J Street: Much more than a "safe space"

On Day 2 of the J Street conference, a student who had attended my panel on the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement, engaged me in conversation. He told me how wonderful he felt at the conference, which he called a "safe space" in which he could talk about Israel in a way that wasn't tolerated in other Jewish communal frameworks, such as his synagogue or family table.

But for J Street to fulfill its mission, it needs to be more than a "safe space".

As I imagine it, a "safe space" is where a minority of non-conformists gather together for solace, and to take a breath of fresh air. A "safe space" is a refuge - a shelter from the storm, a place for mutual support.

More importantly, a "safe space" is an inward-looking locale, whose denizens are primarily seeking the camaraderie of the like-minded.

A "safe space" is an attitude of self-defense, of self-preservation, of respite. The connotation of "safe space" is a desire to ward off - not take on - the world.

The pro-Israel pro-peace movement has had an abundance of "safe spaces" for dozens of years. What it hasn't had - and what J Street has brought us, and what J Street needs to be if it is to succeed - is not a new and bigger "safe space", but a political movement that confidently and assertively looks outward into the wider community, not inward towards the "already converted".

Success will therefore require not only time, energy, creativity and other resources. Success will require that we, J Street's supporters, recalibrate our expectations.

J Street is not only a place to take comfort. It is a coalition for creating real change.

Often the reaction of those shunned by what's perceived as the mainstream is to shun that mainstream in return. J Street's challenge is to avoid that trap: To make it work, its supporters must slowly wean themselves of the psychology of the underdog, the outcast, the pariah, and take on a new attitude that seeks to build bridges with those who might have feared us in the past.

Clearly, there will be a need for smaller, more ideological organizations to continue their work in pushing the limits of the American Jewish debate. But J Street's role, more than to carve out radically new swaths of territory, will be to bring a growing number of American Jews, and others, into the ideological territory that has already been carved out, but desperately and urgently needs to be reinforced: Two states, 1967 borders, the illegitimacy of occupation and settlement, the legitimacy of Palestinian national rights, and serious, unswerving American commitment and involvement to make it all happen.

In the terminology of American expansionism, J Street needs to be the homesteader, not the frontiersman-explorer. Its work needs to be prose, not poetry.

If J Street's supporters expect J Street to be just another "safe space", this time for the Facebook generation, then the real potential for creating something immensely important - and powerful - might be lost for years to come. And there's no guarantee that Israel will still have a two-state option by that time.

Finding our way on 'J Street'

Most of Meretz USA's active leadership attended J Street's inaugural annual conference, Sunday evening through Tuesday. This links to the historical view that our executive director Ron Skonik took on the eve of this event.

Attending with us were an announced total of 1500 registrants. Most sessions were mobbed; twice I could hardly find a piece of wall to lean on, let alone a seat or (in one case) even floor space to sit on.

J Street has been whacked from right, left and center, yet has tried to conduct itself in a polite and even welcoming manner. Most sessions that I saw were informative and uplifting. A few others seemed more about showing how far it has gone in a mere 18 months of existence, but it deserves to crow about itself.

As our former executive director and now Meretz USA board member, Charney V. Bromberg indicated to me, "The peace movement has now found its center of gravity." Describing itself as the "political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement" (I take "political" to mean that it strives for influence in Washington), J Street welcomed the participation of Meretz USA and at least 19 other peace-oriented Zionist or dovish organizations in the US and Israel as "partners" --- as written on the conference badges that participants from those groups wore on their necks to facilitate access.

It has grown from a founding staff of four, a year and a half ago, to 30 today. Its initial two legally distinct entities, J Street and J Street PAC, have multiplied to five: there is the J Street Education Fund and an on-campus university student group called J Street U; the latter existed for several years as the Union of Progressive Zionists, which Meretz USA helped found and took the lead in fostering with staff time; and there is the brand new merger or alliance with Brit Tzedek V'Shalom as J Street's "grassroots" or field arm (with a possible new name still to be determined).

J Street's positions are nuanced and often misunderstood, if not deliberately distorted. Hence, today J Street U has felt it necessary to deny the claim that J Street U has dropped the "pro-Israel" part of its central slogan and organizing principle as "pro-Israel, pro-peace."

Scheinberg: Good news from Israel

This is the text of a "Radio Shalom" commentary by Stephen Scheinberg, an emeritus professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal:

I get tired of all the news of conflict from the Middle East. I hoped to be able to wake up this morning to the news that Israel’s great writer Amos Oz had won a Nobel prize, but we will have to wait for that. Yet there is interesting news on the technological front.

You may recall that Israel is now in the process of building the infrastructure, throughout the country, for its own electric car. That will involve first, installing recharging outlets in 500,000 of Israel’s 3 to 4 million parking spots. For those who need to drive more than 100 miles at a time there are battery swap stations being established to do quick changes of the batteries, in less time than a current fill-up with gasoline. These swap stations are the really innovative part of the plan and China, among other nations, is interested in them.

Of course, as a small country, Israel is ideally situated to go electric and with a new and complementary-electricity producing highway, on the way. You heard me right, an Israeli company in cooperation with the Technion University has just successfully tested a highway that can produce electricity. It is done by embedding generators in the asphalt, two inches below the surface. The weight of the passing cars produces the electricity through applied mechanical stress. The manager of the project, Dr. Lucy Edri-Azoulay, estimates that a kilometer of a four lane highway will be able to produce enough electricity to power 2,500 households. This system sounds like an Israeli winner to me and, in time, it should find large export markets.

Imagine a nation replacing its polluting automobiles with clean electric cars and producing much, if not all of the power, for recharging their batteries, from the highway itself. This is not the stuff of science fiction. Israel is now pioneering technologies on the cutting edge of the world’s green future. She can be a technological “light unto the world.” May she also demonstrate such innovative capacity in peace making.

A note to our readers: We'll be away for a few days next week in Washington, DC, at the J Street conference.

Should 'Human Rights Watch' watch Israel?

Maybe Robert Bernstein, the founding chairperson of Human Rights Watch who served HRW from 1978 to '98, is right in his NY Times op-ed of Tuesday, Oct. 20, that HRW should focus only upon correcting human rights abuses in closed, authoritarian societies. The British officer, Col. Richard Kemp may even be correct, or close to correct, in his assessment that Israel was attempting to be humane in the Gaza war (doing “more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare”).

There were those cell phone calls telling civilians to flee their neighborhoods about to be targeted– creepy yet humane insofar as lives were saved– but it still should be clear that things went wrong in producing so many non-combatant victims. For my money, the strategy itself was problematic: fighting in heavy population centers in pursuit of an ill-conceived mission that punished the people of Gaza as a whole for Hamas attacks on Israel.

I don't have any magic prescription for Israel's dilemma in facing an enemy that insisted on attacking Israel proper even after a wholesale withdrawal from Gaza of Israel's settlements and soldiers in 2005, but I have some thoughts. For one, Israel is said to have been obligated to end the economic blockade of the Gaza Strip as part of its ceasefire agreement that survived four of the agreed upon six months; what if the blockade were ended, but with a newly negotiated provision to end the smuggling of rockets and other arms through those tunnels built beneath Gaza's border with Egypt?

Bernstein would be correct that “intent” needs to be assessed in relation to whether such events were crimes: “... there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.” But Israel needs to react more openly in this regard, as even the Likud deputy prime minister, Dan Meridor, suggests with his new proposal for establishing an independent commission to investigate the events described in the Goldstone Report.

To sum up, Bernstein makes some interesting points on where HRW may be going wrong, but he fails to address what Israel actually did in Gaza. Here are highlights of his op-ed:

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them ― through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. ...

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world ― many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ...

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. ...

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism. …

Are Jews NOT a 'people'? Postscripts

I asked Charles Nydorf, an authority on Yiddish whom I know slightly, about Prof. Sand's notion of Ashkenazi Jews originating with the Khazars, and his reference to Paul Wexler (a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University) in this connection. I see from some online citations, that Prof. Sand did not adequately explain Prof. Wexler's work.

As discussed in a 1996 science article in the NY Times: "... in a 1993 book, "The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity" (Slavica Publishers),.... Dr. Wexler uses a reconstruction of Yiddish to argue that it began as a Slavic language whose vocabulary was largely replaced with German words. Going even further, he contends that the Ashkenazic Jews are predominantly converted Slavic and Turkic people who merged with a tiny population of Palestinian Jews from the Diaspora."

This was Nydorf's response to my query:

Paul Wexler is very well respected but his opinions are in the minority. The 20th century consensus was that Yiddish originated about 1000 years ago on the Rhineland or in Bavaria and that it is based on a mixture of Germanic, Semitic, Romance and Slavic elements with the dominant structural influence being German.

There are of course, dissenters. Wexler is one and my own research based on materials from the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry has led me to a new theory which I have been presenting in my blog. In my theory Yiddish originated considerably before 1000 and its original Germanic elements came not from German dialects but from Gothic.

As for the Khazars, Nydorf disagrees with Wexler: "The Ashkenazim already existed at the time the Khazars converted and they were living far away from Khazaria in Austria, Germany, Bohemia and France."

Hillel Halkin wrote a devastating response to Sand's book in The Forward. Halkin, an American-Israeli writer and translator who leans toward the right, may have marred it just a bit by getting personal. The following is a taste:

... Sand’s book, which argues that there was no such thing as a Jewish people until one was “constructed” by Zionism and Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, would have attracted little notice had it been written by a professor of history at the University of Damascus. As the work of a supposed historian at the University of Tel Aviv, it is a scandal, a fashionably phrased political screed against Zionism that cherry-picks its data while pretending to be history. Alas, it will be accepted as history by many readers who are as dutifully impressed by its 568 footnotes, as were, it would seem, the French journalists on the Aujourd’hui panel.

Not that Sand gets everything wrong. His book is full of perfectly correct and quite unoriginal observations: some elaborating why today’s Jews are not all descendants of biblical Israelites and stem in part from ancestors who joined the Jewish people by religious conversion over the ages (although Sand’s treatment of the considerable genetic research on the subject is shockingly shoddy, he is not wholly wrong about the matter); some pointing out that Diaspora Jews never shared a single spoken language or material culture, let alone territory, as do most peoples; and some dwelling on the problematic nature of the State of Israel, which aspires to be Jewish, democratic and secular while denying non-Jews certain privileges extended to Jews and defining Jewishness in terms of traditional religious law. These are all issues worthy of discussion, and there is nothing wrong with raising them.

And yet to go from there to Sand’s absurd conclusions that the Jews, who considered themselves a distinct people from their early history, were “invented” as one in modern times; that their historical connection to Palestine is “imaginary,” because they are not descended in their entirety from ancient Palestinian Jewry; or that the idea of a Jewish state is therefore less acceptable than the idea of a French or Spanish state, demands a thoroughly dishonest manipulation of the facts. Indeed, if one is talking about the “construction” of national identities, an enterprise that numerous post-modernist historians of nationalism to whom Sand is indebted have written about, it is the French and Spanish who are the parvenus, having undertaken the task only in the late Middle Ages. And if you are looking for peoples who accomplished this even later, in the last two or three centuries, say, you might consider the Italians, the Germans, the Americans, the Brazilians, the Indians and a host of others (including those latest of latecomers, the Palestinians). You would never, unless you wanted to flaunt your ignorance, mention the Jews, who had a fully developed national consciousness at least 2,500 years ago. ...

This article inspired a huge number of online comments, including this one. I can't judge the truth of the first paragraph on genetics (such research in Israel was ridiculed by Shlomo Sand, who depicted it as completely bogus and ideologically motivated) but the second paragraph below seems particularly insightful in indicating that conversion to Judaism through most of the post-Judean history of the Jews (basically an "exile"-- notwithstanding Sand's protestations to the contrary) had to be rare. It does not even mention that such conversions under Islam were punishable by death and those in "Christendom" also dangerous:

... More studies have been carried out on the genetic history of the Jews than on most ethnic groups, perhaps because there are so many Jewish doctors to take advantage of the fabled willingness of Jews to participate in research. These studies not only show that almost all Jewish populations have origins in the Middle East, but that the DNA of Jews from almost every corner of the Diaspora is more similar to that of other Jews than to any other population. When compared with non-Jewish groups, the closest match is with the Muslims of Kurdistan, not with the European peoples alongside whom Ashkenazi Jews lived for centuries or the Arab neighbors of many Sephardi populations.

Other groups with histories of ancient migrations do not have the same degree of continuity. Hungarians are known to have originated on the Eurasian steppe and moved westward in a migration many centuries long, arriving in the Carpathian basin about 995 CE. They speak a language from the steppe, take pride in their history of migration and military conquest and expected that genetic research would demonstrate their central Asian origins. The evidence to date, however, has shown a varying but quite small element of central Asian ancestry in Hungarian populations, along with great similarities between Hungarians and their Slavic and German neighbors. This does not mean that the Hungarians with Slavic ancestry are not real Hungarians. Rather, Hungarian culture has been so powerfully attractive that for many centuries people of Slavic, Germanic and other ancestry elected to join the Hungarian people. Ironically, the genetic distinctiveness of the Jews in part may reflect the unattractiveness of joining a religious minority that was oppressed and impoverished through much of its history.

Are Jews NOT a 'people'?

Shlomo Sand is a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, with a specialization in Europe. In New York last week to promote the English-language edition of his book, "The Invention of the Jewish People" (Verso Press), he quipped that he would not have published his book before obtaining job security as a tenured professor. Although somewhat flawed in his English, he charmed a packed audience of the "Marxist Theory Colloquium" at New York University with his wit and devastating attacks on ideas that most Jews and Israelis hold dear.

The basic notion is that the people we know as Jews are a disparate collection of peoples who are descendants of converts, but not of the original inhabitants of the land of Israel, and that the Palestinian Arabs are actually descendants of the ancient Judeans to a much greater degree than today's Jews. His basic points of argumentation include:

1. that the Romans never "exiled" the Jews from Judea and that most of them converted to Islam with the Arab conquest about 600 years after Rome's suppression of the two great Jewish rebellions;
2. that Ashkenazi Jews are mostly descended from the Khazars --- a Turkic people, originally from near the Caspian Sea, who largely adopted Judaism over 1000 years ago;
3. that Sephardic Jews are mostly descended from Berbers who had a Jewish kingdom that fell to the Arab-Muslim conquest of North Africa;
4. that Yemenite Jews are descended from a Jewish kingdom in Medieval Yemen;
5. that the idea of a "Jewish people" was "invented" by Zionist thinkers in the late 19th century.

If this were a dispassionate academic discussion of scholarly issues, there'd be less of a problem here. Instead, Prof. Sand presents his ideas in incendiary ways, to forums that are emotionally committed to thinking of Israel as automatically in the wrong in whatever it does and to a large extent unjust in its very existence. Sand engages more as an ideologue and provocateur than as a true scholar.

According to Wikipedia, Prof. Sand is a red diaper baby who belonged to an Israeli Communist youth organization and the anti-Zionist Matzpen group in the 1970s. I point this out only to indicate that his personal history predisposed him to a sharply dissenting viewpoint regarding Israel.

I lost my cool at certain points and shouted out brief comments protesting some of what he asserted as fact: for example, that Israel as a self-defined "Jewish state" cannot be a democracy. I indicated that Israel is a democracy since the word fundamentally denotes majority rule, but I would agree with critics that it's a flawed democracy and in some ways not a liberal one. He actually shot back that Israel is liberal in many ways --its pluralism, its free press, etc.-- and I would not disagree, but this leaves him arguing a contradiction: that Israel is both "liberal" and undemocratic. (Following the lecture, I explained to someone sitting near me, who had believed otherwise, that Arab citizens of Israel vote and are even elected to political office.)

In another of my interjections during his talk, I indicated in response to his #1 point that the Romans killed most of the Jews of ancient Judea/Palestine in the course of putting down the rebellions of the years, 66-73 C.E. and 132-135 (Bar Kochba's revolt). He said that contemporary accounts always exaggerated numbers and that you have to discount them by "dropping a zero."

But even if this were true, many if not most survivors were exiled as slaves; still, he dismissed the notion that the figures carved in Rome's Arch of Titus, depicting men carrying menorahs and other Jewish artifacts, were exiled Jews-- because their faces were shaven (and therefore Roman). Evidently, these figures were Roman soldiers carting off booty from the Temple; but the Roman Coliseum is understood to have been built by Jewish slaves. He is correct that Jews remained (he makes the point that rabbis there created the "Mishnah"), but their viability as a people with the numbers and means to sustain national independence was surely gone by then. There is certainly no dispute that Palestinian Jews compiled the "Jerusalem Talmud" after the Roman wars; but these points prove nothing other than how hard he's arguing to minimize the extent of the catastrophe suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Romans.

During the Q & A, I calmly asked him how his ideas comport with linguistic scholars who see Yiddish as originating about 1,000 years ago from eastern French and western German dialects, and then moving eastward. He complimented me on the question, indicating that the answer is in his book; he takes the view of a scholar named Paul Wexler who contends that Yiddish developed in eastern German lands rather than the west. It took me a day or two to realize that this didn't answer my question, because whether Yiddish originated in western German lands or a couple of hundred miles to the east, this doesn't show why Yiddish, the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews, would be based on German and not on the Turkic tongue of the Khazars.

With regard to #5, I've already discoursed somewhat on this in an earlier posting: "The Zionist movement successfully remade the Jewish people as a nation in the land of Israel. It took a series of scattered religious and ethnic communities and – with the ‘help’ of pervasive and (eventually) genocidal antisemitism – gathered them up and transformed them. ...”

Prof. Sand admits that there is such a thing as "Jewish identity," apart from the religion. But he doesn't seem to understand that all national identities are "invented."

I blogged on this as well: "This is one of the lessons I drew from an insightful book by Prof. Rashid Khalidi: Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997). He makes the point that 'National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given....' Khalidi proceeds to relate how Palestinians didn't see themselves as a distinct people until well into the 20th century. Just as anti-Zionist writers and activists would never think of denying Palestinians their understanding of themselves as a people, they should not be denying the Jews their sense of peoplehood – a consciousness born of centuries of persecution, discrimination and worse, not to mention strong religious and cultural continuities."

Early Reform Judaism, born in 19th century Germany and the US, attempted to recast Jewish self-definition into only a religious frame; classical Reform Jews were Americans or Germans of the "Mosaic" faith. The traditional or Orthodox view of Jews is of "Ahm Yisrael" -- the people or nation of Israel (even among anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews). The left has generally granted people the right to define themselves, to "national self-determination"; only for the Jews does this seem not to be the case.

Sand proved that he knows little about Jewish religious practice in asserting that "Jews don't read the Bible." I don't see the relevance of this to his thesis, but I assume that he was really thinking about the fact that observant Jews interpret the Bible in light of Talmudic and later rabbinic commentaries; but the Torah (the first five books) is read in traditional synagogues three times a week-- Saturday, Monday and Thursday-- supplemented by readings from the Prophets every Saturday, and the chanting of other Biblical scriptures on specific holidays (e.g., the Megillahs of Ruth on Shavuot and Esther on Purim).

We had a nice little discussion afterwards. We briefly got into some core political issues: when I indicated that I'm with Meretz USA and that the Meretz party believes that Israel should be a "Jewish state" that is also "of all its citizens," he dismissed this as "an oxymoron."

We both agreed and disagreed some on the 1948 war and the Palestinian-Arab "Nakba" (catastrophe): we agreed that it was not at all unreasonable for Palestinian Arabs to flee the fighting with the expectation of returning to their homes once the war was over, but that it's too late for a Palestinian "right of return." He hastened to add, of course, that he disapproves of Israel's "Law of Return" (something that I see necessary as an insurance policy for Jews requiring a safe haven from persecution).

I see the Nakba as a Palestinian as well as Jewish responsibility in that it happened because of the violent Arab rejection of the UN's partition plan. He harked on the fact that the smaller Jewish population was granted a larger share of the land -- ignoring that the Jewish state was to have a large Arab minority and that many survivors of the Holocaust (stateless refugees in DP camps--as he was, ironically, as a child) were sure to move there.

He believes strongly in Israel as "an Israeli state," rather than a Jewish state; while I agree that it's only proper and healthy for Jews, Arabs and other Israeli citizens to forge a sense of common nationality as Israelis, I don't see it as wrong that Israel also serves a special function as the one place in the world that Jews can call their spiritual homeland (whether or not it's actually their ancestral home). Finally, Prof. Sand and I agree on the need for a two-state solution, for Israel and the Palestinians, and we'd both welcome a regional confederation some day, but we disagree profoundly on many other things, as I've indicated. Click here for a follow-up posting.

Netanyahu as sadistic toreador

Yossi Sarid was the leader of the Meretz party from 1996-2003 and a Meretz MK from 1992-2006. Currently he is a columnist for Haaretz who offers a dry, acerbic wit, a wonderful command of the Hebrew language, and probing insights into the Israeli social psychology that forms the underlying foundation upon which Israel's political struggles are played out.

In his latest column - Abbas is a dead man - Netanyahu and Barak killed him - Sarid depicts an Israeli leadership and public that are driven not only by legitimate security interests, but by triumphalism, anger, and an almost unrestrainable, self-destructive impulse to demean the enemy, the same enemy with whom peace must eventually be made.

Here is a snippet of Sarid's troubling indictment:

"Netanyahu does not merely want to win; he also wants to humiliate. He does not merely want to stab a knife in the back, but also turn it in the stomach. Bibi understands the nature of the beast's soul - that of Israeli public opinion, which cheers on the toreador who places his foot on the bull when it is already dead."

Better in Hebrew (and entitled "Why Humiliate?") than in translation, it is still a difficult and bracing read in English.

Obama's Nobel: good news for Mideast

This post is from Michael Lame, the founder of “Re-Think the Middle East,” an organization attempting to elevate the quality of public discourse regarding the Middle East. He blogs at www.rethinkme.org:

President Barack Obama, as everyone knows, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Many people ask: Does he deserve it? Well, it depends on what the meaning of the word “deserve” is: “Deserve: to merit or have a claim to…because of one’s acts, qualities, or situation.”

Obama’s acts or actions have not produced definitive results on the world stage, not yet in any case. His qualities, as discerned through his words, probably weighed more with the Nobel Committee than any identifiable accomplishments. Speeches given in Cairo, Ankara, Prague, Strasbourg, and at the U.N. in New York have all been well-received internationally. Obama is the anti-Bush, signaling a new direction in foreign policy, and that sits well with Arab, Muslim, Russian, and European audiences, among others.

For those of us who care about the future of the Middle East, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize should be received as good news, though perhaps for reasons not at first obvious. Click here to read more.

Baskin: Don't tread on Temple Mount

Gershon Baskin, the co-CEO of IPCRI -- Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information touches upon several topics in his Oct. 12 commentary in The Jerusalem Post, but none more effectively than the question of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem:

... Events, particularly those surrounding Jerusalem, have their own internal energy that, as we have seen in the past, can easily get out of control. In this region, we should make sure not to let the genie out of the bottle -- and Jerusalem is the ultimate genie. Both the Israeli and Palestinian governments should be extremely cautious in their handling of Jerusalem. The second intifada was launched because of a misinterpretation of the direction of Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount close to a decade ago. Sharon's target was then-prime minister Ehud Barak, not the Palestinians.

THE PALESTINIANS today do not understand that Israel is not planning to destroy al-Aksa Mosque or to take over the Temple Mount, despite the desire to do so by some right-wing and religious fanatics.

Because of the sensitivity of the situation in Jerusalem, Israel should unilaterally freeze its excavations in the area of the mosques for a limited time. The Israel Antiquities Authority should invite Palestinian experts, religious leaders and PA officials to see the excavations area firsthand. Israel should also invite PA President Mahmoud Abbas to Jerusalem, to pray in al-Aksa Mosque, to see the Western Wall and the excavations around the mount.

Abbas should then declare his recognition of the fact that the Temple Mount was the location of the Holy Temple (which is even mentioned in the Koran). Abbas need not worry that his recognition would grant Israel and the Jewish people the green light to rebuild the Temple in place of the mosques. There is no such intention, there are no such plans and the Chief Rabbinate has once again stated that Jews should not go onto the Temple Mount as a matter of Halacha.

According to Jewish law, the Temple will be rebuilt only when the messiah comes, so Abbas should be able to rest assured that until the messiah arrives, the Temple Mount will remain under Muslim control - and when the messiah finally does show up, he will be wise enough to deal with the future of the mount.

The Palestinians should understand that when Yasser Arafat foolishly denied the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the Holy Temple, he did great damage to the peace process. Recognizing this fact would facilitate greater understanding. ...

Boycott advocate NOT being punished

This can be read as a follow-up to what Ron Skolnik wrote recently on this general subject of boycott. At the behest of In These Times (ITT) magazine, I contacted authorities at Ben-Gurion University to examine the rumor that boycott advocate, Neve Gordon, was being punished for his views.

ITT published a shortened version of my findings in its November issue; I was not pleased with the way this piece was edited because it did not emphasize that Dr. Gordon’s teaching post at BGU is not under threat. The complete version is now online at InTheseTimes.org. This is the shortened version as I would have edited it:

In an August 20 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of politics at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Beersheba (and a contributor to In These Times), announced his support for the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement. Calling it “the only way that Israel can be saved from itself,” Gordon argues that it will force an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories beyond the pre-June 1967 borders of Israel.

Gordon’s bold and very public call for an international boycott against Israel has triggered a pushback from some Israelis and others.

On Aug. 27, Virginia Aksan, president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, wrote to Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University, protesting the university’s alleged effort to dismiss Gordon from his dual roles as a senior lecturer of politics and as chair of BGU’s department of government and politics.

On September 2, The Jewish Forward reported that the American Associates of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev—a U.S.-based organization that raises funds for BGU—had called for “disciplinary action” against Gordon because his op-ed was hurting their fundraising efforts.

Faye Bittker, BGU’s director of public relations, said in an e-mail to In These Times: “The university ... NEVER EVER threatened him with dismissal ... However, the University feels that a call for a boycott is ... the equivalent of screaming fire in a crowded theater, as an academic boycott undercuts every single value that the University stands for, and were such a boycott to succeed, it would cause great damage to both the University and to the State of Israel. Moreover, the University feels strongly that if Neve really believes in such a boycott, he cannot fulfill his responsibilities as the chairman of the department ... and as such should resign.”

The Forward reports that Isaac Nevo, a senior lecturer in philosophy at BGU, organized a letter signed by 48 faculty that demanded Gordon not be sanctioned for his views. And Hebrew University law professor Alon Harel initiated a petition signed by 180 Israeli academics, similarly opposed to punishing Gordon. Interestingly, both Nevo and Harel actually oppose BDS.

Nevo did suggest that Gordon “may consider” resigning from his administrative position. But Gordon told The Forward that he sees his stepping down now as an impossibility because it would be regarded as punishment for his views.

Nevertheless, he admitted to “a contradiction” in performing his duties as chair, since he views visits by foreign academics to Israel as “extremely problematic” unless their visit helps highlight what he sees as the injustices of the Israeli occupation. (Gordon did not respond to queries from this writer.)

Vanessa Redgrave against anti-Israel protest

The actress,Vanessa Redgrave, has long been an activist for the Palestinian cause and a vociferous critic of Israel. Ms. Redgrave has not likely altered this basic view, but a news article in Haaretz reveals her to be an unusually intelligent and sensitive voice on the Toronto Film Festival controversy about honoring the city of Tel Aviv on its 100th anniversary year:

In a letter to the New York Review of Books co-signed by artist Julian Schnabel and playwright Martin Sherman, Redgrave defends the festival's choice to spotlight Tel Aviv and denounces those who have called for a boycott.

"We oppose the current Israeli government, but it is a government," Redgrave and her co-signatories wrote in their letter, "Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter." ...

"Thousands of Palestinians have died through the years because the Israeli government, military, and part of the population fervently believe that the Arab states and, indeed, much of the world do not want Israel to exist.

"How then are we halting this never-ending cycle of violence by promoting the very fears that cause it?

"Many citizens of Tel Aviv are particularly aware of the situation of the Palestinians and are concerned about their government's policies and their country's future. And none more so than the Tel Aviv creative community. This is exemplified by Israeli films that criticize their government's behavior.

"These citizens of Tel Aviv and their organizations and their cultural outlets should be applauded and encouraged.

"We do not agree that this involvement is a reason to shun or protest, picket or boycott, or ban people who are expressing thoughts and confronting grief that, ironically, many of the protesters share."

Scheinberg on 'Jews Who Hate Obama'

This is the text of another "Radio Shalom" commentary by Stephen Scheinberg, an emeritus professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal (Prof. Scheinberg is a US citizen):

I voted for Barack Obama last November, despite receiving countless negative e-mails, many of which originated from the Jewish Republican Committee. I was told that he was a Muslim, that he was anti-Israel and anti-semitic. Now, many of these same e-mailers and others inform us that he plans to introduce death panels, that he would teach socialism to American children, even introduce that Canadian, socialist system of health care to the U.S.

We are also informed by the so-called birthers that he was not really born in the United States and therefore not qualified for the Presidency. Orly Taitz, the leader of the birthers, is a Soviet-born Israeli, with a “degree” from an unaccredited law school who believes that Obama threatens Israel because he sent humanitarian aid to Gaza and also espouses “radical socialist” policies.

We can certainly see that President Obama has changed direction in the Middle East from the Bush-Cheney course and certainly, by some, that alone will be perceived as anti-Israel. So, let us try to cut to the core of what I refer to as the right-wing analysis.

Writing in the leading Israeli newspaper Yediot, Rabbi Levi Brackman tells us that Obama is pro-Israel but only “when it fits in to his view of America’s national interests,” as if it is quite remarkable, for the leader of the United States, to put American interests first. The Obama view of national interest, and here I agree with Brackman, is that America “must win the battle for public opinion in the Islamic world and elsewhere … he thinks that the USA would be much safer if the Muslim street had a positive opinion of the USA.” And here we come to the crux of Brackman’s criticisms, when he states “Clearly, therefore, the demand for Israel to cease all settlement expansion and ease blockades on Gaza is meant to appease the Muslim street rather [than] out of concern for Israel’s security interests.” Thus, somehow, settlement expansion, for Brackman, becomes a security interest.

No one seriously entertains that equation today. Settlements are a strategic liability, which would force the IDF, in case of attack, to divert troops to the defence of scattered settlements and outposts.

Canadian, Allen Z. Herz, formerly a senior advisor in our Privy Council, carries on Brackman’s theme, saying: “As tension now grows over Iran’s race to develop nuclear weapons, President Obama seeks rapprochement with the Muslim world, including Iran. Can we ask if there are similarities between Obama and Chamberlain?” Herz, in his article, revives all the spurious charges about Obama and his pastor Rev. Wright, his “close relationship” to former Weatherman Bill Ayers, childhood practice of Islam, and the like. Herz’s wildly over-the-top charge of appeasement is apparently based on his reading of Obama’s Cairo speech, which suggests, to him, “that Obama may believe that a weaker Israell now suits the interests of the USA.”

That is a strange reading of a speech in which Obama, in front of his Arab audience, told them that: “America’s strong bonds with Israell are well known. This bond is unbreakable.” He was certainly not seeking Arab applause with that line.

As always, my favorite right wing source is Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post. She, in her typically vigorous manner, contrasts American Jewish and Israeli views of Obama: “Whereas Israeli Jews recognize that it is morally obscene, strategically suicidal and historically inaccurate to suggest that Israel has no right to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and that Jews have no right to live there, American Jews do not intuitively understand this to be the case. Consequently, while Israeli Jews recognize Obama’s calls for a total freeze in Jewish construction in these areas as inherently hostile, most American Jews do not.”

One should note how she links Jerusalem to the West Bank without even qualifying that, at issue is only new construction in East Jerusalem but that is typical of those who wish us to confuse the old city with the vast annexations of 1967. It is a means of tapping into widely shared Jewish emotions, on historic Jerusalem, to enlist them in settlement expansion. Glick is most outrageous when she turns the occupation itself into a moral and strategic imperative. The apologists for the great European empires, of another era, could hardly rival Ms. Glick’s imperial chutzpa. Unlike Obama, she shows no concern for Israel’s sometimes harsh rule over 2.5 million Palestinians.

I have presented the words of these three right-wing writers, in some detail, in order to point up the right’s real difficulties with Obama. It is first the settlements, second the settlements, and third the settlements. Some of those hostile to Obama’s Mideast policies may, from time to time, raise other issues, Iran included. However, I am convinced that the advocates of “greater Israel” do have a difficulty with the President which is cloaked in the formula that he is anti-Israel, but they really mean that he stands in the way of realizing their dream, of permanent rule over the West Bank and its Palestinian citizens.

Challenging scholars: Khalidi and Shlaim, Part 2

Avi Shlaim was more vehemently critical of Israel than the relatively dispassionate Khalidi. Nevertheless, Shlaim sees the Arab side, mainly Nasser, as being responsible for causing the 1967 Six Day War. This came up because both were preparing papers for a conference on the 1967 Six Day War. Interestingly, Khalidi went even further than Shlaim in blaming the Arab side, stating that Nasser was not very interested in the Israel/Palestine issue-- focusing mostly on Yemen at the time-- and that he gave in to pressures from Syria and the Palestinians to embark upon his confrontation with Israel.

In terms of his general view, Shlaim says that he accepts the "lachrymose history" of the Jews (a chronicle of disasters)-- as dubbed and decried by Salo Baron, an iconic scholar of Jewish history-- but only up to 1948. Shlaim sees the Jews as having been victims of history up to that point, and then "the boot was on the other foot" and the Jewish State of Israel has primarily been the victimizer ever since.

He repeated his published observation that Jewish forces actually outnumbered Arab combatants in the 1948 war. I'm familiar with this contention and don't doubt his factual documentation. But I see it as a static and one-dimensional snapshot of a conflict that rapidly changed tides more than once. His statement tells us nothing about how well armed the warring sides were (or at what point Israel received substantial arms) or what forces had to be held back to guard population centers and how many were available to go on the attack. If his point is that Israel's victory in 1948 was not "a miracle" -- that it is explainable materially-- he's certainly correct. But if he's arguing that the Jews were not seriously threatened by the Arabs in 1948, he is certainly wrong.

There is much more that needs to be said in this analysis. Israel's casualties were high: one percent of the entire population (not just combatants) was killed and 2.5% wounded. Jewish Jerusalem, with its 100,000 inhabitants, was besieged for an extended amount of time and had to be relieved militarily. The Jewish Quarter of the Old City fell to Arab forces, as did the Etzion Bloc of settlements to the east of Jerusalem, and these areas were "ethnically cleansed." I don't for a moment deny the ultimately higher toll among the Arabs or that many suffered instances of great brutality-- their "Nakba" was clearly a humanitarian disaster-- but these were losses suffered by the side that had chosen to go to war and made it into a life-or-death struggle.

Other factors that go into this matter: the relative military experience and coordination of the opposing forces, the morale and motivations of the opposing combatants, and the availability of seasoned foreign volunteers. These mostly favored the Jews.

Which brings me back to Prof. Khalidi. I asked both scholars questions in the Q & A. Khalidi responded to my query on the pro-Nazi Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini that his role was minimal, because he spent the 1940s in exile. Khalidi also minimized the Mufti's influence as a leader of the pro-Nazi rebellion in Iraq, and then stated that most Palestinian Arabs favored the Allies during World War II and that "thousands" had volunteered to serve in the British forces.

Khalidi further pointed out that referring to the Mufti has "iconic" value for Zionists in the debate over the historical merits of the two sides. While this is undoubtedly true, it doesn't mean that the Palestinians should discount him as a major bad actor on their side. The Mufti's actual impact on the events of 1948 may be debatable, but it obviously was not good.

I'd like to see figures on Khalidi's assertion that so many Palestinians ("thousands") had served with the British in WW 2; if this were true, I think that their forces would have been more difficult to defeat in '48. One of the advantages that the Jews had in the '48 war was that they had several thousand combat veterans who had in fact served with the British.

Prof. Shlaim responded to my question about King Hussein's peace offering to Israel in the early 1970s. Shlaim indicated that he's written on this in detail in his biography, "Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace," including an index listing the "42 secret meetings" that Hussein held with Israeli leaders. He stated that King Hussein offered Israel a "total peace in exchange for total withdrawal." Since this would corroborate my understanding that Golda Meir blew a peace treaty with Jordan prior to the Yom Kippur War, because she didn't want to give up East Jerusalem, I need to do my homework and read up on this. In particular, I need to discover if there was any wiggle room in what Shlaim describes as Hussein's demand for a complete withdrawal. If there was none-- nothing regarding Israel's access to the Western Wall or to Jewish-owned properties in the Jewish Quarter, or regarding the strategic Latrun Salient-- then for the stronger power to give up all its gains on the demand of the weaker (who was also the aggressor in 1967), defies historical precedent. Shlaim may or may not be overly harsh in judging from this episode that Israel valued land over peace. But this is something I need to study.

Professors Shlaim and Khalidi are scholars who challenge Zionist understandings, but their arguments are not bullet-proof. It was a pity that there was nobody at the speakers' table at this major university to represent a Zionist point of view, preferably a left-wing one. Why not, for example, the Queens College/CUNY historian, Mark Rosenblum-- a founder and longtime spokesperson of Americans for Peace Now, who hosted Khalidi at pro-peace forums in the early '90s? And now Benny Morris-- the pioneer of the New Historians' school of historiography who has gone "bad" with extremely un-PC understandings of the conflict -- is in New York to lecture at NYU. Could we have possibly had a civilized three-way conversation? I would like to think so.

Challenging scholars: Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim

On Sept. 25, I sat in a packed hall at Columbia University's School of International Affairs attending a stimulating public conversation between the historians Rashid Khalidi (of Columbia) and Avi Shlaim (of Oxford). Both men walk a difficult line between scholarship and activism: Khalidi as a Palestinian-American who has advised the PLO and long advocated for a Palestinian state, and Shlaim, raised in Israel but now a dual national with British citizenship who has made his reputation as one of the New Historians who document the dark corners of Israel's history and is an outspoken critic of contemporary Israel.

Khalidi is also very much a chronicler and critic of the Palestinian national movement, but more from a practical perspective than morally. For example, he sees the crushing defeat of the Palestinian-Arab revolt of 1936-39 by the British as having doomed the Arabs to defeat in the 1948 war. But this conclusion begs a question I wish someone had asked: If these casualties had not been suffered and the Palestinian irregular forces were much stronger when they attacked the Yishuv (the organized Jewish community in Palestine) in '47-'48, would their possible military triumph have been a step forward for humanity? Would the likely result of widespread slaughter and/or displacement of the country's Jews been a triumph for the good?

In Bennett Muraskin's review of Prof. Khalidi's 2006 work, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood ("A History of Failure," summer 2007 issue of ISRAEL HORIZONS magazine), Muraskin addresses Prof. Khalidi's failure to provide a moral critique of Palestinian nationalism:

Was violence the only answer? What about the binational solution proposed by Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hashomer Hatzair? Khalidi disappoints in simply dismissing their thinking as fuzzy. Citing Magnes and Buber – but not Hashomer Hatzair – he said that they advocated for a binational state but "did not flesh out what that formula might mean in practice, nor did they convince large numbers of Jews in Palestine of the force of their arguments."

When the Palestinians revolted in 1936, it was too late, in Khalidi’s opinion. By then the Yishuv was firmly entrenched―a state-in-waiting. And despite a massive Palestinian general strike in 1936 and an armed uprising that lasted from 1937 to 1939, the Palestinians were no match for the British army. When the revolt was finally crushed, 5,000 Palestinians had lost their lives. This outcome left the Palestinians woefully unprepared to resist the Zionist move toward independence.

Nevertheless, the Palestinian uprising was far from a total failure. The British caved in to Palestinian demands, cutting off Jewish immigration to a trickle in its 1939 White Paper and promising eventual independence for Palestine. But the Palestinians rejected this concession in what Khalidi describes as a “tactical error.” Furthermore, he acknowledges that the Grand Mufti, initially promoted by the British as a Palestinian “leader,” disgraced himself by collaborating with the Nazis during World War II.

Still, their far greater strategic error was in rejecting the 1947 UN Partition Resolution that would have created a Palestinian Arab state alongside the Jewish state. If Khalidi is looking for a reason why Palestinians have not achieved statehood, he need look no further. Yet on this question, he is strangely silent. ...

To be continued.

Daniel Kurtzer-- hardly an extremist

On Sept. 17, the Israel Policy Forum hosted Daniel Kurtzer at the Manhattan JCC. Now at Princeton after a career with the State Department, including as US ambassador to Egypt and then to Israel, Kurtzer gained notoriety as a religious Jew serving in an Arab country. He's also been subjected to attack in the past year for advising the Obama campaign and the new administration with his allegedly "leftist" or very dovish views regarding Israel.

So I was surprised to find that day that his views were only moderately dovish, and not at all "leftist." I've already recounted his pronounced disagreement with the charges leveled at Israel in the Goldstone Report.

He happens to be a very articulate, fluid and well-informed speaker, but his views are not exceptional. For example, he very much believes in a negotiated two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians and does not think that a solution can be imposed from the outside. He also says that the US should not be one-sided and that it should be more pro-active and creative than in the past in helping the two sides reach an agreement. He sees it as a good sign that Pres. Obama is pressing now, unlike both his recent predecessors, and not waiting for his final year in office to make a big push.

Behavior on the ground must change, he says, which means both that Israeli settlements must stop and that the Palestinians must come to grips with terrorism. Kurtzer praises the work of US General Dayton in rebuilding Palestinian security forces and says that in May, it was very significant that PA forces were willing to take casualties in violently suppressing a terrorist element in the town of Kalkilya.

When he left his post as ambassador to Israel in Sept. 2005, Kurtzer says that the Bush administration was pushing for Palestinian candidates to qualify for the planned parliamentary elections by endorsing a platform for peace. (This would have been consistent with the Oslo Accords which still provided a legal framework for the Palestinian Authority; Oslo required that Palestinian officials endorse peace with Israel.) But afterwards, the Bush administration dropped such a requirement, which allowed Hamas candidates to run and take office without pledging themselves to peaceful coexistence. Kurtzer agrees with Yossi Beilin that this latter step by the Bush administration was a terrible mistake.

Kurtzer went on to say that he does not believe in "confidence building measures" and that he is "an unabashed hardliner on Hamas." He doesn't think that Hamas can be tamed by backchannel diplomacy. But on the positive side, he sees the Saudi/Arab League peace initiative (originally launched in 2002) as being of enormous significance, because it publicly offers Israel peace with the entire Arab world.

Whether he's right or wrong in all of these particulars, he is hardly a bomb-throwing radical. The hysteria that we heard from the (Jewish) right in the notion that this "dangerous," guy had Obama's ear is totally out of place.

This reminds me of similar concerns we heard from the far left about Rahm Emanuel-- someone with clear Israeli roots and attachments (and a father who once belonged to the right-wing Irgun underground, to boot) -- when he became Obama's chief of staff. They were sure Emanuel was going to act as if he were a Mossad agent inside the White House. In more recent months, with the White House pressuring Netanyahu's government to commit to a complete freeze in settlement expansion, the extreme right has been screaming about how this guy, Emanuel, is actually a "self-hating Jew."

I'm sure that it's too much to ask that extreme firebrands on either side of the spectrum actually monitor how their earlier assessments of people they were so upset about, have actually checked out.