Jewish Current Issues

Laura Bialis' "Refusenik" Opens

Appropriately for the week of Israel’s 60^th anniversary, REFUSENIK -- a major new documentary -- opens in New York tonight, at The Quad Cinema, with special appearances by Natan Sharansky at the 3:30 and 6:15 screenings on May 11.

REFUSENIK is the first documentary to chronicle the thirty-year movement to free Soviet Jews.  The film is the project of the remarkable Laura Bialis, currently living in Sderot where she is filming a documentary of the city on the frontline of Islamic fascism.

REFUSENIK is a tapestry of first-person accounts of heroism, sacrifice, and ultimately liberation, told through the eyes of activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The campaign to free Soviet Jewry is a major event in Jewish history.  By 1992, one and a half million Jews had left the Soviet Union to live in freedom as a direct result of what was likely the most successful human rights campaign of all times.

One of the proudest chapters in Jewish history, the story of the refuseniks demonstrates the need for Jewish solidarity, the importance of the State of Israel, and the responsibilities we face as individuals living in a democracy.

Much of the material used in REFUSENIK is unique and exclusive to this film. Interviews with key leaders in the movement are some of the first ever to be recorded. Many of the photographs and covert film footage -- some of it smuggled out of the Soviet Union -- have never been seen before by a large audience, and help make REFUSENIK a unique portrait of this amazing story.

The reviews in the Seattle Times, Variety, The Jerusalem Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer , and New York Jewish Week have been uniformly favorable.  The brief trailer is itself well done.

Bialis’ first film -- “TAK FOR ALT:  Survival of a Human Spirit” (1999), the story of Holocaust survivor turned civil rights activist Judy Meisel -- was produced a couple years after Bialis graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in History (focusing on wartime and post-war Europe) and an M.F.A. in Production from the USC School of Cinema-Television.  The film won the Anti-Defamation League’s Dore Schary Award, aired on PBS on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2000, and was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of the outstanding films of 1999. 

Screenings of REFUSENIK are scheduled for around the country, and the film will be shown May 14 as part of the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival.

Israel's 60th Anniversary

Youths, one waving an Israeli flag, dance in Rabin's Square in Tel Aviv, Israel during a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel, late Wednesday May 7, 2008.  AP Photo Moti Milrod Photo Tools

Israelis wave their flags while fireworks kick off the celebration for the 60th anniversary in Jerusalem on May 7.  AFP Marco Longari

Cars drive past a building lit up with an image of Israel's flag in Tel Aviv May 7, 2008.

REUTERS Gil Cohen Magen

Israeli soldiers fire their weapons during a Memorial Day ceremony at the military cemetery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem May 7, 2008. REUTERS Eliana Aponte

The streets of downtown Jerusalem are decorated for the upcoming Memorial and Independence Day celebrations, Tuesday, May 6, 2008. Israel began marking its annual Memorial Day observances Tuesday night, with air raid sirens wailing across the country in memory of its fallen soldiers and victims of attacks by militants, just a day before its joyous 60th birthday.  AP Photo / Lefteris Pitarakis

An Israeli woman mourns beside the grave of a fallen soldier at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem May 6, 2008. Israel commemorates its fallen soldiers on Memorial Day, which begins on Tuesday night.  REUTERS Eliana Aponte

Israeli soldiers salute in front of graves of fallen soldiers at the military cemetery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem May 6, 2008. REUTERS Yannis Behrakis

Israelis watch fireworks and a laser show during Independence Day festivities in Jerusalem, Wednesday, May 7, 2008. AP Photo Tara Todras-Whitehill

Hillel Halkin, writing in "Land Without Regret":

How many people would have believed a hundred years ago, in 1908, that 40 years later, in 1948, there would be a Jewish state in Palestine?

How many would have believed in 1948 that, in another two decades this state would be a military titan bestriding the Middle East, its armies triumphantly camped from the outskirts of Cairo to those of Damascus?

How many would have believed in 1967 that another 40 years would pass with the titan still at war with its closest neighbours and unable to defend its population against small groups of guerrillas belonging to organizations pledged to destroy it?

How many would have believed that, in 2008, it would have become trendy to talk about its demise?

If you want to be pessimistic, you don't have to look far for reasons. Israel is a tiny speck on the map, surrounded by a hostile Arab and Muslim world that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf and beyond; that is growing all the time in wealth, influence, population, military power, self-confidence and religious zealotry; and that continues to be convinced that a Jewish state in its midst is a historical anomaly and a moral injustice that must one day be wiped out. What rational gambler would bet on this state's survival?

But one can argue the opposite side of it, too. Arab wealth and power will prove to be ephemeral products of an already doomed Age of Oil; so will radical Islam, which can never deliver on its political promises; in the long run, the Arab world will have to democratize, modernize and come to terms with Israel's existence. And meanwhile, Israel itself, far from a failure, has been an extraordinary success, a country that has gone in 60 years from being the poor, bankrupt, imperilled home of less than a million Jews to a militarily powerful, economically thriving, financially independent state of five-and-a-half million Jews who are among the world's richest and most technologically advanced peoples. Already at peace with some of their Arab neighbours, they can hold out against the others until accepted by them as well.

History will decide -- and its decision will almost surely not come in any of the ways we might expect it to. The only thing about history that is predictable is its unpredictability.

And yet as an Israeli -- or, more precisely, as an American Jew who decided 38 years ago to make his life in Israel-- there is a sense in which none of this matters to me.

I don't wish to be misunderstood: The future of Israel is of enormous importance to me. The thought of Israel's death is as saddening to me as the thought of my own.

But the thought of my death is not sufficient reason to make me wish I had never lived. On the contrary, it makes my life meaningful in a way it would not be had I been guaranteed immortality.

I feel the same about Israel. I did not choose to live in it because I was convinced it could not perish. I have always lived in it with the consciousness that it could. This is what makes it so precious to me.

I'll go further. Were I prophetically to know that Israel would perish within the next 20 or 30 or 50 years, as many of its bon ton critics are now prognosticating, it would not make the slightest difference to me in terms of my own decisions. I would still feel happy that I chose to live here; would go on living here; would want my children to live here; would want them to raise my grandchildren here -- until the last possible moment. Isn't that the way we want to live our own personal lives, too: Until the last possible moment?

Happy -- and proud. Because for all its shortcomings and mistakes, Israel is and will always be one of the most glorious historical adventures in the history of mankind. A 3,000-year-old people, the victim of the greatest act of mass murder ever committed on this planet, has the indomitable will to reconstitute itself in its ancient homeland, to revive its ancient language, to assert its right to live, to create new life, to nourish it and maintain it in defiance of all odds -- there's never been anything else like it before and never will be again.

I'm grateful that I've had the opportunity to be part of it. I would have felt envious had I been anywhere else.

Sixty years isn't much. I hope Israel has many times that amount still ahead of it. Realistically speaking, the chances seem to me pretty good. But I would have no regrets even if they weren't. Life doesn't have to go on forever for it to have been forever worth living.

Recall also this from a Rabbi David Wolpe sermon in 2006:

Back in April, Rabbi Wolpe gave a sermon whose title took one aback: "Can Israel Survive?"

One would not have thought such a question – 58 years after Israel's restoration – would still be a question. The theme of the sermon was that nothing physical endures. Even empires do not last; entire civilizations come and go. . . .

The trick of life, Rabbi Wolpe argued, is to value something while you have it the way you will value it when it is gone. We frequently appreciate things only when we no longer have them – valuing them retroactively because we took them for granted while they were here.

So, the sermon concluded, we need to think about Israel, and what it means, and what we would do to have it if we did not already have it.

And then we need to do that, in order to keep it.

Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalence

Jimmy Carter appeared on The Charlie Rose Show on April 29 and had the following colloquy about the “moral equivalency” of Hamas rockets into Israel and Israeli responses to the rockets:

CHARLIE ROSE:  You believe there's a moral equivalency in terms of what Hamas does, vis-a-vis Israel, in comparison of what Israel does vis-a-vis Hamas?

JIMMY CARTER:  Well, the thing that concerns me about Palestinians in general relating to Israel is that there's no evidence at all that Israel is willing to have peace with the Palestinians if it means relinquishing the Palestinian land that they have confiscated and colonized.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Well, clearly they're willing to agree to some of it, aren't they?

JIMMY CARTER:  No, I haven't seen that yet.  Let me tell you why. . . . [Carter discusses Israeli settlements and roadblocks]. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  But is that, in your judgment, equivalent to whatever terrorist activities and whatever --

JIMMY CARTER:  I wouldn't say --

CHARLIE ROSE:  -- shelling that Hamas is doing onto Israel?

JIMMY CARTER:  I have condemned the shelling of the little town of Sderot, which I visited, and Ashkelon which I also visited, as an act of unforgivable terrorism, because the people who suffered -- they have been shelling for seven years.  Thirteen people have been killed.  And the people of Sderot are living in terror.  It's a town of about 20,000 people.  We spent a couple hours, two or three hours with the mayor.  And you ride through this town and there's nobody on the street.  Nobody on the playgrounds.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.

JIMMY CARTER:  They`re afraid of these rockets.  Well, if you look at the statistics from last year, 2007, every time one Israeli was killed, 40 Palestinians were killed by attacks by Israel against Gaza.  And if you just look at children, every time an Israeli child is killed, eight Palestinian children are killed.  So you can't just say that all of the blame lies on one or the other.  So what I try to do --

CHARLIE ROSE:  But more one than the other?

JIMMY CARTER:  I'm sorry?

CHARLIE ROSE:  More one or the other?

JIMMY CARTER:  I don't even say that.  You know, I think any time any powerhouse takes military action when it's a high danger or almost an inevitability that women and children are going to be killed, I think that can be considered an act of terrorism, yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  So Israel is engaging in acts of terrorism?

JIMMY CARTER:  I think both are equally guilty, yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  OK.  That's a moral equivalency.

JIMMY CARTER:  I think so.                                  

Bret Stephens demonstrates in today’s Wall Street Journal how statistics can be used by people such as Carter and Walt & Mearsheimer (with footnotes!) to support a pre-conceived antagonism to Israel, in the guise of a moral vision.

Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Los Angeles

Doris Wise Montrose, right, the President of the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Los Angeles (CJHSLA), with Nonie Darwish.

The Daily News profiles the remarkable Doris Wise Montrose, the head of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Los Angeles.

"I always knew I was different," says Montrose, who by her own admission typifies [the second generation] complex, even if her parents tried to protect her from any past trauma by enveloping her in the safe environment of the 1950s and 1960s San Fernando Valley.

"They had a joy of life as I was growing up, and they didn't go down the road of remembering (the Holocaust)," recalls Montrose.

"When they talked about it, it was part of our back-noise.  They and their friends spoke Yiddish, and sometimes they would say words in Yiddish that we knew had to do with camp.

"They were vivacious.  They were beautiful.  They laughed.  They sang.  They smoked.  They drank.  They ate.  That's what we got from them.  What we got from my parents was something any other child would hear."

But that changed when Montrose, as a high school student, interviewed her father for a term paper.

"That's when he told me about the details . . . about the Holocaust," says Montrose.  "I was shocked to hear about it and about my mom being smuggled out of Poland.  I guess I always knew, but it wasn't until then that I learned about the horror and later when I started studying (the Holocaust) because my parents hadn't wanted me to know how horrible it was.  They protected me from it."

* * *

[Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Los Angeles] began with a protest over the 2006 abductions of Israeli soldiers Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser by the extremist Islamic terrorist group Hezbollah, which sparked the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

Montrose's group wrote to the International Red Cross urging it to intervene, reminding the organization that it kept silent during the Holocaust -- a fact admitted by the Red Cross in 1997 when it handed over 60,000 pages of World War II-era documents to Israel.

"As an activist, these are the kinds of positions we must do in remembering the Holocaust and to avoid another one," says Montrose, who prides herself on pulling no punches. . . . "I get calls from people who think I am (doing) education, and I will direct them to other places," says Montrose.

The website of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Los Angeles is an essential resource for those wanting to arm themselves with the information necessary to act.  It currently features the complete audio of Daniel Gordis's extraordinary April 2 presentation at Sinai Temple and Caroline Glick's brilliant presentation at Congregation Beth Jacob on January 19. 

Prior events sponsored by CJHSLA include a debate on "Prospects for Middle East Peace Post Annapolis" between Dr. Michael Berenbaum of AJU and Steven M. Goldberg of ZOA,  and a debate on "The Next President and the Jewish People" between Larry Greenfield (California Director of the Repubican Jewish Coalistion) and Andrew Lachman (President of Democrats for Israel, Los Angeles).  Coming up on May 25 and June 17:  Ariel University of Samaria and Dr. Andrew Bostom. 

You can check out more events and action opportunities here.  Or contact Doris directly at doris@cjhsla.org. Or mail a check to CJHSLA, 20058 Ventura Blvd., #198, Woodland Hills, CA 91364. It would be a good action to take on Holocaust Remembrance Day, as a start.

Bellow of the Blogosphere

James Lileks had another masterful little bleat yesterday, demonstrating once again why he is the best writer in the blogosphere (something we first noted in “Shabbat and the Stars”). Here is his latest Bellovian effort:

I’m one of those guys who thinks that science class should set aside a day or two for metaphysical speculation -- not instruction, but speculation. So, guys, what do you draw from the remarkable procession of life on this planet and the boundless mysteries of the universe above? Is this random, or not? If not, who? How? Why? It’s an interesting conversation . . . .

Now and then (G)Nat likes to look at pictures of space, and I showed her this one, which always fills me with awe and no small amount of terror:

That’s a tiny patch of sky, and it’s as swimming with galaxies as a Dixie cup of Mexican tap-water swims with bacteria.

It’s hard to look at that and think you matter a whit, but then when you turn back to earth you see all things that tell you that you do matter, and I suppose someone can come up with all the cerebral chemicals that rush in to restore self-worth and love and other delusions of biology, but I don’t buy that. You can either look at that picture and think we have company, in whatever form you wish, or decide that we are alone, and as someone once noted, either fact would be quite remarkable. I’d like to think that magnificent sight is all staves and notes, and after we die the melody is revealed.

Lileks’ bleat reminded me of the answer that Saul Bellow gave to Martin Amis when he asked him, late in life, if he believed in the afterlife.  Bellow’s answer (as given by James Atlas in “Bellow:  A Biography”) was this:

Well, it’s impossible to believe in it because there’s no rational ground.  But I have a persistent intuition, and it’s not so much a hope because it would be better to be blotted out entirely – call it love impulses.  What I think is how agreeable it would be to see my mother and my father and my brothers again – to see again my dead.  But then I think, “How long would these moments last?”  You still have to think of eternity as a conscious soul.  So the only thing I can think of is that in death we might become God’s apprentices and have the real secrets of the universe revealed to us.

Shabbat Shalom. 

Yom HaShoah

A visitor walks through the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem, April 30, 2008.  Reuters (Ronen Zvulun).

Today is Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day.  In Israel, at 10 a.m., a siren will sound and the entire country will stop (including cars on the road) and observe a minute of silence.

Yaacov Lozowick, the former Director of Archives at Yad Vashem and author of the remarkable history “Right to Exist,” reflects on the contribution of the Holocaust survivors to the creation of the modern State of Israel:

Holocaust survivors brought great blessings to just about every single walk of life or undertaking they touched. There is much that is miraculous about this country, and the survivors wrought more than their shares of the miracles.

Which in itself is miraculous. It is extraordinarily fashionable in this age to garner the benefits of victimhood, to inherit loss, and of course to blame the culprits for each and every weakness we are blighted with, and for all the flaws in our world.

The survivors of the Shoah were victimized beyond all others. They didn't wallow in their victimhood. Nor did they pick themselves up and get on with their lives, which would have been the admirable thing to do. Instead, they hauled themselves up by their torn shoestrings, and then created a world, one immeasurably better than the one they came from.

Those of us born later, who are the beneficiaries of the miracle they helped create, have an obligation to do what we can to safeguard it -- which, as Anne Lieberman notes in her Yom HaShoah post, means at least considering what could be staring at us in the face:

I know less than a handful of people who warn of another, coming Holocaust.  Even as we see pictures in the New York Times of Ahmadinejad waving a victory sign from the nuclear site at Natanz in Iran, most people -- and I do mean MOST people -- can't stand to hear that another Holocaust is possible, in our time . . . [I]f people refuse to even consider that very real possibility, what good is commemorating the last one?

The obligation of memory is not simply to remember.

It also requires us to act on "the central moral issue of our times."

Obama, Wright, Sister Souljah and Israel

Richard Baehr has a typically astute analysis of “Obama’s Wright Turn” today in American Thinker, which includes this observation about Obama’s denunciation of Rev. Wright:

Barack Obama has been showing up at Wright's church for close to 20 years and was exposed to his brand of crackpot racist anti-American lunacy on more than one occasion during this long period. So it is really way too generous, I think, to applaud the Senator for his dramatic "Sister Souljah moment" with his late-to-the party denunciation of Wright.  A real Sister Souljah moment would have required leaving Trinity Church before Wright became politically inconvenient for Obama, and not when Wright is beginning to threaten Obama's bid for the Democratic nomination.

Actually, there was an earlier Sister Souljah moment that Obama passed up, relating to Israel.  Only American Thinker’s indefatigable Ed Lasky spotted it at the time, and only he has found “a buried nugget” in Rev. Wright’s Monday press conference:  “Rev. Wright’s Middle East Views.”

Caroline Glick: Living and Writing in Israel

Those who read Caroline Glick’s columns in the Jerusalem Post are familiar with the eloquence and passion that make her not only one of Israel’s most prominent commentators but one of its finest writers.  (She has just published "Shackled Warrior ," a collection of her essays in English). 

She also writes a monthly column for The Jewish Press, and her latest column there (“The Luckiest Jews in the World”) is a magnificent description of the experience of writing in modern Hebrew -- in an essay that expands into a reflection on something even more grand.  Here is part of what she says about Hebrew:

Writing in Hebrew is a qualitatively different experience than writing in English. . . .  [Hebrew] has fewer words and the words it has are denser and more flexible than English words.  A 1,200-word essay in Hebrew will be 1,800 words in English. . . .

The density of meaning in Hebrew is a writer’s dream.  Nearly anyone can imbue a seemingly simple sentence with multiple, generally complementary meanings simply by choosing a specific verb, verb form, noun or adjective. These double, triple and even quadruple meanings of one word are a source of unbounded joy for a writer. . . .

Modern Hebrew in particular is an eclectic amalgamation of classical Hebrew, Yiddishisms, and expressions from the Sephardic Diaspora experience. Greek, Roman, Aramaic, Turkish, Arabic and English expressions meld seamlessly into the stream of words. It is not simply that it is the language of the Bible. Hebrew is also an expression of the unique culture of a small, proud, often besieged, often conquered and permeable people.

It is unbelievable that a language can be so immediately and unselfconsciously expressive of feelings that have traversed millennia.

Then she explains that Hebrew is part of the reason “why a Jew in the Diaspora, particularly the United States, would want to live in Israel.”

Leaving America is difficult on several levels. In my own experience, it involved physically separating from my entire family. It also involved cutting myself off from my language -- English -- and immersing myself completely in a tongue I had yet to master. Beyond that, it meant leaving a country that had done only good for me and for the generations of my family who fled to America from the pogroms in Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. . . .

Israel is a troublesome, hard, often irritating place. It is a young country that belongs to an ancient, eternal people who are all imperfect. Some Israelis, particularly those who today occupy the seats of power, are weak and irresponsible and often corrupt and self-serving.

Israelis have quick fuses. Among other things, this distinctively Israeli rush to anger makes being stuck in rush hour traffic a bit like dancing a waltz in the middle of a shooting range. Then too, service is not a concept that most Israelis -- particularly in service professions -- are even vaguely familiar with.

Beyond the general fallibility of Israelis, there are the wars and the hatred and the terror that make up so much of life in Israel. Being surrounded by enemies and living in the midst of jihad-crazed Arab states is like sitting on the edge of a volcano. And rather than acknowledge the danger and contend with it, Israelis -- frustratingly and dangerously -- more often than not blame one another for the heat while ignoring its source.

Yet once a Jew catches the Zionist bug, none of that is important. Once a Jew allows himself or herself to feel the pull of our heritage, of our language and our land, the frustration, danger and hardship of living in Israel seems like second nature -- as natural as breathing in and out.

I recently moved to a home on the edge of a valley filled with forests and carpeted by wildflowers. Every day I hike for an hour or two along the trails below. A few days ago, as I walked late at night, I considered the dark and silent hills surrounding me and felt safe. They were liberated in 1948.

As I stood for a moment, I thought to myself, “These hills have already been conquered for you, by people better than yourself. Now it is your job to keep them safe for the next generation. . . .”

Israel lives in me, as it lives in all Jews. It is who we are. And those of us lucky enough to recognize this truth and embrace it in all its fullness and depth are the luckiest Jews in the world.

Caroline Glick moved to Israel in 1991, after receiving her BA in Political Science from Columbia University, and served in the IDF as an officer for more than five years, the last three of which she spent as a member of Israel’s negotiating team with the PLO.  She later served as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s assistant foreign policy advisor.

After she left government in 1998, she received a Master’s from Harvard University in Public Policy and returned to Israel as a senior commentator and editor at Makor Rishon newspaper. In 2002, she joined the Jerusalem Post as senior columnist and deputy managing editor and during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 was embedded in the front lines with US infantry forces, reporting for the Jerusalem Post, Ma’ariv, Israel TV’s Channel 2 and the Chicago Sun Times. 

In 2003, Ma’ariv named her the most prominent woman in Israel and in 2005 she was presented with the ZOA's Ben Hecht Award for Outstanding Journalism on the Middle East. 

Read the essay.  Buy the book.  (Hat tip:  Richard Baehr).

On Engaging Syria

In his landmark June 24, 2002 speech on the Middle East, George W. Bush invited Syria to join the right side in the war on terror:

Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel -- including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. Every nation actually committed to peace must block the shipment of Iranian supplies to these groups, and oppose regimes that promote terror, like Iraq. And Syria must choose the right side in the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and expelling terrorist organizations.

After that, Syria (1) sided with Saddam Hussein just before the 2003 Iraq war, (2) provided refuge in 2003 (and since) to Ba’athist extremists trying to undermine the new Iraqi government, (3) rejected multiple overtures during 2003-2005 from senior officials of the Bush administration who traveled to Damascus to meet with Bashar al-Asad, (4) was undoubtedly involved in the February 2005 murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, (5) supported Hezbollah in its 2006 war with Israel, (6) has been restocking Hezbollah since 2006 with more rockets than it had before, in direct violation of the UN Resolution that ended the war, (6) was building during all this time a nuclear facility in secret with the help of North Korea, and (7) has been providing the headquarters for the leaders of Hamas. 

It sure seems like Syria made its choice.

Last week, Martin Indyk appeared before a House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee and noted that:

The dominant view of Syria that has developed in Washington during [the past seven years] is that of a country ruled by an unreliable leader, with ruthless ambitions to dominate its smaller Lebanese neighbor, harboring Palestinian terrorists and Iraqi insurgents, and maintaining an alliance with Iran – a strategic adversary of the United States.

Notwithstanding the Syrian response over seven years, Indyk offered the subcommittee his suggestion -- “pursuing engagement” with Syria, an idea he called “worth testing” by “the next president.”  Indyk had “one caveat” about deciding to pursue “this option of engaging Syria via peace negotiations”:

Just about every leader that has attempted to deal with President Bashar al-Assad has come away frustrated.  The list includes Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Nicholas Sarkozy, Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah.

Maybe if a U.S. president just offers Syria change it can believe in (and throws in Lebanon and the Golan Heights while deserting Iraq), the results will be different.

Peter Rodman also testified before the House subcommittee on April 24.  Here is how he described the Bush administration trips to Syria after the Iraq war:

Secretary of State Colin Powell went in May 2003; I had the privilege of visiting myself in September 2004 as part of an interagency delegation with Assistant Secretary of State William Burns; and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had a similar meeting with Asad in early 2005.

In each case, the Syrians’ response was that destabilizing Iraq and killing Americans were the furthest things from their minds; they did confess to having trouble controlling the Syrian-Iraqi border, and asked for our technical assistance. The concern that the American side expressed, however, was that the main problem was not border control but the evident policy of the Syrian government to allow sanctuary inside Syria for political organizing by Iraqi extremists directly involved in those hostile activities.

We even gave them names of senior Iraqi extremists who we knew were operating out of Syria. As we told President Asad, we had a hard time believing that the Syrian government did not have control over these kinds of activities on its territory. In response, they turned over one Iraqi radical, if I recall correctly.

And the Syrians are masters of spin. Each of these visits by senior Americans was meant to convey a serious warning and to ratchet up pressures on Damascus to reverse its disruptive and destructive policy. Our talking points, I recall on my own visit, were as blunt and tough as any talking points I have seen in many years (and we let President Asad know they had been cleared by President Bush). But the Syrians always publicized the fact of the high-level meetings as a sign that U.S.-Syrian relations were excellent.

This conveyed a wrong impression to everyone, including our friends in the region.  In other words, while our tough talking points were meant to ratchet up pressures, the Syrians spun the visits into relief from pressures.

Rodman’s testimony is the subject of several extraordinarily interesting comments over at Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH).  Michael Young notes that:

Syria sees Iran as the regional superpower of the future, an impression Asad has little reason to discard when the debate in the United States so foolishly ignores the regional implications of a substantial American drawdown in Iraq. . . . He prefers to take his chances with a fight, with Iran on his side.

Eyal Zisser, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, comments that:

The problem would seem to be not only Syria’s behavior, but the very nature of the regime, especially that of the Asad dynasty. It is useful to consider Syria as another Cuba or North Korea, with which it bears many similarities. All three countries are ruled by dictatorial family dynasties cloaked in anti-Western ideologies that legitimate them and ensure their survival. For this reason, Bashar Asad is unlikely to be “bought” by the West. . . .

What Bashar is proposing to the United States is an honorable capitulation: that it depart from Iraq, abandon Lebanon, pressure Israel to return the entire Golan Heights, and acquiesce in Syria’s continued membership in the region’s Iran-centered “axis of evil” (with no more than a vague Syrian hint of a possible future withdrawal from that axis).

Itamar Rabinovich, who was Israel’s chief negotiator with Syria and is currently visiting professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, commented that when Ehud Olmert began to talk about resuming negotiations with Syria, “he was told by the Bush administration that this was not a good idea.”  But “Olmert has his own domestic political reasons for flaunting this prospect.” 

If Martin Indyk is in the next administration, the U.S. will undoubtedly encourage him.

Happy Anniversary to BtB

Boker Tov, Shavua Tov and Happy Anniversary to Boker tov, Boulder!

Today is the fifth anniversary of perhaps the best blog in the JBlogosphere.  There certainly is none better.

It’s instructive to re- read the incomparable Anne Lieberman’s front-page article in the May 19, 2004 issue of The Jewish Press:  “Truth, Terrorism and the Times:  My First Year as a Blogger.”  It is a story worth remembering, and her conclusion was prophetic:

There is room for everyone in the blogosphere, where your point of view is judged only by the skill of your writing and the merit of your thoughts. . . .  The day has arrived when the established media no longer control and define public discourse.

Suffice it to say the person at the New York Times with whom she had the correspondence that led to her blog is no longer in the established media (and the NYT itself is barely holding on), while Anne is a new-media superstar.  She goes from strength to strength.  Yasher koach.