmert is against such a meeting. Peretz met with Abbas during his election campaign, then he thought it was the right thing to do, he should do it again now. Why should Lieberman’s entrance to the government force Labour to leave. It is time for Labour to take a leading role in setting the agenda of the government and to stop being the puppy dog of Olmert.

Ofir Pines-Paz has proven to be a politician with integrity. He is one of the few political leaders today who says what he means and acts on it. Once Ofir declared that he would not sit in the government with Lieberman, he had no choice, but to leave the government. In the past years he has been considering his future chances to take over the leadership of the Labour party. He probably is moving ahead with those plans before he would have liked to. Ofir proved his integrity as the Minister of Interior for a short period during the last Sharon government. He did a very good job, given the deep rooted religious and anti-Arab civil service dating back to years of Shas control of the Ministry. He hired an Israeli Arab as Director General of the Ministry, the first time in history. He went forward to tackle planning and land issues in the Arab sector and he worked hard and succeeded in getting additional budgets for deprived communities....

II. Despite its reputation in left-wing circles as an irredemably right-wing organization, the ADL has condemned a leaflet in Ashdod, Israel, against the renting of apartments to Arabs.

Jerusalem, October 30, 2006 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) strongly condemned a call signed by Ashdod rabbis forbidding Jews from renting apartments to Arabs or foreign workers. The call was made in a leaflet distributed by the organization Yad l'Achim and signed by well-known rabbis in the city. ADL's Israel office issued the following statement:

We deplore such bigotry in the strongest terms. Such discriminatory appeals are a terrible offense against Jewish teaching and a stain on the name of the Jewish people. Such conduct toward Jews anywhere in the world would not be tolerated and such conduct toward non-Jews must also not be tolerated in the Jewish state.

The call to residents of the city to discriminate against Arabs and foreign workers is not only incompatible with Israeli democratic law and we call upon the authorities to investigate this so-called ultra-Orthodox organization.

This is not the first time that Yad l'Achim has issued racist statements. In the past they have intimidated and harassed members of Jehovah's Witnesses and others....