Here Comes the Sun: harnessing solar power in the desert3-year-old Mohammed Abu-Kaf was was diagnosed at birth with sleep apnea, a life-threatening chronic illness. A resident of the 'recognised' village of Um Bathin, his father Hassan explained that Mohammed requires a special Seapack mask to keep his airways clear when he sleeps. Sounds simple enough, except that his mask must be plugged in to a regular power supply--a necessity made difficult by the fact that many Bedouin villages aren't connected to the national grid.

Filling the void left by a government seemingly unable and unwilling to address the sometimes dire situation that many of the Bedouin population find themselves in, Bustan--an NGO comprised of Jewish and Arab eco-builders, architects, academics, and farmers promoting social and environmental justice in Israel and Palestine--has initiated a project that utilizes solar energy for sick Bedouin children in the Negev. The organization has teamed up with solar designers and manufacturers at Interdan to bring solar-powered electricity to Bedouin villages that aren't connected to the national grid, and which would obtain electricity only by using expensive diesel or gas-powered generators at each family house.

The Abu-Kaf family home is now powered by a large solar panel, which Hassan turns around twice a day to catch the sun's rays.

"Thank you to Bustan for this," says Hassan. "Now my son is a happy and healthy child. He can sleep well at night, and so me and my family can now, too."

Um Bathin, a village of 3,500 residents who can trace their ancestral, semi-nomadic roots across many generations in this area, is one of seven Bedouin communities in the Negev that has been 'recognised' by the government in the past 3 years, but is still awaiting basic services such as electricity and water.

Founded in 1999 by American-Israeli Devorah Brous, and now headed by Bedouin activist Ra'ed Al-Mickawi, Bustan has a mandate to bring sustainable energy solutions to communities, focusing on a fair allocation for all of such resources. Previous projects have included work on a medical clinic made from straw bales in the 'un-recognised' Bedouin village of Wadi Al-Nam, south of the city of Be'erSheva.

Bustan also offers tours of the Negev area, bringing participants directly into the Bedouin villagers' homes and meeting places, and to meetings with the manager of the Ramat Hovav--Israel’s controversial chemical plant and industrial complex-- amongst other local players.

With Bustan's intervention and the involvement of Interdan, more sustainable and environmental solutions are on the horizon for Israel's marginalised communities.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or email.

Title: The Truth About Camp David Author: Clayton Swisher Description: Before Swisher wrote this book in 2004, conventional wisdom dictated that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David negotiations was all Arafat's fault and that Barak was a victim. Swisher, who was at Camp David, interviewed all the players and demonstrates that Barak was as much responsible for the failure as Arafat. Additionally, he shows that the Clinton "peace team" helped doom the Camp David talks by acting, in negotiator Aaron Miller's words, as "Israel's lawyer" not as an honest broker. This book helps Jews get beyond the blame-the-Palestinians game to the realization that peace was almost achieved, and that the reason it wasn't is due to mistakes, blunders and, in Barak's case, the sheer arrogance of the various parties. The book also helps one understand just how Barak evolved from peace negotiator to the hawk he is today. The answer: he hasn't evolved. He is no more skeptical about negotiating with Palestinians today than he was then. Recommended By: M.J. Rosenberg is the Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum (IPF), a position he has held since the spring of 1998. In this position, MJ heads IPF's Washington, D.C. office and writes IPF Friday, a weekly opinion column on the Arab-Israeli conflict which is widely circulated throughout the United States and the Middle East. In addition, MJ has published numerous op-eds, in the national and Jewish press.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or tips.

Previously: Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Recommended by Vanessa Ochs

Our post earlier this week about No Sweat, the sweatshop-free apparel company creating jobs for Palestinians in Bethlehem, set off quite the debate. Whatever your stance on the work Adam Neiman and company are doing, one thing is for certain: A number of their organic, Bethlehem-made T-shirts are must haves. Here are a few of our faves:

Organic Bethlehem Green Menorah Tee, $18: "The Shalom Center of Philadelphia does remarkable interfaith work with an integrated approach to the issues of peace, justice and environmental responsibility. Their new green menorah covenant campaign is focused on climate change. It's an especially good fit on our Palestinian produced organic t-shirts from Bethlehem, West Bank. $4 per t-shirt goes to support the Shalom Center's climate change campaign."

Organic Bethlehem Vision in Action Tee, $18: "There’s only one symbol in the holy land that’s embraced by Jews, Christians & Muslims & this is it, the eye of Fatima (or Miriam), encircled by a Japanese proverb that fits the moment to a T: Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. Fatima was Mohammed’s daughter, Miriam, Moses’ sister. It is said that the symbol actually represents the hidden female aspect of the deity and is used as a talisman to ward off the evil eye. For us the placement of the eye in the hand implies vision in action - what we strive to provide every day."

Organic Bethlehem Musicians Against Sweatshops Tee, $20: "Musicians Against Sweat Shops™ official tee is here, and only here! Support this initiative to help wipe sweatshops out of the music merchandising business while raising awareness of the issue. $5 on every T goes to MASS."

Previous: Alternative Jewish Grooves for Passover

Of the many strange things George W. Bush has said while president, here is one of the strangest: “I couldn’t imagine someone like Osama Bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah.”

Shrub must have figured this sound bite was a slam-dunk. He was wrong. Osama Bin Laden may be the person on the planet most attuned to the joys of Hanukkah. As it turns out, the traditional Hanukkah spiel about the oil-that-was-only-supposed-to-last-for-one-day-but-lo-and-behold-it-lasted-for-eight-wowza is mostly Talmudic PR. Contrary to popular myth, the holiday arose from the exact struggle Bin Laden is waging today: an armed rebellion against an imperial power, driven by religious fanaticism and suicidal self-assertion.

The genesis of Hanukkah resides in the Books of Maccabee. You can be forgiven if you have not read these books--they never made it in to the Biblical canon.*

I only read them, in fact, because my wife is converting to Judaism and I wanted to be able to provide her a full accounting of the festival. Weirdly, I happened to have the New American Bible at home, a Catholic version of scripture that includes both books.

History repeats itself: Insurgents in action 1 Maccabees opens with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. The Hannukah story begins around 175 BC, when Antiochus, leader of the occupying Seleucid dynasty,issues a decree forcing the Jews to profane their Covenant: “Women who had had their children circumcised were put to death, in keeping with the decree, with the babies hung from their necks.” The high priest Mattathias kills a Seleucid official, then retreats to the desert to launch a revolt, which under the direction of his sons Judah, Jonathan, and Simon becomes a guerilla war. There’s another word for all this, of course: insurgency.

Judah Maccabee leads the Jews to numerous improbable victories on his way to reclaiming the Temple in Jerusalem, “destroying the impious” (here defined as any Jews less pious than themselves) along the way. Up north, Judah squares off against Antiochus IV’s son, the unfortunately named Eupator, whose army includes armored elephants, the Old Testament equivalent of tanks.

The account of a Maccabee soldier named Eleazer made me queasy:

Eleazar, called Avaran, saw one of the beasts bigger than any of the others and covered with royal armor, and he thought the king must be on it. So he gave up his life to save his people and win an everlasting name for himself. He dashed up to it in the middle of the phalanx, killing men right and left, so that they fell back from him on both sides. He ran right under the elephant and stabbed it in the belly, killing it. The beast fell to the ground on top of him and he died there. (6:43)

Eleazer sounds to me like a Biblical version of the suicide bombers who launch themselves at military convoys in Iraq. He isn’t trying to kill and maim innocent bystanders, so it’s not an exact comparison, but his mindset is essentially the same: He relishes the chance to give his life in exchange for the glory of the cause, and his own name.

I got the same queasy feeling when I read about Judah decapitating the vanquished general Nicanor and putting his head on display in Jerusalem. This might have been how you asserted your might 2000 years ago. But isn’t the gesture really just an old school version of the decapitation videos Al Qaeda uses today to horrify its Western foes?

Judah himself eventually dies, but his brothers Jonathan and Simon carry on the insurgency. Their methods could hardly seem more familiar:

They watched and suddenly saw a noisy crowd with baggage; the bridegroom and his friends and kinsmen had come out to meet the bride’s party with tambourines and musicians and much equipment. The Jews rose up against them from their ambush and killed them. Many fell wounded and after the survivors fled toward the mountain, all their spoils were taken. Thus the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of music into lamentation.

Again, from where I’m sitting this sounds a lot like, well, terrorism. It calls to mind the horrifying images of the 2005 attack at a Jordanian hotel, when members of al Qaida turned a wedding party into a bloodbath.

Miniature imperialists: This is roughly what a battalion of Seleucid troop looked likeIt gets worse.

Jonathan then cuts a deal to send 3000 of his soldiers -- let’s not call them foreign-born terrorists – to help the despot Demetrius put down a rebellion by his troops in Antioch. The Jewish mercenaries kill 100,000 people.

Obviously the Maccabees were in a tight spot, surrounded by hostile enemies and forced to defend themselves in mortal combat. What’s striking is the righteous lust with which they carry out this defense. Because they believe in the one true God, they have no problem with killing innocent civilians, killing other Jews, and killing themselves.

Radical Islam, meet radical Judaism.

I hoped the second book would be a softer ride, one that might tease out the less martial aspects of Hanukkah. Wrong.

2 Maccabees recounts the victories of Judah, only this time the Almighty plays a much more significant role in the combat. Indeed, if the message of the first book was that Jews kick serious ass when inspired by God, the message of the second is that the Jews kick ass because God actively intervenes on their behalf

In one particularly hallucinogenic episode, God helps his people by conjuring a “manifestation” straight from the pages of the Book of Revelation: he takes the form of a “richly caparisoned horse, mounted by a dreadful rider” who attacks one of Judah’s antagonists. Elsewhere, Judah reminds his troops that the Almighty will vouchsafe their victory. The rebels cut down “at least 35,000” of the enemy and “rejoice greatly over this manifestation of God’s power.”

The second book also places a disturbing emphasis on martyrdom. The most famous example is the story of a Jewish mother and her seven sons who refuse Antiochus’s order that they eat pork. The story illustrates the cruelty of the Seleucid soldiers, but its real emphasis is on dying for a cause:

At that, the king gave orders to have pans and cauldrons heated … He commanded his executioners to cut out the tongue of the one who had spoken for the others, to scalp him and cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of his brothers and his mother looked on. When he was completely maimed but still breathing, the king ordered them to carry him to the fire and fry him. As a cloud of smoke spread form the pan, the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die bravely…

Which they do.

I am going to resist using this story to suggest that torture doesn’t really work, because I think it speaks to a broader pathology—the mindset that exalts a noble death above all other human courses.

The other oil miracle of the Hanukkah story: Drilling for petroleum One other passage in 2 Maccabees is nothing short of eerie. It’s the retelling of a story about Nehemiah, the leader who had helped rebuild the Temple wall after the Babylonian Exile. During the exile, the priests took some of the sacred fire of the Temple altar and hid it in the hollow below a dry cistern. Hoping to rekindle the altar flame, Nehemiah sends the priests to retrieve the hidden fire, but they come back with a thick liquid instead. “And when the materials for the sacrifices were presented, Nehemiah ordered the priests to sprinkle the liquid on the wood and what was laid upon it.” (7:21) A great fire blazes up and everyone marvels. The King of Persia declares a miracle. The material, whatever it is, comes to be called naphtha – which, translated from Greek, means “petroleum.”

I wish I were making this stuff up. But it’s really and truly in the book. Twenty two hundred years ago, with insurgents and imperialists doing battle in the Middle East, people were agog over the miracle of petroleum.

In recent years, Jews have made an understandable decision to steer people away from the violence in Hanukkah’s exegetical basement. As an assimilated and not-very-observant Jew, I grew up hearing almost exclusively about the miracle of the oil.

The only thing I knew about the Maccabees was that they were heroic defenders of the faith who had something to do with the Jewish Olympics. The modern holiday has been recast as a cheery Festival of Lights, a counterpart to the bright tinsel of Christmas. It’s the same impulse that leads Christians to repackage Easter as a vista of bunnies and candy eggs, rather than the commemoration of a brutal public murder.

But this kind of soft-pedaling distorts our history and distracts us from the true meaning of our holidays. Hanukkah really is about a violent insurgency. It’s about the lengths to which the oppressed will go to defend their beliefs. But it’s also about a strain of unchecked aggression that infects those who are convinced that God is on their side. It’s precisely the sort of holiday story, in other words, that might force us to confront the moral crises of our present historical circumstance – before we go the way of the Maccabees, or their imperial enemies.

* * *

RELATED LINKS:

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens agrees that Hanukkah is predicated on some less-than-enlightened principles. Being Christopher Hitchens, he also calls Judaism "an ancient and cruel faith" and suggests that Hanukkah violates the first amendment; hilariously, Slate illustrated this rant with a picture of an adorable Jewish child lighting the menorah.

In the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Danya Ruttenberg takes a more positive approach, looking for the good in a holiday that celebrates Jew-on-Jew civil war.

Correction, December 14: The original piece mistakenly stated that the Books of Maccabee were removed from the Biblical canon in the third century. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Hamas, he said Hamas!: Hummus, he said hummus!I was reminded of last year's Oscar-winning short West Bank Story when I stumbled upon this article today. Amidst the tense discussions at Tuesday's Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, the Israeli diplomat noticed - and relished - the fact that "one member of the Egyptian delegation grabbed a sandwich from the kosher table set up especially for the Israeli side."

What is it about food that can, even in the middle of the world's most difficult peace negotiations, shift our attention from the serious to the comical? Perhaps it's the simple, usually subconscious fact that in the end - after all of the conflicts, accusations, and wars - we're all just people who need to eat.

For those who somehow missed Ari Sandel's hysterical film, it's "a musical comedy about David, an Israeli soldier, and Fatima, a Palestinian fast food cashier - an unlikely couple who fall in love amidst the animosity of their families' dueling falafel stands in the West Bank."

Do yourself a favor and Netflix it.

The leftist origins of neo-conservatism are frequently exaggerated but Joshua Muravchik is one of those neo-cons who really did cut his teeth in the radical left scene before heading rightwards – he was a member of the Young People's Socialist League who has ended up at the American Enterprise Institute. It is perhaps not so surprising then,in his overview of the current state of neo-conservatism, for Commentary Magazine, which is a must-read defence of neo-conservative foreign policy (“the only game in town”), he addresses the old question of revolution from above or below.

Francis Fukuyama has explained his disaffection from neoconservatism on the grounds that, in contrast to his own, “Marxist” approach to democratization, his former friends and allies had behaved like “Leninists.” By this he means to separate his analysis in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) from the policies to which that analysis seminally contributed. In writing about the “end of history,” Fukuyama now says, he was only attempting to discover the historical laws that, sooner or later, would lead all nations to democracy. But just as Lenin took matters into his own hands when he tired of waiting for Marx’s predicted revolution, so had the neoconservatives tried, fatally, to force the pace of democratization.

Muravchik argues against Fukuyama by showing that many of the advanced democracies reached that stage not due to some historically inevitable process but as a result of intervention – sometimes military. “It turns out that we are all “Leninists,” he says. Fascinating though such a discussion is (and who could argue with the writer’s point?) it is disappointing that Muravchik does not go further into this analogy and address what is surely the fundamental question facing both neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists in the wake of the Iraq disaster, namely what if interventions in favour of democracy in the Middle East end up producing something even worse than the status quo?

Continue reading...

Someone responding to Josh's post about the Hezbollah-loving hottie asked if he (Josh) had ever been to the Middle East. Josh said no, and then came this:

crazy, fascinating place.

crazy, fascinating place. you need to go someday, spending time there day may add an interesting dimension to your thoughts, experience that nuance

"Experience That Nuance" -- can we get that on a t-shirt?

Bonus points for baiting Josh, too. He might have lied and said, "Yeah, I taught English in Tyre for a couple years," to which he'd have been met with stone-cold silence or -- even better -- a terse, "Oh."

Justin Raimondo believes, with emphatic certainty, that "Iran is no threat to Israel, and that there is no danger of Iran dropping nukes on Tel Aviv." Likewise he says that "Iran, with or without nuclear weapons, represents no threat to America." Far be it from me to take Mr. Raimondo seriously when he says such things – his contributions to last week's exchange were studded with so many hateful condemnations, bizarre declarations, and quarter-baked ideas that doing so would require me to empty my brain of everything I've learned about both the Middle East and foreign policy. But these two platitudes do serve as a good jumping-off point for discussing the true nature of the Iranian threat, which is, I believe, why the editors of Jewcy asked me to contribute to this debate.

Iran is indeed a threat to both the United States and to Israel – but the threat does not come in the cartoonish form of Mr. Raimondo's fevered imagination, with Iranian bombers nuking Tel Aviv and Iranian ICBM's rocketing their way toward New York. Those scenarios are red herrings intended to make Raimondo's task of turning America and Israel into the world's leading belligerents much easier.

The actual threat posed by a nuclear Iran involves the manner in which such a development would upset the balance of power in the Middle East, which no doubt for Mr. Raimondo is a boring subject as it does not provide ready opportunities for Israel Lobby hysteria and mushroom cloud fantasies. To understand the consequences of a nuclear Iran, we have to look to the recent history of Middle East power arrangements.

Before the American-Israeli alliance was solidified in the late 1960's and early 1970's, the Middle East -- especially the eastern Mediterranean half of it -- was home to regular warfare. This bloodshed arose from the conviction among the Arab nations that they could destroy Israel, which they tried to do repeatedly: in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Even though some of the Arab countries were allied with the Soviet Union, Israel repulsed the invaders, and in the latter two wars even captured territory from the attacking armies. In doing so Israel created for itself a reputation as the most militarily competent country in its half of the region.

And then, as Martin Kramer explains, "the United States began to look at Israel as a potential strategic ally. Israel appeared to be the strongest, most reliable and most cost-effective bulwark against Soviet penetration of the Middle East. It could defeat any combination of Soviet clients on its own and, in so doing, humiliate the Soviet Union and drive thinking Arabs out of the Soviet camp."

In contrast to the benefits that Israel's victories provided the United States in its maneuverings against the Soviets, the 1973 war did create something of a crisis for America, in the form of the Arab oil embargo. Having suffered a gasoline shortage at home, American strategists decided to attempt to impose peace in the region by showing so much support for Israel that the Arab states would henceforth refuse to challenge it. And this strategy has been a resounding success: Since 1973 there have been no more wars between Israel and Arab countries. This security arrangement even ended up prying Egypt away from the Soviets and into an alliance, later joined by Jordan, with America.

What does all of this have to do with Iran today? It has to do with the Islamic Republic's prospects for success in its endeavor to undermine this American-enforced security architecture. Iran is trying to destabilize the Middle East by creating its own set of alliances and clients that it hopes will rival America's. This is why it funds Hezbollah in Lebanon and now Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories; has cultivated an alliance with Syria that seeks to engulf Lebanon and allow Hezbollah free reign there; and provides weapons, money, and leadership to insurgents in Iraq.

Iran's intentions are clear: it wants America out of the Middle East, so that it can control the Persian Gulf and manipulate the rest of the region through its alliances and proxies. Are these goals going to be easier or harder to accomplish with the benefit of nuclear deterrence? The answer is obvious, and it is the real reason why preventing a nuclear Iran is both in the American and Israeli interest. The short-term stakes, though, are higher for Israel (and Lebanon, for that matter). A nuclear Iran allied with Hezbollah to the north and Hamas and Islamic Jihad to the Southwest and East would dramatically embolden Israel's enemies, suppress foreign investment and tourism in Israel, and over time would cause the economic and psychological attrition of the Jewish state -- with no bombing runs over Tel Aviv necessary.

And so the true disappointment of Israel's war against Hezbollah last summer was its failure to act as a competent American client by dominating the part of the region it is responsible for keeping quiet. The war against Hezbollah was a particularly important conflict for Israel to win, because Hezbollah is more than just another disruptive presence in the Levant -- it is a vanguard force in the Iranian arsenal that is attempting to make American involvement in the region as costly as possible. It is one of the means by which Iran can summon a counterattack should the U.S. or Israel strike its nuclear facilities, and it is the primary asset of the Syrian-Iranian project to co-opt Lebanon, defeat the American-allied nascent democracy there, and bring uncontested Iranian power to Israel's northern border.

In one of his many dumb asides, Raimondo says that people who favor preventing Iran, by force if necessary, from acquiring nuclear weapons "don't have any compunction about throwing the entire region into chaos." This is probably the most wrong-headed of his many ridiculous assertions. Western acquiescence to a nuclear Iran would do perhaps more than anything else to throw the Middle East into chaos. It would shatter the balance of power that has governed the region, however shakily, for nearly forty years. Second-tier powers, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, would be sent scrambling for their own nuclear weapons and new alliances, and the United States would almost certainly be forced from the region. Raise your hand if you're in favor of handing over control of the U.S. economy to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That'll teach me to skip the cover of a print magazine's cover story. Damnable web-version articles! I thought I was getting a fairly straightforward analysis of Western shibboleths and misconceptions about the Middle East in this month's Prospect, that is, until I got to this paragraph:

That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.

A oil-saturated regional economy where the wealth gap is continent-wide; where oligarchs pay off religious radicals to export their only commodities -- violence and misery -- to the West; where illiteracy rates stagger the statistician; where Jew hatred, that reliable bellwether of civilizational decline, is the cultural norm; where a nuclear arsensal is being developed by at least one messianic regime we know of.... Yeah, what's worth paying attention to there?

The War: SucksBack when the Iraq war began, I caught a lot of shit for being a poet against the war. Which shocked me at the time.  But other Jews seemed to feel that although my anti-war position was philosophically understandable, my willingness to go on the record as a member of such an organization was NOT!

I was told (by otherwise progressive intelligent people) that such groups are all (either secretly or not so secretly) anti-Israel groups.  I was told that such groups were only “using” the war in Iraq as a more acceptable way of opposing Israel.  I was told that by siding with anti-American groups I was siding with anti-Israelis.  And that in adding a Jewish name to their ranks I was lending support to the efforts of  Jewish anti-Semites, letting them use me. 

Yeah, well.  That all seemed insane to me.  I figured there are always wingnuts screaming on both sides of any fight.   And you have to follow your own instincts…

Until one day I went down to a demonstration at the anti-war tent-city in downtown Iowa City, and I discovered that there were, in fact, an awful lot of Jewish anti-Israel demonstrators mixed into the population.  And that by right of being Jewish, I was assumed to be “with them”.

I didn’t know how to feel.  The two issues had gotten conflated and confused somehow, and though I wanted to support the war-protesters, and though I do have complicated feelings about certain Israeli policies, I did NOT want to be seen as generally anti-Israel.

Well now I don’t have to be! 

Because now I can be a Jew Against the War!  I’m certainly on board with this (link via Jewschool):

Believing in the wisdom and relevance of the Jewish tradition, we, the undersigned, maintain that the invasion of Iraq was not just and that the continued occupation extends this injustice. It is now common knowledge that the “permission” to prosecute this war was gained under false pretenses by our president, and that the goals of the war were ill-considered, unrealistic, and poorly planned….

…We the undersigned implore our elected officials to act according to the will of the people of this great country and end this war! We ask that Congress set hard and fast limits on the ability of the President to expand this war or to extend it further in a military action against Iran.

This is important to me, the existence of a sane Jewish anti-war response.  Really important.  
I only wish that in 2003, there had been a more mainstream segment of the Jewish community looking critically at the war. Or that I had known about it.