MJ Rosenberg vs. Rosenfeld & AJCommittee

As some folks know, I read a range of items online - and off. While this matter has been discussed earlier in this weblog here and then here, I thought this, by a veteran observer of the American Jewish community, is worth reading now. >> Arieh

American Jewish Committee Report Goes After Liberal Anti-Semites
By M.J. Rosenberg / TPM Cafe / January 30, 2007 / bio

Today's New York Times carries a news item about a report issued by the American Jewish Committee which attacks progressive Jewish critics of Israeli policies as anti-semitic.
"The American Jewish Committee, an ardent defender of Israel, is known for speaking out against anti-Semitism, but this conservative advocacy group has recently stirred up a bitter and emotional debate with a new target: liberal Jews....

"An essay the committee features on its Web site, ajc.org, titled “ ‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” says a number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist.

"In an introduction to the essay, David A. Harris, the executive director of the committee, writes, “Perhaps the most surprising — and distressing — feature of this new trend is the very public participation of some Jews in the verbal onslaught against Zionism and the Jewish State.” Those who oppose Israel’s basic right to exist, he continues, “whether Jew or gentile, must be confronted.” ...
... Rosenberg's weblog entry, in toto, can be found here ....

One can see this as part of a multifaceted attack on liberal, progressive and left-wing Jewish critics. More on this ... anon.

Carter’s ‘Palestine’: Review by Gidon Remba

The following is a somewhat abbreviated version of Gidon Remba’s new review, published in the Winter edition of ISRAEL HORIZONS, of Jimmy Carter’s “PALESTINE PEACE NOT APARTHEID.” Pres. Carter has conceded a point (noted by Remba) at Carter's recent visit to Brandeis University, that he mistakenly seemed to be making the Arab obligation to end violence against Israel contingent upon Israel’s unilateral acceptance of demands to withdraw from the occupied territories.

The Webcast from Brandeis also included Alan Dershowitz’s one-hour rebuttal. As reported by JTA, Dershowitz acknowledged that if Carter’s gracious words that day (Jan. 23) were typical of his book, there would not have been much controversy. Dershowitz went on to state that Carter speaks with a different voice to different audiences, that the "Brandeis Carter" is not the same as the "Al-Jezeera Carter." But somebody in the audience was quoted as saying that he thought that Carter's apology was absolutely sincere. (Readers may also be interested in Kenneth Stein’s article in Middle East Quarterly, “My Problem with Jimmy Carter’s Book.”) – Ed.

President Jimmy Carter advocates many of the same constructive policies endorsed by moderates on the Zionist left and center in Israel and the American Jewish community: a negotiated Palestinian-Israeli peace under the rubric of the Road Map and the Geneva Initiative, two states for two peoples, an end to the expansion of settlements and the occupation of the West Bank. Nevertheless, his book is replete with major errors of fact, all systematically biased against Israel. Although Carter himself is no Israel hater, at times he does an uncanny impersonation of one, unfailingly showing deep sympathy for Palestinian perceptions, while displaying little understanding for Israeli attitudes or needs.

Apartheid and Separation Barrier

Before reviewing Carter’s troubling errors, we must give the former president his due. Even with his biases and blunders, Carter unearths a moral truth that many Jews find difficult to face. Carter describes Israel’s 40-year occupation of several million Palestinians in the West Bank as a form of “apartheid.” Despite Carter’s explicit insistence that Israel within the Green Line is a “liberal democracy,” his use of this word has provoked outrage in the American Jewish community.

Yet many Israelis and American Jews recognize Carter’s kernel of truth. It was, after all, Israel’s own Ehud Olmert, while still Sharon’s deputy prime minister, who warned in 2003 that within a few years Jews risked becoming a minority controlling an Arab majority in the land between the Jordan and the sea. If Israel did not soon leave much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it would be forced to choose between remaining a Jewish state and a democracy. Eventually, Ariel Sharon himself grudgingly endorsed this view.

Carter concedes some of the salient differences between South African apartheid and what he terms Israel’s “abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine’s citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.” He understands that “apartheid in Palestine is not based on racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land and the resulting suppression of protests that involve violence.”

But Carter’s analogy breaks down in his claim that Israel is constructing an “encircling barrier,” a “segregation wall,”by which it is imposing on the Palestinians a “forced separation” into “Bantustans.” For Carter, this separation recalls the original meaning of the term apartheid – which literally means “apartness” in Afrikaans – segregation, domination and disenfranchisement.

Carter writes that “the area along the Jordan River ... is now planned as the eastern leg of the [Israeli] encirclement of the Palestinians....” Yet this proposal to build an “eastern fence” was unceremoniously discarded by Israel some years ago, as reported widely in the Israeli and international media. Still, Carter contends that the eastern barrier is an operative plan....

International Law

Carter often cites international law as a basis for a just peace. But on this conflict, he cites international law only when it serves his argument.... Carter lumps together Israel’s attacks on terrorists with acts of terror against Israeli civilians: The killing of noncombatants in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon by bombs, missile attacks, assassinations, or other acts of violence cannot be condoned. These words fail to distinguish civilians taking part in hostilities — like launch squads in Gaza or Lebanon preparing to fire rockets into Israel, guerrillas who have lost their civilian noncombatant immunity under international law — from Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli civilians who do not participate in combat and thereby qualify for protection. Article 51(3) of the 1977 Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention is clear: “Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.”

Carter further conflates the unintended deaths of noncombatant civilians, permitted under the laws of war if the combatant is making reasonable efforts not to harm them, with deliberately targeting civilians with the aim of maximizing harm, as Palestinian suicide bombers and rocket squads always intend.

Despite his record as a humanitarian and an advocate of peace, Carter does not call for an unconditional end to Palestinian suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism. Instead he says that It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.

To be sure, Carter does condemn suicide bombings as morally reprehensible and politically counterproductive for the Palestinians. But he is not prepared to demand a cessation of such heinous acts, which are war crimes, until Israel ends its own violations. Carter's position is at variance with the laws of war, which do not permit one party to commit war crimes on the grounds that the other party is already committing them, or in response to political injustice. Under international humanitarian law, both sides have an independent and unconditional duty to obey the laws of war.

Blames Israel Only

.... Israel's occupation, in Carter eyes, is the primary cause of the conflict, and Palestinian suicide bombings are simply a reaction to Israeli injustice. Indeed, Carter says outright that “Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land.”

But Palestinian rejectionism preceded Israel's occupation and is an independent cause of the conflict. Such violent rejectionism will not evaporate when the occupation ends, but it would be easier to combat if the moderates have won the day.

There are also errors of omission in Carter's book, which are invariably biased against Israel. For example, Carter's chronology omits any mention of the firing of more than 600 rockets by Palestinian militants into southern Israel during the months between Israel's Gaza disengagement and the abduction of Gilad Shalit.

Carter says that the Palestinians have accepted the Road Map in its entirety, but the Israeli government announced fourteen caveats and prerequisites, some of which would preclude any final peace talks. I agree with Carter that Israel's objections to the Road Map were intended to prevent its implementation so that Sharon could proceed with his unilateral plans. Still, the Palestinians also had major objections to the Road Map and have completely failed to live up to its most central near-term requirement on their conduct: making a sustained effort to disarm terror groups and enforce a truce.

As the US has stated many times, both sides are obliged to fulfill their commitments under the Road Map regardless of the performance of the other. Israel must dismantle the illegal West Bank settlement outposts regardless of whether the Palestinians have disarmed the terror groups, and the Palestinians cannot use Israel's failure to take serious action against the outposts as an excuse for inaction in fulfilling their security obligations.

Clinton, Hamas, Oslo

Carter claims that Barak gave no clear response to President Clinton's final proposal, but [Barak ] later stated that Israel had twenty pages of reservations. President Arafat rejected the proposal— a position which Carter justifies on the grounds that no Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive.

Yossi Beilin served in Barak's cabinet at the time. Beilin reports that, On December 28 [2000], at a meeting of the government, the [Clinton] plan was endorsed in principle together with permission to send reservations that had not been presented to the government for endorsement.... From that moment, the Clinton Plan embodied Israel's stance on the Palestinian-Israeli issue. (From “The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement 1996-2004,” p. 223.) Ross reports this as well in his memoir, “The Missing Peace” (pp. 754-5), as does Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's foreign minister at the time (see his “Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy,” p. 272)....

Carter, who should know better from his experience as a mediator, ignores the fact that Clinton never asked Arafat or Barak to accept his plan unconditionally. Arafat was not obliged to accept its terms and risk his survival, as Carter suggests, misappropriating a line Arafat used at Camp David about an earlier proposal. In December 2000, Clinton simply asked both leaders to accept his plan as a basis for further negotiations towards a peace treaty. The Israeli government agreed to continue negotiating within Clinton’s parameters.

Carter claims that the famous Palestinian Prisoners' National Reconciliation Document endorsed a two-state proposal. He says that the prisoners' proposal called for...acceptance of Israel as a neighbor within its legal borders. It endorsed the key UN resolutions regarding legal borders.... But it did not even mention Israel let alone recognize it or endorse UN Resolution 242 or the Arab League peace proposal. Carter ignores Hamas’s repeated denials that its willingness to accept a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza, as called for in this document, constituted a readiness for peace with Israel.

Here is the Americans for Peace Now’s analysis of the prisoners' document on this crucial point: ... in the introduction of the revised document—which the paper says must be considered as part of the whole initiative—it is stated that the document is being put forth 'on the basis of no recognition of the legitimacy of occupation.' Given that Hamas has considered all of Israel to be occupied territory, in addition to the West Bank and Gaza, it's unclear that the moderates have achieved any sort of compromise on this matter from Hamas.’ Indeed, one Hamas legislator, Salah al-Bardawil, told Reuters, 'We said we accept a state in 1967 — but we did not say we accept two states.'....”

Another misrepresentation is Carter's belief that Withdrawal to the 1967 border [is] specified in UN Resolution 242 and ...promised in the Camp David Accords and the Olso Agreement and prescribed in the Roadmap of the International Quartet. Again, this is a misreading of key documents. It is widely known that UN Resolution 242 omitted the definite article in its English version, referring to occupied territories so as not to dictate Israel’s complete withdrawal to the 1967 borders in exchange for peace. Moreover, the resolution called for an eventual Israeli withdrawal to secure and recognized borders in exchange for peace, which would be the outcome of negotiations, not simply a restoration of the pre-war status quo ante.

The Oslo Accords actually say nothing about what the final borders will be, and the Road Map's call for a final peace treaty that will end the occupation which began in 1967 does not mean that the withdrawal will be to the 1967 boundaries. In a final peace accord in which the parties define the final borders, they will agree that the occupation which began in 1967 has ended.

These borders will not be identical to the 1967 lines and Carter knows this. He talks of mutually agreeable exchanges of land, perhaps permitting significant numbers of Israeli settlers to remain in their present homes near Jerusalem. He's not wrong on the big picture — the 1967 borders must be the basis for a negotiated land swap — but he fudges important details....

GIDON D. REMBA is co-author of the forthcoming “The Great Rift: Arab-Israeli War and Peace in the New Middle East.” He served as senior foreign press editor and translator in the Israel Prime Minister’s Office during the Egyptian-Israeli peace process from 1977-‘78. He is currently active in the American Zionist peace camp from his home in Chicago. His commentaries are available online at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/.

Invective helps nobody

This morning, we note with sadness the first suicide bombing inside Israel in nearly ten months, murdering three people at a bakery in Eilat. The Palestinian governing party, Hamas, although not implicated in this attack, claimed by Islamic Jihad and a faction of the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, praised it as legitimate resistance.

The following is a version of my response to an article by SUNY Professor Emeritus Jerome Slater, published in Tikkun as “The Need Not to Know: The American Jewish Community and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” and republished at AlterNet as “The Zionist Dream is Becoming a Nightmare,” posted on January 24. It is a review of Tanya Reinhart’s polemic, The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003, published by Verso in 2006. That Tikkun and Alternet would publish his tirade without an alternative view reflects badly upon both.

While I do not have a problem with much of Jerome Slater’s indictment of Israel’s shortcomings and failings, I am struck by the strident and one-sided nature of his presentation. Slater’s analysis provides barely a hint that there are two sides that have continually made mistakes and committed wrongdoing in this conflict.

He is sure that Ben-Gurion only accepted the UN partition plan for tactical reasons, with the intention of embarking upon ethnic cleansing when presented the opportunity. There are documented quotes that support this view, but he totally ignores the historical words and deeds of the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini (an active ally of Hitler during World War II) and other Palestinian leaders of that era, which substantiate their intention to destroy the Palestinian Jewish community. And the initial months of battle were a near thing; 100,000 Jews of Jerusalem were under siege and 3.5 percent of the total Jewish population of Palestine (not just fighters) were killed or wounded.

If the Arab side had either accepted partition or credibly offered equal rights of citizenship in an independent Palestine, open to both Jewish and Arab immigration, there need not have been a conflict. There were substantial elements within the Zionist movement that advocated binationalism instead of an explicitly Jewish state.

Mind you, the Ben-Gurion that Slater “knows” would have subverted partition is the same man who was criticized by Benny Morris for refusing to take back the Old City of Jerusalem and to ethnically cleanse all of the West Bank when the Jews had a decisive military edge at the end of the independence war. He’s also the same man who advised from retirement after the great victory of 1967 that Israel should give up the conquered territories as quickly as possible. And Slater makes his contention about Ben-Gurion while ignoring Yasir Arafat’s similar tactical justifications for signing onto the Oslo Accords, made to a Muslim audience in South Africa, among other places.

The most noxious measures imposed upon the Palestinians, including the depredations of the wall/fence, are reactions to the Intifada-related attacks on Israelis that have taken hundreds of civilian lives. While both sides share blame for the breakdown of the peace talks of 2000-2001, the Palestinian turn toward violence in 2000 (although “enabled” by an overly lethal initial Israeli response) insured that the Israeli peace camp was routed from power. Compounded by the unfortunate election last year of Hamas and the ongoing mindless rocket attacks on southern Israeli towns, a return to an Israeli embrace of negotiations and reconciliation will be politically difficult.

Not (yet) ‘apartheid’

I wish that Linda Grant had changed one reference here: “There is no question that the Zionist insistence on a Jewish state puts the Arab minority in a position of second class citizens....”

Ms. Grant overstates her point. It isn’t “Zionism” as such that’s the problem. The ongoing efforts of the Meretz party and other progressive Zionists to promote equality for non-Jewish Israelis within the “Jewish state” belie this statement.

“Racism and Apartheid” by Linda Grant (Originally published in the London Jewish Chronicle, but taken here from the “False Dichotomies” Weblog posting of Jan. 23.)

.... We had booked rooms at Le Meridien, a new five star hotel on the beach [in Eilat]. We walked into the usual cacophony of noise you find in the lobby of any Israeli hotel: children ran up and down, large family parties sat drinking coffee, taking up every sofa and chair, vying to attract the attention of the harassed waitresses. It was a normal scene for Eilat, and at least half the guests were Arab-Israelis.

We went for a walk that evening. Thousands of strolling Arab-Israeli families – Muslim, secular and Christian – were strolling along the beach front, thronging the malls, buying clothes at the best stores, eating at the best restaurants, unremarked on. Around 70 per cent of visitors were Arab-Israeli because it was the religious festival of Eid. I saw a woman in hijab having her tarot cards read by a blonde-haired Russian. I saw teenage girls trying on jeans. I saw kids in the hotel pool, a cluster of splashing dark heads and brown bodies, unable to distinguish between Jew and Arab, tourist and Israeli citizen.

While I was in Eilat I read an interview in Haaretz with an Arab-Israeli political activist rejecting the charge levelled by the rest of the Arab world that her fellow Arab Israelis had become ‘Israelized’ - seduced and corrupted by Western liberal values. Later that afternoon, at the airport, I bought a copy of the Jerusalem Report whose cover story was a discussion of what it described as a controversial document issued by Arab Israeli intellectuals calling for a binational system and Arab autonomy. The conference, held on 25 December at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, discussed the huge gap that had opened up between Jewish and Arab education ‘both in terms of resources and results as a consequence of decades of inadequate funding and discrimination,’ according the article.

There is no question that the Zionist insistence on a Jewish state puts the Arab minority in a position of second class citizens, underscored by the inferior school system, roads and town planning. No Israeli government has ever invited an Arab party to join its coalition. And this week, in an ominous signal of what might be to come, rabbinical leaders in Bnei Brak issued a statement saying that it was forbidden to rent apartments to Arabs. This is naked racism.

The Jerusalem Report’s long report on the Van Leer conference raises various possibilities for the future of Arabs in Israel, the nature of the state they live in and how it will have to change to become truly equal and democratic. This is, for me, the most important debate that confronts the country today. Many, maybe most Israelis would like to blink, open their eyes and find the Palestinians had gone away. Israel can build fences and walls and define its borders. But a millions Arab Israelis live inside Israel itself. Despite the wet dreams of MK Lieberman or the wilder fantasies of expulsion (whose proponents think they can co-opt the army into loading the cattle trucks) there is a non-Jewish population inside Israel which deserves the full equality that we in Britain, as a minority, demand for ourselves.

As a writer I take objection to the violation of language. You may wish to call the ceramic object from which I just now sipped a mouthful of coffee a ledge or a camera or a paving stone or a tree, you have that right, but words have common meanings. When one set of people are restricted to separate buses, benches, are forbidden from the act of miscegenation, you call it apartheid. When a people are drinking coffee in the lobby of five star hotels and their kids are swimming in the same pool as the kids of the majority, you’re going to have to call it something else. Right now Arab-Israelis may be second-class citizens but they do not live in an apartheid state. Unless the orthodox rabbis of Benei Brak have their way and Israel turns into a racist theocracy and the hotels are declared Arabrein zones.

See also Bradley Burston’s Haaretz column, “Occupation Is Horrid, But It’s Not Apartheid.”

Apartheid Analogy: Pro and Con

Uri Avnery is a radical non-Zionist Israeli who overlaps with the Zionist left in his advocacy of a two-state solution. I found parts of this essay too noxious to copy on our blog (click on the link below for his entire piece), but he has instructive – albeit painful – things to say about what is and isn’t “apartheid” in the West Bank.

A Freedom Ride by Uri Avnery

Yesterday, a decree of the Officer Commanding the Central Sector, General Yair Naveh, was about to come into force. It forbade Israeli drivers from giving a ride to Palestinian passengers in the occupied territories. The knitted-Kippah-wearing general, a friend of the settlers, justified this as a vital security necessity. In the past, inhabitants of the West Bank have sometimes reached Israeli territory in Israeli cars.

Israeli peace activists decided that this nauseating order must be protested. Several organizations planned a protest action for the very day it was due to come into force. They organized a "Freedom Ride" of Israeli car-owners who were to enter the West Bank (a criminal offence in itself) and give a ride to local Palestinians, who had volunteered for the action.... At the last moment, the general "froze" the order. The demonstration was called off.

THE ORDER that was suspended (but not officially rescinded) emitted a strong odor of apartheid. It joins a large number of acts of the occupation authorities that are reminiscent of the racist regime of South Africa, such as the systematic building of roads in the West Bank for Israelis only and on which Palestinians are forbidden to travel. Or the "temporary" law that forbids Palestinians in the occupied territories, who have married Israeli citizens, to live with their spouses in Israel. And, most importantly, the Wall, which is officially called "the separation obstacle". In Afrikaans, "apartheid" means separation....

Because of this, we are right when we use the term "apartheid" in our daily struggle against the occupation. We speak about the "apartheid wall" and "apartheid methods". The order of General Naveh has practically given official sanction to the use of this term. Even institutions that are far from the radical peace camp did relate it to the Apartheid system.

Therefore, the title of former President Jimmy Carter's new book is fully justified - "Palestine - Peace not Apartheid"....

BUT WHEN we use the term "Apartheid" to describe the situation, we have to be aware of the fact that the similarity between the Israeli occupation and the White regime in South Africa concerns only the methods, not the substance. This must be made quite clear, so as to prevent grave errors in the analysis of the situation and the conclusions drawn from it....

These reservations all apply to comparisons between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the historical conflict between the Whites and the Blacks in South Africa. Suffice it to point out several basic differences:

(a) In SA there was a conflict between Blacks and Whites, but both agreed that the state of South Africa must remain intact- the question was only who would rule it. Almost nobody proposed to partition the country between the Blacks and the Whites.

Our conflict is between two different nations with different national identities, each of which places the highest value on a national state of its own.

(b) In SA, the idea of "separateness" was an instrument of the White minority for the oppression of the Black majority, and the Black population rejected it unanimously. Here, the huge majority of the Palestinians want to be separated from Israel in order to establish a state of their own. The huge majority of Israelis, too, want to be separated from the Palestinians. Separation is the aspiration of the majority on both sides, and the real question is where the border between them should run. On the Israeli side, only the settlers and their allies demand to keep the whole historical area of the country united and object to separation, in order to rob the Palestinians of their land and enlarge the settlements. On the Palestinian side, the Islamic fundamentalists also believe that the whole country is a "waqf" (religious trust) and belongs to Allah, and therefore must not be partitioned.

(c) In SA, a White minority (about 10 percent) ruled over a huge majority of Blacks (78 percent), people of mixed race (7 percent) and Asians (3 percent). Here, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are now 5.5 million Jewish-Israelis and an equal number of Palestinian-Arabs (including the 1.4 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel).

(d) The SA economy was based on Black labor and could not possibly have existed without it. Here, the Israeli government has succeeded in excluding the non-Israeli Palestinians almost completely from the Israeli labor market and replacing them with foreign workers.


IT IS important to point out these fundamental differences in order to prevent grave mistakes in the strategy of the struggle for ending the occupation....

SOME PEOPLE in Israel and around the world follow the Apartheid analogy to its logical conclusion: the solution here will be the same as the one in South Africa. There, the Whites surrendered and the Black majority assumed power. The country remained united. Thanks to wise leaders, headed by Nelson Mandela and Frederick Willem de Klerk, this happened without bloodshed.

In Israel, that is a beautiful dream for the end of days. Because of the people involved and their anxieties, it would inevitably turn into a nightmare. In this country there are two peoples with a very strong national consciousness. After 125 years of conflict, there is not the slightest chance that they would live together in one state, share the same government, serve in the same army and pay the same taxes. Economically, technologically and educationally, the gap between the two populations is immense. In such a situation, power relations similar to those in Apartheid South Africa would indeed arise....

IT MAY be hoped that this situation will change in 50 years. I have no doubt that in the end, a federation between the two states, perhaps including Jordan too, will come about. Yasser Arafat spoke with me about this several times. But neither the Palestinians not the Israelis can afford 50 more years of bloodshed, occupation and creeping ethnic cleansing.

The end of the occupation will come in the framework of peace between the two peoples, who will live in two free neighboring states - Israel and Palestine - with the border between them based on the Green Line. I hope that this will be an open border....

What occupation looks like, Part 2

The following is by the well-known Israeli correspondent who has made her home in the West Bank, as part of her commitment to her job:

Impossible travel By Amira Hass, Haaretz

All the promises to relax restrictions in the West Bank have obscured the true picture. A few roadblocks have been removed, but the following prohibitions have remained in place. (This information was gathered by Haaretz, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Machsom Watch [an Israeli women's human rights monitoring organization].)

Standing prohibitions:
* Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are forbidden to stay in the West Bank.
* Palestinians are forbidden to enter East Jerusalem.
* West Bank Palestinians are forbidden to enter the Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing.
* Palestinians are forbidden to enter the Jordan Valley.
* Palestinians are forbidden to enter villages, lands, towns and neighborhoods along the "seam line" between the separation fence and the Green Line (some 10 percent of the West Bank).
* Palestinians who are not residents of the villages Beit Furik and Beit Dajan in the Nablus area, and Ramadin, south of Hebron, are forbidden entry.
* Palestinians are forbidden to enter the settlements' area (even if their lands are inside the settlements' built area).
* Palestinians are forbidden to enter Nablus in a vehicle.
* Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are forbidden to enter area A (Palestinian towns in the West Bank).
* Gaza Strip residents are forbidden to enter the West Bank via the Allenby crossing.
* Palestinians are forbidden to travel abroad via Ben-Gurion Airport.
* Children under age 16 are forbidden to leave Nabus without an original birth certificate and parental escort.
* Palestinians with permits to enter Israel are forbidden to enter through the crossings used by Israelis and tourists.
* Gaza residents are forbidden to establish residency in the West Bank.
* West Bank residents are forbidden to establish residency in the Jordan valley, seam line communities or the villages of Beit Furik and Beit Dajan.
* Palestinians are forbidden to transfer merchandise and cargo through internal West Bank checkpoints.
__________________________

Periodic prohibitions:
* Residents of certain parts of the West Bank are forbidden to travel to the rest of the West Bank.
* People of a certain age group - mainly men from the age of 16 to 30, 35 or 40 - are forbidden to leave the areas where they reside (usually Nablus and other cities in the northern West Bank).
* Private cars may not pass the Swahara-Abu Dis checkpoint (which separates the northern and southern West Bank). This was canceled for the first time two weeks ago under the easing of restrictions.
__________________________

Travel permits required:
* A magnetic card (intended for entrance to Israel, but eases the passage through checkpoints within the West Bank).
* A work permit for Israel (the employer must come to the civil administration offices and apply for one).
* A permit for medical treatment in Israel and Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem (The applicant must produce an invitation from the hospital, his complete medical background and proof that the treatment he is seeking cannot be provided in the occupied territories).
* A travel permit to pass through Jordan valley checkpoints.
* A merchant's permit to transfer goods.
* A permit to farm along the seam line requires a form from the land registry office, a title deed, and proof of first-degree relations to the registered property owner.
* Entry permit for the seam line (for relatives, medical teams, construction workers, etc. Those with permits must enter and leave via the same crossing even if it is far away or closing early).
* Permits to pass from Gaza, through Israel to the West Bank.
* A birth certificate for children under 16.
* A long-standing resident identity card for those who live in seam-line enclaves.
_________________________

Checkpoints and barriers:
* There were 75 manned checkpoints in the West Bank as of January 9, 2007.
* There are on average 150 mobile checkpoints a week (as of September 2006).
* There are 446 obstacles placed between roads and villages, including concrete cubes, earth ramparts, 88 iron gates and 74 kilometers of fences along main roads.
* There are 83 iron gates along the separation fence, dividing lands from their owners. Only 25 of the gates open occasionally.

What occupation looks like

It's the little things that make an occupation, The Economist news magazine.

DURING 2006, according to B'tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, almost half of them innocent bystanders, among them 141 children. In the same period, Palestinians killed 17 Israeli civilians and six soldiers. It is such figures, as well as events like shellings, house demolitions, arrest raids and land expropriations, that make the headlines in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What rarely get into the media but make up the staple of Palestinian daily conversation are the countless little restrictions that slow down most people's lives, strangle the economy and provide constant fuel for extremists.

Arbitrariness is one of the most crippling features of these rules. No one can predict how a trip will go. Many of the main West Bank roads, for the sake of the security of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, are off-limits to Palestinian vehicles—only one road connecting the north and south West Bank, for instance, is open to them—and these restrictions change frequently. So do the rules on who can pass the checkpoints that in effect divide the West Bank into a number of semi-connected regions (see map).

A new order due to come into force this week would have banned most West Bankers from riding in cars with Israeli licence plates, and thus from getting lifts from friends and relatives among the 1.6m Palestinians who live as citizens in Israel, as well as from aid workers, journalists and other foreigners. The army decided to suspend the order after protests from human-rights groups that it would give soldiers enormous arbitrary powers—but it has not revoked it.

Large parts of the population of the northern West Bank, and of individual cities like Nablus and Jericho, simply cannot leave their home areas without special permits, which are not always forthcoming. If they can travel, how long they spend waiting at checkpoints, from minutes to hours, depends on the time of day and the humour of the soldiers. Several checkpoints may punctuate a journey between cities that would otherwise be less than an hour's drive apart. These checkpoints move and shift every day, and army jeeps add to the unpredictability and annoyance by stopping and creating ad hoc mobile checkpoints at various spots.

According to the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the number of such obstacles had increased to 534 by mid-December from 376 in August 2005, when OCHA and the Israeli army completed a joint count. When Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, agreed last month to ease restrictions at a few of these checkpoints as a concession to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, human-rights people reported that not only did many of the checkpoints go on working as before; near the ones that had eased up, mobile ones were now operating instead, causing worse disruption and pain.

It is sometimes hard to fathom the logic of the checkpoint regime. One route from Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative capital, to Jerusalem, involves a careful inspection of documents, while on another the soldiers—if they are at their posts—just glance at cars' occupants to see if they look Arab. Israeli law strictly forbids Israeli citizens from visiting the main Palestinian cities, but they can drive straight into Ramallah and Hebron without being challenged, while other cities, such as Jericho and Nablus, remain impermeable. In many places the barrier that Israel is building through the West Bank for security purposes (though in Palestinian eyes to grab more land) is monitored with all the care of an international border, while around Jerusalem the army turns a blind eye to hundreds of people who slip through cracks in the wall as part of their daily commute.

Because of the internal travel restrictions, people who want to move from one Palestinian city to another for work or study must register a change of address to make sure they can stay there. But they cannot. Israel's population registry, which issues Palestinian identity cards as well as Israeli ones, has issued almost no new Palestinian cards since the start of the second intifada in 2000. And that means no address changes either. This also makes it virtually impossible for Palestinians from abroad to get residency in the occupied territories, which are supposed to be their future state, never mind in Israel.
No-through-roads galore

On top of that, in the past year several thousand Palestinians who had applied for residency in the West Bank and were living there on renewable six-month visitor permits have become illegal residents too, liable to be stopped and deported at any checkpoint, not because of anything they have done but because Israel has stopped renewing permits since Hamas, the Islamist movement, took control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) a year ago. (Israel says it is because the PA isn't handing over the requests.)

Like Israelis, Palestinians who commit a traffic offence on the West Bank's highways have to pay the fine at an Israeli post office or a police station. But in the West Bank the only post offices and police stations are on Israeli settlements that most West Bank Palestinians cannot visit without a rare permit. If they do not pay, however, they lose their driving licences the next time the police stop them. They also get a criminal record—which then makes an Israeli entry permit quite impossible.

Some of the regulations stray into the realm of the absurd. A year ago a military order, for no obvious reason, expanded the list of protected wild plants in the West Bank to include za'atar (hyssop), an abundant herb and Palestinian staple. For a while, soldiers at checkpoints confiscated bunches of it from bewildered Palestinians who had merely wanted something to liven up their salads. Lately there have been no reports of za'atar confiscation, but, says Michael Sfard, the legal adviser for Yesh Din, another Israeli human-rights body, the order is still in force. As he tells the story, he cannot help laughing. There is not much else to do.

Peace with Syria nixed by Israel?

M. J. Rosenberg gets only half of what went wrong with Israel’s foreign policy under Golda Meir in the early 1970s: not only did Golda miss an opportunity for peace with Egypt prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but perhaps even worse, she missed signing a peace treaty with Jordan in those years, because King Hussein wanted most of East Jerusalem back — while allowing some border adjustments (such as the Latrun Salient in Israel’s favor) and Israeli control over the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter. Without a war, Golda could have secured peace treaties with two powerful Arab neighbors and mostly solved the Palestinian issue to boot.

The buzz in the last week or so is that Prime Minister Olmert has nixed a deal with Syria, the fruit of two years of back channel discussions. This is not incontrovertibly proven fact, but it’s intriguing and also frustrating, if true.

When Uncritical Support leads to Disaster by M.J. Rosenberg January 19, 2007

Once upon a time the adage that they "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" seemed to apply to only one side of the Arab-Israeli divide: the Arab side.

After all, Israeli officials – at least in the first 20 years of Israel's existence – were emphatic that Israeli representatives would go anywhere in the world, at a moment's notice, to negotiate without preconditions with any Arab government willing to talk with Israel.

Prime Minister Levi Eshkol re-stated that principle immediately following the 1967 war, indicating that the lands captured in that war would be on the table if the Arabs would agree to talk. But the Arab League rejected Eshkol's offer with the famous "three noes" -- "no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel...."

Talk about a missed opportunity. Eshkol viewed the West Bank, Gaza and the other occupied territories as valuable primarily because Israel could give them up in exchange for peace and security. Before the '67 war, Israel had no surplus land to spare and hence nothing to offer the Arabs. Suddenly it did and Eshkol was willing. But the Arabs foolishly let the moment pass.

Israel's major missed opportunity came in 1971. Up to that point, no Arab leader (except Jordan's King Abdullah back in the 1940's) had indicated a clear willingness to negotiate with Israel. But then, Anwar Sadat, Egypt's new President, announced that he was ready to negotiate with Israel. Furthermore, he did not link negotiations to Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territory.

Sadat was primarily interested in the formerly-Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and, particularly, in regaining the east bank of the Suez Canal so he could re-open the canal to international shipping. As for Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and the Palestinian issue, that was for negotiating about later.

Israel took note of Sadat's stated willingness to talk. Prime Minister Golda Meir acknowledged that Sadat was "the first Egyptian leader to say he was ready to make peace." But she was not interested in negotiating with Sadat over Sinai, not in 1971. As Meir said later: "We never had it so good." Israel had security and the territories. Who cared what Sadat offered or withheld?

So when Sadat said that in return for an Israeli pullback of 2-3 miles from the east bank of the canal he would begin negotiations toward a full peace, the Israeli government said "no."

President Nixon pushed hard to get the Meir government to explore the offer, as did Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. But the majority of the Cabinet felt that Israel should reject the pressure and reject the peace offer too. The pro-Israel community in America backed Israel and told Nixon to butt out. The Prime Minister knew best, or so the thinking went.

It was at that point that Sadat decided that the only way he would regain his territory would be through war. He spent two years preparing an attack and then, on Yom Kippur 1973, the Egyptians crossed the canal, wiped out the Israeli defenders, and – with Syrian assistance -- came close to defeating Israel itself.

The war cost Israel 3,000 young lives - all of whom would likely have been spared if Israel had taken up Egypt 's offer. In the end, Israel got peace with Egypt but at the price of surrendering not a mere 2-3 miles of the Sinai, but every last inch of it. And thousands of lost sons, fathers, and brothers. (It is worth noting that the pro-Israel community’s backing of Israel’s resistance to Nixon’s “pressure” contributed to the worst disaster in Israel’s history–a demonstration that unthinking and uncritical “support” is, in fact, anything but).

It is just possible that another colossal missed opportunity is in the making right now. According to the highly respected and well-connected Ha'aretz correspondent, Akiva Eldar, Israeli and Syrian representatives – meeting secretly over a two year period ending in July 2006 – agreed on the framework of a peace treaty.

According to Eldar, the plan provides for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Syria and Israel would be separated by a buffer zone in the form of a nature park, open to citizens of both countries.

Israel would retain exclusive control over the coveted waters of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee. Demilitarized and reduced military presence zones, provisions for early warning stations and international security oversight, would be established. And, of critical importance, Syria would end its support for Hezbollah and distance itself from Iran. Likewise, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal would be forced to leave Damascus.

Once these mutual commitments are met, a full peace treaty would be signed and normal relations established.

The Eldar story sounds like a fantasy but it isn't. We know it isn't because key figures mentioned in Eldar's piece – Americans, Israelis and Syrians – have confirmed that the meetings took place.

Most notably, Alon Liel, a former Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Geoffrey Aronson, the American director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who facilitated the meetings, confirm that they happened. Liel told Ha'aretz that "Syria is serious about resuming peace talks with Israel and even proposed holding secret high-level talks during the war in Lebanon last summer, which Israel rejected. "

The most significant piece of evidence attesting to the significance of these meetings is that senior US officials say that Vice President Cheney was kept up-to-date about the meetings and indicated no opposition to them. This is critical because some Israelis claim that it is the Bush administration that is preventing Israel from responding to Syrian overtures. Apparently not in this case.

Perhaps, the Bush administration is moving away from its hard-line on dealing with Syria. Perhaps, taking a page from the Baker-Hamilton report, it is concluding that our disdain for the Assad regime should not prevent us from engaging Syria. Not if doing so will lead Syria to stop its trouble-making on the Iraq and Israeli borders and drive a wedge between Iran and Syria (not to mention Hamas and Hezbollah).

Unfortunately, the Israeli government responded to the Ha'aretz report with instant rejection which almost immediately produced a negative response in Damascus.

Obviously, Syria was not going to own up to negotiating with Israel if the Israeli government was in full rejection mode.

By why would it be? Prime Ministers Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak all pursued the idea of trading the Golan for peace. And Ariel Sharon was aware of the talks that were going on at the time of his stroke and did nothing to halt them

Why not explore how far Damascus will go? The answer is, almost surely, politics.

A weak Olmert government may not feel it can pursue negotiations with Syria right now.

Nevertheless, Olmert should not hesitate to explore the Syrian option.

The possibility that Syria is ready for peace is too important to ignore.

Any peace feeler is worthy of exploration, especially one as promising as this.

By pursuing the Syrian track Israel could succeed in eliminating the threat from its most implacable neighbor. Peace with Syria would remove Iran's entry point into Israel's immediate neighborhood and halt its arms supply, virtually destroying Hezbollah. And Hamas would be almost totally isolated.

Anyone who believes this is not a gamble worth considering simply does not understand what the stakes for America and Israel really are.

But wait. There's good news. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is, according to media reports, ready to make a major push for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with a view toward reaching an agreement by the time President Bush leaves office. That explains why the Vice President has, apparently, encouraged the unofficial Israeli-Syrian talks (or, at least, not opposed them).

Bush, Cheney and Rice may understand that success in Iraq looks increasingly unlikely and that, by comparison, achieving a final status Israel-Palestinian agreement would be relatively easy. It's legacy time. The Bush administration should go for it.

As for the pro-Israel community and the Congress, it should recall the lesson of 1971. Supporting Israel by supporting the status quo is no support at all. Just visit the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem and imagine it without the 3000 graves of soldiers who died heroically in an utterly preventable war.

The views expressed in IPF Friday are those of MJ Rosenberg and not necessarily of Israel Policy Forum. If you have colleagues or friends who would appreciate receiving this weekly letter, or you would like to unsubscribe, send an e-mail to: ipfdc@ipforumdc.org

Yossi Beilin on Carter

This is a very understated and gentle piece by our colleague, Yossi Beilin, the head of Israel's Meretz-Yahad (social democratic) party. It's not really a review – it doesn't deal with much detail – but it's very generous in its tone.

And it's not really a "case for Carter" because Beilin isn't arguing with anybody. The review to appear in the coming issue of ISRAEL HORIZONS is quite negative on Carter's account of the facts. But it also refrains from attacking Carter as a person.

Beilin agrees with Carter on the big picture (as does the IH reviewer, by the way) and Beilin considers Carter to be a friend. As progressive Zionists, we are caught between emphasizing Carter’s one-sided depiction of many facts and our overall agreement with how awful things are in the Palestinian territories and Israel’s need to make every effort to negotiate a two-state solution in order to save both its Jewish raison d’etre and its fundamentally democratic character.

The Case for Carter by Yossi Beilin / The Forward / Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Looking at the controversy that has erupted over former President Jimmy Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” I have to say I am a little envious — envious of a national culture in which a book, or just a book title, can stir such a debate.

I cannot recall when the publication of a book has generated such a debate in Israel. And even though we are talking here about a book that was published in the United States and has yet to be translated into Hebrew, the quiet way in which “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” has been received in Israel is nevertheless noteworthy, not least because it is Israel itself that is the object of Carter’s opprobrium.

Part of the explanation for why Carter’s book did not set off any public outcry in Israel lies in the difference in literary culture. For better or worse — and I, for one, certainly think that it is for worse — books just don’t matter here in the way they still do elsewhere. Yet perhaps a larger part of the explanation lies with the difference in political culture, and with local sensitivities (or perhaps insensitivities) to language and moral tone.

It is not that Israelis are indifferent to what is said about them, but the threshold of what passes as acceptable here is apparently much higher than it is with Israel’s friends in the United States. In the case of this particular book, the harsh words that Carter reserves for Israel are simply not as jarring to Israeli ears, which have grown used to such language, especially with respect to the occupation.

Link here for the rest of this article in The Forward.
Link here with yesterday’s op-ed by Jimmy Carter in the Washington Post. (It has a somewhat softer tone than some other of his recent writings and interviews.)

Critique of AJC Response to Anti-Zionist Jews

The fellow who thought up and is the blogmeister of the sometimes iconoclastic Jewschool, Dan Sieradski - aka Mobius - has written a rather lengthy critique of Prof. Rosenfeld's “29-page polemic” published by the American Jewish Committee [and available online here]. And from what I can tell, Sieradski's talk on WBAI’s "Beyond The Pale" radio program [a project for New York City's Jews For Racial and Economic Justice], can be heard online.

Sieradski would agree with Ralph Seliger's assessment that it’s written from a somewhat centrist to right-of-center point of view, I think, but go much further. As for me, I'm not that surprised that Prof. Rosenfeld doesn't mention criticisms of Israeli policies taken from a liberal or left-Zionist perspective, as noted by Meretz USA President Lilly Rivlin. Most mainstream or right-of-center folks ... just don't.

Sieradski, at least for now, considers himself a post-Zionist or anti-Zionist. And while he may be somewhat consumed by the heady mix of left-Zionism, left anti-Zionism, all manner of Jewish left politics from Anarchism to Zionism in fact, such that his politics are still in a state of rapid evolution - nothing wrong with that! - that ... well, no matter. His criticisms of the Rosenfeld piece, as well as the diverse responses posted at the end of his critique, should be taken into account by anyone within the progressive Zionist camp when contemplating "how we as Zionists address our concerns for an Israel more dedicated to peace and humane values."

Sieradski states that Rosenfeld
... begins to explore this issue by running through a list of manifestations of antisemitism in the Muslim and European communities. However, he does not venture to explore the causes of antisemitism in these communities, nor their relationship to economics or geopolitics. Rather, Rosenfeld seems content accepting that it is simply age-old irrational Jew-hatred. This, despite our thorough knowledge of antisemitism’s historic use as a political device.

Nonchalantly sandwiched between mentions of Jews being beaten in France and the pervasiveness of Jewish conspiracy theories in the Former Soviet Union, Rosenfeld inserts references to London mayor Ken Livingstone’s condemnations of Israel, as well as a brief history of the British divestiture movement. Yet Rosenfeld does not demonstrate why either criticizing Israel or divesting from Israeli businesses are antisemitic acts. He simply lumps them in with varied acts of antisemitic violence and paranoia without meaningfully connecting them.

Rosenfeld concludes that the “new” characteristics of antisemitism are marked by its globalized nature (thank you, Internets), its evolving nature (yesterday it was poisoning wells, today it’s subterranean nukes), its predominance among Muslims rather than Christians, and finally, its primary manifestation in anti-Zionism. According to Rosenfeld, opposing Jewish statehood is simply the modern manifestation of desiring the Jewish people’s extermination:

Some of the most impassioned charges leveled against the Jews today involve vicious accusations against the Jewish state. Anti-Zionism, in fact, is the form that much of today’s anti-Semitism takes, so much so that some now see earlier attempts to rid the world of Jews finding a parallel in present day desires to get rid of the Jewish state.

At this point, Rosenfeld adds the oft repeated caveat, “Criticizing [Israeli] policies and actions is, in itself, not anti-Semitic.” Of course, to claim otherwise would be to condemn a majority of the Israeli public, if not the entire world Jewish population. Rosenfeld then draws what he perceives to be the line between legitimate and illegitimate criticism of Israel — the tone of the critique, or more specifically yet, the invocation of specific analogies: “To call Israel a Nazi state […] as is commonly done today, or to accuse it of fostering South African-style apartheid rule or engaging in ethnic cleansing or wholesale genocide goes well beyond legitimate criticism.”

But waging a purportedly illegitimate criticism of Israel and engaging in antisemitism are still not the same thing. Many of these Nazi analogies, for example, derive from Palestinian and pro-Palestinian sources. However the motivation behind Palestinian comparisons of Jews to Nazis rests in the Palestinian experience of Israeli occupation. While it is indeed true that a large segment of the Palestinian population harbors deeply troubling antisemitic beliefs, the comparison of one’s perceived oppressors to Nazis cannot be so easily reduced to an irrational outburst of antisemitism. The former are based in traditional, mythical canards, the latter in one’s own experience of suffering. In other words, calling the soldier who bulldozes your home a Nazi is not the same as believing he is part of a conspiracy to manipulate the world economy. Thus while such analogies may ultimately be used as slurs with which to tarnish the State of Israel, they are not necessarily antisemitic in nature. Rather, they are emotional appeals.

Further, though Israel is not systematically murdering Palestinians, one might be inclined towards such exaggerations as “genocide,” while noticing that at least one Palestinain civilian is killed every few days by the IDF, on some days that number growing as high as 18 (a rare but not altogether infrequent result of Israeli “attackcidents”). While they’re certainly not evidence of genocide, such incidents do not make for a positive impression of Israel, and lend themselves instead to hyperbole.

I would also like to add that to accuse Israel of engaging in ethnic cleansing and/or fostering an apartheid-like regime can not justly be deemed as illegitimate. That is because Israel can be seen as engaging in ethnic cleansing and adopting apartheid-like policies. By its own admission, Israel is participating in demographic warfare and considers the systematic dispossession and forcible relocation of Palestinians part of its strategy to maintain a Jewish majority. This process has involved the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank, the Judaization of The Old City and East Jerusalem, numerous land grabs associated with the erection of the security barrier, hundreds of house demolitions unrelated to demonstrable security concerns, and the employment of practices not unlike those employed under South African apartheid (such as barring marriage between Israelis and Palestinians, denying reentry to the territories by Palestinians who have been traveling abroad, restricting travel between Palestinian villages, denying work permits to residents of the territories, and confining Palestinian settlement to predefined areas). These policies have culminated in the “The Convergence Plan,” which is intended to unilaterally draw the borders of a future Palestinian state, ultimately forcing the Palestinians into a marginal territory surrounded on all perimeters by the Israeli army, with internal jurisdiction granted to a Palestinian government with limited autonomy. This configuration is hardly distinct from the South African Bantustan system.

Thus, these supposed “tarrings” of Israel cannot be justly conflated with antisemitism. It is not accurate to compare Israel to Nazi Germany nor to claim that Israel is committing genocide. However, it is not necessarily antisemitic to do so either. Neither is it antisemitic nor even inaccurate to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa, though it is certainly unflattering and contrary to Israel’s projected self-image.
With this already glaringly problematic conception of anti-Zionism in mind, Rosenfeld moves on to his next question: “In what ways might Jews themselves, especially so-called ‘progressive’ Jews, be contributing to the intellectual and political climate that helps to foster [modern anti-Semitism], especially in its anti-Zionist forms?”

Rosenfeld begins to identify individuals whom he considers to be representative of the progressive Jewish community, and goes on to attack what he views as their negativity, their general hostility, and the inaccuracy of their information.

Here I could spend much time nitpicking and disputing Rosenfeld’s characterizations and purported facts.
Contrary to Rosenfeld’s claims, it has routinely served Zionist interests to tap into Jewish religious impulses such as messianism in order to bolster their efforts.

Jacqueline Rose’s claim that Israel is in “decline” and “in danger of destroying itself” is not just a view held by anti-Zionists, as implied by Rosenfeld, but one also shared by 67% of participants polled at this week’s World Zionist Youth Congress.

With regards to the claim that the razing of Jenin is an “outright fabrication,” on May 31, 2002, concerning the operations there, IDF soldier Moshe Nissim told Yediot Ahranot, “I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, just so that our soldiers won’t expose themselves to danger. […] I didn’t give a damn about demolishing all the houses I’ve demolished — and I have demolished plenty. By the end, I built the ‘Teddy’ football stadium there.”

Concerning the claim that only “rigorously observant Jews associated with Neturei Karta and other extreme Orthodox groups have regarded the idea of a Jewish state established before the days of messianic redemption as blasphemous,” it was not just groups affiliated with Neturei Karta. Rather, the predominant view in Orthodox Judaism in-and-of itself was that Zionism was illegitimate — a view which was held up until the Shoah and is still in the back of most Orthodox people’s minds.

Binationalism was never “properly discredited and discarded.” Rather, its chief proponents were assassinated. Chaim Arlozoroff and Yaakov Yisrael De Hann are just two names of men who were killed for trying to actualize a binational vision. Support for their cause diminished because of fears of physical reprisal. It became dangerous to simply promote the idea of binationalism, let alone make steps towards accomplishing it. Evidence of this notion’s impossibility was only retroactively provided once the Arabs began their armed resistance to Zionist colonization. De Hann was killed by the Haganah five years before the Hebron riots even took place.

Yet none of these factual disputes cut to the heart of Rosenfeld’s position, which is primarily focused on examining the hostility of Jewish anti-Zionist rhetoric. These Jewish anti-Zionists, claims Rosenfeld, are “not driven by anything remotely like reasoned historical analysis, but rather by a complex tangle of psychological as well as political motives that subvert reason and replace it with something akin to hysteria.”
To make this case, Rosenfeld relies heavily on the use of Nazi analogies by the “progressive” Jews he includes in his survey.

One such was the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who felt no reservations in talking about the “Nazification” of Israeli society and was fond of using the epithet “Judeo-Nazi” in referring to the Israeli army. And Leibowitz was hardly alone in employing such corrosive language.

Indeed, the members of Israel’s parliament were known for much worse. The phenomenon of MKs likening one another to Nazis was so rampant that a law was passed banning the use of Nazi analogies on the Knesset floor! In fact, everyone in Israel uses Nazi analogies.

Hareidim frequently call the Zionists Nazis while rioting and burning dumpsters in Mea Shearim.
Settlers wore orange “yellow” stars during the disengagement and took out newspaper ads comparing the withdrawal to a Nazi atrocity.

Israeli Leftists throw the word around as if it were an innocuous synonym for anyone who disagrees with their politics.

The Mizrachim refer to the Ashkenazim at Ashkenatzim, due to the discrimination they suffered at the hands of Israel’s once white European majority.

Nazi analogies are even invoked by the mainstream Right: “It’s 1933 and Iran is Nazi Germany.”
Come to think of it, Rosenfeld himself is putting Left-wing Jews in league with Nazis.

The Nazi charge thus bears a certain irresistability for Jews, precisely because it’s so incendiary. Those who invoke it want you to share their outrage. However, the tactic consistently fails, whereas the outrage instead becomes focused on the use of the Nazi analogy itself.

Perhaps the employment of such incendiary language and imagery is more rooted in a general Jewish propensity towards hyperbole and extremism more so than any particular political ideology. This tendency might explain, for example, Rosenfeld’s outrageous claim that Jewish “progressives” are just barely concealing their “murderous fantasies” towards their fellow Jews.

And therein lies the true heart of the matter — that which ultimately accounts more for the inflammatory remarks of these “progressives” than any explanation Rosenfeld offers.

All such behavior is no more than a reflection of the fact that there is no safe space for legitimate criticism of Israel within the Jewish community itself. Those who question Israeli policies are hastily isolated, demonized, marginalized and excluded. The resentment of this treatment frequently results in movement towards the farthest fringes of the discourse and the adoption of a tarnished impression of the Jewish community.

It would seem that the more Jewish activists seek to bring troubling matters to attention, the more vociferously they are ostracized. I can only assume that these authors, like so many others, had been dealt with harshly by their Zionist counterparts for criticizing Israel’s behavior, and were thusly driven towards the fringe. It should thus be no surprise that this group might employ hostile rhetoric, or even come to identify with and/or borrow from antisemites (such as the case with Israel Shahak and Gilad Atzmon). They are cowed into this position. From my own experience, I can say that the completely abhorrent and downright nasty way in which staunch Zionists often respond to challenges to their views can result in antipathy towards one’s fellow Jew. As a result, the hostility of Israel’s defenders soon becomes seen as part and parcel of the entire Zionist enterprise and the underlying intentionality with which that enterprise was embarked upon. It is here that legitimate concerns about Israel and Zionism become entangled with anti-Jewish platitudes that are neither helpful to one’s argument nor conducive towards finding a just resolution to the conflict.

Perhaps, in that respect, Rosenfeld is correct that such behavior is hysterical.

The facts on the ground — our very experiences of Israel — are simply inconsistent with the picture Israel’s defenders seek to project. Yet the response of this group to that assessment is to cover their ears and, instead, smear concerned Jewish voices as antisemitic, as this paper does, claiming that “the cumulative effect of these hostile ideas, which have been moving steadily from the margins to the mainstream of ‘progressive’ opinion, has been to reenergize ugly ideas and aggressive passions long considered to be dormant, if not dead.”

Yet we’re pleading with you, dying for you notice that something is very wrong here. We’re begging you to please, please, snap out of it and take a step back. And you’re telling us, shut up, you’re making a shonde fur der goyim.

At a time when the delegitimization and, ultimately, the eradication of Israel is a goal being voiced with mounting fervor by the enemies of the Jewish state, it is more than disheartening to see Jews themselves adding to the vilification. That some do so in the name of Judaism itself makes the nature of their assault all the more grotesque.

To not be taken seriously, but rather to be responded to with such degrading rhetoric, is enough to drive anyone insane.

AJC responds to anti-Zionist Jews

Meretz USA’s president, Lilly Rivlin, made us aware of “a 29-page polemic” from the American Jewish Committee, entitled “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism”; its author is Prof. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, the director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University. It’s written from a somewhat centrist to right-of-center point of view, but not badly as these things go.

I agree with Lilly that it does speak to the problem of the demonization and delegitimization of Israel by voices on the left and that, to some extent, this corrosive depiction of Israel and Zionism has been seeping into more mainstream liberal discourse as well (e.g., via Tony Judt, Professors Mearsheimer and Walt and Pres. Carter). As Lilly indicated, Rosenfeld “also makes the case that there is overlap between the rhetoric of anti-Semites and these ‘progressive’ voices.”

The essay especially resonated for me when he examined Seth Farber’s book of interviews with anti-Zionist Jews, “Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers” (pp. 20-24). I’ve had numerous occasions in the last few months to discuss and debate (often with heat and invective — my heat, but their invective) Israel and Zionism with the now-aged socialist and pacifist activist, David McReynolds, and his friends and comrades — including Farber. Seth Farber is one of the most extreme and vicious of anti-Zionists that I’ve ever crossed swords with. Even one of his anti-Zionist colleagues privately admitted to me that Seth is particularly “intense.”

Lilly points out that Prof. Rosenfeld does not mention criticisms of Israeli policies taken from a liberal or left-Zionist perspective (considering what Rosenfeld might say, perhaps we should be grateful). Meretz USA and Ameinu are planning a joint programmatic response on how we as Zionists address our concerns for an Israel more dedicated to peace and humane values.

Click here to obtain a download of Rosenfeld’s paper.

NY Times writer on ADL’s Foxman

I admire James Traub very much. I've followed his writing for years and even reviewed one of his books, over a decade ago. I found this piece to be nuanced; it both conveys (appropriately) some amusement toward Foxman, while understanding perfectly where he's coming from. He also, by the way, punctures Tony Judt for his display of arrogance and self-importance.

But I’ve discovered that not everybody appreciated Traub’s piece. Some think that he ridicules Foxman, uncovering some hint of nefarious bias. The thing to understand about Traub is that he is a journalist. Journalism is an art form, not a science. Traub is neither an advocate for or against Foxman, neither for or against Judt or Mearsheimer. Traub writes with both sensitivity and panache. Sometimes his panache can be mistaken for disdain.

DOES ABE FOXMAN HAVE AN ANTI-ANTI-SEMITE PROBLEM?
By James Traub, New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2007

In certain precincts of the Jewish community, a person who insists that the sky is falling, despite ample evidence to the contrary, is said to gevaltize — a neologism derived from the famous Yiddish cry of shock or alarm. The word is sometimes applied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC, the hard-line and notoriously successful pro-Israel lobby. But in the world of Jewish leaders, one man stands alone in the annals of gevalthood — Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League and scourge of anti-Semites of high estate and low, in Hollywood and Tehran, on campus and in the tabloids.

In a conversation last month ... I asked the A.D.L. leader about his ever-renewed fount of outrage. “I haven’t done gevalt for 30 years,” Foxman said, though some might argue otherwise. “But never before has there been such a threat to Israel and to the Jewish people from a geopolitical conglomerate — the Arab world, with Iran, with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with its position that it will not recognize Israel. The vise is closing.”

Click here for the entire article.

Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006)

Meretz USA was honored to have on its advisory board, one of the great political sociologists of all time. See his obituary in the New York Times and the following remembrance by another renowned sociologist, Nathan Glazer (also a member of the Meretz USA advisory board) in The New Republic:

The New Republic Online, MARTY LIPSET, RIP: Exceptionalist by Nathan Glazer Post date: 01.12.07 Issue date: 01.22.07

Seymour Martin Lipset, the distinguished political sociologist who died on December 31, 2006, tells the story in a memoir of how he shifted in City College (CCNY) from science--as a prelude to dentistry--to sociology. During the Depression, the only member of his family who prospered was a dentist uncle, and that seemed the road to security. But Pete Rossi, a fellow student and member of the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League, told him that sociology was the way to go--it could lead to a career in social work, and, because there would always be people in trouble in capitalist societies, there would always be jobs for social workers. I was a classmate of Lipset's, thinking much the same way. After trying various majors, I too shifted to sociology, with my eye on the federal exam for junior professional assistant, which, if one passed it, led to a job that paid $17 a week. Clearly, none of us young advocates for socialist revolution--which might have obviated the need to make a living under capitalism--were taking its near-possibility very seriously.

Still, we all migrated to the anti-Stalinist Alcove One in the CCNY cafeteria. (We never bought anything, instead bringing sandwiches from home.) Trotskyists, social democrats of various persuasions, and leftist Zionists (as I was) all hung out there. We learned from one another--not that I have any complaint about the formal education CCNY provided. In his memoir, Lipset recalls the day Philip Selznick (also to become a distinguished sociologist) brought to the Alcove's attention Robert Michels's Political Parties. Michels was a revelation. He explained why socialist parties did not bring socialism; why and how they turned into bureaucracies; why, despite a commitment to democracy, they were not democratic; and, by extension, why the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia resulted in a totalitarian dictatorship. Michels set Lipset's agenda for a good part of his scholarly career. This was bracketed, at its beginning and at its end, by his inquiries into one particular question: Why was there no major socialist party in the United States? But Lipset also steadily considered, in many books, the question of how democracy is established and maintained, and how it can be lost, in organizations and in societies.

Lipset was unique among us in being able to start immediately on an academic career. Few of us dreamed of such a possibility. CCNY had one available fellowship, as far as we knew, and Lipset got it and went to Columbia. (He told me about the phenomenal Robert Merton, who later became my teacher.) And he ingeniously found, through his prodigious reading of newspapers and journals, a subject for a dissertation that addressed his central concerns: Saskatchewan, a western Canadian province and the only state in North America that had elected a socialist government. Lipset went off to study how it had happened and with what consequences. He also considered why it didn't happen right across the border in North Dakota, which had a very similar economic structure and economic conditions--and where the Non-Partisan League, a radical organization similar to the socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation that had taken power in Saskatchewan, was also dominant. This led him to ponder the differences between Canada and the United States, and to a lifelong interest in how the historically determined structures of societies set limits for their development that are difficult to transcend. Canada (that is, Anglophone Canada) was set on its course by the fact that it did not break with England through revolution, and it was further influenced by American emigrants who opposed the revolution and the break with Great Britain. Canada was conservative; its conservatism paradoxically made possible in time its welfare state, similar to those in Europe, shaped by both far-sighted conservative politicians and their socialist opponents. The United States, in contrast, was individualistic and anti-statist. Its egalitarianism was more social than economic and aimed at equality in opportunity rather than in achievement.

Agrarian Socialism was the book that resulted, and it was stage one in Lipset's lifelong effort to understand why the United States, alone among the major industrialized countries, never has had a mass socialist party. In the course of his career, Lipset addressed the issue again and again, and it was also the subject of his last book (with Gary Marks), It Didn't Happen Here. Initially, he put great weight on the contrast between America's electoral system, with its winner-take-all presidential elections, and parliamentary systems, which seemed to foster minority parties. But, in time, Lipset discounted the significance of these differences, as he noted the third-party threats of George Wallace, John Anderson, and Ross Perot. Rather, he concluded, it was American values--individualism, anti-statism, a distinctive kind of egalitarianism--that explained the country's indifference to socialism.

Lipset, along with so many radicals of the 1930s and 1940s, evolved into an admirer of the United States: its political system, its open society, its democracy, its opportunities--from which he and his friends had benefited. This embrace of America helped turn Lipset away from socialism. I recall running into him the morning after the 1948 election. We had both voted for Norman Thomas but were so happy that Harry Truman, surprisingly, had won. What did that tell us about our socialism?

Lipset's evolution made him, along with other social scientists of his generation and background, targets of the new student left of the 1960s. He and his old radical friends who had joined him in the academy discovered, in the period of student unrest, that they appreciated the role of universities as homes for independent thinking, they saw no reason why the authority of these institutions should be undermined, and they found leftist student obstruction of research for the national interest or on-campus recruiting for government agencies excessive and unjustified. Lipset was not particularly involved, as many social scientists were, with the Defense Department and research in support of U.S. foreign policy. But his studies of the conditions that made for democracy in developing societies, one of his central interests, made him a leading authority on the politics of important sites of our worldwide competition with Soviet communism and were useful for government-sponsored research. And his friendships with leading social scientists who conducted this federally funded and pragmatically oriented social research designed to promote national aims seemed to ally him with them.

As the student left became more and more hostile to what it dubbed Amerika, Lipset, with his deep appreciation of America, moved further to what he considered the center--and what the student radicals considered the right. He may not have called himself a neoconservative as that tendency emerged in the 1970s, but the neoconservatives were part of his intellectual and social circle: He wrote for their journals, and his research increasingly emphasized the role of values as opposed to class and economic interests. One of his most provocative and disputed articles was "Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism," which observed that while the poor "are everywhere more liberal when it comes to [economic] issues ... when liberalism is defined in non-economic terms--so as to support, for example, civil rights for political dissidents, civil rights for ethnic and racial minorities, internationalist foreign policies, and liberal immigration legislation--the relation is reversed." Marxist and socialist sociologists did not like this, even though the conclusion came from research rather than ideology. Lipset could not have been surprised by Wallace's support among industrial workers when he ran for national office.

But Lipset, who always thought of himself as a liberal and never, I would guess, voted for a Republican for president, did not see Wallace and other third-party movements as harbingers of fascism, as some alarmed liberals did. He studied and wrote on the history of extreme right-wing movements--anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-black, and anti-immigrant--that have risen again and again in the United States, but he saw these as anomalies in the American experience. He had faith in America. In his most interesting and original book, The First New Nation, he played an important role in redefining U.S. nationality as something new in the world: It was based on ideas, principles, values, rather than on British origins, on Protestant religion, on whiteness; it was not the nationality of a primordial ethnic group, but something quite different. In principle, the entire world was eligible to become American.

In that book, Lipset also showed an appreciation for George Washington that is not common among intellectuals, who are generally attracted more by Jefferson or Hamilton or Madison. But it was Washington who, by giving up the leadership of the Army at the end of the revolution and passing on the presidency to his elected successor after two terms, set the pattern that made the United States a stable democracy. Writing at a time when new nations by the score were gaining independence and freedom, Lipset saw this as an excellent--indeed, crucial--model for their founding fathers to follow. Alas, few did. Lipset went as far as anyone in defining the conditions that make for democratic success. And there is much in his writings that could help us understand why we have done so badly as we try to establish liberal democratic regimes in unlikely parts of the globe.

Nathan Glazer is a contributing editor at The New Republic.

Copyright 2006, The New Republic

My critique of Siegman’s critique

There was something about Henry Siegman, the one-time director of the American Jewish Congress (when it was a liberal group) that's been bothering me for years. He's very eloquent, but he’s more argumentative and sure of himself than warranted; he is not above simplifying complex matters at Israel's expense. For example, on Avigdor Lieberman, the controversial head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, he writes in the Jan. 22nd issue of The Nation:

Several months ago, the same Olmert who worried publicly about the stigma of apartheid appointed Avigdor Lieberman, a man of racist and antidemocratic convictions, as his deputy prime minister. Lieberman, who ... holds political views that would have made Rehavam Ze'evi sound like a charter member of the ACLU.... Lieberman advocates not only the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the occupied territories but getting rid of Arabs who are Israeli citizens. He has urged that Arab members of Israel's Knesset be executed for having contacts with Hamas or for failing to celebrate Israel's Independence Day....

The appointment also raises the question of how a government whose deputy prime minister is a man who does not recognize the right of Palestinians to even one square inch of territory in Palestine can impose draconian sanctions on a Hamas government that will not recognize Israel's legitimacy. Talk about double standards!

Actually, as the Meretz party leader, Yossi Beilin himself informed us months ago, Lieberman now advocates a Palestinian state alongside of Israel. As part of the negotiations for such a state, Lieberman favors the transfer of the "Little Triangle" of Israeli territory, including the town of Um el Fahem that is populated by Israeli Arabs. Whereas we may find this proposal unacceptable and smacking of racism, this is an advance for a rightist like Lieberman. And, while his appointment to the cabinet is problematic and terrible PR for Israel, he's effectively a minister without portfolio and his party (as Beilin explained to us at the Greenberg home, Nov. 8) is eclectic, including liberals.

I'm not saying that Siegman's all or even mostly wrong, but he's definitely not all correct. To me, tone is almost as important as content, and when some details are fudged or simply wrong, such writing spells trouble. If he represented himself as an advocate for progressive Zionism, this would be better, but instead he lends ammunition to the propaganda machine that is all too eager to dump on Israel and Zionism in any way possible.

Click here to link to Siegman’s Nation article, “Hurricane Carter.”

Death of a Jewish socialist

Emanuel (Manny) Muravchik died on Monday at the age of 90. I worked for him briefly in the 1970s, when he was executive director of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). I recall also being supervised by May Bromberg, the mother of Charney (executive director of Meretz USA) and the daughter of a founder of the JLC, B. Charney Vladeck.

Manny criticized the anti-Vietnam war movement for being soft on Communism, but he later fell out politically (but not personally) with his son Josh, who embraced the Reagan administration and the neoconservative movement that emerged, in part, from Socialist ranks. You can compare the obituary article published in today’s Forward with a modified version of what I actually submitted below:

Emanuel Muravchik (1916-2007): Retired Director of Jewish Labor Committee, Disciple of Norman Thomas By Ralph Seliger

When Emanuel (Manny) Muravchik, the son of secular Russian-Jewish immigrants, recalled his “bar mitzvah,” he thought not of a religious ceremony (which he didn’t have) but of having free rein in the Rand School’s library, then the domain of the Socialist Party USA, now the Tamiment Library associated with the Wagner Labor Archives at NYU where his oral history and personal papers reside. He recalled spending the ten-day spring break of his 13th year reading all he could on the nature of socialism for a school research paper. It is then and there that he decided upon his life’s course as a socialist activist.

His father, Chaim, worked as a “corrector” — a combination of copy editor and proof reader — for the Forward and other Yiddish publications. His mother, Rachael, wrote “at least once a week” for the Forward, and also lectured frequently for the Workmen’s Circle — where they were “active members” — on child-rearing and family issues.

Perhaps surprisingly, this champion of the working class was educated at private institutions: the Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools, undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago and Columbia, and post-graduate studies in political science at the New School for Social Research and in clinical psychology at New York University. But he learned his most profound lessons as an organizer.

He began almost immediately, upon joining the Socialist Party (SP) at the age of 13, to speak at street-corner rallies (he said he was big for his age). Occasionally, he’d wander from his local Washington Heights branch of the SP to visit the nearby Harlem local, where he got to know the unionist and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph and his associate, Bayard Rustin.
Working for the Socialist Party in 1940, he barnstormed Upstate New York’s rural counties with Norman Thomas to gather signatures for Thomas’s presidential run that year — six intense 18-hour days that touched off a friendship which lasted until Thomas’s death in 1968. Muravchik recalled in later years being asked by Thomas to explain why Jews felt the need for a state.

Muravchik did not consider himself a Zionist, but visited Israel frequently and had a granddaughter who lived there for a time. Of Israel, he said thoughtfully: “I don’t believe in principle that the Jews should have to have a separate state, but it’s good that they have one. This is not the same thing as saying they should have to have one.”

After working with Thomas, Muravchik was dispatched by David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’s Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) to unionize workers in Kingston, New York. Later he worked in an aircraft factory in Newark, New Jersey, where employees were represented by the United Auto Workers.

He served in the US Army during World War II. Ever the organizer, even before being discharged, he worked to establish a progressive anti-Communist ex-servicemen’s organization. After the war, he became executive secretary of the Veterans League of America, which later merged with the American Veterans Committee.

In 1947, he began his long career at the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), becoming national field director in 1949 and executive director in 1967, a post he held until his retirement in 1984. The JLC represents Jewish issues to organized labor — such as combating antisemitism and support for Israel’s security — and labor issues — e.g., the right to organize and for fair labor standards — to the Jewish community.

It has also been closely allied with the civil rights movement. For example, the JLC worked closely with Muravchik’s Socialist comrades, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, for the 1963 March on Washington. The JLC mobilized union and Jewish support and Manny Muravchik was there with his two young sons.

During the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute in 1968, the JLC sympathized with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and Al Shanker, its president. Muravchik described his relationship with the pioneering union leader as “personally very close” and Shanker served as secretary of the JLC.

Muravchik went through the Socialist Party's transition from electoral politics into seeking influence within the Democratic party. He was a strong anti-Communist even before the growing influence of the ex-Trotskyist, Max Shachtman, a fierce anti-Stalinist who sowed the seeds of what became known as “neoconservatism” within a diminished and splintering SP. Muravchik was not sympathetic to the anti-Vietnam War movement, which he regarded as soft on Communism. But he befriended Tom Hayden for a time, then the paid head of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), which started out as the youth wing of the League for Industrial Democracy, an SP-allied agency that included Muravchik on its board.

In the formal split of the Socialist movement in the early ‘70s, Muravchik remained with Bayard Rustin in the Social Democrats (SD) USA, while Michael Harrington joined with Irving Howe to found the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and eventually the Democratic Socialists of America. The most contentious issue between the factions was the SD’s alignment with the pro-Vietnam War position of the George Meany-Lane Kirkland leadership of the AFL-CIO.

Manny’s son, Joshua Muravchik, headed the SP and then SD youth wing, “Yipsel” (the Young People’s Socialist League). Following the defeat by Jimmy Carter of the SD’s favorite Democratic politician, Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, and his death a few years later, prominent SD’ers joined the Reagan administration. The former SD chair, Carl Gershman, became counselor to the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick, herself a social democrat turned neoconservative and Pres. Reagan’s pick for ambassador to the UN. A number of SD’ers teamed up with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, moving on from their own association with Sen. Jackson, (eventually) into the Republican fold. (The rest is history, one might say.)

Josh Muravchik has long been a neoconservative intellectual associated with the American Enterprise Institute and writes frequently for Commentary. He and his father remained close personally, but Manny stayed resolute in his advocacy of democratic socialism/social democracy, which his son had renounced explicitly in one of his recent books, “The Rise and Fall of Socialism.”

In a posting on the Social Democrats Web site, dated May Day 2002 and entitled, “Socialism in my life and my life in socialism,” Manny muses at the beauty of Wave Hill, the park administered by the City of New York near their rent-stabilized apartment in Riverdale and on such other benefits of the welfare state as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that he feels the socialist movement has bequeathed this country: “Our impact was epitomized by Franklin D. Roosevelt who, after initiating the New Deal, whispered to Norman Thomas, ‘Norman, I stole your platform.’

Manny turned 90 in September. He was staying with his wife Miriam, at the Workmen's Circle Rehabilitation Center where she is recovering from a fall. She reported that he died peacefully on Monday, January 8. He is survived by his wife of 67 years, their sons Joshua and Aaron, four grandchildren and four great grandchildren.

Shulamit Aloni on Israeli ‘apartheid’

Shulamit Aloni retired from public life in the Knesset and as head of the RATZ component of Meretz in 1997, at the point that Meretz changed from a parliamentary bloc into a single political party, with Yossi Sarid as its leader. While she remains a friend of Meretz USA, she is still an outspoken public voice, placed politically by her own description as somewhere between the Meretz-Yahad party and the Hadash party of the non-Zionist left.

This may explain why this article is posted at the notoriously anti-Israel website, “Counterpunch” under the curious title: “This Road is for Jews Only: Yes, There is Apartheid in Israel.” Why curious? Because Aloni knows, with all of the Israeli peace camp, that the “apartheid” situation she describes is not about Israel, but rather the West Bank and East Jerusalem under occupation. Jimmy Carter, for all the factual faults of his book that merit criticism, carefully distinguishes between Israel within its pre-1967 borders — which he characterizes as a “liberal democracy” (going further than even I would, since I see Israel in many ways as a not so liberal democracy) and the occupation of Palestinian territories that he regards as “apartheid.”

Still, this makes this article no less painful for the truth it conveys.

THIS ROAD IS FOR JEWS ONLY By Shulamit Aloni, January 8, 2007

Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what's right in front of our eyes. It's simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.

The US Jewish Establishment's onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population's movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians' land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.

If that were not enough, the generals commanding the region frequently issue further orders,
regulations, instructions and rules (let us not forget: they are the lords of the land). By now
they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing "Jewish only" roads.
Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night--all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.

On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. "Why?" I asked the soldier. "It's an order--this is a Jews-only road", he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign
indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of
amazing. "It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a
sign here and let some antisemitic reporter or journalist take a photo so he that can show the
world that Apartheid exists here?"

Indeed Apartheid does exist here. And our army is not "the most moral army in the world" as we are told by its commanders. Sufficient to mention that every town and every village has turned into a detention centre and that every entry and every exit has been closed, cutting it off from arterial traffic. If it were not enough that Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the roads paved 'for Jews only', on their land, the current GOC found it necessary to land an additional blow on the natives in their own land with an "ingenious proposal": Humanitarian activists cannot transport Palestinians either.

Major-General Naveh, renowned for his superior patriotism, has issued a new order. Coming into affect on 19 January, it prohibits the conveyance of Palestinians without a permit. The order determines that Israelis are not allowed to transport Palestinians in an Israeli vehicle (one
registered in Israel regardless of what kind of numberplate it carries) unless they have received
explicit permission to do so. The permit relates to both the driver and the Palestinian passenger.

Of course none of this applies to those whose labour serves the settlers. They and their employers will naturally receive the required permits so they can continue to serve the lords of the land, the settlers.

Did man of peace President Carter truly err in concluding that Israel is creating Apartheid? Did he exaggerate? Don't the US Jewish community leaders recognise the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination of 7 March 1966, to which Israel is a signatory? Are the US Jews who launched the loud and abusive campaign against Carter for supposedly maligning Israel's character and its democratic and humanist nature unfamiliar with the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 30 November 1973? Apartheid is defined therein as an international crime that among other things includes using different legal instruments to rule over different racial groups, thus depriving people of their human rights. Isn't freedom of travel one of these rights?

In the past, the US Jewish community leaders were quite familiar with the meaning of those
conventions. For some reason, however, they are convinced that Israel is allowed to contravene
them. It's OK to kill civilians, women and children, old people and parents with their children,
deliberately or otherwise without accepting any responsibility. It's permissible to rob people of
their lands, destroy their crops, and cage them up like animals in the zoo. From now on, Israelis
and International humanitarian organisations' volunteers are prohibited from assisting a woman in labour by taking her to the hospital. [Israeli human rights group] Yesh Din volunteers cannot take a robbed and beaten-up Palestinian to the police station to lodge a complaint. (Police stations are located at the heart of the settlements.) Is there anyone who believes that this is not Apartheid?

Jimmy Carter does not need me to defend his reputation that has been sullied by Israelophile
community officials. The trouble is that their love of Israel distorts their judgment and blinds
them from seeing what's in front of them. Israel is an occupying power that for 40 years has been oppressing an indigenous people, which is entitled to a sovereign and independent existence while living in peace with us. We should remember that we too used very violent terror against foreign rule because we wanted our own state. And the list of victims of terror is quite long and
extensive.

We do limit ourselves to denying the [Palestinian] people human rights. We not only rob of them of their freedom, land and water. We apply collective punishment to millions of people and even, in revenge-driven frenzy, destroy the electricity supply for one and half million civilians. Let them "sit in the darkness" and "starve".

Employees cannot be paid their wages because Israel is holding 500 million shekels that belong to the Palestinians. And after all that we remain "pure as the driven snow". There are no moral
blemishes on our actions. There is no racial separation. There is no Apartheid. It's an invention
of the enemies of Israel. Hooray for our brothers and sisters in the US! Your devotion is very much appreciated. You have truly removed a nasty stain from us. Now there can be an extra spring in our step as we confidently abuse the Palestinian population, using the "most moral army in the world".

Linkage between Israel and Iraq? Part 2

The author, a media and public affairs strategist in New York City, is a Board Member of Ameinu (formerly the Labor Zionists Alliance) and Americans for Peace Now.

What Israel Can Do for America by Dan Fleshler

Too many Israeli and American Jewish leaders have a problem with the L-word, “linkage.” They reflexively denounce any suggestion that progress toward Arab-Israeli peace will help America solve its own problems in the Middle East. They should change their approach, because what they are doing not only ignores reality; it harms American and Israeli interests.

The rejection of the L-word is often prompted by denial of the tragic, obvious fact that U.S. support of Israel is one the main reasons why Muslims throughout the world despise Americans. This support is used as a recruiting tool by jihadists who want to spill American as well as Israeli blood, and it inhibits moderate Arab leaders from cooperating with the U.S. to address a host of challenges, including the bloody chaos in Iraq. The whole world knows this is the case, but Israeli and American Jewish leaders often try to wish it away.

Recently, this mentality was demonstrated by the hue and cry over the report by the Iraq study group led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former U.S. Congressman Lee Hamilton. It asserted that America “will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the U.S. deals directly with the Arab-Israel conflict.” The authors believe that in a time of widespread, anti-American rancor on the “Arab street,” a U.S.-sponsored, Israeli-Arab peace process would make it easier for leaders of relatively moderate Sunni states to join America in a coalition that could help stabilize Iraq and isolate Iran.


Prime Minister Olmert’s predictable response was that “the problems in Iraq ... are entirely independent of the controversies between us and the Palestinians” and that Israel opposed any attempt to connect them. A senior Israeli official told the New York Times: "Why should we want to link our own problem to a nightmare like Iraq? It’s a terrible mess there."

At least judging from their public statements, these and other Israelis who have weighed in on the report seem oblivious to the fact that Americans – including American Jews –desperately crave an end to the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq. About [3,000] American soldiers have died there, including some of my neighbors in New York. Maimed, shell-shocked veterans of the Iraq war have started to become visible on my city’s streets. I, for one, am a supporter of Israel who implores its leaders to try to help us get out of there as fast as possible.


I am not arguing that Israel should necessarily accept every recommendation made by the Study Group. If Olmert believes it is not in Israel’s interests to negotiate immediately with either Syria or the Palestinians, the U.S. should not force him to do so. But Olmert has expressed an interest in negotiating with both under the right circumstances. He and other Israeli leaders should clearly acknowledge that creating those circumstances as soon as possible will not only help Israel: it also might save American lives in Iraq.

There is at least a chance that Syrian-Israeli peace talks under American auspices will prompt President Bashar Asad to seal his borders with Iraq and stop insurgents who want to kill Americans from crossing back and forth, and stop making common cause with Iran, which sponsors America's fanatic Shi’ite enemies. There is at least a chance that jumpstarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks will be an incentive for Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other states to use their leverage with Iraqi Sunnis to calm things down. Of course, the same coalition would also benefit Israel if it helped to isolate and enforce tough sanctions on Iran.

Heard any better ideas, lately? I haven’t. Olmert is off the hook when it comes to the Syrians, for the moment, since the Bush Administration has nixed talks with Asad. But why shouldn’t Israel embrace the basic premise that our two countries’ fates are intertwined, and a solution to Israel’s daunting problems will help solve America’s?

Some fear that acknowledging the L-word will put Israel in a position where it is pressured to make concessions. But it is hard to believe that the Bush Administration would do more than ask Israel to talk seriously to its neighbors, since prodding it to make compromises before it is ready to do so would spark a fearsome domestic backlash.

Still, there is a tiny but admittedly tangible risk that if diplomatic initiatives are undertaken to address the Iraq war and the Israeli-Arab conflict simultaneously, a momentum could be created that would put pressure on Israel. Its supporters in the U.S. will need to ensure that this does not happen. But right now, Americans patrolling the streets of Baghdad are taking much greater risks.

Whether a peace process comes about on the basis of the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations or another plan, America urgently needs to make it happen for its own sake, as well as Israel’s. And it needs help from Israel and American Jews, not a panicky denial of the connection between Mideast peace and American interests.

Linkage between Israel and Iraq?

As many have pointed out, there’s no direct linkage between the Israeli-Arab conflict(s) and the US war in Iraq. Still, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a running sore for US relations with the Muslim world and, therefore, one of several areas of contention that helps the recruitment of terrorists by al-Qaeda and its franchisees around the world.

The following are sections of the Iraq Study Group report that deal with Israel-Arab issues:

The Executive Summary
The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This commitment must include direct talks with, by, and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept Israel’s right to exist), and Syria. As the United States develops its approach toward Iraq and the Middle East, the United States should provide additional political, economic, and military support for Afghanistan, including resources that might become available as combat forces are moved out of Iraq.

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The United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United
States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a
comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This commitment must include direct talks with, by, and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept Israel’s right to exist), and particularly Syria—which is the principal transit point for shipments of weapons to Hezbollah, and which supports radical Palestinian groups.
The United States does its ally Israel no favors in avoiding direct involvement to solve the
Arab-Israeli conflict. For several reasons, we should act boldly:
• There is no military solution to this conflict.
• The vast majority of the Israeli body politic is tired of being a nation perpetually at war.
• No American administration—Democratic or Republican—will ever abandon Israel.
• Political engagement and dialogue are essential in the Arab-Israeli dispute because it is an
axiom that when the political process breaks down there will be violence on the ground.
• The only basis on which peace can be achieved is that set forth in UN Security Council
Resolutions 242 and 338 and in the principle of “land for peace.”
• The only lasting and secure peace will be a negotiated peace such as Israel has achieved with Egypt and Jordan. This effort would strongly support moderate Arab governments in the region, especially the democratically elected government of Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas.
RECOMMENDATION 13: There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon and Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
RECOMMENDATION 14: This effort should include—as soon as possible—the unconditional
calling and holding of meetings, under the auspices of the United States or the Quartet (i.e., the United States, Russia, European Union, and the United Nations), between Israel and Lebanon and Syria on the one hand, and Israel and Palestinians (who acknowledge Israel’s right to exist) on the other. The purpose of these meetings would be to negotiate peace as was done at the Madrid Conference in 1991, and on two separate tracks—one Syrian/Lebanese, and the other Palestinian.

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RECOMMENDATION 15: Concerning Syria, some elements of that negotiated peace should be:
• Syria’s full adherence to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006, which
provides the framework for Lebanon to regain sovereign control over its territory.
• Syria’s full cooperation with all investigations into political assassinations in Lebanon,
especially those of Rafik Hariri and Pierre Gemayel.
• A verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah and the use of Syrian territory for
transshipment of Iranian weapons and aid to Hezbollah. (This step would do much to solve
Israel’s problem with Hezbollah.)
• Syria’s use of its influence with Hamas and Hezbollah for the release of the captured Israeli
Defense Force soldiers.
• A verifiable cessation of Syrian efforts to undermine the democratically elected government of Lebanon.
• A verifiable cessation of arms shipments from or transiting through Syria for Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups.
• A Syrian commitment to help obtain from Hamas an acknowledgment of Israel’s right to
exist.
• Greater Syrian efforts to seal its border with Iraq.
RECOMMENDATION 16: In exchange for these actions and in the context of a full and secure peace agreement, the Israelis should return the Golan Heights, with a U.S. security guarantee for Israel that could include an international force on the border, including U.S. troops if requested by both parties.
RECOMMENDATION 17: Concerning the Palestinian issue, elements of that negotiated peace should include:
• Adherence to UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and to the principle of land for
peace, which are the only bases for achieving peace.
• Strong support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to
take the lead in preparing the way for negotiations with Israel.
• A major effort to move from the current hostilities by consolidating the cease-fire reached
between the Palestinians and the Israelis in November 2006.
• Support for a Palestinian national unity government.
• Sustainable negotiations leading to a final peace settlement along the lines of President
Bush’s two-state solution, which would address the key final status issues of borders, settlements, Jerusalem, the right of return, and the end of conflict.

Weekly Update 1/5/07

The New Year is a time for resolutions; a time for transformation. Yet, the first week of 2007 did not bring any change whatsoever. Instead it prompted feelings of déjà vu.

The year started off with the continuation of a deadly trend. According to B’Tselem’s annual report, 2006 was lethal for the Palestinians. In total, Israel was responsible for the deaths of 660 individuals – more than three times the number from 2005. These numbers included 322 civilians and 141 minors. Israeli security forces also demolished 292 homes, housing 1,769 people.

Although Israel continued to uphold its ceasefire in the Gaza strip during the first week of the year, it conducted raids into the West Bank. On Thursday, undercover Israel forces went into Ramallah and attempted to arrest Rabia Hamad, a militant of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. In the process, they killed four civilians, wounded 20 others, and damaged cars and shops. As in the past, Prime Minister Olmert apologized for the civilian casualties but showed little guilt. He claimed that the incursion was necessary for Israel’s defense, and, on Friday, the IDF conducted yet another raid into the town Tul Karm, looking for an Islamic Jihad militant.

According to several journalists, including the New York Time’s Steven Erlanger, these raids “overshadowed” what could have been significant talks between Olmert and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to discuss plans for a prisoner release. But it’s unclear how productive these talks would have been – even without the embarrassment of civilian deaths.

Egypt has been playing a role to mediate an agreement since Gilad Shalit’s capture in June, and many times have the sides appeared close to an agreement without actually reaching one. This week seems to have been no exception.

On Tuesday, Hamas announced that it would accept Israel’s offer of 450 prisoners for Shalit. The proposed agreement involved several steps: First, the release of a small number of prisoners for a video of Shalit, proving that he is alive; second, the transfer of Shalit to Egypt then Israel, in return for 450 prisoners – including Fatah activist Marwan Barghouti; and third, another “generous” prisoner release. But throughout the week, Israeli and some Palestinian officials denied these reports, and, following the Olmert-Mubarak meeting yesterday, no agreement was announced.

The beginning of 2007 also saw the continuation of Palestinian infighting. On Wednesday, after a lull for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, commemorating Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, hostilities again intensified. For the second time, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh was forced to cut short a trip abroad due to the fighting – he did so for the first time in mid-December.

With this stagnation and with the prospects for the future looking bleak, it’s no wonder that analysts are bemoaning inaction and a lack of leadership on the part of Israel. A recent Dahaf Institute poll showed that the majority of Israelis believe that Olmert has given a poor performance as Prime Minister and that he lacks decision-making capabilities and the ability to function well under pressure. And Akiva Eldar writes about the ambiguity of Israel’s policies, which “is eating away at every good part of the army, politics and all branches of the establishment.”

Others, such as Dr. Menachem Klein, lament the fact that Israeli officials, unlike others in the Middle East, seem to have no plan for the future. Indeed, this week, Egypt, which has long been a leader in Middle East peace efforts, put forth a proposal for a “four-way” summit with Egypt, and Jordan to help break the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians.

Perhaps this inaction, this lack of planning, has to do with what Rami G. Khouri sees as Israel’s dominance “going in slow reversal.” Following the summer war with Hezbollah and Israel’s inability to return Gilad Shalit to his family or to stop rockets from falling on the south, Israel’s power could be waning.

Which is why the US needs to get involved. Currently, America is providing financial support to Abu Mazen’s security forces in an effort to bolster Palestinian President’s. But it needs use its influence to actively end the conflict. According to the Forward’s Nathan Guttman, Secretary of State Condolezza Rice has plans to visit the region in the middle of this month. Nevetheless, she is not expected to press for much needed change. As Olmert has said time and again, America is Israel’s greatest ally; as such, the US needs to push Israel to take concrete steps towards a peaceful resolution.

It’s true that things look bleak at the moment. But as we saw around this time last year when Prime Minister Sharon succumbed to a stroke, things can change in an instant.

Should Israel Negotiate with Syria?

A diplomatic opportunity may be at hand: An analysis by Robert O. Freedman

One of the most volatile issues in Israeli politics today is the question as to whether Israel should respond positively to Syrian President Bashar Assad's offer to begin peace negotiations. While Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert currently opposes such talks, his senior partner in the governing coalition, Labor party chair Amir Peretz, strongly endorses them. While the rhetoric on this question has been heated, in part because of the recently released report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), which advocates both US-Syrian talks and Israeli-Syrian talks leading to the return of the Golan Heights as part of a peace agreement, what has been lacking is an evaluation of the costs and benefits for Israel in entering into talks with Syria, and that will be the subject of this essay.

Israeli Prime Minister Olmert makes two major arguments against negotiations with Syria. First, he emphasizes the need to cooperate with the Bush Administration which, in seeking to keep Syria diplomatically isolated, opposes such talks. Given the strong support given to Israel by the Bush Administration, Olmert does not want a confrontation with the US on an issue for which he would not have a great deal of domestic support. Indeed, the majority of Israelis, unhappy with the results of the unilateral pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza which, instead of bringing peace, only brought more war, oppose any pullout from the Golan Heights. While this could change, especially if Syrian President Bashar Assad made a Sadat-like gesture by visiting Jerusalem for talks with the Israeli government, for the time being, most Israelis oppose withdrawing from the Golan.

The second argument against talks with Syria made by Olmert is that so long as Syria supports Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations dedicated to the destruction of Israel, there is no purpose in talking with Syria.

By contrast, those advocating talks with Syria make five points:
1. Peace talks with Syria, if successful, would end the threat of war with Syria, the most powerful Arab state not yet to have made peace with Israel.
2. If Israel launches a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities – an increasingly likely possibility – Syria (and Hezbollah) would be less likely to join the conflict on Iran's side if Syrian-Israeli peace talks are underway.
3. A peace treaty with Syria, or even negotiations with it, would put Israel in a stronger bargaining position with the Palestinians if Israeli-Palestinian peace talks resume.
4. Israeli-Syrian peace talks, if successful, would weaken the power of Hezbollah in Lebanon, because Syria is the major arms supplier to Hezbollah, as well as the transit point for Iranian arms going to Hezbollah.
5. A Syrian-Israeli peace agreement has the possibility of splitting Syria from its alliance with Iran.

In evaluating these arguments about Israel starting peace talks with Syria, there are four major considerations to keep in mind. First, while it is, of course, important for Israel to cooperate as closely as possible with the US, when it comes to the possibility of peace with Syria, Israel's existential needs should take precedence. Testing the regime of Bashar Assad, if done discreetly, should not unduly upset US-Israeli relations, especially since US attempts to isolate the Assad regime appear to have failed. In addition to the recommendations of the ISG for US-Syrian and Israeli-Syrian talks, there are a steady stream of European diplomats visiting Damascus, and American Congressmen, most recently Senators Chris Dodd and John Kerry, have also visited the Syrian capital for talks with Assad.

Second, Olmert's assertion that Israel can't talk to Syria so long as Damascus supports Hamas and Hezbollah also needs scrutiny. If the goal of Israeli diplomacy is to end Syrian support for the two anti-Israeli organizations, such an outcome could be expected at the end of negotiations, not at the beginning, as part of the price Syria would have to pay for the return of the Golan Heights. That is, after all, what diplomatic negotiations are all about.

Third, testing Assad's repeated calls for talks with Israel is good diplomatic strategy. If Bashar Assad is serious about negotiations, and is willing, in addition to ending support for Hamas and Hezbollah, to make major security and water concessions on the Golan Heights, then a peace agreement with Syria would be beneficial for Israel. These concessions could include, for example, demilitarizing the area, having it policed by a multinational force which could not be ousted (unlike the UN force in the Sinai before the 1967 war), along with an agreement not to interfere with the water flowing into the Sea of Galilee from the Golan. If Assad proves not to be serious about negotiations, then not only would Israel have lost nothing, but is also would have gained diplomatic points within Europe where significant sectors of public opinion do not believe that Israel is sincere about desiring peace.

Finally, the most challenging question in considering the possible benefits of talking with Syria is whether this could lead to a rupture in the Syrian-Iranian alliance. It should be remembered that Syrian-Iranian relations go back many years, as Syria was one of the few Arab backers of Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. However, the close alignment between the two countries only took place in the last few years as Syria became increasingly isolated after its suspected involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, and the US brought escalating pressure on Syria because of its alleged support for the Iraqi insurgency.

One must ask, however, how natural is the Syrian-Iranian alignment? The Syrian Baathist regime is secular, while the Iranian regime is theocratic. Secondly, Iran is Persian and is now exerting increasing pressure on the Arab world, of which Syria is a part. On the other hand, the minority elite ruling Syria is Shia [Shiite] (the majority of the Syrian population is Sunni) and may be seen to get some religious legitimization from Iran; still, the Syrian Shia are Alawi [Alawite], who follow the 11th Imam while the Iranians are twelvers, who follow the 12th Imam.

Both Iran and Syria support Hezbollah, as was evident during last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war. They do so, however, for different reasons. For Iran, Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia force tied to Iran religiously, which shares Tehran's goal of destroying Israel. For Syria, which since its cease-fire agreement regarding the Golan Heights in 1974 has not called for Israel's destruction, Hezbollah is a tool in its conflict with Israel and a
means of maintaining influence in Lebanon.

It appears to be possible for Israel to drive a wedge between Syria and Iran by negotiating with Syria. Given the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran, an effort to separate Syria from Iran makes good diplomatic and strategic sense.

In sum, a close examination of the arguments suggests that it is indeed in Israel's interest to take up Syria's offer of negotiations. Whether such negotiations would be successful, however, remains an open question.


Dr. ROBERT O. FREEDMAN is Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Professor of Political Science at Baltimore Hebrew University and is Visiting Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His books include “Israel in the Begin Era,” “Israel under Rabin,” and “Israel's First Fifty Years.” He is also an executive board member of Meretz USA.

Neocons thumped by 'paleo-con'

I have a friend who is a "paleo-con," the right-wing opposite of a neocon. A couple of years ago, he got me a gift subscription to The American Conservative, a magazine co-founded by Patrick Buchanan a number of years ago. It was illuminating reading. This group combines old-fashioned conservative social policy with a mostly isolationist foreign policy. They love to criticize the neocons (and Israel-- often in the same breath) every chance they get. Once I noticed one of M.J. Rosenberg's dovish columns (I don't know if Rosenberg should laugh or cry). Occasionally, they publish anti-war writers from The Nation.

I once had the fantasy of writing a piece for them where I would expound upon the neoconservatives' Shachtmanite socialist roots, something I know about personally from having been a Yipsel -- a member of the Young People's Socialist League -- in the late '60s and early '70s. But they've already done it, sort of, with a piece by Scott McConnell in the Jan. 2, 2007 issue. He comes up with an answer on something I've wondered about, why my CCNY Yipsel comrade, Josh Muravchik, never was appointed to the Clinton State Department:

"In 1992, a significant group of neocons signed on as advisers to Bill Clinton, and the Democratic standard-bearer, eager to shed the McGovernite label neoconservative publicists typically draped around his party, entertained their counsel during the campaign.

"But appointing them to strategic foreign-policy posts in his administration was another matter. Soon enough, press coverage of the Clinton transition was filled with neoconservative grumbles of being shut out. In one noteworthy example, Beltway neocons strongly backed Joshua Muravchik’s aspiration to be assistant secretary of state for human rights. But like many neoconservatives, Muravchik had a long paper trail, and his job search did not survive Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory’s illumination of it. 'Plainly if the president-elect is looking for a human rights director who thinks Mrs. Clinton is a post-Cold War Communist dupe, the search is over,' wrote McGrory."

McConnell writes from a right-wing perspective, which explains why he'd refer to the neocons' "anti-Stalinist socialist" roots with "anti-Stalinist" in ironic quotation marks. He also makes them into pro-Israel fanatics, which is true of some, but not all of them. Furthermore, he gives them way too much credit (read: discredit) for Bush's Iraq policy. But overall, it's good reading, and he gives them a well-deserved thumping. Click here for McConnell's entire article.

Muslim’s condemnation of Holocaust Deniers

Even if the extent of Jewish-Muslim accord over the ages is somewhat exaggerated, this Pakistani writer’s piece is much appreciated. We could do without his linkage of the late anti-Zionist/Judaism-hating Dr. Israel Shahak with Yossi Sarid, Akiva Eldar and Amira Hass, but I suspect that he doesn’t really know who Shahak was.

If you read the entire article, you'd learn that conservative commentator Dennis Prager protests the use of the Koran for the swearing in of the new Muslim congressman (Keith Ellison). I know that Prager used to claim to be a centrist; that a newly appointed board member of the US Holocaust Museum should hold this opinion is scandalous and puzzling.
[Original text copyright by the author and MidEastWeb for Coexistence, RA. Posted at MidEastWeb. Subscribe by e-mail to MEW-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.]

“Victims of Holocaust Denial: Jews, Muslims, and Human Dignity”
By Dr. Munawar A. Anees

The Islamic Republic of Iran under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently hosted a conference of historical revisionists dubbed as "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision." It was neither global nor visionary. That it coincided with the commemoration of the international Human Rights Day betrayed the sarcastic intent of its organizers.

The conference was yet another attempt by Ahmadinejad to portray himself as a strong challenger to the State of Israel, calling for its destruction. He has characterized the Holocaust as a "myth." He is quoted as saying that, "Israel must be wiped off the map...Anyone who signs a treaty which recognizes the entity of Israel means he has signed the surrender of the Muslim world."(October 2005) Again, in December 2005, he said, "They have fabricated a legend under the name 'Massacre of the Jews,' and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves."

Earlier, Iran's largest daily, Hamshahri, sponsored a widely publicized cartoon contest making a mockery of the Holocaust. This was a rebuttal allegedly to the right-wing Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad while reminiscent of the anti-Semitism once prevalent in Europe.

What went largely unnoticed was the courtly reaction to the cartoons by a paraplegic painter, Hossein Nouri, who painted, amidst flag-burnings and noisy protests, a portrait of the Virgin Mary in front of the Danish Embassy in Tehran; marking the respect Islam accords to the mother of Prophet Jesus.

Tehran ostensibly offered "scientists" from around the world an opportunity to discuss the Holocaust without taboos. This, however, stood in sharp contrast to the increased censorship of the Internet and denial of access to the websites critical of the Iranian government.

Another evidence of duplicity towards free expression came to light when a Palestinian lawyer, and one of the invited speakers, Khaled Kasab Mahameed, was refused entry visa by Iran. Mahameed runs the Arab world's first Institute for Holocaust Research and Education, in Nazareth. He was prevented from telling the audience that "It's not enough to curse these Holocaust deniers as foolish. We have to convince them the Holocaust did happen." While hopeful of meeting with the Iranian President, he wanted to convince him that denial or questioning of "such huge, monstrous horror" harmed the Palestinian cause.... Click here to read entire article at MideastWeb for Coexistence.

Realists Negotiate, Idealists Make War

Gidon D. Remba, a Zionist peace activist and Mideast affairs analyst currently living in Chicago, has written his latest occasional column for the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, dated December 28, 2006:

Negotiations, as a tool for dealing with our enemies, get a bum rap. Hardliners mock them as the feeble crutch of Kumbaya liberals who imagine that if only we talked with our adversaries, everything could be hashed out with a dollop of reason and a gallon of good will. But our foes are truly evil, they cavil. Dialogue with the devil will lead to naught, or worse, to mortal dangers to ourselves and our friends—especially Israel.

It helps to bear in mind the difference between “hawks” and “hardliners.” I’m a selective hawk; sometimes force is both necessary and just. Hardliners, by contrast, are emotionally and ideologically ossified when confronting the threats facing America and Israel. Their response is invariably to scoff at talk and brandish get-tough hit-em-hard panaceas.

But the biggest champions of negotiations aren’t mushy romantic liberals and Birkenstock-clad doves. They are rock-ribbed American and Israeli military strategists, high officers, combat veterans and intelligence analysts.

Click to read entire article.