No, Mr. Walt, The Iraq War is Bush’s Fault, Not Israel’s

Rinse, Wash, Repeat

John B. Judis

For the last time, Stephen Walt, Israel did not send the U.S. and Britain into Iraq.

I don’t think anyone would mistake me for a big fan of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main (as they put it) “pro-Israel” lobby in Washington. The only organization of that kind that I’ve ever given money to is Americans for Peace Now. And I have defended critics of AIPAC, including Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of The Israel Lobby, from charges of anti-Semitism. But I think Walt and Mearsheimer have been dead wrong in trying to blame the Israel lobby or the Israeli government for America’s invasion of Iraq. And now Walt is repeating the same nonsense.

Walt, who blogs for Foreign Policy’s website, recently revived the argument, claiming in a self-congratulatory column titled “I don’t mean to say I told you so, but…” that Tony Blair’s testimony last month before Britain’s Iraq War Commission confirmed that “the Israel lobby … played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.” I have read Blair’s testimony. I don’t find it to be proof of anything of the kind; and I don’t think Walt’s accompanying restatement of the argument is any more persuasive than the version he and Mearsheimer put forward in his book.

Walt says that Blair’s statement to the commission “reveals that concerns about Israel were part of the equation [that is, the decision to go to war] and that Israel officials were involved in those discussions.” Here is what Walt, citing a column in the New Statesman, quotes Blair as saying about his early April 2002 meeting in Crawford, Texas, with George W. Bush:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Now there are at least three problems with the inferences that Walt draws from this statement. First, even if we were to grant that Blair is saying that he and Bush were talking about Israel’s role in or importance to the Iraq invasion, this certainly does not show that the Israel lobby had anything to do with the decision to go to war. Nor, secondly, does it show that the Israeli government pressured the U.S. to go to war. The “conversations” could have easily consisted of the Bush administration informing Israelis of their plans.

But these are minor objections. The real problem is that Walt does not seem to have taken the trouble to have read the transcript of Blair’s testimony. If he had, he would have realized that Blair was not talking about how invading Iraq might benefit Israel, but about the conflict then occurring between Israel and the Palestinians. The second intifada had reached a new height with the Passover and Haifa suicide bombings and the beginning of the siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and Blair was concerned that the Bush administration was not actively pursuing the peace process. Blair wanted the administration to put the Arab-Israeli issue on a par with the threat of Iraq. The former prime minister makes this clear in other parts of his testimony. Here is an exchange between Blair and Sir Roderic Lyne:

Lyne: … Just one more point arising from Crawford, but not just from Crawford. You said–you reminded us that the Arab-Israel problem was in a very hot state at Crawford. You said you may even have had some conversations with Israelis from there, and obviously it was something that was a large part of your conversations with President Bush. I think it is right to say–indeed, Jack Straw said it–that you were relentless in trying to persuade the Americans to make more and faster progress on the Middle East peace process. Ultimately, Jack Straw said it was a matter of huge–in his evidence the other day–it was a matter of huge frustration that we weren’t able to achieve something which you had been seeking so strongly …

Blair: … I believe that resolving the Middle East–this is what I work on now–is immensely important, and I think it was difficult, and this is something I have said before on several occasions, it was difficult to persuade President Bush, and, indeed, America actually, that this was such a fundamental question …

Lyne: But surely you must have said to him, “Look, this thing is only really going to have a chance of working well if we can make this progress down the Arab-Israel track before we get there”?

Blair: Well, I was certainly saying to him, “I think this is vital,” and I mean, this was–you could describe me as a broken record through that period …

The talks at Crawford and subsequent discussions led eventually to getting Bush to launch the “road map” for peace. In other words, he and Bush were not saying that they had to invade Iraq to assist or appease the Israelis. Nothing that Blair said in his testimony should have provided the slightest evidence that this was occurring. And it seems clear enough that the discussions Blair and Bush had with the Israelis were not about Iraq but about the peace process.

I am sorry to say that this kind of sloppy research and reasoning is typical of the way that Walt and Mearsheimer deal with the question of whether the Israel lobby influenced the decision to go to war. In their book, they claim that the U.S. would “almost certainly” not have gone to war without the influence of the Israel lobby. That’s a very strong claim, but they do not back it up either in the book or in Walt’s current blogging. Let me briefly deal with their logic here.

There are three ways in which the Israel lobby could have made itself indispensable to the decision to go to war: first, in White House-Pentagon deliberations; second, in significantly influencing the critical Congressional vote in October 2002; and third, in dramatically shaping public opinion. Their argument falls short on all these counts.

White House: To contend that the “Israel lobby” influenced the White House decision to invade—which had more or less been made by the spring of 2002 when Blair visited Crawford—Walt and Mearsheimer expand the “lobby” to include “neoconservative intellectuals” such as Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. They then imply that Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives favored regime change in Iraq primarily because it would benefit Israel.  No evidence has surfaced to show that Wolfowitz was acting in this manner.  There were other neo-conservatives in the administration – such as David Wurmser and Douglas Feith – who had in the past explicitly linked regime change in Iraq to Israel’s welfare, but they were not in a decision-making capacity. Indeed, the two people outside of the President who appear most responsible for the decision to invade — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney — could not be categorized, even by Walt and Mearsheimer’s absurdly broad standards, as part of an Israel lobby.  So while it would be foolish to rule out that Israel’s welfare was not discussed or mentioned in discussions about whether to invade Iraq, there is no basis for saying that the White House decision to invade Iraq was driven by neo-conservative preoccupations with Israel’s security.

Congress: Walt cites my quoting of AIPAC head Howard Kohr’s boast that AIPAC had been “quietly lobbying” Congress to pass the war resolution in October 2002. I don’t doubt that AIPAC officials favored going to war, as did the leaders of some other pro-Israel organizations. But AIPAC did not aggressively lobby for the war resolution the way it lobbied in 1981 against the AWACs surveillance plane sale to Saudi Arabia or recently for refined petroleum sanctions on Iran. I have interviewed AIPAC people and members of other Jewish lobbying organizations on this question, and they say the same thing. It was not a make-or-break legislative priority. And there is very good circumstantial evidence to back this up. Some of AIPAC’s most dependable supporters on the Hill—such as Senators Daniel Inouye and Carl Levin and Representative Jerrold Nadler—opposed the resolution. So, yes, AIPAC probably did “quietly” make its preference known; but it can’t be credited or blamed for the outcome of the vote. And no other pro-Israel or Jewish lobby possesses comparable clout on the Hill.

Public Opinion: Did the Israel lobby have a sine qua non influence on public opinion in favor of the war? If so, one would expect that its influence would at least show up among Jewish Americans, who would be most likely to listen to their arguments. In a 2003 survey, the American Jewish Committee found that 54 percent of Jewish Americans disapproved of going to war with Iraq and only 43 percent approved. At the time, a majority of Americans approved of going to war. So, far from being a leader in pro-war sentiment, American Jews were lagging behind. Walt and Mearsheimer concede this point, but it’s important nonetheless to include it because it is the only other way in which the Israel lobby might have had a decisive effect on the decision to invade, but did not.  

There is, in other words, no basis at all for accepting Walt and Mearsheimer’s contention that, without the Israel lobby, the U.S. would likely not have invaded Iraq.  It’s not anti-Semitic to make these charges–they have quotes and anecdotes in their book–but they don’t add up to the proof of any overriding influence. Nor does Walt’s use of Blair’s testimony to the Iraq War Commission. I think it’s time for Walt and Mearsheimer to put this part of their argument to rest.

Is Anti-Bankism the New Anti-Semitism?

How to Think About: Jewish Bankers

By Michael Kinsley

Goldman Sachs, the huge and hugely profitable investment bank, has become a symbol of the financial excesses that helped to bring on the current recession. Because Goldman is thought of as a “Jewish” firm, and because it dominates the financial industry, criticism of Goldman, or of bankers generally, is often accused of being anti-Semitic. Commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have been so accused. When, if ever, are such accusations fair?

If you believe that Goldman has done nothing wrong, then any criticisms of Goldman or use of the firm as a symbol of the crisis are obviously unfair to Goldman. Furthermore, they would raise the legitimate question of “Why pick on Goldman?” and the possibility that anti-Semitism is part of the explanation. Similarly, if you believe that anything Goldman did wrong was done wrong by lots of others, the question of “Why pick on Goldman” arises, as does the same obvious answer.

Unfortunately for Goldman, it is not obviously blameless in the crisis. It was never so reckless that it risked going under. It borrowed only [sic] ten billion dollars from the Federal government, even that under duress, and paid it back as soon as possible, with interest. But the firm engaged in complex transactions that amounted to betting against its clients. Throughout the crisis, it enjoyed an implicit government guarantee on the grounds of being “too big to fail.” The government bailed out one of Goldman’s biggest borrowers–the insurance company AIG–saving Goldman billions in losses. And its profits and executive bonuses revealed, at the least, a lack of sensitivity at a time when millions are losing their jobs.

Even if Goldman did nothing in particular wrong, its status as one of only two remaining huge investment banks on Wall Street (the other is Morgan Stanley) might make it a legitimate focus, especially given its reputation, even before the crisis, for ruthlessness.

Is it legitimate to think of Goldman as a Jewish firm? Messrs. Goldman and Sachs, who founded the firm in the nineteenth century, were Jewish, as have been most of its partners since then, almost all of its leaders, and its current CEO (Lloyd Blankfein). It was founded because Jews were excluded from other firms. At this point Goldman is a publicly traded stock that anybody may own, and probably most of its employees are not Jewish. (Just as Jews are more than welcome at “gentile” firms like Morgan Stanley).

Is it legitimate to talk about Goldman as a Jewish firm? That’s a different question. Many American Jews think “Jewish” when they hear the words “Goldman” and “Sachs,” but still cringe whenever they hear the connection made in public, especially by non-Jews. Certainly any explicit suggestion that Goldman’s alleged misbehavior and its Jewishness are related in any way is anti-Semitic.

But what about comments about Goldman Sachs that draw on the classic stereotype about Jews and money, without making any explicit connection to it being a Jewish firm? That depends on which stereotype you mean. There is the stereotype that Jews thrive and tend to predominate on Wall Street and in the financial professions generally. This is true, but so what? There is no mystery or conspiracy involved. Jews in Europe were excluded from many occupations for centuries. They couldn’t own land and be farmers. Here in the United States they couldn’t climb the executive ladder at big corporations. They were not welcome at investment banks run by Protestants. So they founded their own.

The stereotype that Jews gravitate toward, and often do well in, finance is so innocent that, ironically, bringing it up is suspicious. What does it have to do with anything?

Rush Limbaugh brought it up the other day. He said on his radio show that President Obama may be appealing to anti-Semitism with his recent populist criticism of banks and bankers. “There are a lot of people,” Limbaugh said, “when you say banker, people think Jewish.” He didn’t mention Goldman Sachs. Abe Foxman, longtime head of the B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, declared that Limbaugh’s remark was “offensive and inappropriate” and “borderline anti-Semitic.” Limbaugh and his defenders protest that Limbaugh clearly was referring to other people, “people who have–what’s the best way to say–a little prejudice about them,” and not endorsing such views himself. And the transcript bears him out.

By Foxman’s standard, even to mention that many bankers are Jewish is anti-Semitic (even though it’s true), and attributing this view to others (while professing to be worried about it) is no excuse This may be over-the top. We live in a culture of umbrage, in which everybody seems to be taking offense at something somebody else says. Foxman is one of the nation’s foremost umbragists.

However, Limbaugh’s supporters make too much of the fact that, read literally, his remarks took the form of defending Jews against unfair maligning. There can be something creepy about “philo-semitism,” or a professed special fondness for Jews. Even when it is sincere (as it may well be in Limbaugh’s case), it rests on an acute feeling of “otherness” about Jews that makes many Jewish Americans rightly uncomfortable.

Sometimes the stereotype about Jews and money takes a harsher form: Jews are greedy, they lie, cheat and steal for money, they have undue influence with the government, which they cultivate and exploit ruthlessly, and so on. In recent weeks, many have said this sort of thing about Goldman Sachs, but with no reference to Jews. Are they all anti-Semites? No. It ought to be possible to criticize Goldman in the harshest possible terms–if you think that’s warranted–without being tarred as an anti-Semite. (Many of Goldman’s harshest critics, unsurprisingly, are Jewish. Jews can be anti-Semites, too.)

Then there is this oft-quoted passage at the beginning of a lengthy rant against Goldman Sachs by Matt Taibbi last July in Rolling Stone: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This sentence, many have charged, goes beyond stereotypes about Jews and money, touches other classic anti-Semitic themes about Jews as foreign or inhuman elements poisoning humanity and society, and–to some critics– even seems to reference the notorious “blood libel” that Jews use the blood of Christian babies to make matzoh.

Taibbi claims to have been utterly blindsided by accusations that his article was anti-Semitic. He says he finds the idea “ludicrous.” He denies any relation between his words and classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. His critics find this impossible to believe. Could such a sophisticated writer (the article skewers Goldman with great skill and style) actually not know about the stereotypes and ancient lies that this passage echoes, and could he actually be surprised that there would be people calling his article, fairly or otherwise, anti-semitic? It may be possible to call Goldman Sachs a bloodsucker without being an anti-Semite. But is it possible to call Goldman Sachs a bloodsucker and then be surprised when you’re called an anti-Semite?

Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador, vs. Andrew Sullivan

Deep Denial

Why the Holocaust Still Matters

• Michael B. Oren

Toughened by their frontier ethos, steeled by serial wars, Israelis are not prone to flattery. Most, in fact, eschew using the closest equivalent to the Hebrew word for flattery–chanupa–in favor of the derisive Yiddish-derivative, firgun. An Israeli joke holds that the word, slashed by a red diagonal line, graces the exit from Ben-Gurion Airport, together with the warning, “You are now entering a Firgun Free Zone.”

Not surprisingly, then, several Israeli commentators reacted unflatteringly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to the U.N. General Assembly. Though many international leaders and even the audience in the U.N. hall applauded Netanyahu, his words were lambasted in Haaretz by Tom Segev as “unnecessary and embarrassing” and by Gideon Levy as “demagogic” and “insulting to the intelligence.” Aluf Benn, one of Israel’s most respected journalists, faulted the prime minister for failing to address a global, rather than an Israeli, audience.

The bulk of the speech highlighted the threat of Iranian nuclearization, the travesty of the Goldstone Report, and Israel’s hopes for a peace with the Palestinians based on security and mutual recognition. Yet criticism of the prime minister virtually ignored these topics and focused instead on his opening remarks, about the Holocaust. “One third of all Jews perished in the great conflagration of the Holocaust,” Netanyahu reminded the delegates. “Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own.” He went on to assail President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world’s premier Holocaust denier, who had addressed the same assembly the previous day, as well as those ambassadors who did not walk out on him. “Have you no shame?” Netanyahu upbraided them. “Have you no decency?”

Detractors of Netanyahu alleged that, by asserting the reality of the Holocaust, he stooped to Ahmadinejad’s level–worse, that he granted credibility to the Iranian thug by debating him over a universally accepted truth. “If 64 years after World War II concluded with Hitler’s fall … the debate on the reality of the Holocaust has reached the UN General Assembly,” Benn wrote, “then Ahmadinejad has succeeded in instilling doubt.”

Perhaps because they were raised in a society suffused with Holocaust consciousness, some Israelis might be unaware of the extent of ignorance of the Final Solution throughout the world, even in the United States, and especially among youth. Confronted with the enormity of the horror, many young people today–much like American Jewish leaders in 1942–react with incredulousness, rendering them susceptible to denial. Millions of Muslims, moreover, subscribe to the syllogism: If Israel was created by Europeans out of Holocaust guilt, and the Holocaust never occurred, then Israel’s existence is unjust. Where better than the General Assembly, a body established in response to World War II and affording a global audience, to reaffirm the veracity of an event now so widely questioned if not refuted?

But in concentrating on the prime minister’s preamble, critics overlook the deeper connections between the Holocaust and his subsequent themes. Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report. Reasserting the factuality of the Holocaust is a prerequisite for peace.

Many factors contributed to the Holocaust–European anti-Semitism, mass murder technologies, and Allied indifference–but none more elemental than the Jews’ inability to defend themselves. Israel and its citizen Defense Forces represent the most palpable means for redressing that incapacity.

Accordingly, denying the Holocaust not only deprives Israel of its raison d’être, but, more nefariously still, it invalidates the Jews’ need to defend themselves. So, the Iranian leader proceeds to arm Hamas and Hezbollah and produce nuclear weapons while claiming that the Jews of Israel–like those of 1940s Europe–have nothing to fear. But Ahmadinejad does not stop short at merely deeming the Holocaust a “fairy tale;” rather, he portrays Israel as a Nazi state–guilty of perpetrating the very offenses against the Palestinians that the Nazis never did to the Jews.

Where Ahmadinejad leaves off, the Goldstone Report, or, as it is officially called, the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” persists. The U.N. mission purports to have investigated Israel’s military action in Gaza last winter, an operation launched in response to the firing of more than 7,000 Hamas missiles at Israeli towns since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Strip. But instead of probing Hamas’s deliberate effort to maximize Israeli civilian casualties and its doctrine of hiding behind Palestinian human shields, the judges interviewed handpicked Hamas witnesses, several of them senior commanders disguised as civilians, and uncritically accepted their testimony. Inexorably, the report, which presumed Israel’s guilt, condemned the Jewish state for crimes against humanity and for mounting a premeditated campaign against Gaza civilians.

The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves. If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all. But more insidiously, the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents–as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed.

Ahmadinejad’s genocidal rhetoric and the iniquity of the Goldstone Report notwithstanding, Israel will, of course, continue to defend its citizens. No amount of vitriol will compel Israel onto a course of self-destruction. But what will be destroyed is any chance for peace. Having twice withdrawn unilaterally to recognized borders and received only onslaughts in return, and having suffered censure for protecting themselves from that aggression, Israelis will understandably recoil from additional retreats that will leave them vulnerable. Israelis, moreover, will not withdraw from any territory liable to become staging grounds for terrorist groups empowered by international agencies and convinced of their ability to murder Israelis with impunity.

Israel will pursue policies with or without firgun. But by making the connection between the Holocaust and its denial, the Iranian nuclear program, and the Goldstone Report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has exposed the venal narrative that concludes with Israel’s paralysis. By reaffirming Israel’s right to safeguard its citizens, he has demarcated the only path to peace.

Michael B. Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

 

The Undiplomatic Michael Oren

Andrew Sullivan

I thought ambassadors were supposed to smoothe over rifts, not inflame them. And I thought they were supposed to speak to the broadest number of citizens in the countries to which they have been appointed, not provide inflammatory rants to the already-persuaded. But this Michael Oren piece in TNR abandons any pretense of diplomatic balance.

The premise of Oren’s piece is that Israel faces a new Nazism represented by Ahmadinejad and Holocaust deniers but, to an even greater extent, by the South African liberal, Richard Goldstone, and the United Nations. Oren seems to be arguing that Gaza was a war of survival for the Jewish state and that Israel had no choice but to launch a war that killed, by one conservative Israeli count, 320 children, destroyed 4,000 homes, and up to 80 government buildings. Even if one is sympathetic to the horrific barrage of Hamas rockets that Israeli citizens endured (and what decent human being wouldn’t be?) – every single rocket being a war crime – it helps no one to use language this extreme or to distort history in this manner.

One might ask what the response of Michael Oren would be if Palestinian terrorists pulled off a major coup by killing 320 Jewish children, and destroying 4,000 homes in Tel Aviv, because Israel had lobbed primitive missiles at its territory, missing human targets an overwhelming proportion of the time. This is not to defend Hamas’ wickedness and war crimes. It is not to say that Israel deliberately targeted children. It is to insist that the laws of war be applied equally to both parties in a conflict. It is to ask Israel to live up to its own ancient moral values – values that were pioneered when my own ancestors were running around painted in wode.

It is also to ask beleaguered Israel to get some perspective and to see, for a moment, how things might look from the outside. I can see why they may feel encircled and alone. But they’re not. Even those of us who have been made angry by their recent actions and seeming unconcern for the needs of their most powerful friend, want to help. God knows I love Israel and its people; and I understand that some of the extremism among neocons is really an excess of passion and love rather than mere belligerence and orneriness. But, seriously guys, get a grip. Help the US help you. And try to see the wider picture.

Here’s a graph that tells the story of the comparative human toll in the year before the conflict broke out:

Over eight years, 28 Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets in what were clearly war crimes, as Goldstone emphatically reports. Four times that many Palestinians were killed by Israelis in one month in 2008. In the subsequent conflict, the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths was close to 100 – 1. With this tally, Oren writes:

If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all.

Seriously? No; the issue is whether Israel committed war crimes in its self-defense in Gaza and whether that self-defense was disproportionate to the threat it faced. At the time Bret Stephens offered the just war theory behind the Gaza war thus:

For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of “proportionality” is just the endgame that Israel needs.

Does that sound like the desperate act of a country on the brink of extinction? Glenn Reynolds explained the actual rationale:

Israel’s just playing by Chicago rules:  “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.  That’s the Chicago way!”

Whatever else that is, it is not a just war. The disproportion was the point: it was designed to teach the Gazans and Hamas a lesson they would never forget. Michael Goldfarb, McCain’s former spokesman, echoed Reynolds’ statement but embraced the murder of children as well:

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions. Or maybe not, and the only way to stop Hamas is to eliminate its capacity for violence entirely.

Now it is a completely fair point that many other nations are in no position to criticize, including the US. Israel has to survive on a tiny strip of land which is surrounded by enemies. The Jews have achieved there such a miraculous, inventive, dynamic state it puts most other countries to shame. And its moral standards and its internal airing of debate have no peer in its own region. In some respects, the US has recently had lower standards.

 

The US, by invading Iraq and failing to provide any security for the civilians trapped in the chaos the US tolerated, (“stuff happens”), by torturing hundreds of prisoners, innocent and guilty, and by unleashing entities like Blackwater on civilian populations is in no position to judge. 3,000 Americans died on 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the Iraq occupation in sectarian violence that an invading army has a fundamental moral responsibility to restrain. To have invaded a country with no thought for the security of its civilians is one reason I came to see the execution of the Iraq war as morally intolerable. Israel, moreover, has seen its Supreme Court outlaw the torture methods championed by the US under Bush and Cheney. The US, in stark contrast, refuses to investigate its seven-year policy of torture and abuse of individuals, some of whom it knew to be innocent.

But that doesn’t make either war just. As Matt points out, even if you believe the Israeli attack on Gaza was justified, that doesn’t exclude the possibility of war crimes in its execution. Is this so hard to understand? Jews of all people – the victims of war crimes of unimaginable evil – should know this. And exchange anger and paranoia for the integrity they once had.

Rejecting Shmuley Boteach’s “War on the White House”

SHELTER FROM THE STORM

by Steven Eidman

I was puzzled by Shmuley Boteach’s sounding of the battle cry against the Obama administration and its call for Israel to stop all building activity in the settlements: http://www.jstandard.com/index.php/content/item/the_coming_storm_obama_and_u.s._jewry/.

While I have no problem championing Israel’s interests and jeopardizing any dinner invitation which the President might be thinking of extending, I would first need more evidence that Israel was indeed threatened by U.S. demands. Successive Israeli governments, both left and right-leaning, have agreed to dismantle the majority of the settlements and to surrender more than 90% of the land in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, in the context of a negotiated peace treaty. Furthermore, Israel agreed to a settlement freeze in 2002, included in Phase I of the “roadmap for peace”. While the nuances of the word “freeze” may well need to be settled on, this can’t be the casus belli that Rabbi Boteach makes it out to be, as quiet diplomacy between our countries is already bringing us to an agreed upon definition. I suspect the clear majority of the 78 percent of U.S. Jews who voted for Obama have no problem in supporting the President’s call for the freeze, especially as it was accompanied by a clear and forceful demand for an end to all terrorism and violence by the Palestinians. The presumption by Rabbi Boteach that only a “sunshine Jewish patriot” could support President Obama’s forceful attempt to make both sides adhere to their commitments in moving the peace process forward is unjustified, and doesn’t take into account the dramatic shifts that have already taken place- in Lebanon, in Iran, on the Syria-Iraq border- since the election of Obama. Israel’s new ambassador to the United States, appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the blessing of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is on record as supporting a unilateral withdrawl by Israel from the West Bank. Other than in the Orthodox community, I expect most U.S. Jews to react to our President’s initiatives with cautious optimism. A rapproacment between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and the release of Gilad Shalit – both distinct possibilities- can change the entire landscape of the peace process. Let us press the White House to bring about these stepping stones to peace, rather than gird for war with it.

Steven Eidman

Shalit’s Release May Reveal Who Israel’s REAL Friends Are

Neocon enemies, using diplomacy, reach deal for Shalit’s release

by Glenn Greenwald

Last night, I noted the sudden and obviously hypocritical concern about detainee abuse emerging from The Weekly Standard‘s Michael Goldfarb now that the transfer of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by the Palestinians to Egypt appears imminent and it’s time to exploit his detention.  In service of that same mission, Goldfarbalso tries to attribute this deal for Shalit’s release to the heroism of Benjamin Netanyahu, excitedly claiming that, if it happens, it will cause the Israeli Prime Minister’s “approval numbers [to] skyrocket, further undermining Obama’s leverage over him” (i.e., Israel will be able to continue to expand settlements on land that isn’t theirs).

But as Omooex points out in comments, the Haaretz article which Goldfarb himself cited makes clear that it was not Netanyahu, but numerous other parties — Jimmy Carter, Egypt, Syria and the Obama administration — who engineered the agreement to transfer Shalit from Gaza to Egypt (followed eventually by his release to Israel, pending the release by Israel of Palestinian prisoners):

The move is part of a new United States initiative that includes Egyptian and Syrian pressure on Hamas . . . The idea to transfer Shalit to Egypt in exchange for the release of Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians being held in Israeli prisons was raised about a year ago during a visit by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter to Damascus, Jerusalem and Gaza. . . . Carter raised it again on his visit earlier this month, during which he met Noam Shalit, Gilad’s father. . . . The European source said Shalit’s transfer to Egypt was the first stage of the Egyptian-brokered agreement hammered out between Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions, in coordination with the U.S. and with Syria’s support.

In other words, the deal for Shalit’s release was secured by some of the neocon’s most despised enemies (Jimmy Carter and Syria), with the help of a President they insist hates Israel (Barack Obama), relying on tactics they have long scorned (diplomacy, negotiating with Terrorists, including Hamas).  Of course, Jimmy Carter — who neocons endlessly smear as being Israel-hating and even anti-Semitic — did more to advance the interests of Israeli security than every neoconservative keyboard-tough-guy combined (indeed, more than virtually any single individual on the planet) when he engineered the 1979 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, which — even 30 years later — continues to pay dividends for Israel in the form of this apparent agreement for Shalit’s release.  Identically, the Shalit deal is possible only because, as Haaretz notes, Hamas knows that there is now an American administration willing to negotiate with hostile parties, rather than trying to feel “tough” by ignoring and/or threatening them:

Hamas, which controls Gaza, has increasingly tried to reach out to the Obama administration in recent weeks.

This is but one of the numerous inanities of neoconservatives:  as destructive for the U.S. as their obsession with Israel and mindless belligerence are, those fixations also do nothing for Isarel but jeopardize it further.  Years of neocon rule and moronic chest-beating in Washington did nothing to help Shalit.  But a deal is struck for his release — long a top priority of Israelis — only months into a new administration committed to engagement with Syria and other ostensible Enemies, as well as an emphatic rejection of neoconservative ideology at least when it comes to dealing with some Muslim states.  But even those clear and obvious facts — whereby this apparent success is possible only with them out of power, their ideology repudiated and their Enemies engaged — won’t stop them from claiming that this somehow vindicates their tawdry mindset.

[Along those same lines, Omooex also highlights what will be an overlooked part of the story:  namely, that Israel is imprisoning “Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians” (including, until his release this week, “Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Sheikh Aziz Dweik after three years in prison” who is “a leader of Hamas in the West Bank [and] espouses a moderate line in the organization”).  If this Shalit deal ends up being consummated (and that still remains to be seen), the American media narrative will undoubtedly dramatize the detention of Shalit, an actual Israel solider, even while Israel imprisons scores of “Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians.”]

Notably, Goldfarb seems to think that Obama’s leverage over Israel is dependent upon the domestic approval ratings of Netanyahu.  Actually, that leverage is grounded in the tens of billions of American dollars in aid to Israel, the supplying of American weapons for Israel’s various wars, and the multiple forms of diplomatic protection the U.S. extends to Israel.  At least preliminarily and from all appearances, the Obama administration has been using that leverage for U.S. interests by demanding that Israeli actions that harm the U.S. cease.  Ironically, despite all the right-wing rage about that (in both Israel and the U.S.), the refusal to cater to neoconservatives when it comes to  U.S. policy towards Israel just so happens — as demonstrated by this Shalit episode — to be benefiting Israel as well.

UPDATE:  From a Haaretz Editorial last year, entitled “Our Debt to Jimmy Carter” (h/t thomas c):

The government of Israel is boycotting Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, during his visit here this week. Ehud Olmert, who has not managed to achieve any peace agreement during his public life, and who even tried to undermine negotiations in the past, “could not find the time” to meet the American president who is a signatory to the peace agreement with Egypt. . . . Carter, who himself said he set out to achieve peace between Israel and Egypt from the day he assumed office, worked incessantly toward that goal and two years after becoming president succeeded – was declared persona non grata by Israel. . . .

The boycott will not be remembered as a glorious moment in this government’s history. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian missions, to peace, to promoting democratic elections, and to better understanding between enemies throughout the world. . . .

Whether Carter’s approach to conflict resolution is considered by the Israeli government as appropriate or defeatist, no one can take away from the former U.S. president his international standing, nor the fact that he brought Israel and Egypt to a signed peace that has since held. Carter’s method, which says that it is necessary to talk with every one, has still not proven to be any less successful than the method that calls for boycotts and air strikes. In terms of results, at the end of the day, Carter beats out any of those who ostracize him. For the peace agreement with Egypt, he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life.

That all speaks for itself, and speaks volumes about our current Middle East predicaments and what to do about them.

UPDATE II:  Speaking of using leverage, the original road map “quartet” — the U.S., the EU, the U.N. and Russia — have now jointly adopted the Obama administration’s position that Israel must “freeze all settlement activity, including ‘natural growth’.”  Israel is long accustomed to ignoring worldwide consensus because the U.S. sides with them on those matters.  Where, as here, the U.S. is publicly and privately in favor of the consensus, Israel’s ability to defy it will depend upon how much leverage Obama is really willing to use.

UPDATE III:  Goldfarb replies here, with the full array of textbook neoconservative platitudes.  The only point worth noting is that he agrees with the observation I expressed last night that Goldfarb’s views (like those of most neonconservatives) “ultimately come down to nothing more complicated than: what we do is Good and Right because we are superior and because they are inferior.”  Goldfarb admits he thinks torture is tolerable when we do it to Them but not when They do it to us because — as he puts it — “Of Course We Are Superior and They Are Inferior ” (that, of course, is the very definition of “moral relativism,” which Goldfarb and his allies like to pretend they oppose even as they exemplify its core premise).  And — other than a view that Muslims generally are inferior — what possible ground is there for claiming moral superiority over the numerous detainees at Guanatnamo and elsewhere who, even by the Bush administration’s reasoning, were guilty of nothing?  Independently, it’s bizarre to hear someone proclaim themselves morally superior when, just a few months ago, they were celebrating the benefits of the wholesale slaughter of an entire extended family — including small children — in Gaza.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: “I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X — my group — is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly” . . . . Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best [] is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in “false moral equivalencies.” To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group’s objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly.

Goldfarb’s reply is a pure expression of that warped and self-glorifying mentality.

Breaches in the Wall of Israeli Rabbinate’s Kashrut Monopoly

CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT LAUNCHES KOSHER SUPERVISION IN ISRAEL

Hechsher will compete with Rabbinate and various independent haredi hechshers.

A kashrut conundrum
YAEL BRYGEL , THE JERUSALEM POST

Most kashrut-observant Jews are accustomed to walking into an eatery and asking the restaurateur or waiter whether the establishment is kosher. Often the customer is told, “Yes, we are kosher but we don’t have a teudah (kosher certificate) because we are open on Shabbat.” It therefore may come as a surprise to the customer when he/she is told, “Yes, we are kosher and we are closed on Shabbat, but we choose not to have a teudah.”

The Jerusalem Marakiya is one restaurant where you will receive such a response. Owner Noam Frankforter, an observant Jew, says that the restaurant is kosher and closed on Shabbat, but he chooses not to have a teudah for ideological reasons. “Part of the point is that I am trying to break the sense of alienation, distrust and suspicion that exists among people in today’s society. I say to people who come here that if they try to get to know me, they will realize that I keep kosher.”

Frankforter believes that in general there is no need for a teudah. But if restaurant owners choose to acquire one, it should be administered by an organization with trustworthy workers, who do not give in to self-interest and corruption. He says that this is a significant consideration in his decision not to acquire a teudah from the rabbinate. “I don’t want to pay the rabbinate money,” he says. “In my opinion, the rabbinate does not do a good job. They are detached from reality. They have their own self-interests and are not faithful agents of kashrut.”

Frankforter says that many people in Jerusalem’s religious community have responded positively to what he is trying to achieve. “In general people ask if I have a teudah and I try to be patient and explain the idea behind not having one. It is more complicated than simply not having one, and there are many people out there who believe in what we are doing.”

One potential problem with this approach, however, is that the Marakiya displays an old-fashioned wooden sign that reads “Kosher” on a ledge at the back of the restaurant. In one case, customers ordered their food and only then realized that the restaurant did not bear a kosher certificate from a halachic authority.

Another Jerusalem restaurateur who considers his establishment kosher, even without supervision, is Gilad Kanfi, owner of Humous Ben-Sira in the center of town. According to Kanfi, the restaurant uses strictly kosher products and is completely kosher, serving Beit Yosef meat, mehadrin chicken, badatz humous and rabbinate vegetables. His reasons for not having a teudah are primarily financial but also out of frustration with the rabbinate, believing that he would not get value for money from the rabbinate. “I don’t need someone to come and check up on me for half an hour and simply sit and drink coffee instead of doing his job,” he says. Kanfi admits that not having a teudah does affect business but that “It is all a matter of priority.” He says that being around for 40 years means that people have gotten to know and trust him. The restaurant has regular customers, which include haredim.

Michael Shaulson, a 27-year-old observant Jew who will eat in kosher restaurants without a teudah, explains his decision to do so. “If I go to a friend’s house, I don’t ask to see a teudat kashrut. Just like I’ll go to a friend’s house that fits the kashrut criteria, I will also go to a restaurant that fits the criteria,” he says. “Kashrut isn’t a set of certificates, it is a set of laws. If you know them well enough, then you can negotiate your way through life applying them without having someone else [kashrut authorities] doing it for you,” he adds.

He also suggests that although teudot kashrut may serve as an important tool to the kosher consumer, it does not imply that establishments without certificates are invariably not kosher. “They [teudot] can play an important purpose in saying that restaurants are kosher, but that’s not saying that if an establishment does not have one it is not kosher,” he says. “Kashrut existed before there was such a thing as a teudat kashrut. There weren’t chains of kashrut authorities when people ate in inns in the Middle Ages. It was kosher because someone who ran it kept kosher.”

However, not all Jerusalemites view restaurants without teudot in the same way. Sarah Asch, a 25-year-old Modern Orthodox Jew, won’t eat in a place in Jerusalem without a hechsher (kosher certification) even if its owners claim that it is kosher. “For me it’s a matter that if there are kosher restaurants available, why would I want to go to one that doesn’t have a hechsher? I understand the plight of these people [restaurants without teudot], but I want to go to a place where I know that someone has taken responsibility for inspecting the place in which I am eating.”

Asch, an immigrant from Australia, says that in her hometown of Melbourne she may have considered drinking coffee in a place without a hechsher, and the same with places like Tel Aviv, where the majority of restaurants do not have kosher certification, but if the option is available to eat in establishments with teudot, then she will choose to eat there. “In Tel Aviv I’m more likely to go to a bar that is not kosher, but I would never dream of getting coffee in Jerusalem from a place without a hechsher,” she says.

While some eateries are opting to not have kosher certification, other religious groups are establishing alternatives to rabbinate certification. In Israel, there are private haredi organizations called badatzim – Beit Din Tzedek (Court of Justice) – that oversee kashrut alongside the chief rabbinate. While some establishments with badatz certification also obtain a rabbinate certificate, some rely solely on a badatz teudah.

In addition, Masorti movement leaders met a few weeks ago to discuss a program, due to begin next fall, that will train Masorti rabbis to be mashgichim (kashrut supervisors). Rabbi Andrew Sacks, director of the Masorti Rabbinical Assembly of Israel, says that the Masorti movement wants to create a kosher structure independent of the rabbinate whose standards are in keeping with the philosophies of the Masorti movement.

When asked about restaurants with no kosher certification, Sacks advised that consumers need to be cautious about eating in such establishments. “We don’t have a teudah in our homes and our friends come and eat, but in a commercial kitchen they may have a financial incentive to cut corners, so we rely on a mashgiach to say it’s kosher. If something does not have a teudah, then an individual needs to be extra scrupulous in determining whether or not the place is kosher or not kosher.”

Sacks says that the main differences between the Masorti and rabbinate hechsherim are that in the case of the Masorti movement, “Kashrut will be based on laws and not the economic interest of the overseeing body.” Sacks also says that the Masorti movement does not believe in the concept of mehadrin, a term that literally means “beautiful” or “embellished,” but which in the kashrut world refers to food that has undergone a higher level of kosher supervision. “We do not believe in mehadrin. Something is either kosher, in keeping with our standards, or not,” says Sacks.

No response was available from the rabbinate by press time.

Obama Speech Crystallizes Competing Israeli/Palestinian Foundation Beliefs

Debating, Again, the Founding of Israel

Holocaust and Zionist Narratives Collide in Muslim Outreach

By Nathan Guttman

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration deepens its outreach to the Muslim and Arab world, it faces the difficult task of countering Holocaust denial without reinforcing an increasingly popular anti-Zionist narrative that ties the legitimacy of the State of Israel to Jewish suffering in Europe.

And as discussion of the Holocaust becomes more widespread, so does the argument heard from Tehran to Gaza that while Europeans were responsible for atrocities against Jews, it is the Palestinians who are paying the price.

“Discussing the Holocaust and learning its lessons have become an integral part of global culture, and therefore, to a certain extent, the Arabs feel they are on the defensive,” said Esther Webman, research fellow of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, at Tel Aviv University. “That’s why we see in recent years an increase in Arab rhetoric tying the Holocaust to the Palestinian hardship.”

It was into this minefield that President Obama stepped June 4, when he delivered his anticipated speech to the Muslim world from Cairo.

“America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable,” Obama said in his speech. “It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”

Obama’s seemingly supportive statement was, in the eyes of some pro-Israel activists, insensitive at best, or even biased. “It sounds as if he is buying into the Arab narrative,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

Foxman was quick to issue a statement in which he accused Obama of making an “egregious error which plays into the hands of the most extreme elements of the radical Muslim world.” The error, Foxman said, was in implicitly asserting that Israel’s legitimacy is based on the suffering of the Jewish people’s “tragic history” and not on their historic ties to the Land of Israel. Obama’s choice of words and his decision to mention only the Holocaust as a reason for the creation of the State of Israel “gave fodder to the many in the Arab world who argue against the legitimacy of Israel,” Foxman said.

Researchers believe that viewing the Holocaust as the sole reason for the creation of the State of Israel and the subsequent Nakba — what the Palestinians call their “catastrophe” — date back to the years after Israel’s 1948 independence. As those views have become more prevalent, there also has been a shift in the Arab world, from “hard” Holocaust denial (totally denying the systematic murder of Jews, as done by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) to a “soft” denial that questions facts about the Holocaust and argues that the Jews are cynically using its memory to justify the occupation of Palestinian land.

“Historically, this is not true,” said Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev, who has written extensively on the issue. “The State of Israel would have come to being even without the Holocaust. It was a result of 30 years of intensive work by the Zionist movement.”

Still, Segev believes that Israel shares some blame for perpetuating the myth of a state that “rose from the ashes of the Holocaust.”

Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum argues that the narrative of tying the creation of Israel to the Holocaust has “certain plausibility,” since international support for the Jewish homeland increased after the end of World War II. But Berenbaum agrees with Segev that Israelis themselves bear some responsibility for helping this notion take root.

“How do they want Obama to deny this narrative when the Israelis have done it themselves?” Berenbaum asked. “The Israelis send warplanes from Jerusalem to fly over Auschwitz, and then they claim there is no relationship between the two?”

The assertion of a causal relationship between the murder of Europe’s Jews and the creation of the Jewish state has sparked a renewed debate in Israel, as well.

“In the heat of debate with Holocaust deniers, sometimes this mistake is repeated,” wrote Eli Eyal, editor of the World Zionist Organization’s Kivunim Chadashim (Hebrew for “New Directions”), a magazine on Zionism and Judaism. He argued that David Ben-Gurion understood the problems that could rise from linking the Jewish national revival to the Holocaust and deliberately chose not to mention the link in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

Obama’s speech alone did not spark this debate; there has been growing international awareness that the Arab world is the last enclave in which Holocaust denial is on the rise.

A recent poll conducted by Haifa University found that 40% of Israeli Arabs believe the Holocaust never happened. This is a dramatic increase compared with 28% two years ago, and especially notable, since those surveyed were educated in the Israeli system, which puts great emphasis on Shoah studies. “My explanation is that it is completely a political issue,” said Webman, who is also a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. “What stands behind this approach is an attempt to undermine Israel’s legitimacy.”

Obama’s remarks on Holocaust denial — he called it “baseless, ignorant, and hateful” — were widely criticized in Arab blogs. As’ad AbuKhalil, a visiting professor at University of California, Berkley, wrote in his blog, Angry Arab: “What is his point here: That because of Nazi crimes, the Palestinians need to accommodate Zionist crimes on their land?”

The argument that Palestinians are “paying the price” for Jewish suffering during the Holocaust also has been echoed in statements by left-wing groups throughout Europe; some Germans have argued that their nation now carries a moral burden of taking care of the Palestinians, since their suffering has derived from the Nazi-era crimes against Jews.

Activists on the right also point frequently to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as one of those responsible for spreading Holocaust denial in the Arab world. Abbas, in a 1984 research paper written at the Moscow Oriental College, questioned the existence of gas chambers and suggested that the number of Jews murdered was not more than 1 million. After Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization engaged in negotiations, however, Abbas said, “Today I would not have made such remarks.” In a 2003 interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, he added, “The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it.”

Another contentious issue is equating Jewish suffering during the Holocaust with current Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation. In his Cairo speech, Obama spoke emphatically about the need to recognize Nazi crimes against Jews and to fight anti-Jewish stereotypes used in the Arab world. “On the other hand,” he added, “it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” The term “on the other hand” drew criticism from supporters of Israel, who saw it as equating the Holocaust with the occupation. “How dare Obama compare Arab refugee suffering to the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust?” Israeli right-wing lawmaker Aryeh Eldad asked after the speech.

Berenbaum argues that while the debate over “who suffered more” is legitimate, it is not helpful. “What makes suffering suffering is that it is personal,” he said. “Everyone feels his suffering is the worst.”

As Obama Looks Forward, Netanyahu Seeks Refuge in the Past

A Man of the Past

Netanyahu’s disappointing address on Palestinian statehood showed a leader mired in history, not looking to the future

BY GERSHOM GORENBERG | 

Before Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the lectern to give his foreign policy speech Sunday night, the most optimistic prognostications went like this: It took Charles de Gaulle, a man of the political right, to recognize that France must leave Algeria. It took a Richard Nixon to go to China, a Menachem Begin to give up the Sinai for peace. So perhaps Netanyahu, the lifetime nationalist, would recognize the demands that history has thrust upon him, change political direction, and lead Israel toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

So much for optimism. Responding to the diplomatic challenge posed by President Barack Obama’sspeech in Cairo, Netanyahu delivered an inadequate, internally contradictory and disappointing message.

Yes, he did say for the first time that he would be willing to accept a “demilitarized Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state.” Formally, that’s a shift from Netanyahu’s previous rejection of a two-state solution. It’s a step forward, if measured against the positions that Netanyahu laid out when he first sought the leadership of the Likud in the early 1990s, when he wrote of allowing the Palestinians autonomy in four “counties” that would rule one-fifth of the West Bank.

Relative to Israel’s diplomatic record, however, the speech was a leap backward. Even the archetypical hawk, Ariel Sharon, had already accepted the principle of a two-state solution—however limited he actually expected the Palestinian state to be. Sharon recognized that Israeli rule over the West Bank was “occupation” and paid lip service to the U.S.-backed “road map” for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Netanyahu did neither (though he did acknowledge that “Israel is obligated by its international commitments”). Netanyahu’s erstwhile colleague on the right, Ehud Olmert, concluded that for Israel’s own sake, to maintain its Jewish majority, it would have to give up political rule over at least some Palestinian areas of Jerusalem. Netanyahu repeated the tired slogan of “Jerusalem remaining the united capital of Israel.”

At the center of his message was a deep contradiction. Netanyahu invited the Palestinian Authority to negotiate peace “without preconditions.” He then proceeded to lay out, at length, his own preconditions, which in turn contained further contradictions.

The Palestinian state to be reached at the end of the peace process, he asserted, must be toothless in every way—with no army, no control of its own airspace, and no authority to conclude military alliances. Yet as a condition for negotiating toward such statehood, Netanyahu said, “The Palestinian Authority must impose law and order in the Gaza Strip and overcome Hamas.”

In other words, in order to avoid any form of Palestinian unity government, any situation in which Hamas is even a silent partner to negotiations, the embryo of the powerless state-to-be must accomplish what Israel, with its powerful army, has yet to find a way to do. It is hard to imagine a reason for stating such a precondition except the desire to avoid negotiations, to preclude reaching the two-state solution to which Netanyahu was supposedly acceding. Indeed, the full list of publicly stated preconditions appeared designed to insure that no Palestinian leader could sit down to talks.

But Netanyahu’s speech was not aimed for Palestinian ears; it was intended for a domestic audience and for the American administration. To the Israeli audience, and especially to the supporters of his rightwing coalition, he recited Israeli history in terms meant to show that he had not deviated from his ideological path. Arab hostility toward Israel had no connection to “our presence in Judea, Samaria and Gaza,” he argued. His proof was that Arabs attacked the new state of Israel in 1948 and were ready to do so again in 1967. Those facts are correct. Yet it is also true that the Arab League peace initiative of 2002 offered Israel full peace based on a return to the pre-1967 boundaries. There was a time in Israeli history when such an offer would have celebrated with dancing in the streets as the victory of Zionism. One does not have to agree to the Arab initiative as written to see that it represents a historic change, an acceptance of Israel’s reality. Netanyahu, the son of the historian, does not see historic shifts.

Netanyahu’s presentation of the past points to the difference between his speech and Obama’s. Obama, seeking to reshape relations with the Muslim world, traveled to a Muslim city, and voiced respect for Muslim accomplishments. In addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he asked each side to see the other’s suffering—and then to put history in the past and to move forward. Netanyahu chose as his venue the most right-wing university campus in Israel. He called attention only to Israeli accomplishments, and recited a version of history that contained only Jewish suffering and Arab responsibility for the conflict. In the simplest terms, Obama showed that he understands the dynamics of reconciliation; Netanyahu did not.

The reason for giving the speech was what the prime minister called “international situation”—a delicate way of referring to U.S. diplomatic pressure. Responding to Obama, Netanyahu did grudgingly offer the words “Palestinian state.” At the same time, he flatly rejected Obama’s demand that Israel freeze settlement construction in accordance with the road map. His comment about “the need to have people live normal lives” in settlements “and let mothers and fathers raise their children” was an allusion to his claim that building in settlements is only meant to accommodate growing families. This is untrue. Government-initiated building projects continue to attract migration from Israel to the settlements. The administration knows this. The White House’s polite response to the speech masks cause for continuing tension.

Netanyahu will probably succeed in one respect: uttering the words “Palestinian state” without breaking up his coalition. True, last night settler rabbis were already calling for a mass prayer meeting at the Western Wall in response to “the intention to hand over parts of the Land to murderers.”

But politicians—in the Likud and the other parties of the right–are more likely to understand that he gave only lip service, and very little of that, to a two-state solution. He safely showed that he is a man of the past, not of the future.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (Times Books), and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He blogs at SouthJerusalem.com.

The Rabinofication of Barrack Obama

The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers

By FRANK RICH

WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States …” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.

New Incarnation of an Online Mag of Jewish Arts and Culture

 

Introducing Tablet Magazine

Our new online magazine is inspired by century-old journalistic traditions— and two rough-hewn pieces of stone

BY ALANA NEWHOUSE |

Dear friends,

Welcome to Tablet Magazine, “a new read on Jewish life.”

That’s our nifty, if somewhat inaccurate, tagline. Tablet isn’t entirely new—it’s a beefed-up, rebranded, refocused update of Nextbook.org, which from 2003 until earlier this year published a range of great writing on Jewish arts and culture. We’ve expanded our mandate to cover, break, and analyze news and politics, and will work to tie our cultural coverage much more closely to current public discourse. Even more important, Tablet is not simply a read. On our site, you will find lengthy pieces of in-depth journalism and cultural criticism, fiery blog posts, audio podcasts and video clips, beautiful slideshows, and bits of animation. Offering up-to-the-minute reactions to the day’s news, sophisticated cultural coverage, and in-depth explorations of broad trends in Jewish life, Tablet magazine is the first fully-integrated multimedia Jewish journalistic enterprise in history.

And yet, despite all this innovation, Tablet is closely tethered to the past. We seek inspiration and owe gratitude to sources as diverse as the pioneering magazines and “big idea books” of the 1960s and 70s, the robust Yiddish (and Ladino!) dailies of the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century, and, of course, the tablets themselves—the first medium of Western civilization, whose message remains deeply relevant to our lives today.

These are difficult times for journalism, uncertain times for the economy, and challenging times for Jews throughout the world.

Launching a new journalistic site devoted to Jewish life now is, in many ways, an act of audacity. It requires faith in the journalistic profession and a strong sense of mission, but most of all it requires the right people. I cannot fact-check this assertion, but I’ll make it anyway: no other editor in the history of American journalism has amassed a team like mine. From staffers and columnists to contributing editors and even outside consultants, every single person who works on Tablet has been essential to its creation.

Tablet would not be what it is without the writers and editors we are privileged to have on our inaugural masthead. The editorial staff is led by Deputy Editor Gabriel Sanders, who has worked at the Forward and Vanity Fair, and Executive Editor Jesse Oxfeld, most recently an editor at New York Magazine and previously the editor of Gawker. Senior Writer Allison Hoffman joined Tablet after stints at the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Yorker. Senior Editor Sara Ivry has bestowed her vast talents on Nextbook for six years now, while newly minted senior editor Michael Weiss, formerly of Jewcy, came on-board earlier this year. Hadara Graubart, our associate editor, joined the staff in 2007 while earning a master’s degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU; Marissa Brostoff, a veteran of the Forward, is staff writer; Julie Subrin and Marit Haahr produce our podcasts, and Liel Leibovitz is our video and interactive guru. Len Small, our art director, and Abigail Miller, our assistant art director, ensure that the site moves smoothly and looks beautiful.

Tablet and its readers are blessed with a roster of phenomenal regular columnists, including Victor Navasky and Seth Lipsky on politics, Adam Kirsch and Joshua Cohen on books, Mimi Sheraton on food, Marjorie Ingall on parenting, and more. Our expanded family also includes a slate of contributing editors whose wise counsel will keep us responsible as well as ambitious.

We are privileged to be part of Nextbook Inc., an organization headed with a rare combination of firm leadership and warm encouragement by Morton Landowne, our executive director. He is joined by Marylee Raymond Diamond, our director of finance and administration; Wayne Hoffman, managing director of special projects, and Ella Leitner, managing director of marketing; Debbie Schuval, associate director of public programs; Diana Fishbeyn, our office manager, and Zhanetta Chernyak, bookkeeper.

And then there is Jonathan Rosen, who runs Nextbook Press, our sister organization, which publishes the Jewish Encounters series with Schocken. Very few people in life get to work with their journalistic heroes, and I am lucky enough to be one of them. In 1990, Jonathan created the Arts & Culture section of the Forward newspaper, which I read religiously for the entire decade he was at its helm. Years later, I was privileged to take the reins as one of his successors—a job I held for five years before joining Nextbook. I am still trying to reach the intellectual bar he has set for the world of Jewish letters and ideas.

Tablet Magazine is fortunate enough to have all of these blessings. But we still need one crucial component without which no journalistic enterprise can thrive: curious, committed and caring readers, who engage with our content and speak their minds in return.

That’s where you come in.

Enjoy,

Alana Newhouse
Editor-in-chief