The informal truce between Israel and Hamas that was brokered this summer through Egyptian assistance started to unravel on November 4th when IDF soldiers darted 250 meters into the Gaza Strip and blew up a tunnel. Four Hamas terrorists were killed in the attack and an additional dozen have been killed in subsequent strikes. Hamas and the other Palestinian terrorist organizations once again started firing rockets, including Iranian made Grad missiles, at civilian targets in Israel. A total of at least 140 rockets have been fired since the resumption of hostilities, the latest one striking Ashkelon on Friday morning.

Israel has suspended the transfer of humanitarian goods to the Strip following the renewed attacks on its civilians, which has resulted in pressure from various foreign governments. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, demanding the free flow of aid through the Israeli border crossings, even as the rocket attacks continue. Livni's response was to say that ”[w]hoever thinks that a situation of them firing at us, while everything continues as usual, can exist – is mistaken. The Israeli government will take action in the event that the attacks against Israeli civilians continue.”

Most Israelis, however, think that this situation can – and does – exist. The repetitive responses of the Israeli leadership to the rocket attacks is starting to sound more and more like the hot-headed responses of Hamas and the other terrorist organizations whenever the IDF successfully takes out one of their operatives: ”The revenge will be harsh, we will strike at the heart of the Zionist enemy, their blood will color the streets of Tel Aviv.” This never happens these days, since the IDF mows the lawn in the West Bank virtually every night, and Gaza is sealed off, yet the terrorists continue with their theatrical vows of revenge as if their words actually meant something. This pathetic disease has now fully infected the Israeli leadership as well.

The fact that 250,000 Israeli civilians live within range of the rockets from Gaza has been slammed as ”unacceptable,” ”outrageous,” ”intolerable,” and every other conceivable superlative for well over three years by to the failed leaders of Israel. Yet absolutely nothing is done to change this equation. This inaction has altered the attitude of the international community toward this area of the conflict. Not only is every military response immediately branded as disproportionate, but even a non-military response such as the closing of border crossings is condemned off hand. It has come to the point where Israel can't even scratch its nose in response to these rocket attacks, much less pick it.

It has been said that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out, but if you place it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it will swim around until it boils to death. This is a tragically apt analogy for Israel today.

So is there a logic to the inaction of Israeli decision makers? Yes, and it is a disgusting one. They are waiting for one of the rockets to score a direct hit on a kindergarten. It's as simple as that. Then all hell will break loose.

Part 3 focuses on the Antisemitic motifs in Islamic eschatology and how they have become enmeshed with the "corporeal" Antisemitism from Islam's foundational texts to engender a contemporary atmosphere of genocidal Muslim Jew hatred. This third and final installment also illustrates the interaction between indigenous Islamic Antisemitism, and two salient "imports" from colonial Europe-specifically, the blood libel, and Nazism. Concluding observations illustrate the scope of contemporary Muslim Jew hatred fueled by orthodox motifs in Islam's foundational texts, and reinforced by Islam's central religious educational shrine, i.e., Al Azhar University, and its Muslim Pope equivalent, to textbooks widely used in Islamic schools across the globe, even those within the United States.

The recent annihilationist sentiments regarding Jews, as expressed by Hamas cleric al-Zarad, and incorporated permanently into the foundational 1988 Hamas Charter, are also rooted in Islamic eschatology [end of times theology]. As characterized in the hadith, Muslim eschatology highlights the Jews' supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl-the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ-or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered- everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree, as per the canonical hadith included in the 1988 Hamas Charter (in article 7). Another hadith variant, which takes place in Jerusalem, has Isa (the Muslim Jesus) leading the Arabs in a rout of the Dajjâl and his company of 70,000 armed Jews. And the notion of jihad "ransom" extends even into Islamic eschatology-on the day of resurrection the vanquished Jews will be consigned to Hellfire, and this will expiate Muslims who have sinned, sparing them from this fate. Moshe Sharon recently provided a very lucid summary of the unique features of Shi'ite eschatology, its key point of consistency with Sunni understandings of this doctrine, and Iranian President Ahmadinejad's deep personal attachment to "mahdism":

Since the late ninth century, the Shi'ites have been expecting the emergence of the hidden imam-mahdi, armed with divine power and followed by thousands of martyrdom-seeking warriors. He is expected to conquer the world and establish Shi'ism as its supreme religion and system of rule. His appearance would involve terrible war and unusual bloodshed.

Ahmadinejad, as mayor of Teheran, built a spectacular boulevard through which the mahdi would enter into the capital. There is no question that Ahmadinejad believes he has been chosen to be the herald of the mahdi.

Shi'ite Islam differs from Sunni Islam regarding the identity of the mahdi. The Sunni mahdi is essentially an anonymous figure; the Shi'ite mahdi is a divinely inspired person with a real identity.

However both Shi'ites and Sunnis share one particular detail about "the coming of the hour" and the dawning of messianic times: The Jews must all suffer a violent death, to the last one. Both Shi'ites and Sunnis quote the famous hadith [Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985] attributed to Muhammad: The last hour will not come unless the Muslims fight against the Jews, and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and the stone or the tree would say: "Muslim! Servant of Allah! Here is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!" Not one Friday passes without this hadith being quoted in sermons from one side of the Islamic world to the other.

Here I think it is helpful (and sobering) to illustrate the still dominant understanding of so-called "Islamic" Antisemitism that persists in the public domain, as expressed, for example, in the brief Michael Ezra posting, and by journalist Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, his widely acclaimed investigative account of the events leading to the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism on September 11, 2001.

Until the end of World War II...Jews lived safely -although submissively-under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice [antisemitism]. After the war, Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.

Wright's statement was not accompanied by documentation-this was the accepted "wisdom" after all, promoted, sadly, even by historian Bernard Lewis. And on Thursday, June 5, 2008 during an interview on the National Public Radio Boston affiliate (WBUR) program "Here and Now," with Robin Young, author James Carroll opined with distressingly ignorant certitude, "The Christian tradition of antisemitism has spread like a virus and it has been picked up-caught by segments of Arab, Islamic culture but one of the things to be quite aware of is that there is nothing endemic to the religion of Islam or to certainly the text of the Koran that leads to Antisemitism." [emphasis added].

Why are these (admittedly) imported motifs considered "Islamic," and what is their impact, relative to the Jew-hatred engendered amongst Muslims, for over a millennium, by indigenous, motifs from Islam's foundational texts?

The infamous 1840 Damascus blood libel represents a classic Christian Antisemitic motif transferred to the Islamic world. One cannot simply affirm (while grossly exaggerating) the "catastrophic effect" of Christian motifs "at work" in Islamdom, relative to Islam's own intrinsic Antisemitic motifs-the impact of the former has to be proven, and the historical "proof" is a negative proof, by any objective standard.

For example, morbid as such comparisons may be, the actual body count from the "watershed" 1840 Damascus event was paltry in comparison to the numerous Muslim anti-Jewish pogroms precipitated by purely Islamic motifs, like Koran 2:61 and the related apes (2:65 and 7:166) or apes/pigs (5:60) verses used to incite great massacres in Granada (1066), Baghdad (1291), and Touat, Morocco (~1490). Hundreds to thousands died in these earlier pogroms; despite the heinous accusations of the Damascus blood libel, only four of the thirteen Jews imprisoned for the 1840 Damascus blood libel died during their incarceration and torture. The other nine were released unconditionally, and one of these survivors, Moses Abulafia, became a Muslim in order to escape his torture.

Historical analyses of the 1840 Damascus blood libel by Tudor Parfitt and Jonathan Frankel emphasize these two key features which were independent of Christian anti-Jewish motifs, per se: the general support that the persecution of the Jews was given by the Arab Muslim population at large, in reaction against the various reforms introduced (under Muhammad Ali) which sought to ameliorate some of the most oppressive aspects of dhimmitude; the fact that this negative reaction by the Muslim masses to these reforms had much more serious repercussions-against Christians-during the anti-Christian pogroms which marred Damascus in the 1860s. Indeed as Frankel observes, despite their own bigoted anti-Jewish attitudes, it was the European consuls who drew the line in 1840,

... when it came to the threat of wholesale massacre...advising that the Jewish communities receive military protection. Just how real that danger was would become apparent twenty years later, when the Christian population of Damascus was decimated in a Muslim, primarily Druse, slaughter

With regard to the later impact of Nazism in the Muslim Middle East, thirty-fours years ago (in 1974) Bat Ye'or published a remarkably foresighted analysis of the Islamic Antisemitism and resurgent jihadism in her native Egypt, being packaged for dissemination throughout the Islamic world. (A full English translation of this book chapter, till now only available in Hebrew, is included in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.) Bat Ye'or demonstrated that the primary, core Antisemitic and jihadist motifs were Islamic, derived from Islam's foundational texts, on to which European, especially Nazi elements were grafted.

The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim religious texts are applied to modern Jews. Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent-due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad. Here the Pan-Arab and anti-Western theses that consider Israel as an advanced instrument of the West in the Islamic world, come to reinforce religious anti-Judaism. The religious and political fuse in a purely Islamic context onto which are grafted foreign elements. If, on the doctrinal level, Nazi influence is secondary to the Islamic base, the technique with which the Antisemitic material has been reworked, and the political purposes being pursued, present striking similarites with Hitler's Germany.

That anti-Jewish opinions have been widely spread in Arab nationalist circles since the 1930s is not in doubt. But their confirmation at [Al] Azhar [University] by the most important authorities of Islam enabled them to be definitively imposed, with the cachet of infallible authenticity, upon illiterate masses that were strongly attached to religious traditions.

In The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, I have elaborated on how the earlier tragic mass killings-in Bat Ye'or's accurate parlance, these decimations by Jihad-for "breaching" the dhimma, which afflicted the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire (Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians) throughout the 19th century, culminating in the jihad genocide of the Armenians during World War I (and documented, by historian Vahakn Dadrian [pp. 403ff] to have inspired Hitler to express the notion of predictable impunity with regard to future genocides), were nearly replicated in historical Palestine, but for the advance of the British army.

During World War I in Palestine, between 1915 and 1917, the New York Times published a series of reports on Ottoman-inspired and local Arab Muslim assisted antisemitic persecution which affected Jerusalem, and the other major Jewish population centers. For example, by the end of January, 1915, 7000 Palestinian Jewish refugees-men, women, and children-had fled to British-controlled Alexandria, Egypt. Three New York Times accounts from January/February, 1915 (reproduced in the book) provide details of the earlier (i.e., 1915) period.

By April of 1917, conditions deteriorated further for Palestinian Jewry, which faced threats of annihilation from the Ottoman government. Many Jews were in fact deported, expropriated, and starved, in an ominous parallel to the genocidal deportations of the Armenian dhimmi communities throughout Anatolia. Indeed, as related by historian Yair Auron,

Fear of the Turkish actions was bound up with alarm that the Turks might do to the Jewish community in Palestine, or at least to the Zionist elements within it, what they had done to the Armenians. This concern was expressed in additional evidence from the early days of the war, from which we can conclude that the Armenian tragedy was known in the Yishuv [Jewish community in Palestine]

A mass expulsion of the Jews of Jerusalem, although ordered twice by Djemal Pasha, was averted only through the efforts of [the Ottoman Turks World War I allies] the German government which sought to avoid international condemnation. The 8000 Jews of Jaffa, however, were expelled quite brutally, a cruel fate the Arab Muslims and the Christians of the city did not share. Moreover, these deportations took place months before the small pro-British Nili spy ring of Zionist Jews was discovered by the Turks in October, 1917, and its leading figures killed. A report by United States Consul Garrels (in Alexandria, Egypt) describing the Jaffa deportation of early April 1917 (published in the June 3, 1917 New York Times), included details of the Jews plight, and this ominous warning:

The same fate awaits all Jews in Palestine. Djemal Pasha is too cunning to order cold-blooded massacres. His method is to drive the population to starvation and to death by thirst, epidemics, etc, which according to himself, are merely calamities sent by God.

Yair Auron cites a very tenable hypothesis put forth at that time in a journal of the British Zionist movement as to why the looming slaughter of the Jews of Palestine did not occur-the advance of the British army (from immediately adjacent Egypt) and its potential willingness "..to hold the military and Turkish authorities directly responsible for a policy of slaughter and destruction of the Jews"-may have averted this disaster.

On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the "Mandate for Palestine," confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine-anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Congressional Record contains a statement of support from New York Rep. Walter Chandler which includes an observation, about "Turkish and Arab agitators... preaching a kind of holy war [jihad] against...the Jews" of Palestine. Earlier, in 1921, leaders of the Indian Khilafat (Caliphate) movement made clear at conferences held in (far removed) India that Islamic suzerainty must prevail over all of historical Palestine. And in 1920, at the local level, within British controlled Palestine, Musa Kazem el-Husseini, former governor of Jaffa during the final years of Ottoman rule, and president of the Arab (primarily Muslim) Palestinian Congress, in a letter to the British High Commissioner, Herbert Samuels, demanded restoration of the Shari'a-which had only been fully abrogated two years earlier when Britain ended four centuries of Ottoman Muslim rule of Palestine-stating that this Religious Law, was "... engraved in the very hearts of the Arabs and has been assimilated in their customs and that has been applied ...in the modern [Arab] states..." During this same era within Palestine, a strong Arab Muslim irredentist current -epitomized by both Hajj Amin el-Husseini and shortly afterward, Izz ad din al-Qassam-promulgated the forcible restoration of Shari'a-mandated dhimmitude via jihad. Indeed, two years before he orchestrated the murderous anti-Jewish riots of 1920, i.e., in 1918-ten years before the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood-Hajj Amin el-Husseini stated plainly to a Jewish co-worker (at the Jerusalem Governorate), I.A. Abbady, "This was and will remain an Arab land...the Zionists will be massacred to the last man...Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country."

Nazi academic and propagandist of extermination Johannes von Leers' writings and personal career trajectory-as a favored contributor in Goebbel's propaganda ministry, to his eventual adoption of Islam (as Omar Amin von Leers) while working as an anti-Western, and antisemitic/anti-Zionist propagandist under Nasser's regime from the mid-1950s, until his death in 1965-epitomizes this convergence of jihad, Islamic antisemitism, and racist, Nazi antisemitism, as described by Bat Ye'or, in 1974. Already in essays published during 1938 and 1942, the first dating back almost two decades before his formal conversion to Islam while in Egypt, von Leers produced analyses focused primarily on Muhammad's interactions with the Jews of Medina. These essays reveal his pious reverence for Islam and its prophet, and a thorough understanding of the sacralized Islamic sources for this narrative, i.e., the Koran, hadith, and sira, which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim apologetics.

Citing (or referring to) the relevant foundational text sources (i.e., Koran 13:36; 8:55-58; 59:1-15; the sira and canonical hadith descriptions of the fate of individual Jews such as Abu Afak and Ka'b ibn Ashraf, and the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayzah, as well as the Jews of the Khaybar oasis), von Leers in his 1942 essay "Judiasm and Islam as Opposites,"-fully translated and annotated for the first time in English in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism-chronicles Muhammad's successful campaigns which vanquished these Jews, killing and dispersing them, "...or at most allow[ing] them to remain in certain places if they paid a poll tax." Von Leers further describes the accounts (from the hadith, and more elaborately, the sira) of Muhammad's poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess, and also notes the canonical hadith which records Caliph Umar's rationale for his putative expulsion from northern Arabia of those remaining Jews who survived Muhammad's earlier campaigns:

On his deathbed Mohammed is supposed to have said: "There must not be two religions in Arabia." One of his successors, the caliph Omar, resolutely drove the Jews out of Arabia.

And von Leers even invokes the apocalyptic canonical hadith which 46 years later became the keystone of Hamas' 1988 charter sanctioning a jihad genocide against the Jewish State of Israel:

Ibn Huraira even communicates to us the following assertion of the great man of God: "Judgment Day will come only when the Moslems have inflicted an annihilating defeat on the Jews, when every stone and every tree behind which a Jew has hidden says to believers: ‘Behind me stands a Jew, smite him.'"

Von Leers' 1942 essay concludes by simultaneously extolling the "model" of oppression the Jews experienced under Islamic suzerainty, and the nobility of Muhammad, Islam, and the contemporary Muslims of the World War II era, foreshadowing his own conversion to Islam just over a decade later:

They [the Jews] were subjected to a very restrictive and oppressive special regulation that completely crippled Jewish activities. All reporters of the time when the Islamic lands still completely obeyed their own laws agree that the Jews were particularly despised...

Mohammed's opposition to the Jews undoubtedly had an effect-oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed by Islam. Its back was broken. Oriental Jewry has played almost no role in Judaism's massive rise to power over the last two centuries. Scorned, the Jews vegetated in the dirty alleys of the mellah, and were subject to a special regulation that did not allow them to profiteer, as they did in Europe, or even to receive stolen goods, but instead kept them fearful and under pressure. Had the rest of the world adopted a similar method, today we would have no Jewish question-and here we must absolutely note that there were also Islamic rulers, among them especially the Spanish caliphs of the House of Muawiyah, who did not adhere to Islam's traditional hostility to Jews-to their own disadvantage. However, as a religion Islam has performed the immortal service of preventing the Jews from carrying out their threatened conquest of Arabia and of defeating the dreadful doctrine of Jehovah through a pure faith that opened the way to higher culture for many peoples and gave them an education and humane training, so that still today a Moslem who takes his religion seriously is one of the most worthy phenomena in this world in turmoil.

And even earlier, in a 1938 essay, von Leers further sympathized with, "the leading role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem [Hajj Amin el-Husseini] in the Arabians' battles against the Jewish invasion in Palestine." Von Leers observes that to the pious Muslim, "...the Jew is an enemy, not simply an ‘unbeliever' who might perhaps be converted or, despite the fact that he does not belong to Islam, might still be a person of some estimation. Rather, the Jew is the predestined opponent of the Muslim, one who desired to bring down the work of the Prophet." Leers' description of the origins of the Muslim "forename," Omar Amin he adopted as part of his formal conversion to Islam in a November, 1957 letter to American Nazi H. Keith Thompson, highlights his personal and doctrinal connections to the Mufti, with whom he engaged in a longstanding collaboration:

I myself have embraced Islam and accepted the new forename Omar Amin, Omar according to the great Caliph Omar who was a grim enemy of the Jews, Amin in honor of my friend Hadj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti.

This October 1957 US intelligence report on von Leers' writings and activities for Egypt and the Arab League confirmed his complete adoption of the triumphalist Muslim worldview, desirous of nothing less than the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization by jihad-a vision all too prevalent today:

He [Dr. Omar Amin von Leers] is becoming more and more a religious zealot, even to the extent of advocating an expansion of Islam in Europe in order to bring about stronger unity through a common religion. This expansion he believes can come not only from contact with the Arabs in the Near East and Africa but with Islamic elements in the USSR. The results he envisions as the formation of a political bloc against which neither East nor West could prevail.

The hypothesis that Nazism, as imbibed and promulgated by the Muslim Brotherhood is somehow the penultimate source of all "genocidal" Jew hatred in the modern Middle East, is completely untenable, as revealed in this simple exchange. I posed the following basic question to one of the champions of this Nazi-centric viewpoint, and recorded their reply:

[Question] "...what would have happened, say in late 1922-the Muslim Brothers were not formed until 1928; the Nazis do not come to power until 1933-with regard to Islamic jihad and Islamic Jew hatred, specifically, if the British had created some rump state Jewish homeland, actually governed by Jews, and rapidly departed, bearing in mind both the fate of other dhimmi nationalisms in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Serb, Greek, Bulgarian, Armenian), and the special place occupied by dhimmi Jews in Islamic eschatology?"

[Reply] "Yes. They [the Jews] would have been slaughtered, possibly to the last man, woman and child."

The rise of Jewish nationalism-Zionism-posed a predictable, if completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order-jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude for Jews-of apocalyptic magnitude.

This is exactly the Islamic context in which the widespread, "resurgent" use of Jew annihilationist apocalyptic motifs-exemplified by the Hamas charter, the utterances by Hamas cleric al-Zarad, and the messianic beliefs of Ahmadinejad-would be an anticipated, even commonplace occurrence. The Shi'ite jihadist organization Hezbollah, not surprisingly, proclaims these sentiments with triumphant exuberance. Hezbollah is viscerally opposed to Judaism and the existence of Israel, stressing the eternal conflict between the Jews and Islam. Eradicating Israel represents an early stage of Hezballah's Pan-Islamic ambitions, and its jihad against the rest of the non-Muslim world.

The most senior clerical authority for Hezbollah, Husayn Fadlalah has stated, "We find in the Koran that the Jews are the most aggressive towards the Muslims...because of their aggressive resistance to the unity of the faith." Fadlallah repeatedly refers to anti-Jewish archetypes in the Koran, hadith, and sira: the corrupt, treacherous and aggressive nature of the Jews; their reputation as killers of prophets, who spread corruption on earth; and the notion that the Jews engaged in conspiratorial efforts against the Muslim prophet. Fadlallah argues, ultimately, "Either we destroy Israel or Israel destroys us."

Muhammad. Hassan Nasrallah, current Secretary General of Hezbollah, and a protége of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presently Iran's highest ranking political and religious authority (i.e., its "Guardian Jurisprudent"), has reiterated these antisemitic and annihilationist views with particular vehemence. Invoking motifs from Islam's foundational texts, Nasrallah has characterized Jews as the "grandsons of apes and pigs," and as "Allah's most cowardly and greedy creatures." He elaborates these themes into an annihilationist animus against all Jews, not merely Israelis.

Anyone who reads the Koran and the holy writings of the monotheistic religions sees what they did to the prophets, and what acts of madness and slaughter the Jews carried out throughout history...

Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them, of peace with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment...There is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.

If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli...[I]f they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.

Unfortunately, the orthodox Islamic archetypes of Jew hatred promulgated by Hamas and Hezbollah, are also being disseminated by the most respected, mainstream Islamic institutions. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page treatise rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra'il fi al-Qur'an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in 1968/69, and then re-issued in 1986:

[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/ 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness...only a minority of the Jews keep their word....[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims {Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not.

Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, "carefully researched" views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope-the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents some 90% of the world's Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on "dialogue" (January 1998) with Jews, the Jews as "enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs" (April 2002), and the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews (April 2002) make clear.

Tantawi's statements on dialogue, which were issued shortly after he met with the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Israel Meir Lau, in Cairo, on December 15, 1997, provided him another opportunity to re-affirm his ongoing commitment to the views expressed about Jews in his Ph.D. thesis:

...anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah's book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews...[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation. [i.e., Jews in the Koran and the Traditions, cited above]

Al-Azhar Grand Imam Tantawi's case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, "normative" Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world. Arnon Groiss' thorough examination of modern Egyptian school textbooks, published in April 2004, reveals that that this sacralized hatred continues to be inculcated among future generations of Egyptian Muslims. Groiss observed, regarding the critical depiction of Muhammad's interactions with the Jews of Arabia,

The Jews are stereotyped and presented in a prejudiced manner, and the themes of treachery and hostility on the part of the Jews toward the Muslims are present here...

Once again, in this context Koran 5:82 ("Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews.." is invoked to remind these students, what "God Almighty says about the Jews' hatred toward the Muslims."

And a 3-month long NY Daily News investigation of textbooks widely used in New York city area Islamic schools published March 30, 2003, demonstrated that the same Antisemitic archetypes-based on central motifs in the Koran, hadith, and sira-are being taught to American Muslim students. The report provided these examples:

In Long Island City, Queens, for example, fifth- and sixth-graders at the Ideal Islamic School on 12th St. learn that Allah has revealed [pace Koran 2:61/3:112] that "the Jews killed their own prophets and disobeyed Allah."...Yet a third book, in use at the Ideal school, describes the hostile relations between Jews and the [Muslim prophet] Muhammad in Medina in the 7th century. "The reasons for Jewish hostility lies in their general characteristics," the book says. Numerous Koranic citations follow with negative references to Jews - for example, "You will ever find them deceitful, except for a few of them." [3:71; 4:46]

On Jewish hostility to Islam: "The reasons for Jewish hostility toward the Muslims of 7th century Medina lies in their general characteristics described in the Koran." Example: "You will find the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews and the pagans." [Koran 5:82; from a textbook "The Messenger of Allah," p. 34; targeting Grades 6-9]

Finally a review of textbooks from the Islamic Saudi Academy of Fairfax, VA published in October 2007 by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, concluded, according to commissioner Nina Shea, that they contain "...blatant Antisemitism, blaming the Jews even for divisions within Islam.." The latter charge is an allegation made continuously for over a millennium since the earliest Sunni historiographies (for example by al-Tabari, d. 923) that a renegade Yemenite Jew, Abdallah b. Saba, is responsible-identified as a Jew-for promoting the Shi'ite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam's "political innocence," culminating in the assassination of the third Rightly Guided Caliph Uthman, and the bitter, lasting legacy of Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian strife.

When questioned for the March, 30 2003 NY Daily News story on New York area Islamic school textbooks, Yahiya Emerick, head of a Queens-based nonprofit curriculum development project for the Islamic Foundation of North America, defended the language in these books, denying they were inflammatory. Emerick opined,

Islam, like any belief system, believes its program is better than others. I don't feel embarrassed to say that...[The books] are directed to kids in a Muslim educational environment. They must learn and appreciate there are differences between what they have and what other religions teach. It's telling kids that we have our own tradition.

Emerick's triumphant denial at once affirms standard Islamic theological supremacism, while deliberately ignoring Islam's intrinsic, virulent Antisemitism-the latter denial being pathognomonic of the mindset of its Jewish victims, past and present.

The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines and history is required in order to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam. Even if all non-Muslim Judeophobic themes were to disappear miraculously overnight from the Islamic world, the living legacy of anti-Jewish hatred, and violence rooted in Islam's sacred texts-Koran, hadith, and sira-would remain intact. The assessment and understanding of Islamic antisemitism must begin with an unapologetic analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs contained in these foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer view Muslim Jew hatred-including annihilationist strains of this apocalyptic hatred-as a "borrowed phenomenon," seen primarily, let alone exclusively, through the prism of Nazism and the Holocaust, the tragic legacy of Judeophobic Christian traditions, or "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" from Czarist Russia.

Moreover, the jihad against the Jews is but one aspect-albeit primal-of the jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony.

Concluding Remarks

When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death in February 2006, his Muslim torturers, as Nidra Poller wrote in the Wall Street Journal "...phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background." In the heart of Western Europe, Ilan Halimi's torturers/murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran.

And Halimi's murder reflects this broader, ugly context: European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, Franco Frattini, who is the European Union official responsible "for combating racism and Antisemitism in Europe," as reported by The Jerusalem Post February 2 of this year, revealed that Muslims are responsible for fully half (50%) of the documented Antisemitic incidents on the European continent. Demographic data from 2007 indicate that the total number of Europeans is 494.8 million; estimates of the number of Muslims in Europe range from 15-20 million, or some ~3.0-4.0% of the total European population. Thus, on a population percentage basis, Muslims in Europe account for roughly 24.0 to 32.3 times the number of Antisemitic incidents as their non-Muslim European counterparts.

As a pre-condition to real dialogue-not its miserable simulacrum-Jews and their leadership-religious, political, and intellectual-must demand a mea culpa from their Muslim counterparts for the sacralized Islamic Jew hatred which is still being taught in Islamic schools, and contributed to Ilan Halimi's death, and countless other similar atrocities across space and time, since the advent of Islam.

Almost 850 years ago, elaborating on the depth of Muslim hatred for the Jews in his era, Maimonides (in ~ 1172 C.E.) made this profound observation regarding the Jewish predilection for denial, a feature that he insists will hasten their destruction.

We have acquiesced, both old and young, to inure ourselves to humiliation...All this notwithstanding, we do not escape this continued maltreatment [by Muslims] which well nigh crushes us. No matter how much we suffer and elect to remain at peace with them, they stir up strife and sedition.

The Jews and their communal leaders like Maimonides living under Islamic rule in the Middle Ages-vanquished by jihad, isolated, and well-nigh defenseless under the repressive system of dhimmitude-can be excused for their submissive denial. There is no such excuse in our era given the existence of an autonomous Jewish State of Israel, and a thriving Western Jewish diaspora, particularly here in the United States, living under the blanket of hard won protections for their religious freedom, physical security, and dignity.

Ehud Olmert's announcement that he would step down from office caught no one by surprise. The drama surrounding the announcement was typical of Olmert, a Prime Minister who has always been much more style than substance.

Israel treats its politicians harshly, even by the cynical standards of the twenty-first century. Almost all leave office under a cloud of disgrace. Where American presidents, even those who left office in disgrace, are generally respected figures in their later lives, even towering figures like Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and David Ben-Gurion, all held in almost idolatrous esteem in the United States, were treated much less ceremoniously in Israel.

On the flipside, disgraced leaders in Israel often have an easier time rehabilitating their image than do leaders in the United States, often even climbing the rungs of party politics to regain positions at the top of government. Such was the case with Ariel Sharon, who rebounded from the debacle of the first Lebanon War in 1982 to regain his position in the Likud Party, eventually becoming its leader and winning the premiership before forming his own party. Ehud Barak suffered the worst defeat of any incumbent Prime Minister ever, yet came back to lead the Labor Party and hold the Defense portfolio. Benjamin Netanyahu left office amid scandal and anger, after being soundly defeated by Barak, yet is currently the leading candidate for Prime Minister in most polls. Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres regained the office after earlier tenures that were widely regarded as failures.

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Sacha Baron Cohen is loose in Israel, and he's creating some confusion over the thin linguistic line between hummus and Hamas. Posing as his character Bruno, a gay Austrian rock star, Cohen has been interviewing unsuspecting Israeli and Palestinian political experts, leaving them flabbergasted by his "confusion" between chick pea paste and the militant political organization. This delicate differentiation has been dealt with before, most notably in West Bank Story, winner of the 2007 Live Action Short Film Oscar, and an official selection of Sundance Festival.

Hungry for more? Check out this video of Adam Sandler discussing the hummus factor in his recent flick, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

Just hours before I arrived on the Israeli side of the Sufa border crossing to Gaza on Monday, the IDF killed three terrorists affiliated with the Islamic Jihad as they were planting a roadside bomb a few hundred meters away. Business was temporarily disrupted while the scene was being secured, but by 10 am things were back to normal. Every day 70-80 trucks carrying freight are transferred from Israel to Gaza through Sufa. As Shlomo Tzaban, the manager of the crossing, briefed the group of journalists that I was with, a steady stream of 18-wheelers making their way to the crossing whirled up clouds of dust. The returning trucks were empty, since the border crossings only serve Palestinian needs: the only things that are exported from Gaza to Israel are rockets and mortars, which you don't need trucks for.

These border crossings are a part of the unnatural umbilical chord that attaches Gaza to Israel. "When people in Gaza turn on a switch, it's our grid; when they turn on a faucet, it's our water," explains IDF Major Mike Vromen. Eighty percent of the population is completely dependent on the humanitarian aid that flows through Israel into Gaza. This is how it works: trucks with goods, funded primarily by USAID, arrive on the Israeli side of the crossing. They are checked by the IDF and then unloaded onto a 200 meter long conveyor belt, which transfers the goods across the border, where they are then reloaded onto Palestinian trucks and distributed to various parts of the Gaza Strip by a confusing array of actors on the ground: WFP, UNRWA, CHF, to name just a few. It is a multi-million dollar industry.

During a Q&A with IDF Colonel Nir Peretz later in the day, I ask what purpose the conveyor belt has. Why not just drive the trucks across the border? The colonel looks at me like I am a total idiot but sticks the knife in gently: "Gaza is run by Hamas, a terrorist organization. Do you know what they would do with our trucks if we just opened the gate and drove right through?" Well, yes, I have a pretty good idea: they would shoot at them and try to blow them up in the same way that they almost daily attack the border crossings. Case in point: the Erez crossing was blown to smithereens on May 22 when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated 4 tons of explosives packed into his truck. So the conveyor belt does make sense, but that is also an instance of what is so disturbing, namely that an Israeli at some point came up with a practical solution of how to continue to transfer goods into Gaza even when the border crossings are constantly being attacked. The image that comes to mind is that scene from Jurassic Park where a T-Rex is being fed a live cow. What would it take for a basic sense of self-preservation to kick in here?

(Above: Scene from the Sufa border crossing; photography by Paul Widen)

Two weeks ago, I spoke with Barack Obama about the Middle East, Zionism, and his favorite Jewish writers. Since my blog is both fair and balanced, I had a lengthy conversation with Senator John McCain earlier this week about many of the same subjects.

The two candidates, who are scheduled to address the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, D.C. early next week, have well-developed thoughts on the Middle East, and their differences are stark. Obama sees the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as one of America’s central challenges in the Middle East; McCain names Islamic extremism as the most formidable challenge. Obama sees Jewish settlements as "not helpful" to peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians; McCain does not offer a critique of the settlements, instead identifying Hamas’ rocket attacks on the Israeli town of Sderot as the most pressing problem. And both men take very different positions on the issue of Philip Roth.

In our conversation, McCain took a vociferously hard line on Iran (and a similarly hard line on Senator Obama’s understanding of the challenge posed by Iran). He accused Iran of not only seeking the destruction of Israel, but of sponsoring terrorist groups – Hamas and Hezbollah – that are bent on the destruction of the United States. And he said that the defense of Israel is a central tenet of American foreign policy. When I asked him why he is so concerned about Iranian threats against Israel, he said – in a statement that will surely placate Jewish voters who are particularly concerned about existential threats facing Israel – “The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust.”

Here is an edited transcript of my talk with McCain:

Jeffrey Goldberg: Is the Zionist cause just, and has it succeeded?

John McCain: I think so. I’m a student of history and anybody who is familiar with the history of the Jewish people and with the Zionist idea can’t help but admire those who established the Jewish homeland. I think it’s remarkable that Zionism has been in the middle of wars and great trials and it has held fast to the ideals of democracy and social justice and human rights. I think that the State of Israel remains under significant threat from terrorist organizations as well as the continued advocacy of the Iranians to wipe Israel off the map.

JG: Do you think the Palestinian cause is just?

JM: In respect to people like Mahmoud Abbas, who want to have a peaceful settlement with the government of Israel, to settle their differences in a peaceful and amicable fashion. If you are talking about Hamas or Hezbollah, which are dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel, then no. It depends on who you’re talking about.

JG: Senator Obama told me that the Arab-Israeli dispute is a “constant sore” that infects our foreign policy. Do you think this is true, and do you think that the Arab-Israeli dispute is central to our challenges in the Middle East?
JM: Well, I certainly would not describe it the way Senator Obama did –

JG: He wasn’t referring to Israel as an “open sore,” he was referring to the conflict.

JM: I don’t think the conflict is a sore. I think it’s a national security challenge. I think it’s important to achieve peace in the Middle East on a broad variety of fronts and I think that if the Israeli-Palestinian issue were decided tomorrow, we would still face the enormous threat of radical Islamic extremism.

I think it’s very vital, don’t get me wrong. That’s why I’ve spent so much time there. The first time I visited Israel was thirty years ago, with Scoop Jackson and other senators, when I was in the Navy. I visited Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust memorial) with Joe Lieberman the last time I was in Israel. So my absolute commitment is to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But the dangers that we face in the Middle East are incredibly severe, in the form of radical Islamic extremists.

JG: Do you think that Israel is better off today than it was eight years ago?

JM: I think Israel, in many respects, is stronger economically, their political process shows progress – when there is corruption, they punish people who are corrupt. The economy is booming, they have a robust democracy, to say the least. Bin Laden has not limited his hatred and desire to destroy the United States to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, though Israel is one of the objects of his jihadist attitude. What you’re trying to do is get me to criticize the Bush Administration.

JG: No, I'm not, what I'm --

JM: Yeah, you are, but I’ll try to answer your question. Because of the rise of Islamic extremism, because of the failure of human rights and democracy in the Middle East, or whether there are a myriad of challenges we face in the Middle East, all of them severe, all of them pose a threat to the existence to the state of Israel, including and especially the Iranians, who have as a national policy the destruction of the state of Israel, something they’ve been dedicated to since before President Bush came to office.

JG: What do you think motivates Iran?

JM: Hatred. I don’t try to divine people’s motives. I look at their actions and what they say. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the state of their emotions. I do know what their nation’s stated purpose is, I do know they continue in the development of nuclear weapons, and I know that they continue to support terrorists who are bent on the destruction of the state of Israel. You’ll have to ask someone who engages in this psycho stuff to talk about their emotions.

JG: Senator Obama has calibrated his views on unconditional negotiations. Do you see any circumstance in which you could negotiate with Iran, or do you believe that it’s leadership is impervious to rational dialogue?

JM: I’m amused by Senator Obama’s dramatic change since he’s gone from a candidate in the primary to a candidate in the general election. I’ve seen him do that on a number of issues that show his naivete and inexperience on national security issues. I believe that the history of the successful conduct of national security policy is that, one, you don’t sit down face-to-face with people who are behave the way they do, who are state sponsors of terrorism.

Senator Obama likes to refer to President Kennedy going to Vienna. Most historians see that as a serious mistake, which encouraged Khrushchev to build the Berlin Wall and to send missiles to Cuba. Another example is Richard Nixon going to China. I’ve forgotten how many visits Henry Kissinger made to China, and how every single word was dictated beforehand. More importantly, he went to China because China was then a counterweight to a greater threat, the Soviet Union. What is a greater threat in the Middle East than Iran today?

Senator Obama is totally lacking in experience, so therefore he makes judgments such as saying he would sit down with someone like Ahmadinejad without comprehending the impact of such a meeting. I know that his naivete and lack of experience is on display when he talks about sitting down opposite Hugo Chavez or Raul Castro or Ahmadinejad.

JG: There’s no rationale for sitting down with Iran?

JM: Yes. I could see a situation hopefully in the future if the Iranians would change the policies that you and I have just talked about, but there would have to be negotiations and discussions and all kinds of things happening before you lend them the prestige of a face-to-face meeting with the President of the United States of America. As you know, our ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has met with the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad on a couple of occasions. Those discussions, according to Ambassador Crocker, have been totally unproductive, because Iran is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, they’re hell-bent on driving us out of Iraq, they’re hell-bent on supporting terrorist organizations, and as serious as anything to American families, they’re sending explosive devices into Iraq that are killing American soldiers.

JG: Tell me how engaged you would be as President in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and give me a couple of names of plausible Middle East envoys.

JM: I would have a hands-on approach. I would be the chief negotiator. I have been there for thirty years. I know the leaders, I know them extremely well. Ehud Barak and I have gone back thirty years. I knew Olmert when he was mayor of Jerusalem. I’ve met many times with Netanyahu. I’ve met with Mahmoud Abbas.

In terms of envoys, there are a large number of people who could be extremely effective, and I apologize for ducking the question, but it would have to be dictated by the state of relations at the time. For example, we know that there were behind-the-scenes conversations Israel was having with Syria. Now it’s broken into the public arena. So it would depend on the state of things. If they were more advanced in talks, which they are not, with Hamas, then you need someone like a mechanic. If it’s someone who needs to lay out a whole framework, it would have to be someone who commands the respect of both sides, someone who has an impact on world opinion.

JG: What is the difference between an American president negotiating with Ahmadinejad and Ehud Olmert negotiating with the Syrians?

JM: You don’t see him sitting down opposite Bashar, do you? (Bashar al-Assad is president of Syria.) I mean, that’s the point here. It was perfectly fine that Ryan Crocker spoke with the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad. The point is you don’t give legitimacy by lending prestige of a face-to-face meeting, with no preconditions.

JG: But Obama has shifted off that position.

JM: Sure, and the next time he sees where he’s wrong, maybe he’ll shift again. The point is is that he doesn’t understand. Look, in the primary, he was unequivocal in his statements. And now he realizes that it’s not a smart thing to say. I didn’t say he wasn’t a smart politician.

JG: Do you think that settlements keep Israel and the Palestinians from making peace?

JM: There’s a list of issues that separate them, from water, to the right of return, to settlements. Look at the Oslo Accords, which basically laid out a roadmap for addressing these major issues. And settlements is one of them, but certainly one of the issues right now is the shelling of Sderot, which I visited. As you know, they’re shelling from across the border. If the United States was being rocketed across one of our borders, that would probably gain prominence as an issue.

JG: Do you believe that Israel will have to go into Gaza in force to deal with the rockets, and if Israel did, would you support it?

JM: It depends on what you mean by force. They’ve responded with air strikes, and identifying Hamas leaders and, you know, quote, responding. Would they respond with massive force? I don’t know. I know from my conversations with them that they are deeply concerned. They’re a democracy. How would an American government, how would American public opinion respond, if there were constant shelling, and kids had fifteen seconds – fifteen seconds – to get into a bomb shelter. I don’t know what the government of Israel is going to do. It somewhat depends on whether these attacks will discontinue or if other things happen. I did get the distinct impression, nothing specific, but I got the impression that the patience of the Israeli government and the people is growing short.

JG: Let’s go back to Iran. Some critics say that America conflates its problem with Iran with Israel’s problem with Iran. Iran is not threatening the extinction of America, it’s threatening the extinction of Israel. Why should America have a military option for dealing with Iran when the threat is mainly directed against Israel?

JM: The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust. That’s a commitment that the United States has made ever since we discovered the horrendous aspects of the Holocaust.

In addition to that, I would respond by saying that I think these terrorist organizations that they sponsor, Hamas and the others, are also bent, at least long-term, on the destruction of the United States of America. That’s why I agree with General Petraeus that Iraq is a central battleground. Because these Shiite militias are sending in these special groups, as they call them, sending weapons in, to remove United States influence and to drive us out of Iraq and thereby achieve their ultimate goals. We’ve heard the rhetoric -- the Great Satan, etc. It’s a nuance, their being committed to the destruction of the State of Israel, and their long-term intentions toward us.

JG: Do you think their intention is the actual destruction of America?

JM: It’s hard for me to say what their intentions are, but the effect – If they were able to drive us out of Iraq, and al Qaeda established a base there, and the Shiite militias erupted and the Iranian influence was expanded, which to my mind is what would happen, then the consequences for American national security would be profound. I don’t know if their intention is to destroy America and what we stand for, but I think the consequences of them succeeding in the destruction of the state of Israel and their continued support for terrorist organizations – all of these would have profound national security consequences.

JG: A question about democratization in the Middle East. Imagine a continuum, Brent Scowcroft on one end, Paul Wolfowitz on the other. Where do you fall on that continuum, five years after the invasion of Iraq?

JM: I think that we’ve got to always balance the realism of a situation with idealism. I’m committed to that fundamental belief that we’re all created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. But there are times when realism has to enter into the equation as well. If you look at Darfur, we don’t want this to go on, but how do we stop it? And what would the consequences of our initial intrusion be? After the initial success, what are the long-term consequences?

I enjoy hearing this debate. There’s no one I love more in the world than Brent Scowcroft. He’s one of the most selfless people I’ve ever seen, never a trace of personal ambition, which is the rarest thing in Washington. But I lean also toward the historic idealism of America. Which means that every situation that confronts us, we have to try to maintain that balance. Have I always been right? No. But I try to learn from the lessons of history.

JG: You bring up an interesting question about the Holocaust, to which you say never again. But do you have an absolute commitment to stop genocide wherever it occurs?

JM: That has to be the fundamental goal, but it has to be tempered by the idea that you have to actually be able to do it, that you can succeed. If you fail in one of these efforts, that encourages others, and increases feelings of isolationism and protectionism in America. It’s hard to convince Americans to send young Americans into harm’s way, as it should be.

JG: It sounds like you’re talking about Iraq.

JM: Well, we haven’t talked about the four years of mishandling this war, which has been devastating, in particular to the families.

JG: A final question: Senator Obama talked about how his life was influenced by Jewish writers, Philip Roth, Leon Uris. How about you?

JM: There’s Elie Wiesel, and Victor Frankl. I think about Frankl all the time. “Man’s Search for Meaning” is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read in my life. And maybe on a little lighter note, “War and Remembrance” and “Winds of War” are my two absolute favorite books. I can tell you that one of my life’s ambitions is to meet Herman Wouk. “War and Remembrance” for me, it’s the whole thing.

Then there’s Joe Lieberman, who lives a life of his religion, and who does it in the most humble way.

JG: Not a big Philip Roth fan?

JM: No, I’m not. Leon Uris I enjoyed. Victor Frankl, that’s important. I read it before my captivity. It made me feel a lot less sorry for myself, my friend. A fundamental difference between my experience and the Holocaust was that the Vietnamese didn’t want us to die. They viewed us as a very valuable asset at the bargaining table. It was the opposite in the Holocaust, because they wanted to exterminate you. Sometimes when I felt sorry for myself, which was very frequently, I thought, “This is nothing compared to what Victor Frankl experienced.”

[Cross-posted from The Atlantic]

Saving The World Is: no sweat. especially in cool kicks like these.You may have heard about No Sweat: A little apparel company aiming to make a big difference in the Middle East. Run by CEO Adam Neiman, No Sweat is more than just 100% union made apparel. In addition to creating sweatshop-free, organic and vegan products, Neiman is dedicated to creating jobs in Palestine. Unlike a lot of clothing manufacturers, No Sweat is upfront about their sources and production sites, such as the Arja Textiles factory in Bethlehem, Palestine. So, why did a Jewish guy from Boston want to source from a textile factory in Palestine? I'll let him tell you in his own words:

"While economic development is no substitute for a diplomatic settlement, no settlement can survive without a sustainable Palestinian economy. So while waiting for a diplomatic resolution, we have created a mechanism for ordinary citizens of
good faith to build goodwill on the ground, and support the peace to come. The concept is simple. When faced with an apparently irresolvable conflict, if there is any one thing all parties agree on, do that one thing and see what happens."

Neiman's optimistic ideals and goals for No Sweat have garnered a lot of positive press over the past couple of years—they've even been the subject of an Al Jazeera profile. That said, No Sweat still needs major funding to pull off this experiment in entrepreneurial diplomacy properly. As Neiman put it, "Hamas has chosen guns. Abbas has bet on butter. If we don't provide Palestinians on the West Bank with butter—good private sector jobs NOW—Hamas and guns will certainly prevail."

You can help No Sweat by voting for them in this month's Ideablob contest, where they're finalists competing for $10,000. You've got until March 31 to vote.

It is getting harder and harder to find leaders in the Kadima-Labor government who are not calling for a massive invasion of Gaza. Here, in this heartbreaking video, is Israeli Interior Minister Meir Shitreet, responding to the latest barrage of Qassam rockets in Sderot. An 8-year-old boy, Oshri Twito, and his 19-year-old bother, Rami, were critically injured. The pair were walking in the street on a Saturday evening (and imagine, if you can bear it, the affection with which an older brother watches over his little brother on a Saturday evening). Oshri lost his leg and is still in intensive care; his big brother’s legs were seriously damaged; their parents are being treated for shock.

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Reason's Michael Young explains why the NIE is almost besides the point in the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict:  

For example, what is the U.S. doing about Iran's alliance with Syria, and their joint patronage of Hamas and Hizbullah? Hamas is dead set on wrecking American efforts to bring about a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and several months ago the movement mounted a successful coup against the Fatah movement in Gaza. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lives in Damascus, is a frequent visitor to Tehran, and although Syria will send sporadic signals that it is displeased with the Islamist group, this is chaff designed to keep alive the illusion that Syria and Iran are on different wavelengths. Nothing will divide Syria from Iran when the relationship brings so many foreign supplicants to Damascus with offers of concessions to President Bashar Assad, if only he would consider abandoning Iran. Assad takes the concessions, offers none of his own, and yet the visitors still keep coming.

We don't hear much about the U.N. investigation into Rafiq Hariri's assassination anymore. And now that Syria has -- in all likelihood -- expanded its 'wet work' in Lebanon to include murdering apolitical military generals, it seems nothing will stop the Alawite regime from attempting a full-scale reconquest of its war-weary neighbor.  Iran's hand in all this is clear: Surround Iraq with terror proxies, and nestle right up to Israel with same.

Moreover, there is no guarantee that the Israelis will not undercut their role as junior intelligence partner to the U.S. and simply go ahead with a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. As Shmuel Rosner reported earlier in the week in Slate, Israel was completely demoralized by the NIE and, as the headline of his piece phrased it, "anxious nations don't compromise." Rosner concludes, however, that the Jewish state will be unable to act on its own without the not-so-tacit approval of the Pentagon:

With U.S. forces deployed all over the region, there are tens of thousands of American soldiers who would be at risk from an Iranian response, were Israel to attack the nuclear installations at Natanz and Arak. And anyway, the Israeli air force would need the U.S. codes that would open the flight path and prevent a collision between friendly forces.

All true. But confronted with the choice between "existential threat" and making things more difficult for overseas American servicemen, I wonder if Tel Aviv wouldn't to jeopardize, at least temporarily, its strongest alliance, even if the consequences turn out to be far worse than those of Suez in 1956. 

My suggestion that Hamas should have been invited to Annapolis triggered all sorts of reactions, from agreement to accusations of being a proto-Islamo-fascist-neo-old-Nazi-appeaser. Thanks to Michael D. Fein for pointing out a key, er, point, which I forgot to make: that we, the west, cannot claim to be supporting or promoting democracy in the Middle East and then ignore the results when we don't like them.

Anyway, it seems that like it or not (and I do), Israel is already talking to influential figures connected to Hamas. At least according to this report in last week's edition of the London-based Jewish Chronicle, which is usually a well-informed newspaper. I reproduce it here in full, as the website is subscription only:

Secret ‘diplomatic' overtures to Hamas

30/11/2007

By Anshel Pfeffer Jerusalem

A diplomatic back-channel is intensifying between Israeli and Muslim religious leaders, including figures identified with Hamas.

The aim of the talks, taking place with the full knowledge of the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships, is to provide a wider consensus at the grassroots for an eventual accord.

While all eyes have been on preparations for this week's Annapolis summit, talks have continued between senior religious figures on both sides.

Israel has insisted on not talking to Hamas politically until it recognises Israel and renounces violence, but politicians are aware of the need to engage with Hamas on some level.

There is also a need to supply some degree of support for a possible peace deal within the Palestinian public, especially among the more Islamist elements. While a dialogue between Jewish and Muslim leaders has been taking place for over a decade, a senior Israeli government source told the JC this week that "it has greatly intensified over the past six months and is of a much serious order than in the past".

The Muslim sources involved confirmed the talks but refused to comment openly.

However, Rabbi Michael Melchior, the senior Israeli participant - a former minister and currently a Labour MK - said: "There are talks at all levels with Muslim leaders, including those who have influence over Hamas.

"We all feel that in the end, the success or failure of the Annapolis summit and subsequent negotiations, is tied to the goodwill of the public on both sides."

Abbas needed to gain support also within Islamist circles, he added. "Also, for many Israelis the fact that there is no consensus within the Palestinian people causes widespread scepticism and we are trying to disprove that."

Rabbi Melchior said that one aim was for a fatwa by senior Islamic clerics to affirm the right of a Jewish state to exist in the region.

Among others, the leadership of Israel's Islamic Movement and representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are involved. Both have close political and religious ties with Hamas. As Sunnis, they also have a joint interest in minimising Iranian-Shia influence in the region.

Rabbi Melchior's hope for a fatwa by Islamic clerics affirming Israel's right to exist as Jewish state seems over- optimistic. This demand for the Arab countries to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, as well as a sovereign state, is a new and not very welcome twist in the tangled Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. The aim should be for a secure Israel to be living in peace and security next to a viable, sovereign and contiguous Palestine. Adding new demands of Arab recognition for Israel's self-definition as a Jewish state only complicates the issue.

Rami G. Khouri, in yesterday's Beirut Daily Star, has an interesting take on this.

Under the headline 'A Jewish Israel needs a healed Palestine" he argues that

One of the most complex and confounding elements that emerged during the run-up to the Annapolis meeting was the demand by several senior Israelis, and its parallel rejection by Palestinian officials, that the Palestinians recognize Israel as "a Jewish state" as a precondition for the start of talks.

There follows some fairly standard anti-Israel arguments:

The issue of the Jewish nature of Israel is so vital for Israelis that it cannot be left totally hanging in the air, rejected outright, or vaguely held out as an undefined goal or prize to be attained after some future negotiations. We in the Arab world cannot be expected to become instant Zionists, proclaiming Israel as a Jewish state, while it continues to offer the Palestinians and other Arabs brutal and long-term occupation, colonization and theft of our lands, Apartheid-like segregation in the Occupied Territories, second-class citizenship inside Israel, the jailing of over 10,000 activists and militants, routine assassinations, and collective punishment of the entire Gaza population by strangulation combined with slowly reducing its supplies of gas and electricity.

Let's put aside for now the rights and wrongs of that paragraph, and instead look ahead at Khouri's rather imaginative and encouraging proposal. The answer, he says, lies in a Bob Dylan song.

As that great American political philosopher Bob Dylan said in one his war protest songs in the 1960s, "I'll let you be in my dream, if you let me be in yours."

In this case, Israeli and Palestinian national narratives must make room for the other, if either wishes to be acknowledged and legitimized. Mutual denial will only get us to where we are today - perpetual warfare, and chronic mutual national rejection.

Israel ultimately must recognize the crimes it and others committed against the Palestinians, and the unstable conditions created by Palestinian national statelessness must be redressed by statehood and a just, negotiated resolution of the refugee issue. Israel, in the same vein, ultimately must be recognized as a state of the Jewish people, as it defines itself, but this can only be formally done as part and consequence of serious negotiations for a comprehensive, permanent peace that resolves fairly the Palestinian national shattering.

Both sides would do well to make these positions crystal clear, so that a Jewish Israel and a reconstituted, healed, wholesome Palestinian state and national community can live normal lives, side-by-side, with equal rights.

I thought this was a remarkable and encouraging article. A columnist in a Lebanese newspaper is arguing for mutual recognition of Israeli and Palestinian narratives and for a Jewish Israel and Palestinian state to live in peace. Call me a hopelessly naive idealist - and I am sure some of you will - but as Mr Zimmerman himself sings: 'The times they are a-changing'.

Adam LeBor has joined one of the great foreign policy fashions of the moment in calling on the United States and Israel to diplomatically "engage" Hamas. He writes that "without Hamas' agreement -- or rather the agreement of part of Hamas's leadership -- no peace agreement will be possible in Israel/Palestine." To his credit, LeBor has located the central question at hand, but to his detriment he doesn't seem to realize the implications of it. That question, as Bernard Lewis put it a few days ago, is the following:

If the issue is about the size of Israel, then we have a straightforward border problem, like Alsace-Lorraine or Texas. That is to say, not easy, but possible to solve in the long run, and to live with in the meantime.

If, on the other hand, the issue is the existence of Israel, then clearly it is insoluble by negotiation. There is no compromise position between existing and not existing, and no conceivable government of Israel is going to negotiate on whether that country should or should not exist.

LeBor, like every engagement fellow-traveler, cannot bring himself to answer the question of whether the conflict is about Israel's borders or its existence, and so LeBor's argument is based on the premise that a "peace agreement" is in the offing, just so long as skillful diplomats can finagle Hamas's consent. LeBor proposes that western diplomats can divide and conquer the organization: "How? By engaging the political realists within the organisation in the political and diplomatic process. By exploiting the growing tensions between the ideologues and pragmatists, that shape every political organisation, even those of radical Islamists who claim a divine mandate."

There is extraordinarily little evidence that such tensions exist, or if they do that they are susceptible to wedge politics. There is an immense paradox to this argument, which simultaneously acknowledges that the isolation of Hamas has begun to create internal division in the organization, but insists that exactly the tactics that are creating such divisions should immediately be ceased. If isolation is grinding the organization down, why stop now? Why not wait another six months, or a year, or however long it takes for Hamas to be truly in internal disarray before attempting diplomacy? In a year's time, wouldn't western diplomats have a great deal more leverage on the organization -- and wouldn't that fact make diplomacy, which the engagers say they prefer, all the most promising?

But I'm not so sanguine on the idea that Hamas is susceptible to internal breakdown, or that that is happening right now. The details that LeBor provides in favor of this view are either incomplete, misleading, or simply laughable. He notes that Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, "has called for dialogue with Fatah," accepting Haniyeh's honesty at face value, and never explaining what such a statement has to do with Hamas agreeing to stop its holy war against Israel. It was just over the summer that Haniyeh's organization led a savage military campaign against Fatah immediately after agreeing, in Mecca, to form a unity government with Fatah. Does LeBor really believe that Haniyeh is a serious adherent to the spirit of dialogue? Or might it be possible that people like Haniyeh advocate diplomacy only when it suits their propaganda purposes, and have no intention of keeping their word?

LeBor offers up Ghazi Hamad as the leader of moderate Hamas because of an internal critique he once wrote about the takeover of Gaza. LeBor didn't mention some other words Hamad said recently: "Israel should be wiped from the face of the Earth. It is an animal state that recognises no human worth. It is a cancer that should be eradicated." The reality of Hamas is that it is thoroughly intolerant of dissent, both within its own organization and in the territory it controls, and operates with an extraordinarily high level of ideological and strategic cohesion.

There is unfortunately not a single example in the history of Hamas in which the organization has permanently moderated its strategy or tactics in response to diplomatic pressure or engagement. LeBor is betting on a fantasy.

Here's another bit of wishful thinking: "For isolation and quarantine is further boosting the radicals, making a long-term solution more unlikely." A comforting thought, but there is really no evidence for this: public opinion polling in Gaza since June shows a significant downward trend in popular support for Hamas. I might also add that the most radical period in Palestinian history came immediately on the heels of the most engagement-heavy period in Palestinian history -- the Madrid and Oslo process and then the second Intifada. The period of 1991-2004 makes a very strong case that excessive western engagement on behalf of the Palestinian cause actually radicalized Palestinian opinion by whetting their appetite for victory.

LeBor continues: "Hamas won the elections not because Palestinians in Ramallah and Nablus are dreaming of a new Caliphate, but because the hideously corrupt and chronically inept Fatah could not deliver." There is perhaps a slight bit of truth to this, but there was another much more significant reason why Hamas was so popular in January, 2006: Israel had disengaged from Gaza five months earlier, and the Palestinian people credited Hamas's "resistance" with having forced the Jews out, and duly rewarded them at the ballot box (and for the record, I supported, and still do, the Gaza disengagement).

There was, by the way, a non-Islamist, anti-corruption Palestinian party running in the 2006 election, the Third Way party of Salam Fayyad (the current PA prime minster) and Hanan Ashrawi. It won -- drum roll, please -- 2.4 percent of the vote. Apologies, friends, but the idea that the Palestinian people voted for Hamas only out of a sense of disgust with corruption is a naive myth, and if we ever wish for the Palestinian electorate to change who it votes for, we cannot make its affection for Islamic imperialism cost-free. In the same way that the citizens of other democracies must live with government they elect, the citizens of Gaza must now live with Hamas. If you believe in Palestinian democracy, you must also believe in holding Palestinians accountable for their electoral choices.

I don't mean in all of this to single out LeBor for criticism. He is articulating a set of views about the conflict that are immensely popular among many westerners, and even among many Israelis. There are a couple of other good reasons for not "engaging" with Hamas, and they are concerned with the wider western effort at encouraging political moderation in the Arab world. The Bush administration, at least before it handed the Israeli-Arab conflict over to the State Department, has been attempting to put its weight behind the idea that radicalism will get the Arabs nowhere -- that it will not cause America to support terrorist grievances; that it will not cause America to pressure Israel for concessions; and that it will not win American diplomatic attention. As part of this strategy, America has chosen to support Arab moderates, such as Mahmoud Abbas, who, while problematic, at least do not today publicly call for Israel's destruction. What will be the lesson for the Arab world if the United States undermines the political salience of the moderates by lavishing attention on the radicals? What will become of our effort to bolster Mahmoud Abbas if we suddenly begin conferring legitimacy on Hamas?

One of the larger, subterranean, problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the West has made Palestine a thoroughly disincentive-free zone, in which there are scarcely few examples in which bad behavior, no matter how depraved, antagonistic, or perfidious, is ever punished. The rocket fire from Gaza that is rained down on Israel on a daily basis could be ceased, for example, if the UN and EU made their lavish aid to Gaza contingent on a cessation of Hamas's attacks. It was thus refreshing, at the height of the last intifada, when the Bush administration finally gave up on Yasser Arafat after the Israeli navy intercepted the Karine A smuggling 50 tons of weapons and explosives to the Palestinian Authority. A clear message was sent: America will not help terrorists. That message must continue to be conveyed, consistently and inflexibly. Inviting Hamas to peace conferences that it openly disdains, that it will only use for propaganda purposes, and that will demonstrate to the Palestinian people that terrorism wins an audience with the American president is no way to make peace.