Jewish Current Issues

Netanyahu Then and Now

The Jerusalem Post linked the 10-minute video below from a 1978 episode of the PBS show "The Advocate," in which a 28-year old “Ben Nitay” (whose name before and later was Benjamin Netanyahu) appeared as a witness testifying about the creation of a Palestinian state. After his direct examination by Morris Abrams, he is cross-examined by Fouad Ajami.

On the video, Netanyahu testifies there is no “right” to a 22nd Arab state (and a 2nd Palestinian one after Jordan) if such a state would endanger the only Jewish one. He questions whether self-determination is at the heart of the Middle East conflict: “For 20 years the Arabs had both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and if self-determination was, as they now say, the core of the conflict, they could have easily established a Palestinian state, but they didn't. . . . What we're talking about here is not the attempt to build a state but to destroy one.”

Palestinian history since then demonstrates that Netanyahu was right. In 2000, the Palestinians received a formal offer of a state on more than 90 percent of the West Bank (with a capital in Jerusalem) and turned it down, starting a new war two months later. In 2001, the Palestinians turned down the Clinton Parameters, which would have given them a state on 97 percent of the West Bank, in favor of continuing their war. In 2003, the Palestinians signed on to the Roadmap and then refused to meet their Phase I obligation of dismantling their terrorist organizations and infrastructure. In 2005, the Palestinians were given all of Gaza (with every settlement dismantled) and used the territory to increase their attacks on Israel. In 2006, the Palestinians elected their premier terrorist group to control their government.

In June 2007, three decades after the 1978 debate, Fouad Ajami wrote in U.S. News & World Report (as Hamas took over Gaza completely in a brutal coup) that:

The Palestinians have lived, and for decades now, on a sense of historical entitlement. The world owed them a state come what may; it would be delivered to them even when their leaders faltered, even as they fell afoul of international norms and expectations. . . .

In the intervening years, the "Palestinian street" would be whipped into a frenzy, and the anarchy and the cruelty of the homicide bombers would become a diet for the Palestinians -- and for a wider Arab audience that lived, vicariously, on the mayhem of Palestine. . . .

Given a chance, by an election in early 2006, to signal their desire for normalcy, the Palestinians voted for mayhem. . . . National movements are often carried away by delirium, their politics can become deeds of self-immolation, and the Palestinians have come to embody the suicidal streak of mass-based nationalism. This is not a failure of the Bush diplomacy, the disorder now on full display in Gaza and the West Bank. This is the harvest of Palestinian history.

The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that Netanyahu refused the demands of two coalition partners to insert a clause against a Palestinian state in the coalition agreement, and his current position is remarkably close to the one he outlined in the 1978 debate:

In recent weeks Netanyahu has been telling international leaders that the Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves, but not the handful of powers that could endanger Israel's security, such as an army, the right to make defensive treaties, or full control over its air space, water supply or electromagnetic spectrum. . . .

Sources close to Netanyahu said . . . the burden of proof in the peace process remained with the Palestinians, and that the Palestinian leadership must show that they were not only able to mouth words in English, but also educate their public toward making the ideological compromises that would be needed for any agreement.

If self-government were really the issue, and not an attempt to move Israel to indefensible borders and overwhelm (or de-legitimate) it with a “right of return,” this would be an effective peace plan. But Palestinian history demonstrates that the devil has always been in the “if," and the burden to prove the contrary long ago shifted to the Palestinians.

The Leadership is Now in Place

In The Jewish War, Josephus’ account of the war of the Jews against the Romans between the years 66 to 70, the first sentence has an eerie echo nearly two thousand years later, as the leaders of four major Israeli parties struggled to form a coalition government, in the face of still another impending war:

 

At the time when Antiochus Epiphanes was disputing the control of Palestine with Ptolemy VI, dissension broke out among the leading Jews, who competed for supremacy because no prominent person could bear to be subject to his equals.

 

This time, however, the most prominent of the leading Jews – Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak – succeeded in forming a right-left coalition:  two former prime ministers, two veterans of the failed “peace process,” two persons articulate in English, two persons with extensive experience with Israel’s principal ally, the United States. 

 

The always insightful Ari Shavit of Haaretz, writing about the two most hated men in Israeli politics – on why they are hated and why they are the best men for Israel’s current existential moment:

 

The Israeli mainstream elite still cannot forgive Netanyahu for being the most eloquent, powerful speaker of the sane right wing. In the absence of peace and the absence of real faith in peace, hating Netanyahu remains the left-wing tribe's emotional campfire.

But the hatred toward Ehud Barak is no less intense. It stems from Barak's failure to fulfill the messianic expectations people had of him after ousting Netanyahu. It continued with Barak's smashing the illusion of peace in our time at Camp David. But even after Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni proved in Annapolis that it was no more than an illusion, the hatred toward Barak has not diminished. . . .

Netanyahu and Barak's immediate mission is Iran. The designated prime minister and defense minister do not have much time. Within a few months they must do what hasn't been done for years - recruit the international community to impose an economic-diplomatic siege on Tehran's ayatollahs. . . . [I]f it happens that the United States is not ready to take the chestnuts out of the fire, Netanyahu and Barak will have to prepare Israel for harsh scenarios. Nobody in Israel's leadership is more suited or capable than these two. . . .

In this time and place, Netanyahu and Barak are the only responsible adults.

 

It is worth reading in its entirety.  The leadership that has been missing since Ariel Sharon’s stroke is now in place. 

 

Peace in Our Time

Roger Cohen in today’s New York Times on Obama’s “bold message to Iran’s leaders,” which Cohen predicts will make it inevitable that a “defining strategic issue” of his presidency will be “a painful but necessary redefinition of America’s relations with Israel”:

He abandoned regime change as an American goal. He shelved the so-called military option. He buried a carrot-and-sticks approach viewed with contempt by Iranians as fit only for donkeys. And he placed Iran’s nuclear program within “the full range of issues before us.” . . .

He referred twice to “the Islamic Republic of Iran,” a formulation long shunned, and said that republic, no other, should “take its rightful place in the community of nations.” Here was explicit American acceptance of Iran’s 30-year-old clerical revolution. . .

One of the people involved in the review [of American policy] told me he had been bombarded by warnings from Israel and Sunni Arab states that engagement with Iran would lead nowhere. . . . Obama’s overture represented a victory not only over such lobbying but also over officials’ favoring tightened sanctions or delaying any American initiative until after Iran’s June presidential election. . . .

A senior Israeli official told me Iran has 1,000 kilos of low-enriched uranium and will have 500 more within six months, enough to make a bomb. It could then opt for one of three courses.

Rush for a bomb by shredding the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, adapting its centrifuges and producing enough highly enriched uranium within a year.

Move the process to a secret site, in which case getting a bomb would take longer, perhaps two years.

Or continue making low-enriched uranium so that “it would have enough for 10 bombs if it decides to rush at a later stage.”

And where, I asked, is Israel’s red line? “Once they get to 1,500 kilos, nonproliferation is dead,” he said. And so? “It’s established that when a country that does not accept Israel’s existence has such a program, we will intervene.”

Cohen is unperturbed.  He thinks “there’s some bluster” in Israel’s position, and that in any event “Obama’s new Middle Eastern diplomacy and engagement will involve reining in Israeli bellicosity and a probable cooling of U.S.-Israeli relations.  It’s about time.”

UPDATE: David Hazony has an excellent post on Cohen's column over at Contentions.

Scott Johnson on "The Case of Roger Cohen." Case closed.

Defenders of the Faith

From Cathleen Schine’s nicely written review of Zoe Heller’s new book “The Believers” in the New York Review of Books – a novel about a Jewish family of “ardent believers in the progressive cause,” including the mother Audrey (“For decades now, she had been dragging about the same unwieldy burden of a priori convictions”) and her daughter Rosa (a “pink diaper baby”):

From within the Litvinoff circle, however, the family faith is showing some cracks. Rosa, for one, has come back from Cuba with some doubts about that battered a priori cannon, announcing "that her lifelong fealty to the cause of revolutionary socialism was at an end...." Disorienting as this is, it is only the beginning:

Recently, she had delivered another, infinitely more shocking punch to the collective family jaw by informing them that she had begun attending services at an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side.

Audrey is appalled. And to some extent, so is Rosa. The absurdity and indignity of the mikvah attendant checking for telltale menstrual stains, the prissy, parochial self-regard of the womenfolk of the rabbi's household she visits in upstate New York, the unfashionable long skirts, the forbidden toothbrush on Shabbat—the accessories of her blossoming new faith are an embarrassment to her and a challenge. . . .  

But from her perch in the women's section upstairs, Rosa undergoes a kind of religious conversion. She has been brought up in a household vigorously hostile to all religion, but particularly to the one closest at hand:  Judaism.  Nevertheless, as the congregation sings, there is "something in the prayer's austere melody" that strikes at her heart. She thinks,

You are connected to this. This song is your song. When next she glanced down at the siddur lying open in her hands, she was amazed to see the little ragged suns of her own teardrops turning the wafer-thin pages transparent.

. . . Rosa is caught between genuine emotion and intellectual dismay. Some other woman might settle the issue by joining a less stern iteration of the faith, but this is Rosa, for whom it took four years in Castro's Cuba to tire of one totalitarianism. We worry for Rosa throughout the novel, and root for her to find emotional peace and intellectual integrity, but sometimes, too, we cannot help but cheer on the awful Audrey:

Audrey looked at Rosa's calf-length navy skirt and high-necked black blouse. Her eyes narrowed. "Is this something Jewy?"

"Actually, I'm attending a Shabbaton."

"And what the fuck is that when it's had its hair washed?

A short video interview with the author is here. Shabbat Shalom.

VDH: An Insidious Estrangement

Victor Davis Hanson, in an interview with Hugh Hewitt this week:

HH: Last question, Victor Davis Hanson, we have an obvious change of government in Israel upon us this week or so. Is this going to be, with a conservative government led by Netanyahu, good for world stability or destabilizing? 

VDH: You know, I’m worried. I think that he would be good for Israel, but I’m very worried because I think that we’re looking at the most insidiously constant estrangement between Israel and the United States we’ve seen in our lifetime.

When you start to see the Samantha Power appointment, the would-be Charles Freeman appointment, the $1 billion dollar rebuilding program for Hamas-controlled Gaza, the efforts to speak with the Iranians and the Syrians without preconditions, sort of some rhetoric, I just think that Netanyahu is going to give the Obamaites the reason they need to distance ourselves from Israel. I really believe that.  

The most telling phrase in that answer was giving the Obamaites “the reason they need.”  As J. Lichty and Dan note, we’ve seen this movie before.

Roger Cohen at Sinai Temple -- II

In his New York Times column yesterday, Roger Cohen reflected on his visit to Sinai Temple last week, where he came to discuss the outrage over his column on the 25,000 Jews left in Iran.  The column portrayed them living a tranquil life there, upset at the “criminal” state of Israel rather than the “Death to Israel” shouts that punctuate life in Iran.  The Iranian media reprinted Cohen’s useful column.

 

In his new column yesterday, Cohen reiterated his belief that the small contingent of Jews in Iran proved the regime did not wish to annihilate Jews.  Here is how Cohen described the evening at Sinai: 

At the invitation of Rabbi David Wolpe of the Sinai Temple, I came out to meet [ Iran’s Jewish exiles in Los Angeles]. The evening was fiery with scant meeting of minds. Exile, expropriation and, in some cases, executions have left bitter feelings among the revolution’s Jewish victims, as they have among the more than two million Muslims who have fled Iran since 1979. Abraham Berookhim gave me a moving account of his escape and his Jewish uncle’s unconscionable 1980 murder by the regime.

Earlier, Sam Kermanian, a leader of the Iranian Jewish community, said I had been used, that Iran’s Jews are far worse off than they appear, and that my portrayal of them was pernicious as it “leads people to believe Israel’s enemies are not as real as you may think.”

Cohen’s response was that it was “impossible to know” what Kermanian had just told him:

Just how repressive life is for Iran’s Jews is impossible to know. Iran is an un-free society. But this much is clear: the hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime — with no sense of its limitations — so frenziedly anti-Semitic that it would accept inevitable nuclear annihilation if it could destroy Israel first.

The presence of these Jews undermines that vision. It blunts the hawks’ case; hence the rage.

In Cohen’s view, the treatment of the Jews still remaining in Iran “blunts” the case of those who view the Iranian government as an existential threat to Israel.  And he will not accept any amendment to his view from people who know the situation of Iranian Jews much more intimately than he does.  They’re “hawks.”   

Perhaps Cohen might reconsider his view in light of the response a Princeton college student posted to his column:

Cohen, the notion of an apocalyptic Islamic regime in Iran is not incompatible with the idea that Jews might live in Iran with at least a modicum of rights and freedom. Islam specifically affords Jews rights under the Quran. The key point is that Jews submit to Islamic rule.

 

During the revolution, as you yourself noted, Jews were brutally executed and their property expropriated. Just because now they are allowed to live within Iranian society does not mean that Iran is somehow tolerant of Jews worldwide. The point is that the Iranian Jews have submitted to Islamic rule and can therefore be allowed to exist. Israel, on the other hand, does not submit to Islamic rule, but openly defies it.

Therefore, it is very much in keeping with Islam and the Iranian regime's rhetoric to annihilate Israel. I know that and I've only taken Islam 101. You should check your premises before you . . . so casually dismiss the apocalyptic rhetoric of Iran.

In a post at Huffington Post yesterday, Rabbi Wolpe described his Sinai conversation with Cohen, including this colloquy:

 

I asked "You advocate negotiations with Hamas and Hizbollah, arguing that they can be pragmatic. What if Hamas and Hizbollah had the arms of Israel, and Israel had their force of arms. What do you think would happen?" To my amazement, he said he didn't know. Well, I do. And so does he.

 

Jeffrey Goldberg has posted the transcript of the above colloquy. 

To get a flavor of the Cohen-Wolpe encounter, watch the five-minute video below:

More from Scott Johnson: "The Case of Roger Cohen." Case Closed.

Fundraising Momentum in Miami

Joel Mowbray called on the way back from the annual fundraiser of the Miami Jewish Federation (for whom he has spoken a number of times), and then emailed this report about the experience:

In a time when most charities are experiencing unprecedented difficulties in raising funds, last month the Miami Jewish Federation managed a haul of $1.3 million at its annual event, increasing its take by 9% versus last year. Over 1,000 people turned out to support the nonprofit, including over 100new or recovered donors.
 
Though the evening tilted a little more left-of-center than many would like -- Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich was the keynote speaker -- the Jewish Federation itself does important work. In addition to traditional charity functions such as providing food and shelter, the Federation helps fight against the complacency that has set into our society. The organization regularly brings in speakers, such as this writer, to talk to the community about issues such as terrorism and the Middle East.

It's obviously just one bright spot in what is otherwise a bleak
environment, but it's a credit to the Miami Jewish Federation's talented staff that they raised a large sum to help support good work.

Roger Cohen at Sinai Temple

Roger Cohen appeared last night at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, to face an audience of about 500 people, mostly members of the LA Persian community, to answer questions about his February 22 column (“What Iran’s Jews Say”).  He traveled at his own expense, taking no fee, in response to the invitation Rabbi David Wolpe conveyed to him through Jeffrey Goldberg’s blog.  The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles has posted the video of the event, which it carried live.  Cohen is an urbane and articulate man.

 

In his column, Cohen portrayed an Iranian Jewish community purportedly living in “relative tranquility.”  He noted a synagogue opposite a mosque in Palestine Square that had put a banner over its entrance reading “Congratulations on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution” and asked the synagogue leader about the chants of “Death to Israel” that punctuate life in Iran.  The leader purported not to be bothered by it and added that “when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian.”  Another Jew told him the “Death to Israel” chants bothered him, but “went on” to criticize the “double standards” that allow Israel to have a nuclear bomb, but not Iran.  A third Jew told him Gaza showed Israel’s government was “criminal.”  In his column, Cohen identified each individual by name. 

 

The Iranian media reprinted Cohen’s column, minus some parts it didn’t like.  Asked last night why he had reported statements of obvious propaganda use, Cohen responded “They said it, so why not report it?”  Told by a Persian member of the audience that the people he interviewed were obviously afraid, especially if they would be identified, Cohen responded “Just because they were afraid does not mean every word they said is not true.”

 

Cohen’s credulous responses reminded me of the Cold War story Gershom Gorenberg recently related:

A Soviet diplomatic delegation once visited the West — so goes the story — and a Jewish member of the team spoke to journalists.

Asked about the Middle East, he parroted the party line and attacked “Zionist imperialism.” Afterward, a reporter cornered him and said, “You’re Jewish. You must have your own opinion about this.”

“Yes,” said the Jew from Moscow, “but I don’t agree with it.”

The difference is the reporter in the story, hearing the improbable parroting of the party line, asked the obvious follow-up question.  Roger Cohen did not.  As someone “ashamed” of Israel, Cohen evidently liked what he heard in Iran, so he reported it.  

UPDATE: David Gerstman (Soccer Dad) emailed a link to Michael Rubin’s excellent post on Roger Cohen (http://tinyurl.com/Rubin-Cohen) and Roger Simon, who was at Sinai Temple last night, has an article at Pajamas Media on Cohen’s presentation (http://tinyurl.com/Simon-Cohen). PJTV filmed both the event and interviews afterwards.

Chagall's Life and Art

 

Marc Chagall: Introduction to the Jewish Theater, 1920 (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

 

Richard Dorment reviews Jackie Wullschlager’s “Chagall:  A Biography” in a fascinating essay entitled “From Shtetl to Chateau” in the new issue of the New York Review of Books:

The painter known to the world as Marc Chagall was born Movsha (Moses) Shagal on July 7, 1887, into a poor family living on the fringes of the Russian Empire. When he died ninety-eight years later, he was the last surviving member of the School of Paris and a multimillionaire with a flat on the Quai d'Anjou in Paris and a villa in the South of France.

Swept up in the most momentous events of the twentieth century, including two world wars and the Russian Revolution, his long life was punctuated by dislocation, flight, immigration, and exile. . . . 

He was the eldest of nine children born to Yiddish-speaking followers of the Hasidic sect; his parents were poor but not impoverished. Khatskel, his father, hauled crates in a herring warehouse on the banks of the Dvina River; his illiterate mother, Feiga-Ita, ran a successful business selling provisions from home.

Vitebsk (today in Belarus) was a town of rickety wooden dwellings, public bathhouses, unpaved streets, onion-domed churches, and more than sixty synagogues. On the poor side of town every householder kept goats, chickens, and a cow in the yard. Rabbis, Talmudic scholars, matchmakers, musicians, and elderly Jewish peddlers who could be seen wandering from town to town with sacks on their backs: the sights and sounds of Chagall's childhood would become the subject of his art.

Chagall’s theater murals for the Yiddish Chamber Theater in Moscow, which Dorment writes are “are now universally regarded as his greatest artistic achievement,” are currently on view in an exhibition devoted to the Russian Jewish theater at the Jewish Museum in New York City until March 22, and will be at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from April 25 through September 7, 2009.

It's March 4. Do You Know Where Your Iran Policy Is?

From the conclusion of a New Republic article on the sidelining of Dennis Ross and the Obama administration's Iran policy:

The real problem may be that the Obama team remains far from clear about how to deal with Iran. During the campaign, Obama said he was determined to open direct negotiations with the Iranians over their nuclear program. But how -- and even whether -- to do so are still not certain matters, administration officials say. An ongoing Iran policy review will last for several more weeks . . .