Politics is an inescapable part of human existence. It concerns the way that people organise themselves, in particular how they act within institutions and units of governance. Above all, politics concerns the way humans interact with power. It is therefore self-evident that politics exists in the British Jewish community, but what I want to question is how far the British Jewish community has an acknowledged politics.

In much of the British Jewish community, politics is in ‘bad taste’. In synagogues a macher that is too overt in political scheming is likely to be viewed with suspicion. On a community-wide level, inter-denominational politicking is widely practiced, but often looked down on. In the oldest and most influential UK Jewish representative organization, the Board of Deputies, which has a quasi-parliamentary structure and whose deputies elect a president and vice-president, there is nothing resembling parties and deputies rarely face election fights in their own communities. Even those few organisations that are openly political, such as the UK branches of Israeli political parties, tend to be low-key and poorly supported.

In short, there is a disparity between the de facto inevitability and ubiquity of British Jewish communal politics and the degree to which this politics is openly recognised. British Jewish politics is largely a matter for quiet, behind-the-scenes activity.

This reticence is perhaps a function of a tacit assumption that politics is antithetical to community. To be openly political is seen to be to seek to divide, to create strife and discord that threatens to rupture communal harmony. In part this may derive from long-held feelings of insecurity that as a minority in British society, the Jewish community must show a united front and that division can only equal weakness. In terms of Israel, one of the most contentious issues in British Jewish life, public campaigning against Israeli policies (from both a right and a left perspective) or open support for Israeli political parties, are marginal activities – viewed by much of the community as bad form and potentially dangerous. 

The assumption that small minorities need to present a united front is not necessarily illegitimate. The problem is that the lack of politics can create problems more serious than those it is designed to combat. If Jewish communal politics is not acknowledged, politics will still continue, but it will continue in ways that can be corrosive. If those who disagree with a particular direction the community takes can only been seen to legitimately disagree if they do so privately, this increases the likelihood that rather than accept their marginality they will resort to attacking the community.

I am thinking here about the position of those who disagree with communal support for Israel. Contrary to the commonly made accusation that the community ‘suppresses’ debate, it is more the case that debate is possible if it is done quietly and behind the scenes. The trouble is that some will not accept only being able to disagree privately while in public maintaining a facade of unity. Without a legitimate political process through which to debate communal policies, those British Jews who are critical of Israel have often resorted to attacking the community from the outside.

I recently attended the annual general meeting of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, an organization whose aims I broadly support. Many of those attending were extremely bitter with the ‘mainstream’ Jewish community, and most were uninterested in working to bring Jews who were more involved in the community on board. As much as the mainstream community shuns leftist critics of Israel, many of them effectively shun themselves.

It is essential to begin the process of rethinking British Jewish politics. The tacit assumption that politics and community are antithetical needs to be questioned. In any but the tiniest, most homogeneous community, differences of opinion are inevitable and there has to be a way of dealing with these differences without the dissolution of the community. What models might there be for a community whose political system could allow for the mediation of difference? What kind of political language do British Jews need to embrace in order to function without undue rancor?

One source of inspiration might be parliamentary democracy itself. The Board of Deputies is structured as a kind of parliament, but it lacks one crucial element of parliamentary democracy – an official opposition. When a politician who has been democratically elected speaks for a country, region or locality, it is clear that even if they govern for all, they were only elected by some. To be a leader in a democracy is to publicly affirm that not everyone agrees. Indeed, when democracies work best (and admittedly they often do not) the opposition plays an important role in the democratic process, scrutinising the executive and acting as a constant rebuke to delusions of unanimity. Political opponents may disagree vehemently but in the best parliamentary democracies, this does not stop them respecting each other as individuals, nor does the fact of divided political loyalties necessarily prevent the cohesiveness of the nation.

The parliamentary model is of course not applicable in its entirety in the British Jewish community. It is hard to envisage a truly representative Jewish parliament – who decides who is a Jew and who can vote? But the parliamentary model teaches us that it does suggest that politics can overt politics can not only allow community and difference to be balanced, it can also improve the quality of the leadership within of the Jewish community. Above all, it suggests that we should not fear politics but embrace it.

I was walking down Carlebach Street when the wailing air raid siren announced the biggest civil drill in Israel’s history. Though I’d timed a morning interview around it, (who wants to pause for two minutes of alarm?), I was otherwise unprepared. Unsure of what to do with myself, I stopped and stood at the edge of a sidewalk café, under the shade of the awning. I was still. I listened. The sound was barely audible, drowned out by the noise of construction and late morning traffic. I looked to the people around me for cues. Their conversations continued, coffees were sipped, cigarettes puffed.

A waitress, her blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, pointed to an underground parking garage across the street and reminded us that we were to head to the nearest “protected space.”

Not that we needed the reminder. On the heels of Netanyahu’s induction, most homes received a pamphlet accompanied by a colorful magnet: a map of Israel, carved into color-coded regions, edged by cheerful images—splashing dolphins, dancing camels, and a smiling skier in snow-covered Golan Heights. That skier is in a red zone—according to the key, if he hears a siren he must slide to a shelter immediately. Tel Aviv is colored like a ripe orange. In the case of a missile attack, I will have two minutes to get somewhere safe.

According to the “Recommended Equipment for the Protected Space” list on the magnet, I ought to bring 12 liters of water, food, a fire extinguisher, a TV, and a WIFI ready computer with me. And I’d better not forget to bring “things that will make passing the time pleasant.”

Home Front Command English Magnet Branding

I stuck the magnet on my already cluttered fridge. Now I take it for granted as part of my kitchen scenery.

As the practice alarm sounded, a sole café-goer stood as though he might head for the parking garage. But when it was obvious that none of his companions were going with him, he hesitated, gave a nervous laugh, and then sat back down. Office workers from a nearby building, led by clipboard-bearing managers, streamed like ants to the underground.

The waitress leaned in the doorway, watching. Though she didn’t actually do anything, she looked concerned—she squeezed her chin, and worriedly rubbed her lips with her fingers.

We looked at each other and she shrugged, “What is there to do?” she asked me.

I gave her a weak smile. Despite the June heat, the surging siren brought goosebumps to my skin as I wondered what would happen if we have a real attack?

Like many Tel Avivians, I have no idea where the bomb shelter nearest to my apartment is. I haven’t bothered to find out. Despite the fact that the drill was publicized for weeks in advance, no one I know took the time to figure out if their “protected space” is a bomb shelter, a stairwell, or a certain room in their apartment. If the alarm sounded, where would we go? And how would each of us carry roughly our own body weight in supplies?

Are we apathetic? Or are we in denial?

As I went about the rest of my day, I turned these questions over in my head again and again. But I couldn’t find the answers within myself. So I turned to Boaz, a typical Tel Avivi, for help. I asked him why he didn’t bother at least finding his bomb shelter.

“I’ll find it in the moment I need to,” he said.

“Really? So, when that siren goes off you’ll just magically know where to go? What, are you going to hop on the internet and look it up? You don’t think you need to be prepared?”

“How will it help me to be prepared?” he asked. “How does it help me to think about all this? No one has the energy to deal with these things,” he concluded.

I knew then what I’d been avoiding myself, what I didn’t have the energy to face—a scenario that included missiles landing in Tel Aviv would mean we were in the midst of an all out war. It would be the end to Israel as we know it.

What is there to do?

Sitting helplessly below slabs of cement doesn’t seem like enough. It almost feels like a joke… like dancing camels and the suggestion that passing time during a missile attack could be pleasant.

The courage and determination of the protestors in Iran are inspiring, and the brutality of the regime’s response is revolting.  The reminder that, as Fareed Zakaria recently put it, “What you know about Iran is wrong” could not be more timely. 

All that being said – with absolute heartfelt sincerity – it is worth looking ahead and thinking about what is likely to come next.  There are two things to think about here.  First, how long can the opposition sustain itself?  Four, five, or six weeks from now, will the protests still continue? Will the world still be watching Youtube videos being recycled on CNN?  Second, if a revolution were to occur, what would it look like?  The catchphrases of this opposition are “death to the dictator” and “Allah u Akhbar.”  Both are religious arguments: a Muslim ruler is expected to rule justly, so a “dictator” cannot be a legitimate Muslim ruler.  But the religious language in which this uprising is being conducted should make us cautious in assuming too much about the consequences of even a dramatic change in the ruling regime.

Start with the cause of the protests, the stolen election. If there was any remaining doubt on that question, this statement by Guardian Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadhodaei should settle the matter:  "Statistics provided by Mohsen Rezaei in which he claims more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 170 cities are not accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities” and that no more than 3 million votes  are likely to have been affected.  Ah, well, in that case … (Kadhodaei points out that Iranians are not prevented from voting outside their home districts so that some occurrence of greater than 100% turnout is not impossible.  That argument is not remotely persuasive.  For a very fine statistical analysis confirming the conclusion that the election was fraudulent, see Walter Mebane’ paper here.

But the fact that the election was stolen does not mean that Ahmedinijad lacks widespread support.  There is good reason to think that Ahmedinijad would – or at least could -- have won a clean election. There is an unlikely but not impossible scenario in which new elections are called … and the outcome is the same.  (I assume here that the effects of the protests themselves on a subsequent election would be mixed; repeated reports that the basijis being bused into Tehran come from other parts of the country suggest that in this as in all things, “the Iran people” is not a singular, monolithic entity.)

As everyone involved recognizes, however, the protests and the initial government reaction have raised the stakes to the point of a challenge to the legitimacy of the governing regime.  The government’s responding violence should not have come as a shock to anyone.  But it remains the case that that violence is being carefully kept within limits.  Some Western observers are reacting as though there has been slaughter in the streets:  the announcement that European embassies are considering opening their grounds to provide sanctuary to injured protestors reminds me of the “unauthorized acts of decency” that were reported during the massacre at Smyrna in 1922.  But that’s hardly an analogous case:  the massacre at Smyrna involved the murder of tens or hundreds of thousands of Armenians  (150,000 is one common estimate) by Turkish forces.  The current analogy – the one we’re hearing over and over -- is Tiananmen Square. 

The problem is that that, too, is a weak analogy.  Tiananmen Square started with a million people occupying a central location on April 15; thousands participated in a lengthy hunger strike; tens of thousands remained there seven weeks later when the tanks rolled in on June 4.  The Chinese Red Cross estimated that 2,600 people were killed in a matter of hours. The issue at Tiananmen was stark:  particularly against the background of the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union, the future of Communism itself seemed to be in the balance.  And the world was watching closely, fed reports and images by western correspondents right up to the end.

The Iranian protests don't seem to be going that way.  First, neither the protestors nor the government – especially the government -- seem to be looking for a pitched confrontation.  After the biggest marches, on Monday, everyone went home.  Day after day the protestors have come back for more in the face of teargas and batons and frequent live fire … but there has been nothing like the sustained seizure of public space that set the battle lines at Tiananmen Square.  Saturday would have been an opportune moment for an all-out confrontation:  many protestors were ready to face death, and in some cases the government obliged, making the tragic death of a young woman named Neda the signature moment of the conflict thus far.  But even on Saturday the government forces did not unleash full-scale military repression.

The government’s strategy appears to be Tiananmen in slow motion:  the application of low-level but steady violence in the hopes that the protestors will eventually give up. There are some signs that the strategy is working.  Protests continued Saturday night and Sunday, but the numbers are down.  Tactics like using the police to bar access to public squares and forcing people to keep moving are making it much harder to mount large-scale sustained marches.  Using police and basiji forces to prevent gatherings or disperse them before they grow too large – rather than trying to disperse them by force after the fact -- and the widespread arrests of perceived or potential leadership figures are strategies aimed at turning a flashpoint confrontation into a sustained low-level counterinsurgency operation, a strategy should sound familiar. 

The Iranian government is dominated by a generation that remembers not only the Revolution of 1979, but more immediately the Iran-Iraq War with its million Iranian dead.  The basijis who are doing the skull-cracking and shooting now are the same force that launched suicidal human wave attacks against much better (American) armed Iraqi forces in the marshes.  In other words, this is a regime that has no trouble accepting casualties and has the forces available that are ready to both inflict and absorb much, much more.

Meanwhile, the extensive efforts to curtail the use of cell phones and cameras, the government’s Youtube propaganda strategy, the effective exclusion of direct reporting by Western agencies, in turn, are aimed at preventing the world’s attention from focusing around a symbolic object like the Lady Liberty statue.  (What a triumph Nico Pitney’s live blog has been for Huffpo; and how pathetic has the MSM been in comparison?  Is anything sadder than CNN’s putting up videos they got from Youtube?)  The world is trying to watch what is happening.  Will they still be trying just as hard after a month without direct news reporting?

We hear that there is a fierce power struggle going on in the meantime, between clerics aligned with Rafsanjani – these are real ayatollahs, which Khamenei is not – and others loyal to the regime, but nothing thus far suggests that a revolution will emerge from Qum. The move are complicated, and hard to read – presumably Rafsanjani and Khamenei are each trying to line up support.  Khamenei recently spoke well of Rafsanjani, suggesting the he wants to avoid an outright split.  At the same time, The New York Times has a story today detailing  efforts to discredit Moussavi as an agent of foreign powers in the government press, a move described as suggesting “that the government may be laying the groundwork for discrediting and arresting Mr. Moussavi.”  The story also quotes Iranian politicians calling for retrenchment and “reconsidering relations” with European nations.   The worst outcome could be a power-struggle that Ravsanjani loses, leading to retrenchment and reconsolidation.  The best outcome appears to be some incremental steps or revisions in power-sharing arrangements, at the most; nothing to turn the unrest in the streets into a top-down revolution. 

Finally, even if revolutionary change does come, it might be well to be cautious in predicting its consequences.  As I noted previously, the language of the protests has become religious.  Some of this is an attempt to enlist popular support rather than a reflection of the protestors’ underlying beliefs, but the result is the same:  they are protesting in the name of Islam.  That is part of what makes the opposition's appeal so powerful, which should be yet another reminder of the simplistic American public understanding of Islam – particularly Shiite Islam -- in the Middle East.  But as we have learned time and again, “democracy” does not necessarily equal “Western,” let alone “secular” or “liberal” (this is as true in the U.S., Israel, and Europe as anywhere else.)  And certainly “democratic” does not mean “pro-American.”  Khamenei’s government earned its unpopularity by staggering economic incompetence, not by its belligerent nationalism; very broad support for that nationalism remains.  In other words, a new or revised regime might be one that features considerable reforms internally but that is no less eager to be involved in regional affairs, particularly with respect to Shiite Iraq.  It is ridiculous to assert that Mousavi would not govern Iran differently than Ahmedinijad in terms of its internal affairs, but it is far less clear that Mousavi would be an Iranian Gorbachev, as some have suggested.  (Ironically, this is a fear that has been expressed by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders:  officials in Netanyahu’s government fear that a reformed government would be just as ambitious but less isolated, while Palestinians fear that a reformed government would be less inclined to make their cause a central concern in its dealings with Western nations in order to maintain good relations.)

Most likely the protests will continue through this week, and so will the low-level violence and the clampdown, the obvious acts of violence by government provocateurs, and the equally obvious propaganda.  Down the road?  Something powerful is moving in the streets of Tehra, but (to mix my metaphors) it is not clear that this new bird will be ready to hatch and take flight for some time yet.  And we can have only the dimmest idea as to what kind of bird it will be turn out to be.

[cross-posted at Huffingtonpost.com] 

"Israel will not freeze settlement construction for natural growth, despite intense pressure from the Obama administration to do so," The Jerusalem Post, June 1, 2009.

The argument that “natural growth” is crucial to Israel's well-being is utter nonsense.  

Here are a few facts. 

First of all, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the population growth in the settlements is 5.6% annually. That is three-and-a-half times the rate of Jewish population growth in Israel. Forty percent of settler population growth is directly attributable to immigration, with a significant part of the rest due to the increased childbirths as a result of that immigration.

Second, there is no housing crisis in the settlements. There remain many vacant units. The idea that "natural growth" forces families to separate is simply counter-factual. Creating more opportunities and incentives for settlers to move back to Israel proper would be a welcome development, but barring “natural growth” contributes little, if anything, in this regard. It simply stops the settlements from expanding.

Third, the idea that a young couple or an expanding family should somehow have the right, guaranteed by the government, to live in the place of their choosing, irrespective of the housing market, is absurd. No one in New York, London, Paris, or anywhere else has such a guarantee, nor do people in Tel Aviv, Haifa or Beersheva. Young settler couples, like any others, must hunt for housing in the existing housing market, and sometimes that means they have to move to a nearby town.

Fourth, the implication that families will be “separated” if some members need to move back to Israel is ridiculous, as anyone who has ever travelled in Israel knows. Israel is a small country. If someone needs to move and finds a nice, affordable place in Israel, they are a short drive or bus ride away from their former community.

Fifth, the municipal boundaries of the established settlements are three times the size of the built-up areas. Therefore, allowing ‘natural growth” exceptions has enormous potential for major settlement expansion.

Sixth, the argument that Israel cannot legally halt construction once tenders have been issued, apartments sold, and work begun, is absolutely false. In 1992, when settlers sued the Rabin government over their decision to freeze work already begun, the High Court of Justice ruled that even after work has begun, the government can stop work due to its policy decisions. If losses are thereby incurred, they would be settled in civil court. Two different decisions agreed on this point, and there is no contradictory precedent in Israeli jurisprudence.

That adds up to the seventh and overriding fact: there is no reason or rationale for making any exception, including “natural growth,” to a settlement freeze. It certainly doesn’t serve Israel’s interests; the settlements are a terrible strain on Israel’s budget, with housing subsidies, increased security, and the need for new infrastructure to supply electricity, roads, water and other services to comparatively remote locales. That is a cost the budget, with education, health and other social services being strangled, cannot withstand.

Under these circumstances, it is astounding that the Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai (Shas) is threatening to grab every shekel he can and pour them into the settlements while Israel’s social services die a slow death. The only reason to oppose a settlement freeze is to oppose ending the occupation of the West Bank. It is to oppose any move toward peace. Sadly, for some like both Yishai and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that is apparently far more important than the well-being of Israelis behind the Green Line.

After the Freeze

Whether he ever admits it publicly or not, Netanyahu is overwhelmingly likely to implement the settlement freeze the US is demanding. The real question is: what then?

A settlement freeze accomplishes two things: one, it buys some time for the Palestinian Authority and for a real, tangible peace process to be revived. But only a few months. In those months, it will be crucial that genuine progress is made on the diplomatic front, on the ground in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and in terms of Israeli security.

The second thing it does is to bring the confrontation with the hardcore minority of the settler movement closer to the surface. A frequent refrain of late has been that Israel is “a country of laws.” Unfortunately, this has generally not been the case when it comes to enforcing the law on the settlers. That will have to change, and the most radical settlers’ likely response to a full and genuine freeze on all construction in the West Bank will put law and order to its final test. Either Israel gets serious about applying Israeli law to the settlers or it will demonstrate that it is not a country of law.

But that’s the limit of a freeze’s effects. Some, including such notable figures in Washington as Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation, have argued that a freeze is the wrong goal, and that the enormous political capital a freeze demands from the US would be better spent on pushing for dismantlement of settlements. They fear that once a freeze is obtained, that political capital will be depleted.

I see it differently. I believe that a freeze will be an investment of political capital, one which will generate great returns if successful and open up more opportunities, including opportunities to push for a rollback of the settlement project. It will give the Palestinian Authority the first evidence it has had that, in the age of Obama, their approach works and Hamas’ does not. The continuing ability of the Palestinian Authority's forces to keep a lid on terrorist activity in the West Bank, coupled with a settlement freeze, will create hope and support for next steps.

But Levy and Atallah are certainly correct that a freeze does nothing in the long run by itself. It must be followed quickly by serious steps toward a final resolution of this conflict. It will open the opportunity for such an outcome.

Benefits of a Settlement Freeze

A freeze will restore some credibility to the PA. If it is successful and Israelis see no decline in security, it will legitimize Obama’s approach and further discredit Netanyahu’s intransigence, particularly in the eyes of the Israeli public.

The ball will then be in Obama’s court, and the next step will be even more difficult. In order to capitalize on the freeze, he will have to get concessions from both Israel and the Arab world. He will have to continue to press Netanyahu to continue with the removal of roadblocks in the West Bank, to dismantle the “illegal outposts,” keep a moratorium on house demolitions in East Jerusalem and to find some way to allow reconstruction materials into Gaza without strengthening Hamas.

The danger is that if Israel is seen to be making all the concessions and getting nothing immediate in return, Obama will start to lose the unprecedented support he has right now from Congress and the pro-Israel community. The Palestinians will need to maintain and even strengthen their security apparatus and prove that they can maintain control in the West Bank.

But much more will be needed. Obama will have to get the Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, to begin to melt the ice between themselves and Israel. Nothing like full diplomatic relations, of course, which must wait until a Palestinian state emerges. But something is needed -- some kind of trade relations or an easing of the boycott of Israeli products.

It can’t all wait until the occupation completely ends. Obama has already begun pushing for some steps from the Arab world, and it will be crucial that he convince the Arab states to take them. One of the main problems with bilateralism is that the Palestinians have nothing to offer Israel that is tangible. The Arab states do, and Obama must obtain something to show Israel that peace is paying off for them as well.

That’s really the dance the President has to do now. When he gets the freeze (and I have no doubt he will get it if he sticks to his guns), he then needs to make sure it means something in the long term for the Palestinians and that it pays off for Israel as well. Not easy, but certainly possible. Obama has acted forcefully and boldly on this issue much earlier than most thought he would. He has earned some faith that he can take the more complicated steps before him. He’d better; because time is running short for a two-state solution and the obstacles in the region are perhaps as big as they’ve ever been.

In my childhood, Shabbat never felt complete without Stella D'Oro cookies. For the uninitiated, these are dry cookies whose chief (or only) advantage is that they are parve (dairy free) and therefore can be eaten for dessert after a meat meal. I was especially partial to the Swiss Fudge flavor, which featured a dollop of chewy fudge in the middle of an otherwise-bland cookie-if you nibbled away the outside first, you could enjoy a few bites of pure fudge at the end.

I have since stopped eating meat and have learned to bake, thereby eliminating the need for parve supermarket cookies, but still have a soft place in my heart for Stella D'Oro. I was therefore upset to hear recently that workers at the cookie-maker's Bronx factory went on strike this past summer, and even more upset that this strike has attracted (as far as I can tell) virtually no notice in the Jewish community.

In 2006, Brynwood Partners bought Stella D'Oro from Kraft Foods. As soon as the contract of the existing 136 workers ran out in the summer of 2008, the new management demanded that the workers accept pay cuts of up to 26% and begin contributing to their health insurance plan. The workers scheduled to bear the brunt of this pay cut would be the women who package the cookies. (Brynwood has classified certain jobs-mostly those held by men-as "skilled" and thus subject to smaller paycuts.) The workers walked out in August.

The Jewish community has already demonstrated an ability to change Stella D'Oro policy. A few years ago, the company decided, for financial reasons, to start using dairy ingredients in the aforementioned Swiss Fudge cookies. Jews around the country rose up as one and demanded justice. Faced with the possibility of losing its primary (or only) customer base, Stella D'Oro quickly reversed the decision to dairy-fy the cookies, and returned to purchasing parve fudge filling.

Will we harness this same economic power to save the livelihoods of 136 Bronx families?

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The only consolation about Benjamin Netanyahu's second government is that two months into office it appears to be the most universally disliked in Israel's 61-year history. Whether at home or abroad, no one, it seems, has anything good to say about it. Following Bibi's predecessor Ehud Olmert, that's an impressive achievement. On the eve of the Prime Minister's long-awaited speech about his approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, US President Barack Obama was already hotly rumored to disapprove of Israel's new policy, the European Union was busy meeting with Hezbollah, and 80% of Israelis polled were reported to have said they could live with a nuclear Iran--even, as the Tel Aviv University study stated, a nuclear-armed Iran.

It's not like this situation appeared out of the blue. During Bibi's first month in office, another poll showed that over fifty percent of Israelis already disapproved of his coalition. So what would compel the Likud leader to continue to emphasize links between Iranian weapons of mass destruction and the Palestinians? Maybe the Americans? Not likely, judging from Senator John Kerry's statement last week to the Financial Times that America could live with a nuclear Iran. Reiterating Obama's debut of this opinion in Cairo, the American position couldn't be any clearer. How about the newly rightist Europeans? They didn't poll well enough to make a difference, and even if they did, these conservatives are purported to hate Israel even more than Europe's left.

Indeed, its a nightmare scenario for Israel's most fluent English-speaking head of state. How did Bibi get himself into such a mess? Was it his inability to do anything besides assert leadership over the country's right-wing parties? Was it Tzipi Livni's refusal to enter a coalition government? What about Netanyahu's deep ties to Jewish power-brokers in the Diaspora? Couldn't they have tipped him off better? Why did his aides not serve him with better information on the Americans? None of this was hard to predict, especially Europe’s continuing ambivalence and the seemingly new American attitude.

Throughout the presidential campaign, rightist activists and pundits across the Jewish world warned repeatedly of the dangers of an Obama-led US government. It would be friendlier to Muslim states and seek diplomatic over military solutions to problems. And it would be led by a mixed-race black politician with a far more troubling intellectual pedigree than any previous president—a pedigree that would insist, for example, on the difference between “Likud” and “Israeli.” Contrast that to a predecessor who when first asked couldn’t say where Afghanistan was located. Much to the right’s chagrin, everything that Obama has done since entering office has affirmed their predictions.

Nevertheless, the Netanyahu government has gone about its business assuming that the status quo would somehow stand, and that Israel and America would share the same policy goals and the same general approach. This US government was supposed to support Israel like other administrations had, if not perhaps as much as the Bush administration. And Israel would continue to perform itself as it always had, paying lip-service to the peace process, disciplining the Palestinians, and dealing with its neighbors as it so chooses. No wonder Bibi's aides have been so surprised at the lack of cooperation from the Americans.

Blame it on the differences that inevitably characterize the clash of two distinct governments. Pin responsibility on Ehud Olmert's inexpert handling of the Lebanon war, his corruption, or Tzipi Livni's inability to successfully negotiate a coalition agreement with Labour, let alone all of the other parties with whom she could have signed deals. Lots of players can take the blame. The point is that even without these variables, we’d be facing the same conflicts between Bibi and the rest of the world due to the pathology that the Prime Minister represents—not to mention his already problematic relations with the Clinton administration during the 1990s.

To put it bluntly, Netanyahu was the worst conceivable contender for the job. He’s displayed a stunning obliviousness to the changes in US strategic thinking, let alone American society, as a consequence of the Bush years. To borrow from the language of psychoanalysis, denial comes to mind. What else could one infer from Bibi's words of frustration—"What do they want from me?"—following his first meeting with Obama? It’s indeed unprecedented that his negotiating team wouldn’t be prepared for the Americans to insist on a total freeze to settlement building, and that Israel's leader would choose to persist in differing with the US so far as allowing ministers and military leaders to continually criticize the Americans.

Did Netanyahu ever count on the US Jewish community backing President Obama's approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict? Did the Prime Minister ever imagine that Congress might endorse the new administration taking such an initiative? No-one of any consequence in the US—not even AIPAC—has been able to extend Netanyahu an effective helping hand. The situation is that bleak. This represents enough of a massive miscalculation that it could almost be seen as the diplomatic equivalent to being snookered by a surprise attack. Netanyahu's failure to work with prior intelligence and adequately prepare makes this episode comparable to the 1973 War, albeit with the Americans.

Bibi's memory of his relations with the Democrats has similarly failed. Even the faintest overview of the Clinton era would make it impossible to conjecture that the present administration would want to work with an Israeli leader who caused them so many problems—including legitimizing the incitement that led to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, on whom the White House was counting on to deliver a peace agreement. What about the Bibi who befriended Newt Gingrich when he was leader of the congressional opposition to then-President Clinton and seeking his impeachment? Wouldn’t that inspire a sense of mistrust in a government largely made up of officials from that era?

Certainly, for anyone with a knowledge of that era, Bibi comes across as a harbinger of the negative that transpired over the next decade. Championing every major idea about the Middle East common in neocon circles today, the Israeli leader was every bit the forerunner of the Bush administration, and its emphasis upon Islam, totalitarianism and terror. Why Netanyahu never had the luck to coincide as Prime Minister with a US leader of his ideological bent will surely never cease to frustrate him. That it had to be Sharon and Olmert to sit across from Dubya, and not Bibi, will forever be his fate. The best Netanyahu could do at this point would be to invite Dick Cheney to address the Knesset. After all, Olmert already did it. Why can't Bibi?

“The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event.” So sayeth Assemblyman Dov Hikind, representative of Brooklyn.

You might not be aware that Nazi Germany, in addition to murdering six million Jews, also managed to snuff out the lives of some five million other undesirable groups: gays, Roma (gypsies), and Jehovah’s Witnesses just to name a few. If you weren’t aware of that, it’s probably due in large part to the efforts of people like Dov Hikind.

The occasion for Hikind’s remarks is a plan that would honor gays and other non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution at Brooklyn’s Holocaust Memorial Park. You’ve probably seen a memorial like the one in Brooklyn. They exist all over the country, virtually anywhere a sizable population of Jews reside. It hardly matters that the Holocaust didn’t happen here. Hikind and others in the Jewish community have made it a communal mission for several decades now to commemorate the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s minions.

Good for them. I’m a fan of remembering the Holocaust. I think it’s a significant part of our history, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and we have much to learn from it. As with all shameful moments in human history, it can be tempting to turn away from it, bury it, pretend it could never happen again. It is critically important that we not bury it, not forget it, if only because it certainly can happen again.

During World War II we marched Japanese-Americans into internment camps. After 9/11 we didn’t have to march Arab-Americans and other Muslim citizens into camps. But we did persecute them in a similar manner. In a moment of fear, we repeated our historic mistakes.

To avoid this, we study history. That is why it is there, recorded for posterity. That is how we learn.

That is why Hikind is an unlearned fool.

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The Holocaust Museum murder and the murder of Dr. George Tiller at his church in Wichita share several characteristics:

Both men who have been accused of the murders have long histories of involvement with ultra-right-wing political-religious groups like the Christian Identity movement. Both might, therefore, have been labeled "Christian terrorists" by the media as various other murderers have been labeled "Muslim terrorists  or "jihadis." So far as I know, this has not happened. I would add, "Thank God" for this restraint, if I thought the media would abandon that kind of labeling for every such incident.

I must admit, however reluctantly, that the media won't abandon religious labels because there is a seed of truth in them. Something about the mysterium tremendum that is at the heart of religious experience is somehow engaged in murders like these. Not only did the alleged perpetrators base some claim to legitimacy in their religious beliefs, but both attacks were aimed at sacred places: the Lutheran church in Wichita, one formally designated "sacred" by our customs; the other, the Holocaust Museum, treated essentially as a place of pilgrimage and awe even more than as a place of education.

The fact is that all our religious traditions (even Buddhism: see under "Sri Lanka") have streaks and strands of blood woven in their fabrics. Even though most of us experience a special twinge of horror when religion is invoked as the justification for murder and when a "sacred" place is the scene for murder, every tradition has been guilty of "playing God," taking the name of God in vain in order to commit acts of violence.

How can both these impulses - the impulse to celebrate our own "god" through murder and our impulse to be horrified by violence in God's Name or in God's Place -- co-exist within us?

It is because each tradition passionately teaches community in celebration of the One. Then proponents of each tradition meet other folks who claim also to be honoring The One but have a totally different set of words, symbols, metaphors, practices. THEY must not only be wrong about their connection with the One; they must be lying about it. Demonic falsehood!

It is clear that we need to strengthen that twinge of horror at "religious" violence" into a torrent. Every one of our traditions needs first to unpeel the truth of its own bloody streaks, -- in bloody texts and bloody actions -- and do penance for them.

We must not only apologize, but publicly mourn the deaths that have been committed in our name, as well as the deaths we have suffered. Lutherans horrified by the murder of a Lutheran in a church on Pentecost Sunday need to grieve the deaths of Jews who were demonized by Luther and murdered by Lutherans. Jews outraged by a murderous attack on the Holocaust Museum and by murderous attacks on civilians in Sderot need to mourn the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed by Jewish bombs.

After looking our selves in the mirror, each of our traditions, our communities, needs to make much clearer its prohibition on violence, not only within the circle of its family but toward us all, each other. No more chaplains should be hired by the military-instead, but independent clergy should instead challenge each soldier to stop killing. Congregations that observe Memorial Days and Armistice Days should mourn not only the dead but the system that killed them.

May the One Who makes harmony in the ultimate reaches of the universe teach us to make some harmony within ourselves, among ourselves, for our own tribe and for all the unique and glorious tribes that You have shaped upon our planet.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director, The Shalom Center http://www.shalomctr.org; co-author, The Tent of Abraham; author  of  Godwrestling - Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism,  and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on US public policy.  The Shalom Center  voices a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life. To receive the weekly on-line Shalom Report, click on  http://www.shalomctr.org/subscribe

 

What to make of the news that a neo-Nazi gunman killed a security guard at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC?  Rabbi Marvin Hier says it shows "that the cancer of hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism is alive and well in America." According to President Obama, it means "we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”

I don't know, I'm not sure that we really needed this particularly horrid act to remind us that hatred and prejudice exist in our country.  But it does seem to offer an important sign that for all of our angst about international terrorism, we'd do well to recognize that it's alive and well in our own backyard.

And it seems to be working. The New York Times reported today that the late Dr. George Tiller's Witchita abortion clinic has now closed permanently...

By now most of the Jewish world has seen the infamous video of Max Blumenthal interviewing kids on Ben Yehuda Street about their feelings towards Obama. The video is disgusting, shocking and a terrible shonda - unless you find yourself hanging around the ultra-Orthodox community where these feelings are the norm, regardless of whether you are drunk or sober. 

The kids were drunk and stupid, but the vile filth that is coming from their mouths cannot be excused. Drunken kids do stupid things, but calling for the shooting of the president and then saying that he hates America and is a terrorist is completely ridiculous. It is understandable if you dislike the man, but to call for his death, is not only wrong it's goes against everything you and your publicly displayed yarmulkes and tzitzit stand for.

 

 

There have been a lot of complaints about the video, specifically that he used drunk kids for his interview, but anyone who has spent any period of time in the frum community realizes that these views on Obama (and African-Americans in general) resonate throughout ultra-Orthodoxy and I am sick of it.

So I figured I would write about this on my Blog (for the purpose of having a wide range of people discuss the issue), Facebook and Twitter and I was attacked. Recovery Rabbi had the gall to reply on Twitter that he thought the video was comedy (it was obviously not) and that he ROFL. On Facebook I was told by multiple people to remove the video, which I certainly would never do and I had to tell one person who called me a disgrace to G-d to go fuck himself.

I don't believe in any way that this video represents the Jewish community, but I can guarantee you that if this was a bunch of drunken Muslims or White Supremacists (the kids on the video would be mistaken as such if not for their yarmulkes) there would be a completely different reaction.

Just because you are drunk doesn't mean you have excuse to disgrace the Jews and pour forth your racist filth. I'm pissed and ashamed of my community!  

The Jewish world is in a tizzy over the reemergence of far-right parties that were elected to the European Parliament. The neocon Michael Weiss quoted Marx, “Once again the English working class has disgraced itself.” The JTA article was replete with offical condemnations.

But perhaps, instead of merely condemning, we should ask ourselves why this is happening.

Weiss offers that voting for the BNP is:

one way to piss off the bourgeois city-dwellers who plundered the economy, brought the country under the yoke of the European Union, and acquiesced—this is the uncomfortable part—to the influx of so many unassimilable immigrants.

 

Yes, Michael, that is the uncomfortable part, isn’t it? So uncomfortable, in fact, that few are willing to address these issues beyond platitudes that preempt a change in policy, as to do so inevitably incurs vicious condemnation for merely raising such challenges.

To publicly question mass immigration is to ensure being labeled a right-wing extremist. And therefore the only people willing to do so are often… right-wing extremists. And therefore the only electoral avenue for protest of mass immigration is by voting for these right-wing extremists.

In the U.S., it has often been elements within the Jewish community that have taken the lead in labeling all whom question mass immigration policies as right-wing extremists. Just ask Stephen Steinlight what happens. He was made quite uncomfortable, wasn’t he, Michael?  But if Europe is any indication of what we face here—and I think it is--perhaps we need to stop letting our discomfort preempt a serious addressing of these questions, and stop making others who are willing to do so uncomfortable as well.

Or our situation will truly become quite uncomfortable indeed.

As a former Jewcer, I'm pleased to call your attention to Tablet Magazine, the new and newsier incarnation of Nextbook. We launched at midnight last night after four not-so-grueling months of redesign and reconceptualization. (Just to preempt any confusion: Nextbook is still the name of our media holding company; think of it as the Conde Nast to Tablet's Jewish New Yorker, if that's not a redundancy.)

Tablet is edited by Alana Newhouse, the wunderkind behind the Forward's old Arts & Culture page, with assists from Jesse Oxfeld of Gawker and New York Magazine, and Gabriel Sanders, also of the Forward and Vanity Fair. I handle our politics coverage, which includes editing our two op-ed columnists Victor Navasky (The Nation) and Seth Lipsky (the much lamented New York Sun).  If that's not a highbrow form of Crossfire in digital media, I don't know what is.

Jeff Goldberg, too, is slated to write a regular column for us, serializing his forthcoming book from Nextbook's Jewish Encounters series, on Judah Maccabee. (I'm also the liaison between the magazine and the publishing arm, overseen by the excellent Jonathan Rosen).

What else? Oh yeah, our spiffy design is explained in a slideshow here.

Far be it for Caroline Glick to oversimplify Barack Obama. From the very outset of her televised debate with fellow Jerusalem Post columnist Gershon Baskin, the American-born pundit made it clear exactly what she thought of the new US President's recent trip to the Middle East, and his subsequent stop in Germany. Obama had massively rebuked Israel, and had done so in four different ways:

First, he visited Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but did not come to the Jewish state. Second, following his speech in Cairo, Obama visited a German concentration camp instead of Israel. Third, he chose to unveil his Mideast policy on June 4th, not June 5th, the 42nd anniversary of the Six Day War. Finally, Obama asserted moral equivalence between Jews and Nazis by visiting the city of Dresden, as well as Buchenwald.

For those familiar with Glick's brand of Jewish conservatism, her criticisms of the American leader check out. Obama was not only demonstrating overt deference to the Muslim world. He'd gone out of his way to placate it as well by carefully running roughshod over the deepest of Jewish sensitivities: inferring his desire to restore the pre-1967 territorial order in the Mideast and relativizing the Nazi genocide.

Of all of Glick's objections, the President's visit to Dresden is the only one that merits additional comment, if only because it is the most ideologically complex of his gestures. Over a two day period, in February 1945, US and British aircraft dropped 3900 hundred tons of ordinance on Dresden, killing upwards of 25,000 civilians, triggering a firestorm that literally incinerated 34 square kilometers of the city.

For over 60 years, the brutality of the bombing has inspired debate about whether the Allies were justified in carrying it out. Not everyone agrees Dresden was a legitimate military target, with a reasonable number of analysts arguing that the campaign constituted a war crime, that Dresden was in fact Germany's own Hiroshima, albeit one triggered by conventional weaponry. Needless to say, 12 weeks after the raids, the Nazis surrendered.

This is why its important to understand the subtext behind Glick's concern about the rhetoric of equivalency. Beneath it lies the fear that the President's decision to acknowledge the possibility of US war crimes might lead to a willingness to give in to "today's Nazis," the Arabs, and eventually acknowledge claims about Israeli culpability for ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

If Obama could apologize for the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government by the CIA, call the US invasion of Iraq a "war of choice," and acknowledge, however carefully, the undeniability of Palestinian suffering, as he did during his speech in Cairo, it would be hard to argue otherwise, at least theoretically. In practice, its another story. The point is what this says about Glick's anxiety, and how we might see it as an example of that being experienced by the larger Jewish right.

Despite frightened reactions to Obama like this, it has been more common than not for Diaspora progressives to condemn Obama's recent positioning on Israel as having been insufficient. At precisely the time when the President could have elaborated a more radical agenda for the Middle East, instead he chose to still defend Israel, prosecute America's war in Afghanistan, and continue US support for distinctly non-democratic allies such as Egypt. At no point was any such threat to Israel perceived. Again, it was being sheltered by the US, albeit disengenuously, through a new deployment of liberal rhetoric.

One participant in a discussion list I subscribe to offered perhaps the hardest hitting leftist critique I encountered when he stated that Obama wasn't trying to destroy Israel, as critics like Glick fear. Rather, he was attempting to revive the notion of a 'liberal Israel,' albeit one that could more rationally serve American interests if it were not engaged in a military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and antagonizing Iran. Obama wasn't trying to solve the problem of Israel itself. He was simply trying to use the country differently than it had been by previous US governments.

With certain exceptions, very few likeminded progressive critics chose to emphasize what Obama did say about Mossadegh, about Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, but especially concerning those things which undoubtedly were heard as threatening by Jewish rightists. It was as though conservatives and progressives were listening to two very different Obamas, each of which was equally disappointing, albeit for entirely different reasons.

The reason why its important to pay attention to the differences between the way right and left speak about Obama's approach to the Middle East is that its impossible to get a sense of the President's actual impact without assessing such disparate responses. Considering that American policy has historically followed a conservative agenda in the region makes it that much more important to hear conservative complaints during such times of policy change, not to mention progressive concerns that he isn't going far enough in his reforms.

This is where Dresden rears its head again, and why its example so clearly matters. Glick and many like her seem to voice anxieties about Obama's rhetoric of equivalency because--at least symbolically--he’s trying to revive the two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. However problematic, such a settlement would mean righting Israeli wrongs, regardless of any Arab responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians.

It would also mean that the Israeli government would have to acknowledge that it was wrong to settle the territories and embark on a program of nation-building that depended on making the Palestinians disappear. Allowing Palestinians to build their own state, however imperfect, means recognizing their right to national liberation as equivalent to that of the Jews. The Israeli right fears that any attempt to portray the Germans as victims leads to a similar appreciation of their Arab other, the Palestinians.

Hence the fear of acknowledging German suffering, in Europe of all places, and of tying all concepts of equivalency to Germany's example. It highlights the instability of portraying the Palestinians, albeit the Arabs, as Nazi stand-ins, while at the same time alluding to the surplus stereotypes that progressives frequently apply to Israelis. That we actually are the real Nazis, insofar as like them, our concept of a Jewish state by necessity does not allow for the existence of someone else.

This is why I welcome President Obama's recent positioning on the Middle East, and regard it as being constructive. Because it is so deeply upsetting to those who would prefer to maintain the present status quo, because it is a catalyst for reflection on the profoundly complex knots we've used to bind ourselves to the situation, which blind us to the distinctions between German and Palestinian, let alone Nazi and Jew, anything that helps tear down these walls, to quote Ronald Reagan, will do.

Today, Holocaust survivor, "Night" author and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel joined President Barack Obama at the site of Buchenwald, one of Nazi Germany's terrible concentration camps, to speak out against indifference and humanity's inability to learn from its own worst moments. "Memory has become a sacred duty of goodwill," said Wiesel, but he worried that "the world hasn't learned."

Wiesel went back to his time in Buchenwald as a prisoner, described watching his father die there, and wondered what he would say to him now: "What can I tell him? That the world has learned? I am not sure."

Said Wiesel: "Had the world learned, there would be no Cambodia, no Rwanda, no Darfur, no Bosnia. Will the world ever learn?"

Seeing Elie Wiesel there at Buchenwald, returning as one of the world's great moral leaders to the place that forced him down that path, flanked on one side by Angela Merkel, the leader of the country that once put him there, and on the other by Obama, the first black U.S. President in a place representing the absolute worst evils of racism; that was an amazing moment. But moments must be followed up by more moments, and action.

"Mr. President, we have such high hopes for you... because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place." For his part, Obama said: "I will not forget what I have seen here."

Great. Awesome. Done. But now what? The Wiesel speech was all over the cable nets, and is burning up Twitter. The image of the kindly-faced elderly man with snowy-white hair blowing in the wind beside the solemn-faced U.S. President and German Chancellor was a great TV moment. But moments must be followed up by more moments, and action.

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Here is the Palestinian writer and literary critic Hassan Khader on the “Nakba Narrative.”

Despite the fact that the signed agreements shook the foundations of accepted Palestinian norms and expectations, the PLO did not fail to develop rhetoric that emphasized the extent of its continued commitment to, and perhaps even conformity with, the traditional Narrative, despite obvious contradictions.

He goes on to say:

There is a unique set of dynamics to this ring of contradiction, most which involve attempts to compensate for secretly deviating from the Narrative by engaging in more eloquent rhetoric that invokes the themes of the constants, the conjuring of memory and the supposed optimism of the will. All these compensatory gestures are effective only in preventing any accumulation of political wisdom, and lead us time and again to the same errors. Therefore, the Palestinians continuously return to square one, as if the sixty years of Nakba and a hundred years of conflict in and over Palestine, could not yield a moment of reflection or a single lesson learned.

Khader’s entire piece, thoughtfully translated by the American Task Force on Palestine, can be read here.

This is not the first time that Khader has characterized the Nakba as a form of ideological cage. An article he wrote for Al Ahram in 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Israel, offered the following observation:

Palestine, in reality, was never a paradise; nor was it lost. It was a remote part of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by poor peasant-farmers. The West Bank and Gaza, which were in and of Palestine, possessed the constituent elements for the perpetuity of Palestinian existence that might have stemmed the deterioration resulting from the annihilation of the larger entity.

However, for the idea of nakba to be complete, the idea of entity could not exist. Consequently, ‘refugee’ became the catchword for identity, which in turn required ignoring the existence of approximately 180,000 Palestinians who remained in that portion of Palestine that was lost. Their continued presence in their country was not viewed as proof of the impossibility of uprooting a people from their land, or as proof of their attachment to their land. Rather it was viewed as cause for embarrassment due to the certain contamination engendered by their daily contact with the usurpers of the land.

Those who read the entire piece will note that Khader is hardly generous when it comes to Zionist readings of Middle Eastern history. He also leaves his reader unsure as to precisely what his political conclusions are (commenters who might be tempted to explain this in terms of “traditional” Arab “duplicity” or “slipperiness” really shouldn’t bother).

But none of this should mask the significance of either his piece from 1998 or today’s offering, which appeared in the leading Arabic daily Al Hayat. Actually, those anti-Zionists who jump up and down with glee whenever an Israeli academic questions, say, the justice of the 1948 War of Independence might want to ponder Khader’s implicit challenge to the kind of historical representations contained, for example, in the opening paragraphs of PACBI’s call to boycott Israel. And, as this account of Palestinian intellectual responses to the 1998 Nakba commemorations shows, Khader is not alone in arguing against the “levelling, nationalist” explanation of the events of 1948.

Ultimately, to puncture the narrative of the Nakba, and to expose the political imperatives which underlie its pretensions to absolute truth, is to simultaneously dispense with the “original sin” theory of Israel’s creation. As Khader writes, the Palestinian leadership has wanted to preserve and deepen the Nakba narrative at the same time as pursuing negotiations with Israel. As a result, the past subsumes the present, so that the “collapse of the Palestinian national movement, and the disasters in education, health and human suffering in Gaza, are thus all rendered merely temporary problems that will pass and are not deserving of any attention.”

It’s an approach - or, as Khader puts it, a “contradiction” - that is no longer sustainable. Those who style themselves as “friends of Palestine” should stop perpetuating it. They might even want to think about how to move beyond it.

On a recent Friday night, Tel Aviv ran out of the Israeli equivalent of Tylenol. A killer migraine throbbing away, I went to not one, not two, but six grocery stores in search of relief. "What's going on in this city?" a clerk asked me. "Everyone's got a headache." 

Maybe it's because we have a lot to wrap our heads around. Tel Aviv, the capital of Israeli secularism, recently marked its 100th anniversary. But we celebrated under the pall of Jerusalem's changing-of-the-guard—including Liberman's ominous "If you want peace, prepare for war."

Anat Litvak, a 29-year-old educational psychologist, doesn't mince words. "I hate it," she says of the new government. “Netanyahu is a manipulator, a dictator.” When asked if this government represents her, Litvak quickly answers, “No.” Litvak feels she speaks for many Tel Avivians, "Here, I feel very much like part of the consensus," she says. "But in situations like elections you see that most of the country isn't like Tel Aviv. It’s a shock."

The gulf between Judean-Hills-ensconced Jerusalem and oh-so-Mediterranean Tel Aviv was emphasized in the February vote when Tel Aviv went Kadima and Jerusalem went Likud. 28-year-old Jesse Fox, who immigrated to Israel from the US 10 years ago, is an urban planner, activist, writer, and something of an authority on Tel Aviv politics. Fox also points to the municipal elections as yet another reflection of the division between the “young, Bohemian” city and the rest of the Israel. Ir Lekoolanu (City for All), a party Fox summarizes as a “red-green movement” meaning that it is “both environmental and socialist”, received strong support from local voters. That members of Ir Lekoolanu were once grassroots activists and radicals now sit on the City Council signifies a realignment of the city’s politics, according to Fox. “All of the energies pushing for change are here,” he says. “But the state of Tel Aviv loses to the state of Israel." 

Fox’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for politics is less than typical. Dror Goldblum, a 25-year-old industrial design student says that he didn't vote in national elections because, "I like some of the political ideologies of the right wing, but they support the religious people... no one really represents my opinion." The result? He shrugs, takes a sip of a headache remedy—a Saturday afternoon mimosa at a fashionably-low-key restaurant on Dizengoff. "It doesn't matter to me," he says of the new government.

But does Zionism still matter? Goldblum, whose maternal grandmother who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and whose paternal grandmother who was part of the Irgun in then-Palestine, holds to the notion that Israel should be a country for Jews. But for him, the choice to live in Israel is just that. A choice. He wants to live amongst his friends and family. "It's more comfortable,” he says.

Litvak, who has toyed with the idea of leaving Israel for either England or Australia, echoes Goldblum's sentiment. Litvak’s parents were propelled from Lithuania to Israel in the 1970s by a deep belief in a Jewish nation, and a desire to be part of it, “But that isn't my Zionism," she says. “I don’t have to live here. Nowadays people make a decision [to live in Israel] and some decide to leave… I can understand people who leave and go somewhere else. If I decide to stay here, it’s not about ideology.”

Though Fox is clearly a Zionist in some sense of the word, he is hesitant to call himself one. "Do I think that Jews have a right to live here and have their own country? Of course I do. But the right-wing has co-opted the word," he says. "And the way the government uses it? I don't connect with that. Zero.” 

Fox feels that just as Tel Aviv replaced Jaffa 100 years ago and Israel came to replace Palestine, today the "Zionist vision of conquering needs to be replaced with a Zionism that is more modest and sensitive... The current government is the polar opposite of what we need now."

As much as the politicians' vision for Israel isn't representative of many Tel Avivians, Fox's less-than-optimistic view is.

But the death of optimism is nothing new here—it gasped its last a long time ago. Litvak prepares to join the festivities on Rabin square in honor of Tel Aviv's 100th birthday Saturday night. She speaks about the assassination that gave the plaza its name and our generation its disillusionment, "I was 15 when Rabin died. Before that I thought my children wouldn't have to serve in the army. Now I know they'll have to." 

Between a government that doesn’t reflect the feelings of many Tel Avivians, and city-dwellers' loose attachment to both the country and Zionism, it doesn’t seem like our headache is going away any time soon. Goldblum looks a century ahead and offers a tongue-in-cheek prediction, "All the secular people will be gone. Only the (Orthodox Jews) and Arabs will be left. They'll fight each other-- and the Arabs will win because they don't go to the army." Despite the gap between Tel Aviv and the rest of the country, Goldblum's black humor is typical of both.

 

Today we mourn the death of Dr. George Tiller, a physician who has been murdered for making it possible for women to actually use their constitutional right to choose an abortion.

All honor to Dr.Tiller, who joins the list of martyrs for ethical decency and human rights, killed for healing with compassion. Dr. Tiller is a religious martyr in the fullest classical sense,  killed in his own church as he arrived to worship, killed for acting in accord with his religious commitments and his moral and ethical choices. (The American Jewish Congress has also condemned this murder).

And all dishonor to those vicious attackers like Bill O'Reilly who have egged on the kind of violent acts that finally murdered Dr. Tiller.  And who have blasphemously invoked the name of God to justify these incitements to murder. 

The Torah's only comment on abortion makes utterly clear that it is not murder.  (In Exodus 21:22-23 we read that if someone causes an abortion but does no other harm to the mother, the agent owes a monetary recompense to the father for the loss of his potential offspring. If the mother is killed, however, a life has been killed. This passage makes clear that while the fetus is a potential person, not just tissue, it is not considered to be a human being.)

I recognize that other religious traditions do claim abortion is murder, but I both disagree with their theology and think they have no right to impose it on mine,  by state power or by murder. Two real-life cases of abortion have shaped my judgement of the practice.

One of these real-life cases of abortion happened in my own family. My father's mother-my grandmother--had already birthed five young boys when she became pregnant again in 1914.  She hoped to be able to concentrate her energy on raising those five instead of birthing more. Because abortions were illegal, she had a "back-alley" abortion--and it killed her.  So she was unable to raise any of them.  Her early death cast a shadow over my father's life till his own dying day.

The second case is that one of my friends and teachers, a great and eminent rabbi, who was the child of a mother who fled Vienna after Hitler annexed Austria. His mother was pregnant when the family needed to leave, and they knew that the underground "railroad" to freedom was bound to be too arduous for a  pregnant woman. The choices were: staying in Austria, to die together; leaving her behind, to die alone; or aborting the fetus, so that all of the family had a chance to live. She had an abortion. Today my rabbi friend says they thought then and ever since that she had given birth to the whole family.

I wish that President Obama, when he spoke at Notre Dame,  had said explicitly what these stories teach me: that women are moral beings, possessed of moral agency and responsibility in this unique situation where their own bodies are intertwined with another's; and that the lives of women would be endangered if abortion were criminalized again.

He chose instead to say only that the choices are difficult  and that unwanted pregnancies should be  minimized. The best way to minimize unwanted pregnancies would be if our culture and our government stopped running away from talking about sex! The U.S. government should subsidize comprehensive sex education and the provision of free condoms, the pill,  and other contraceptives in all American high schools,  and should require health insurance companies to cover the cost of birth control and abortion.

And I wish that religious communities would begin providing comprehensive sex education as their children reach adolescence (and probably for adults as well). In the Jewish community, sex education should be part of the preparation for bar/ bat mitzvah.

In fact, the ancient rabbis linked sexual maturity with adulthood. Rabbis originally defined the moment when a boy became an adult bound by the sacred commitments of mitzvot as the day when he had two pubic hairs. At some later point, the rabbis said that instead of checking individuals, they would settle on thirteen years and one day for all boys. But the point about puberty and sexual maturity was made. (Indeed, it is probably precisely because of the imperative need for ethical sexual behavior beginning with the onset  of sexual maturity that the rabbis thought Jews should at that point be bound by the mitzvot.)

Unfortunately, in modern Jewish life this teaching is prudishly ignored.  What rabbi have you heard ever address the new Jewish adult and the adult community about sexual ethics, as part of the public ceremony of welcoming him/ her as a bar/bat mitzvah? Time to renew this ancient teaching! We will have fewer unwanted pregnancies, and less need for abortion.

Even so, abortion will still be necessary at times-to save the life of the mother, to save the mental health of a woman who has been raped, to allow a woman to live a full life she would not otherwise have if she birthed. And so we need more heroes like Dr. Tiller, who will stand ready to protect this important right. May his memory be a blessing.

Barely a week after Benjamin Netanyahu had his first meeting as Prime Minister with Barack Obama, the two are squaring off publicly over the issue of “natural growth” in West Bank settlements. One of the more interesting circumstances about this confrontation has been the silence of the Jewish groups who are thought of as constituting the “Israel Lobby.”

In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt brought all the theorizing and debating over the role of the “Israel Lobby” in US policy to the forefront. For many, their theory seemed to have too many holes. Those who approached the work of the two esteemed international relations professors critically but rationally pointed us toward the need of a much better understanding of the Lobby and what its effects and limits were.

The confluence of that ongoing debate and the recent direction of US policy illustrates the need for a book like Dan Fleshler’s Transforming America's Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change.

This is a book that should have been written many years ago. It is full of insight into the major Jewish organizations, as well as some non-Jewish ones, working on the issue of Israel. It’s also constructive, offering practical guidance as to how those of us whose passion for peace and desire for fair treatment of Palestinians is equal to our concern for Israel’s well-being might begin to blaze a new policy trail.

Fleshler dispassionately analyzes the depth and limits of the power held by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major lobbying force protecting the status quo in US policy. Unlike Walt and Mearsheimer, who depict AIPAC as the spearhead of a virtually indomitable bastion of power, Fleshler, operating with a great deal of direct knowledge enhanced by discussions with those of us who work in the field, reveals the mix of real influence and mythology that gives AIPAC the influence it wields.

There’s a curious effect of anti-Semitism that paradoxically helps enhance the influence of the major Jewish organizations in Washington. Fleshler reminds us of Chaim Weizmann’s ability to convince British leaders that the Jewish community, thoroughly powerless at the time, could bring valuable support in exchange for British endorsement of Zionism. Weizmann capitalized on anti-Semitic myths about Jewish power and secret control. In some ways, AIPAC does the same, though I’m sure they don’t think of what Fleshler calls “power puffery” in those terms.

That is not to say that the organized Jewish community doesn’t wield considerable political power in the US. Fleshler does a masterful job of portraying the actual political influence that AIPAC and other groups wield, without either overblowing or underplaying it.

It is precisely this contextualizing of AIPAC that marks this book a success in all the ways that Walt and Mearsheimer fell short. The two professors, whose expertise does not lie in a Washington scene with which they have only a dilettante’s familiarity, can’t match Fleshler’s insight into the workings of Washington, much less the Jewish community.

Trying to analyze not only AIPAC, but also the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents, as well as the other side of the coin -- Israel Policy Forum, J Street, and Americans for Peace Now -- without any understanding of the community from which they spring is impossible. Walt, Mearsheimer, and most of the writers and bloggers who pontificate about The Lobby make this very mistake.

But it’s a community Fleshler has not only spent his whole life in, but has played a variety of key roles in. He is thus able to round out his analysis with an insider’s knowledge of the framework and a familiarity with the people he needed to interview for this book.

The particular strength of Transforming America’s Israel Lobby is that, despite his oft-stated and clear allegiance to the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” camp Fleshler largely speaks with familiarity and objectivity about the so-called “Israel Lobby groups” like AIPAC, the AJC, and the Conference of Presidents. As a result, the reader will get the insight into the mainstream Jewish community they need to understand how these institutions achieved their stature and why they pursue the policies they do.

Fleshler reserves his harsher words for extremists on both right and left. And yet, even here, his view is nuanced. When discussing one group, Jewish Voice for Peace, which straddles a line between the far left and Fleshler’s own chevra, he notes his frequent disagreements with them, but bemoans the fact that they and the groups he favors have not been able to find a way to work at some level with each other. Indeed, he’s correct—this is a serious weakness on the left, one the right experiences to a much lesser degree.

Fleshler also draws a clear line between the far right politically active groups like the Zionist Organization of America, more center-right groups like AIPAC and centrist groups like the AJC. Almost all discussions of “The Lobby” acknowledge that there is a variety of groups involved, but fail to actually distinguish between them. The differences are actually quite important.

Fleshler is driving at an alternative lobby to create significant political pressure for the course favored by most Americans, including both Jewish and Arab Americans. Polls have consistently shown that most American Jews support increased US engagement in diplomacy and pressure on both Israel and Palestinians if necessary. Yet the leadership of Jewish organizations do not reflect the views of their own constituents and members of Congress believe that Abe Foxman, David Harris, Howard Kohr and Malcolm Hoenlein represent the views of mainstream Jews. They don’t, according to virtually every poll published.

The reason for the misperception is that the segment of the Jewish community (and this is actually true of the larger American public as well) that they do represent is far more committed and active on the issue. Most who support an American policy closer to the one Obama has seemingly embarked on simply have other concerns that are higher priorities.

The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” camp needs to find a way to galvanize those people and to make Middle East peace a higher priority for them. Fleshler does a very good job of laying out both why this is so crucial and what most of the obstacles are.

And here is where I have my one nitpick with Fleshler’s book.  In his reading of the evolution of the politics of Israel in the US, he misses what I consider to be one of that history’s major turning points: Ehud Barak’s message that there is no “partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.

Fleshler does discuss the failure of the talks at Camp David in 2000. But he omits any exploration of the impact that Barak’s and Bill Clinton’s decision to lay all the blame on Yasir Arafat for that failure. It largely destroyed the peace camp in Israel and seriously impacted it here as well, despite the fact that Barak’s picture of Camp David is wildly inaccurate (see Martin Indyk’s comments here. Bill Clinton also later changed his story about Camp David, though with very little fanfare).  That needs to play a much greater role than it does in this book in mapping out a strategy for an effective peace lobby that puts the interests of both Israel’s future and Palestinian human rights together on the center stage.

That one flaw notwithstanding, from my perspective as someone who has worked in the field of Israel-Palestine peace for years, and writing from my office in Washington, it is clear that Transforming America’s Israel Lobby is the book we have been waiting for. Those of us “inside the Beltway” have long felt much of what Fleshler says.

And the way he says it is important too. AIPAC is not presented here as a monstrous behemoth, but as an organization with people who share many of the goals that the peace camp does, just with different ideas of how to get there. The alternative he calls for must be built, and what there is of it now must mobilize in support of Barack Obama.

For the first time in decades, a US President is leading a fight against the settlement enterprise. It’s long overdue, and those of us who care about Israel’s future, who care about Palestinians’ human rights, who care about peace need to do everything we can to support him. And, we need also to build for the future. Following Fleshler’s blueprint would be a great way to do it.

If the mounting litany of threats against the Islamic Republic of Iran are any indication, Israel definitely intends to go to war. Barely a day passes, or so it seems, without a member of the Israeli government making a statement about Israel's intention to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weaponry. The warnings are forceful, consistent, and, increasingly, emotionally riven. If Israel does eventually raid Iran's strategic facilities, no one will contest that Israel's intentions weren't laid painfully bare, well in advance.  As the saying goes, with repetition, truth accretes. The rest is simply confirmation.

While Israeli leaders are reknown for build up, particularly when it comes to justifying the necessity of armed conflict, this time there is something especially fatalistic about the ritual that distinguishes it from prior campaigns of this nature. It is as though the threats were meant to communicate something else, something far greater, in terms of reach, than Israel's determination to do "everything it has to" in order to insure it's security. Is it because the threat itself is no longer a sufficient deterrent? Is it because the the bearers of the message are untrustworthy? The answer is neither.

As critics of this Israeli government have repeatedly argued in reference to its proposed domestic policies, this is the first government in Israel's history that has formally called into question the health of the country's democracy. Best identified with the anti-Arab incitement of Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, (and now cabinet member Alex Miller) and to a lesser degree, their Israel Beiteinu party's proposals to swap Israeli Arab communities for settlements, for Israelis to sign loyalty oaths to the state, obtain national ID cards, and to restrict civil rights, the concerns are wholly justified. Such a political program is patently authoritarian.

Prime Minister Netanyahu's refusal to explicitly endorse a two state solution, and the verbal combat both himself and his aides have engaged in with the Americans and Europeans since assuming office is simply the foreign policy corollary to such domestic initiatives. Best summed up by the continual invocation of the Iranian threat, and Israel's willingess to "go it alone", the entirety of his government's rhetoric can be summed up in one word: fear. The only way Netanyahu and his cabinet seem to know how to govern is by fostering tension. Not just in the Islamic world, but amongst Israel's historic allies, as well, as though Israel is paranoid that the US and EU are potential enemies on the same scale that the Arabs have always been.

The resort to fear-mongering as a foreign policy strategy is not new. Ever since the establishment of the state in 1948, Israeli leaders have always been quick to advise potential Western friends of the benefits of partnering with Israel against any number of emerging threats in the Middle East. What's new, in this case, is the intimidatory quality of the rhetoric, and the suspicion it communicates that even the Americans are possible antagonists, who have to be won over, again, and remade as Israel's friends. This has been particularly shocking to those Americans who do not understand Israeli political culture, and who found themselves wholly unprepared for this level of hostility, particularly given the sacrifices the US has made for Israel over the course of the last decade.

Indeed, Israel's political echelon has demonstrated remarkably little understanding of how the new US administration's positions on the Middle East do not reflect an ideological change in Washington concerning Israel, as much as they demonstrate the maturation of American political thinking about the region as a consequence of its military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hence the Obama administration's priorities in forming alliances, facilitating dialogue, and engaging in peacemaking, where possible. These impulses are as much a product of the opportunity that the Americans have taken to learn more about the region as both a military occupier and now a local power, governing as much as engaging in warfare.

This is by no means to praise Washington's new savoir-faire as a result of its Mideastern sojourn.  However, it is to point out that the Americans have come to derive the benefits of being a Middle Eastern hegemon in a manner that Israel's most ambitious rightists can only dream of. The US may be hopelessly enmeshed in violent conflicts from Baghdad to Peshawar. Nevertheless it is anything but isolated like Israel, particularly under the presidency of Barack Obama, who wisely has sought to exploit this aspect of America's regional presence by seeking to reconcile the US with the Islamic world. It is a singular opportunity, taken by a country still at war, and this is something that despite his bluster, Bibi cannot only identify with, but similarly lust after.

The Israeli government's rage - at the Americans, at the Arabs, at Israel itself - is a reflection of the Israeli right's inability to find a space for itself in such a context, to find itself useful, or even relevant. This is where the real anger at the Americans lies. No one knows better that the last fourty years of occupation and violence could have only taken place in a context in which the US had to tolerate Israeli territorial expansion in order to eventually justify its own permanent presence in the region. In a sense, the deepening of American involvement in the Mideast, especially since the end of the Cold War, has made Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and its conflict with the Palestinians, redundant, albeit counterproductive. One cannot, logically, have both an American and an Israeli occupation simultaneously, albeit indefinitely, into the future.

The half century after World War II was a period of unusual, perhaps unique international attention to the Jewish people (as opposed to Jewish concepts of God and religion).  Spurred by the horrors of the Holocaust and what once-upon-a time was considered the heroic birth of Israel, the idea of "Jew" came to symbolize a combination of moral honor, intelligence, humor, and-of course-outsized victim.  This produced in Europe and the United States an era of philo-Semitism, a social aesthetic in which the iconic Jew was the object of a general sympathy, curiosity, and respect.

Philo-Semitism is not the opposite of anti-Semitism.  These two sets of sentiments and behaviors are products of the same baseline condition in which non-Jewish authorities and communities exercise the power to define, fashion, and alter the living conditions of Jewish objects.  Philo-Semitism does not mean that non-Jews come to love Jews as individuals or as a community-just for being Jewish.  Rather, philo-Semitism exists when Jewish religion, history, culture and "character" (constructed caricatures of suffering, humor, wisdom, and faith as well as actual expressions of communal identity) come to the center of gentile consciousness and social discourse.  Anti-Semitism does not go away even at the apogee of philo-Semitic sentiment.

Philo-Semitism Was Different This Time

Jews often have been made objects of curiosity and ideological refraction by the smart and powerful.  Philo had noted the interest in Judaism among Romans no longer faithful to the old gods (before the Jewish and Roman worlds both were inundated by the Christian alternative).  Mongols-given their fascination with all religions-had paid some attention to Jews, even though they did not go to the extent some believe the Khazars had in adopting a form of Judaism.  Both Muhammad and Luther originally saw Jews as natural candidates for conversion (as if the progenitors of the True Faith would naturally embrace their destiny by recognizing the new Authenticity).  Later, even as they celebrated the idea that they were the intellectual and spiritual heirs of the ancient Greeks, some "enlightened" Germans welcomed kindred Jewish spirits as evidence of the efficacy of their notion of Bildung.

Aside from the Mongols, however, these various philo-Semites had little interest in Jews as actual people.  Instead, some religious teleologists focused on the principle of the Jew as pump-priming converts to Christianity or Islam.  Similarly, some enlightenment figures looked to Jews to grow from Jewish particularity toward the developed human that was the ideal type of late 18^th-and early 19^th century rationalism.  From the gentile subject's point of view, either a new revelation would complete the Jewish task, or else the Jewish experience of persecution and living on the outside of history would prove to have made Jews good candidates for various versions of new-age evolutionism.  These philo-Semites' patience ran out when Jews proved unable or unwilling to perform the duties assigned them.  Luther and Muhammad became nasty when the expected mass conversions did not come.

Toleration of Jews in nineteenth century Europe was not philo-Semitic.  It represented a liberal welcome for individual Jews to civic culture rather than a particular interest in the communal character or development of the Jewish community.  Therefore, it was not the obverse of the fin de siècle anti-Semitism of Wagner, Vienna Mayor Karl Luegner, and the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus.  This ambiguous context gave Jews who cared about their relationship to the gentile world had what Hannah Arendt called the choice between being pariah or parvenu.

Before the Holocaust, these Jewish Europeans accepted a universe of options involving seeking a personal space in the larger society or accepting a role as victim and Other.  The Nazis considerably narrowed this field of thought and action.

The Holocaust created a unique context for a new philo-Semitism (it would have required a remarkable sort of communal gentile callousness for it not to).  What was unique after 1945 was the realization in the North Atlantic region that the Holocaust had been a central expression of human bestiality, and that this successful, industrial-strength effort to wipe out European Jewry was a basic refutation of the confident modernism common to the science and salons of the past two centuries.  The recognition that the Nazis' intellectual and aesthetic tools were logical-and close-cousins to the conceptual and emotional core of mainstream philosophical and ritual discourse cut deep into the moral bone.

The Jew, therefore, became a different sort of object than before.  In the past it had been easy for elites and intellectuals to distinguish their own genteel denigration of (or philo-Semitic speculation about) an essentially marginal Jewish community from cruder and more violent attacks on Jews by less exalted co-Christians (even when the elites provoked the trouble).  Kings, great lords, and their officers may have recognized that Jews could be important to commercial life, but it usually was not hard to relegate Jews as a whole to the backs of their minds.  Anti-Semitic discrimination or murder provided a useful safety valve when merchants feared Jewish competition or when peasants (in Ukraine, for example) loathed Jewish overseers, but most of the time Jews just did not matter very much.  Officials at various levels could organize anti-Jewish events and then put both the thought and the act out of their minds.

This was not the case at the end of World War II.  The Holocaust burst onto European consciousness only after the war was over, kindling a general sense of shame that so few had taken Hitler's existential threats seriously even when word of the camps and the slaughter began to make its way to Allied capitals.  Turning the neologism "genocide" into a legal category was a direct response to Jewish suffering that had been the culmination of what now was acknowledged to have been centuries of anti-Semitic outrages.

In addition, there was a sense that 1000 years of European development had led to anything but Europe's natural spiritual and material leadership of the World.  Now surviving sages (Friedrich Meinecke, for example) wondered whether the old continent deserved its relegation from Powerhouse of the Planet to a mere theater in a contest between two giants on its flanks.  Europeans adjusted to their new role as subordinate objects of scrutiny by more powerful Others; in a sense, Europe was the new Jew.

Some on the old continent started to turn the catastrophe into a positive.  Post-Holocaust West European philo-Semitism was more than a celebration of the Jews' path from slaughter to redemption and Agency.  The general disgust over the camps and the corpses gave way to a sense that a chastened Europe was evolving toward a higher ethical future.  The end of the social Darwinian competition over which Europeans were fit to dominate the world motivated what would become the effort to replace the celebration of Herderian national myths with the greater story of "Europe." 

For the United States, as one of the flanking giants that now overshadowed Europe, the intimate imagery of the Holocaust reinforced traditional skepticism of the Old World's values.  This strengthened the sense that the City on the Hill had to extend the gift of its leadership to a continent that otherwise would fall back on itself-or else fall under the control of something worse advancing from the East.  Conceptualization of the horror of Jewish suffering as a central expression and experience of humanity developed alongside the rekindling of American revulsion with the struggles for territory and power that had motivated European conflicts.

And then came Israel.  The fact that European governments and communities were not unhappy to have their surviving Jews ship themselves off to the Middle East was submerged in a wave of advertised European admiration for the sudden transformation of the Jew from victim to victorious settler.  For its part, the American Jewish community flexed its muscles.  Sickened and angered by the Holocaust, enabled by European culpability in its horrors, and-unlike their European compatriots-largely undamaged by two world wars, American Jews lobbied hard for US recognition of the new state, took credit when this happened, and jacked up an existing-and essential-financial and emotional umbilical cord.

Meanwhile, while martial virtue may have become oxymoronic in Europe, Europeans and Americans-Jew and non-Jew-dredged up exactly this classical ideal in defining a heroic transformation of the Jewish condition in the World.  The military triumphs that defined Israel through 1967 reinforced a sense of the Jew Revived that was refracted through various ideologies and agendas in Europe and America at the same time as Jews themselves reveled in the feeling of being the Jew Enabled.

The sum of these parts was a unique celebration of Jewish communal identity and culture.  Rather than just freeing Jews from legal restrictions or cultivating individual Jews as evolving creatures, the dominant transatlantic community embraced and mimicked traits and expressions deemed centrally "Jewish."  Yiddishisms entered transnational discourse even as Yiddish itself was dying as a language for Jews.  Jews already were prominent in music, theater and the movies and Jewish themes occasionally had crossed over to a wider audience (for example in "The Jazz Singer").  Now, however, Jewish writers and directors could create and mass-market works that were explicitly "Jewish."

In this context, the remnant of Jews left in Western Europe appeared to be freed from the sterile choice between parvenu and pariah.  The decline in perceived significance of being, say, German or French meant Jews could be lionized as part of a larger European myth.

In the United States, where nationality always had been more fluid, barriers against Jews in private clubs, schools, residential areas, and politics largely evaporated.  Jewish writers and performers gained widespread recognition through the medium of television, and the "Jewish" voice of people such as Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Philip Roth became more a part of the wider philo-Semitic discourse than actual expressions of the notional or actual Jewish community.  In both Western Europe and the United States, Jews became defined as constituent members of a simultaneously diverse and pseudo-homogenized secular society.

Western Jews and the philo-Semitic vogue had little impact east of the Oder-Neisse line.  The official version of Socialist history rejected popular complicity for the Holocaust, assigned responsibility for its crimes to bourgeois racists, and coupled Jew and national non-Jew as victims of Nazism.  Meanwhile, the prominence of Jews in the Communist parties meant that East European images of the Jewish Other remained largely as they had been before Hitler.  The hated Jewish overseer/tax collector in Poland and Ukraine now was the feared Jewish party boss or propagandist.  Stalin and his East European acolytes found it useful to purge Jewish Communists along with non-Jews who had fought in local undergrounds or otherwise stayed at home instead of using the war to seek prominence among co-nationals living in exile in the Soviet Union.  The anti-Semitic campaign unleashed by Poland's Communist bosses in the 1960s differed little from pre-Holocaust outrages.

However, the existence of a tough and victorious Jewish state affected even the traditional anti-Semitism of the Communists.  For one thing, Stalin-who initially was not certain whether the US or UK would be his primary post-war adversary-perceived as useful the fighting between Palestinian Jews and the British in the 1940s.  The emergence of Nasser and Arab socialism altered the Soviet calculus, but the serial defeats of the Arabs by Israel led the Soviets occasionally to use their captive Jewish remnant communities (and even Western Jews) as conduits to the center of what Communist anti-Semites perceived as "Jewish power."[1]

The Biological and Social Entropy of Philo-Semitism

Analysis of the Israeli apogee of 1967, its aftermath, and the decline since then of Israel's standing in the world is a well-trod subject that I will not rehash here.  In a nutshell, European opinion leaders lost their taste for a martial Israel and grew impatient as Israel did not alter its behavior to suit the decline of Israel as a European vogue.  What is important to keep in mind for this argument is that Israel's behavior as a "normal" Western state (but one that acts according to the rules of pre-1945 European statecraft and warfare in a zero-sum conflict many in the West fool themselves into thinking is out of date) is only part of the reason for the atrophy of the conditions that enabled the recent philo-Semitism.

More important is the passing of the generation of non-Jews who perpetrated, suffered, and witnessed the Holocaust.  Their children and grandchildren are not anti-Semitic, ungrateful, or callous.  It is natural that the emotional intimacy associated with feeling responsible for this particular experience of horror goes the way of that involved with the other mass killings, enslavements, and expulsions that continue to recede in memory.  Museums and educational programs might instill in some students something of the feeling of what happened, but-as with slavery and destruction of aboriginal Americans, the serial slaughter of various tribes and settled communities in Eurasia and Mesoamerica, and other, more completely forgotten horrors-social consciousness simply is going to move on.  That this is the way of the world is a final insult to the murdered dead, but there is nothing to do about it.

Although this demographic development already is becoming common knowledge, the impact of the passing of philo-Semitism on the Jews who are used to its benefits might not be.  Many of us born in the US or Western Europe after World War II have not experienced the garden varieties of anti-Semitism that previous generations of Jews took for granted.  The benefits of philo-Semitism lured Baby Boomer Jews into the World, creating the belief that we could exist forever as a component unit-maybe even a central one-of modernity and secular (in Charles Taylor's sense), linear, material time.

Our children may or may not have "Jewish feeling," but they are likely to face a less friendly, more disorienting series of intercommunal experiences than we did.  Some less-than-observant Jews could find themselves feeling the Hobson's choice between pariah and parvenu, while some Orthodox Jews can hope to get what they want-the gradual disappearance of all but those Jews who adhere to the law.

The Jew as Active Subject or Philo-Semitic Artifact

Wherever they live, many Jews could find it difficult to adjust to a renewed status as marginalized Other.  Some-various orthodox and Hasidic communities come to mind-either will turn inward or proselytize among their fellows in an attempt to recreate something like the Ashkenazi universes that predated the philo-Semitisms of the 18^th and 20^th centuries.  These communities could take something like the medieval and early modern approach toward relations with the gentile Other, seeking a sort of brokered autonomy in religious and cultural existence while having little to do with politics or civic life.  A few among these might adopt some version of Herzl's universal dichotomy of Jew and Eternal anti-Semite-a notion that in a post-philo-Semitic era would erroneously posit the Jew as remaining at the center of gentile consciousness.

Other, largely less-observant Jews will assimilate into a totally civic, secular identity.  When made by committed citizens from all religious and ethnic traditions this decision can be a reasonable social choice underpinning the need to separate religion (any religion) from the means of coercion.  Of course, the price for this will be an acceleration of the disappearance of Jewish identity.

What is less clear is whether Jews who are quite "observant," but within Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist traditions can confound Orthodox expectations and maintain the strength of their congregations and social networks in succeeding generations.  The passing of philo-Semitism likely will intensify debates inside these movements over the proper role in their community and in society at large of Jews who juggle various identities in a context in which they no longer enjoy philo-Semitic pride of place.

The one choice that will not be possible, but will be tried, will be to cultivate an afterglow of the privileged philo-Semitic condition of the past few decades.  Some Jews will assume that they always will be able to use the Holocaust like some post-1865 US northerners used the Civil War "Bloody Flag"-as an automatic claim to a moral high ground that should quiet any intent to question Jewish centrality (or Israeli behavior).  The attacks on academics who criticize the influence of the American Zionist lobby have been as pointless as they are wrong.

Such defensiveness involves a default instinct toward misreading marginalization as anti-Semitism-a mistake that could undermine necessary efforts to identify and set in high relief thoughts and acts that really do reflect some racist's hatred of Jews.  Those Jewish individuals and organizations who attempt to hold on to their philo-Semitic status increasingly will become social artifacts and find themselves in an anomic existence where they seem not to belong anywhere.

Is Leaving Center Stage "Good for the Jews"?

Having lived through philo-Semitism, Jewish publicists and commentators may well confuse the emotional entropy associated with its ending with re-emergence of traditional anti-Semitism.  The numbers and intensity of hate crimes against Jews will rise and fall, but the hard task for the anti-Defamation League and other groups will be to recognize that the necessary work of identifying, combating, and resolving such acts now takes place in a context where Jews no longer can successfully claim pride of place in the consciousnesses and agendas of gentile worlds.  We once again have become peripheral, at least in the North Atlantic zone.

The passing of the recent flavor of philo-Semitism coincides with a deeper phenomenon, the end of the era of the "West."  The latter concept, which includes the notion of the inevitability of collective European and North American power and cultural transcendence, has been in common use since about 1798.  It has involved the global spread of a caricature of ideational and political forms that obscure the serial alteration of norms and rules at the West's core at least once a century since the end of the religious wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  There actually have been several distinct "Wests," each with its own coercive utopia of political form and cultural and legal mythology.

The current financial crisis reflects a creeping doubt inside Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States in the value and inevitability of such coercive utopias as Democracy and "free markets" (none of the latter actually exist).  Residual rhetorical celebration of something called "the" International Community obscures the possibility that the anomalous period of dominance of global power and thought by a single state form and by idea of the West is eroding.  The world could be entering a more "normal" period where multiple political, economic, and social layers will compete for resources and ideational hegemony.

The challenge of China, India, transnational informal economies, and problems of climate change, epidemiology, and environmental issues all are central to this dynamic, but the issue relevant to this piece is the reemergence of Agency and authority among Muslims.  The 9/11 attacks were an extreme version of what Charles Tilly and others have called "contentious performances," social activities that change perceptions and therefore the content of power relationships (my shorthand, not Tilly's).

Thanks to the internet and other contemporary communications media, the Palestinian intifadas, the wars in Afghanistan and the political space once organized as "Iraq," and various terrorist attacks, from now on Muslims will make their own-often contending-decisions about what matters and how the world should be organized.  Our simplistic default logic of distinguishing between "moderate" and "extremist" Muslims is mistaken in its implied assumption that dealing with us is the central issue in how Muslims will decide how they should live in this world, and to what extent that involves submission to the words of God and lessons of his Prophet.

However, for at least some Muslims the Jew may be becoming more important, even as philo-Semitism fades in the West.  The era of Western philo-Semitism, with its celebration of Israel and muscular Jewish Agency, brought traditional Western anti-Semitism into the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia.  Western global hegemony may be eroding in the Middle East and Muslim Asia, but the demonization of Israel and its hyper-publicized use of lethal coercion mean that the hated image of the West's philo-Semitic Jewish Other is not.

The relative (if often exaggerated) historical tolerance of Jews by Muslims-particularly in the context of the Ottoman millet system-is being replaced by dramatizations of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," propagation of the idea of the Jew as puppet-master of money and power, and other hoary calumnies.  This likely is an indelible change, due in part to the physical separation of Jewish and Muslims communities through, for example, the population transfers that removed centuries-old Jewish communities from the Arab states in the Middle East and North Africa after 1948.

This issue also will affect politics in the United States, but hopefully with a more constructive outcome.  Muslims likely will outnumber Jews in the American electorate by the 2020s.  That Jewish organizations chose to engage in recent debates over the American Muslim growth rate suggested the existence of some sensitivity among American Jews to this development.  Instead of fighting facts, it is to be hoped that Jews join Muslims in replicating the American civic tradition of minimizing the spread of outside squabbles into the American political fabric.  Anglo-Irish disputes and the controversy between German and Anglophile communities over American involvement in World War I notwithstanding, the dominant American instinct has been not only to avoid fighting foreign wars here, but to encourage social interaction among relevant "hyphenated" communities.  Jewish- and Muslim-Americans have the opportunity to find means for dialogue in an atmosphere where neither community can claim to hold a central place in broader gentile consciousness.  With luck, Jewish and Muslim identity will have less salience to either community in the context of the American civic arena than interests and preferences having nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.

*****

David B. Kanin is a CIA senior political analyst and Adjunct Professor of European Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.  The views expressed in this article are Dr. Kanin's alone, not those of the CIA or the US Government.

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[1] This attitude did not die with the Soviet Empire.  The author was present at a lecture in 1995 in which the speaker-a leader in the Holocaust Museum movement-told of manipulating official Polish assumptions that Jews and Jewish money ran US foreign policy to trade oblique promises of influence in Washington for tangible access to Jewish artifacts and memories.

[2]Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances, New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Images are video stills from the Birthright Monologue Performances