Petition to Solve African Refugee Crisis

I've signed this petition, as have others we know and respect --- including such accomplished Holocaust scholars as Israel's Yehuda Bauer, Canada's Irving Abella, the great David S. Wyman and our own vice president Leonard Grob, in the US. (We know that Israel's initial welcome to African refugees has grown sour, as their numbers have greatly increased.)  Dr. Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies who has initiated this petition, indicated to me that Prof. Bauer and he have formed a bond on this issue, transcending their differences on the Roosevelt administration's record regarding Jewish refugees before and during the Holocaust.  This begins with a note from Dr. Medoff (email him or contact the Wyman Institute to add your name):

As you know, Israel has been at the center of international controversy over its handling of African refugees who have been arriving at its border. 

The interfaith petition below is intended to be signed by religious leaders of all faiths, scholars in all fields, organizational leaders, and political and cultural figures from around the world--we seek a broad cross-section of distinguished individuals to demonstrate the breadth of support for this effort. Once we have a sufficiently large and impressive body of signatories, we will present it to individual governments and press for its adoption.

The Hebrew University-Hadassah Genocide Prevention Program, and the Israeli Association to Combat Genocide, have endorsed this initiative. Would you do us the honor of allowing your name to be added to the list below?

With all best wishes, Rafael Medoff 
rafaelmedoff@aol.com

THE EVIAN DECLARATION
Israel and the African Refugee Crisis:

A WORLD SOLUTION FOR A WORLD PROBLEM

Significant numbers of African men, women, and children are fleeing genocide, political persecution, or economic hardship, and many have been seeking refuge in Israel.  We note

New US Diplomatic Effort Under Kerry

The NY Jewish Week begins a news article, "Hints Of Movement Seen In Wake Of Obama Trip": "Kerry picking up ball as Israel releases tax money to PA...," as follows:

After the electricity of President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel last week and his speech urging Israel’s young generation to get involved in the peace process with the Palestinians, there were reports this week that a new round of talks may be on the horizon. ... 

“What the Obama visit did was to put the Palestinian issue back into the consciousness of everyone here,” said Gershon Baskin, a peace activist and political analyst. “If the [recent Israeli] elections removed the issue from public debate, the Obama visit brought it back — it’s now on the agenda.”

 

This article also provides a glimpse of Secretary of State Kerry's prodigious efforts behind the scenes to reestablish relations with Turkey, persuade Israel to make positive gestures toward the

We Must Rise Above Our Pessimism

We are reminded by Dr. Thomas Mitchell, the "Self-hating Gentile" blogger, that there's plenty of reason for pessimism on the Israeli-Palestinian peace front.  He has been writing for a number of years on the need for "ripeness" by the parties to the conflict, which basically means that they have to want peace enough to pay the necessary price of compromise:  

.... The only major advances in peacemaking in the Middle East came when the situation was ripe (Kissinger, Baker) or when a president was obsessed by it and made it a priority (Carter, Clinton). And even then success is not guaranteed. Kissinger and Carter were successful both due to ripeness and obsession--and skill. Baker declared a peace process but not peace. Clinton was not obsessed and by 2000 the situation was no longer ripe. Obama does not appear to be obsessed and the situation is not ripe. The Palestinians are still divided and Netanyahu's third government is even more nationalist and settler oriented than his second.

Find my general conclusion echoed in these pieces by Prof. Abraham Ben-Zvi, by former American peace negotiator Aaron David Miller, and by Alon Pinkas at the Israel Policy Forum.

He is not wrong, but we cannot stop advocating for peace.  The stakes are too high. 

Pesach Sameach from Tel Aviv

Best wishes for a Happy and Meaningful Seder!

           We here in Israel have only one seder, while you out there have two (and sometimes even three).   Last night was really not an easy matter, arranging to bring my 94 1/2 year-old wheelchair-bound father for the seder at the garden of family friends in Tel Aviv.

On my favorite alternative music station, 88 FM, they are devoted all day to playing songs of freedom (right now "Me and Bobby McGee").  I was particularly moved to hear "The Times They are a Changing," and perhaps for the first time paid particular attention to the words of "The Chimes of Freedom" performed by The Byrds.   

Spring flowers in Neve Tzedek

Since Pesach is also Chag HaAviv (the Holiday of Spring, as we emphasized in the Kibbutz Haggadah), I'm inserting a spring-flower photo from Neve Tzedek in Tel Aviv, just to prove that we have some elements of nature too in the asphalt and sandy city. Here's

Jerusalem sunset, Gesher Hameiterim

also a photo of a sunset behind the new Gesher Hameitarim (Bridge of Strings) at the entrance to Jerusalem. 

And below is a moving passage from President Obama's speech at the dinner hosted by President Peres on Thursday night, following his extraordinary speech at the Binyanei Hauma International Convention Center in Jerusalem before over 1,500 Israeli students and a handful of "veterans" like myself:

Passover: A Festival of Freedom

Let us remember that Passover is a celebration of freedom for the Jewish people; today, our seders often invoke contemporary struggles for freedom and human rights as well.  Let us ponder this when we consider the fate of our fellow Jews in Israel and of the Palestinian people with whom they have struggled for decades.  It is our belief that the freedom of Israel is intertwined today with the freedom of a sovereign Palestinian state living in peace alongside the Jewish state.

We traditionally recite at the seder's conclusion, "Next Year in Jerusalem" --- hopefully this time in peace and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians.  We wish you a sweet Pesach! 

A fuller response on debating about Israel

I agree with Jeremy Kalmanofsky, the rabbi of Manhattan's Congregation Ansche Chesed (of which I am a member), in rejecting a proposed program at AC debating: "Is Israel - or can it be - a democracy? Is there - or can there be - equality in Israel? Can a Jewish state be democratic?"

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of New York's Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) then agreed to host this event. But I am quoted in a NY Jewish Week article by Doug Chandler in a less nuanced way than I would have liked.  

Unfortunately, Doug did not add anything from an email I sent him after our brief phone conversation.  My concerns remain, but I didn't mean to come off as absolutist in tone (nor as critical of Rabbi Kleinbaum) as the published quote may indicate.  The following is most of what I emailed to Doug, with a couple of bracketed emendations, which more fully represents my view:

With Pres. Obama in Jerusalem

It was 4:12 AM EST that an email appeared from our chaver and blogger Hillel Schenker, reporting in real time from Israel:

President Obama is currently visiting Yad Vashem -- he is now rekindling the eternal flame -- after laying wreaths at the graves of Herzl and Rabin.  Yesterday's speech

Israelis & Palestinians to Obama: Situation is Urgent

    I'm posting a link to what I published at The Times of Israel following two discussions, one that we organized and a second one.  In our discussion, the urgency of the situation was emphasized. Here's some of what I wrote:

[A]ccording to reports in today’s newspapers, we know that Secretary of State John Kerry intends to use the API [Arab Peace Initiative], originally launched at the Arab League Summit Conference in Beirut in 2002, and since ratified many times, including after the Arab Spring broke out, as one of the cornerstones for American policy for promoting progress on the Israeli-Palestinian peace track. ...
... I am free only to mention my own contribution to the discussion:

• Contrary to pessimistic assessments about the new Israeli government’s desire to be an active partner in advancing the peace process, in addition to Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and her party, many of the MKs in Yesh Atid have a clear commitment to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.
• While we all know that continued settlement expansion undermines the prospects for peace and a two state solution, now is the time to put the cost of the settlements on the Israeli agenda.  Yair Lapid based his

As Obama Goes There -- How We Got Here

My day job is as a university professor, mostly teaching and writing about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  So, probably more than most people, I think often about how the conflict got to the point where almost everyone wants it to end, and most even claim to favor the same two-state solution, but almost no one can imagine it being settled anytime soon.

What strikes me most in thinking about successive events since modern Zionist settlement started in 1882, is the workings of the law of unintended consequences.  Early Zionists did not think about expelling the Palestinians; they generally didn't think about them at all.  Herzl naively thought they would welcome the "progress" brought by Zionism.  The British, with all their colonizing experience, had little doubt they could manage Jews and Arabs together in Palestine for the benefit of their empire; it took little more than 15 years for them to realize they couldn't, but by then the incompatible goals of the two peoples seemed (and in my view were) irreversible without war.

Despite documented discussions of "transfer" (i.e., ethnic cleansing) in the 1930s and in 1948, I think the full record shows that expulsion was not the ulterior agenda of Zionist leaders in accepting partition.  But it is beyond doubt that they were overjoyed when most Palestinian Arabs fled in well-founded fear (NOT because their leaders told them to), and grabbed the opportunity to have a state that included far fewer Arabs than originally expected.

Israel: A White Colonial Settler State?

The following was written by our friend, Bennett Muraskin, a union representative in New Jersey, who is a frequent writer on, and an advocate for, Jewish secular humanism.  He wrote "The Fate of Jews in Arab Lands" in 2008.  Consider also reading this recent post on a theme similar to this piece: 

Is Israel a White Colonial Settler State?

When Native Americans encountered white Europeans, they had never seen white men before. Their hostility was based exclusively on the aggressive conduct of the white man in seizing their land and/or exploiting their labor. The same paradigm characterized the relationship between white settlers and Black South Africans.

Yet the relationship between Jewish settlers in Palestine and the native Arab population was different. Jews lived in that region from ancient times. Although their numbers were quite small on the cusp of large-scale Jewish immigration in the late 19th century, Jews had a large presence in Jerusalem and a larger one in nearby regions, such as Iraq, Egypt and Yemen. Jews were no strangers to Arabs before Zionism.

'Confessions of a Liberal-Zionist'

Some of you will remember Aaron Sharif who I introduced to you as my "chanich," which means that when I was the head of Habonim (the Labor Zionist youth movement) in Washington, D.C., he was a younger member.  I recommend reading his blog; it will give you a glimpse into how a "liberal Zionist" Israeli feels now: Aaron Sharif's Israeli Chatterbox

Aaron Sharif 

.... For a number of years I joined other dedicated Israelis in chaperoning West Bank Palestinian farmers to their fields and groves as protection against the harassment and violence of our Jewish settlers. As this became physically more difficult for me, I found and joined a group of other Israelis dedicated to driving ailing Palestinian children and their parents from the West Bank to hospitals in Israel. I've "toured" the Palestinian West Bank from the cave dwellers of the southern Hevron

Response to Philosopher-Critics of Zionism

I think it's odd that we should still be arguing the rights & wrongs of "Zionism," nearly 65 years after Israel's birth.  But since anti-Zionists insist, we Zionists should oblige them.  Happily, some of their critiques are polite and rational.  For example, this is from the NY Times Opiniator by Joseph Levine; Mira Sucharov responds to Levine's civilized philosophical critique of Israel's "right to exist" at the Open Zion blog in the Daily Beast.  And this is by Jerry Haber also writing at Open Zion; like Levine, Haber is an academic philosopher and critic of Zionism. 

Perhaps the most potent rebuttal to both writers is that Zionism is analogous to affirmative action for a historically oppressed minority group which has all too often suffered grievously due to not having a state of its own.  This was Arthur Hertzberg's liberal defense of Zionism.  Of course, this does not mean that non-Jewish minorities should be subject to unfair treatment undermining their civil or human rights. Jerry Haber (according to his personal website, not his real name, but "the nom de plume of an orthodox Jewish studies and philosophy professor, who divides his time between Israel and the US")  is too clever by half.  For example, I'm sure that Peter Beinart doesn't in principle reject a peace agreement with Syria that would involve a return of the Golan Heights to a future peaceful Syrian regime.  And we'd agree with Beinart that as a practical measure, a peace agreement

Gates May Open, But Window May Close on Peace

Dahlia Scheindlin is a public opinion researcher and a political consultant. She is a contributor at +972 magazine and is currently writing her doctoral dissertation in comparative politics at Tel Aviv University, where she is also an adjunct lecturer.  She has an impressive article at the Dissent website  on "The Gatekeepers" and why its message has an uphill climb to influence mainstream Israeli thinking (read further for word of another significant article in The New Republic):

Can The Gatekeepers Open the Gates to the Empire?
.... Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people may not be an empire, but after nearly forty-six years, it has become a sort of reigning paradigm of Israeli life. The Israeli Left has challenged, but never truly shifted, that paradigm.
.... The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, is poised to have the greatest possible impact on the Israeli public, because it tackles the arena closest to that public’s heart: the security establishment. The film is a candid series of interviews with six former heads of the legendary Shin Bet, Israel’s Internal Security Agency, who criticize the state’s policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians.... It is also reportedly going to become a television mini-series on Israel’s state Channel 1.

Menachem Froman: Settler Peacemaker?

This should not be read as an endorsement of the late Rabbi Menachem Froman, a founder of Gush Emunim, the militant settler movement founded in the 1970s and known for its extremism; rather it is a remembrance of an individual who apparently believed in transcending his ideological box.  As he indicates toward the end of this video from Tablet, it appears that he was ready to accept the possibility of pious Jews living deep within the West Bank under Palestinian sovereignty in his settlement town of Tekoa:

Refuting canard of 'Zionist-Nazi collaboration'

One of our colleagues in Partners for Progressive Israel brought something that disturbed her on Facebook, to our attention: a link to "The Zionist-Nazi Collaboration" by William James Martin, a piece published in Dissident Voice (July 8th, 2012), "a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice." This noxious view of Zionism damages Israeli-Palestinian relations to this day, as evidenced in a January article in the Times of Israel news website quoting P.A. Pres. Mahmoud Abbas from a recent interview on Lebanese television:

“I challenge any of them [the Israelis] to deny the ties between Zionism and Nazism before World War II,” Abbas said, adding that he had 70 unpublished books [on the topic] which he promised to expand upon in a future interview.
The title of Abbas’s doctoral dissertation, written in the Soviet Union, is “The other side: The secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism.”  

I don't doubt that many if not all of the quotes meant to incriminate Zionism in the Dissident Voice article are accurate.  What is fanciful is the assertion that Zionism was complicit philosophically and politically with Nazism and that the relatively small Zionist movement could have ever thwarted the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust if it had not tried to come to an accommodation in the 1930s (known as the "Transfer Agreement").

If you read the classic anthology of Zionist thought, "The Zionist Idea," by our late friend, the renowned historian, rabbi and liberal Jewish activist, Arthur Hertzberg, you'd see that early Zionists thinkers from Herzl on down did think of Jews in the Diaspora as an alien mass which could not be assimilated; that was, in fact, largely the Jewish experience.  One cannot look back on the late 19th to mid 20th centuries and say otherwise. For example, antisemitism reigned to varying degrees and in varying ways from most of Eastern Europe -- e.g., Czarist Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine -- thru France of the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy; and this is without even mentioning Nazi Germany and the fact that Jabotinsky accurately predicted the coming of the Holocaust. 

'Why Israel Is Different': MK Merav Michaeli

Labor MK Merav Micaheli

Merav Michaeli's first Knesset speech is astonishingly good.   I hope you take a few minutes to read the short post, "Why Israel Is Different," and watch the video at Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Dish.
 
Michaeli is the granddaughter of Rudolf Israel Kastner (1906–March 15, 1957) an Austro-Hungarian-born Israeli civil servant, journalist and lawyer. He became known for negotiating the departure of over a thousand Jews from Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust. He was assassinated by Stern Gang veterans in 1957, after an Israeli court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis.  

My take (among others) on 'The Gatekeepers'

Six ex-heads of Shin Bet featured in 'The Gatekeepers'.

I reflected upon the Academy Awards show as a whole in another venue.  This is what I had to say about the documentary category, where two of the five finalists focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

[I]t was too bad that neither “5 Broken Cameras” nor “The Gatekeepers” won in the documentary category, but I had expected that they’d knock each other out in the ballot. Both are great in their way, and I’d have a hard time picking between them. If anything, “Cameras” and “Gatekeepers” complement each other, with the first focusing on Palestinians and the latter on Israelis. I haven’t seen “Searching for Sugar Man” (the winner), but it didn’t surprise me that it would win, as it was the only one of the five documentary nominees that was about a phenomenon rather than an issue....

"The Gatekeepers" theme is that Israel has concentrated upon security and counter-terrorism at the expense of pursuing a political solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. This is dramatically substantiated by intertwined selections from filmmaker Dror Moreh's extensive interviews with all six living ex-directors of the Shin Bet or Shabak --- Israel's internal security agency, akin to the FBI in the US.  (The Shin Bet also takes on some functioning in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that is analogous to that of the CIA and the military, through the use of drone aircraft for surveillance and the occasional assassination of terrorist faction leaders and fighters -- dramatically illustrated at its outset with the video feed of one such incident.)

Historian Bauer on Israel's Past, Present & Future

In a comprehensive interview with Haaretz, "History professor Yehuda Bauer: ‘Netanyahu doesn’t know history’," Yehuda Bauer (a veteran Mapamnik who backs Meretz, its successor) shared his thoughts on Jewish history, Israel, and the need for a two-state solution.  He will turn 87 in April, widowed in 2011 from his second wife, a relationship recounted in fascinating terms early in reporter Dalia Karpel's piece.  I include selections from her long article, with a few bracketed notes of my own:

Yehuda Bauer (photo by Yanai Yechiel in Haaretz)

.... A professor emeritus at the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry and an eminent scholar of the Holocaust, Bauer ... was awarded the Israel Prize for his achievements in studying the history of the Jewish people. He was one of the editors of the “Encyclopedia of the Holocaust”....
[His new book is] “The Impossible People” ....
....Dalia Karpel: To take a sentence from your book: “Where do we stand today?”
“We live in a country that is divided into four states, all of them within the boundaries of the Land of Israel. In a small country that lies between the Jordan and the sea is a state called Israel. Next to it, in Gaza, is the State of Hamastan. In the West Bank there is the State of the Palestinian Authority, which is under Israeli occupation, and within all of these is the State of Judea of the settlers, on whose behavior Israel exercises a certain influence. ...
DK: What do you suggest?
“A democratic state within the 1967 boundaries, with certain territorial exchanges, will be a Zionist Jewish state that is obliged not only to make peace with its Palestinian and Arab neighbors, but offers the possibility for national-cultural development and full equal rights to the Arab minority living in the State of Israel. The settlement policy is working against us and endangering us. We have to remove the majority of the settlers from the territories, which are actually areas of the State of Palestine. Weren’t a million people moved from Anatolia to Greece? [I disagree slightly, seeing the possibility of drawing boundaries between Israel and a Palestinian state that would allow a majority of settlers to live under Israeli sovereignty, with perhaps some remaining under Palestinian rule, and a minority returning to Israel proper, but I am inclined to agree on the need for outside pressure as he indicates below.-- R.S.]

Go See 'The Gatekeepers' and '5 Broken Cameras'!

I thought I'd show you the blog post that I've published at The Times of Israel on the two excellent films, "The Gatekeepers" and "5 Broken Cameras".  Those of you who haven't yet seen them, may view the trailers by clicking on the blue links in the article. Incidentally, "5 Broken Cameras" can be streamed for free on the web via the Y-Net site. II begin as follows:

So following the Oscar ceremony, Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat said she wasn’t sorry that “The Gatekeepers” and “Five Broken Cameras” didn’t win the Best Documentary Award.  She added that, in her view, “too many movies” made in the past few years “libel Israel throughout the world”.  Of course, as Minister of Culture, she said she was against censorship, but called on the Israeli movie makers to practice “self-censorship.”

Well, for the sake of full disclosure, Livnat and I were fellow students at Tel Aviv University in the early 70s, studying in the Sifrut Clalit (General Literature)