Israel

According to an article over at the Forward, Ms Magazine has refused to run an advertisement (pictured below) that features images of Israel’s top female political leaders, and the American Jewish Congress is pissed off about this.This is Israel: And it makes Ms. Magazine uncomfortable.

The ad was submitted by the American Jewish Congress to Ms. Magazine, and spotlighted photographs of Dorit Beinisch, president of Israel’s Supreme Court; Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, and Dalia Itzik, speaker of the Knesset, over the text, “This is Israel.”

According to the AJCongress, Ms. initially approved the ad but then reversed course, saying that the ad would “set off a firestorm.”

Says AJCongress President Richard Gordon:

“Since there is nothing about the ad itself that is offensive, it is obviously the nationality of the women pictured that the management of Ms. fears their readership would find objectionable. For a publication that holds itself out to be in the forefront of the women’s movement, this is nothing short of disgusting and despicable.”

But according to Ms. Magazine’s executive editor, Kathy Spillar, it's not "the women’s nationality but their party affiliation that was the problem. Two of the featured officials, Itzik and Livni, are both members of the Kadima political party," and thus, Spillar said, "the ad would leave Ms. Magazine open to the charge of political favoritism."

The AJCongress created the ad to highlight the fact that women now occupy leading positions in Israel’s executive, legislative and political branches. In response, a Ms. representative said that “we would love to have an ad from you on women’s empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this,” according to the AJCongress.

But, for me, this is the kicker:

“Not only could the ad be seen as favoring certain political parties within Israel over other parties, but also with its slogan, ‘This is Israel,’ the ad implied that women in Israel hold equal positions of power with men,” she said. “Israel, like every other country, has far to go to reach equality for women.”

Oh, no, god forbid that a feminist magazine recognize the fact that women in Israel have more opportunities than women in surrounding countries. That wouldn't be fair to Saudi Arabia.

Now, I don't think anyone is going to argue that the equality gap between men and women has completely closed in any nation. But it's hard to deny that there are some countries that have done a much better job of narrowing this gap than others. In particular, I can think of many countries in the same region as Israel (i.e., again, Saudi Arabia, where women can't even drive cars) that have done virtually nothing to rectify this situation. In my opinion, the position of women in Israel is one of the best in the world (comparatively), and the fact that women can hold positions of political influence in Israel should be celebrated by a feminist magazine, especially when considered in contrast to other countries in the Middle and Near East.

I don't know that I agree with the political ideologies of all three of these Israeli women, but I do appreciate the fact that they have been given the opportunity, as women, to hold these positions of power, and I think that is something worth celebrating (or, at least, acknowledging). But the only thing worth acknowledging here is the ease with which Ms. Magazine is able to flaunt its own political and ideological biases at the expense of their own cause.

The artistic process is a funny one. Sometimes a playwright begins to write one play and winds up with another. This is a good thing. As Ezra Pound said, “If you know what you’re going to write when you sit down at the typewriter, don’t bother.”

Originally commissioned by Ari Roth, the visionary artistic director of Theater J in Washington D.C., I had set out to reflect on the public reaction to the deaths of Rachel Corrie and Daniel Pearl. Ari and I had pulled our hair out a bit together over the controversy surrounding the cancellation of the New York production of the play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie.” Ari thought it might be interesting to dive into the currents of American Jewish debate surrounding this play and beyond.

Ari wondered if Daniel Pearl’s tragic story was somehow a counter-weight to the controversy over Corrie’s. So I began to research these two very different Americans. I immersed myself in each of their narratives. I won’t go into what I found, here, but I will say that many people, including Daniel Pearl’s father, Judea, found the implications of a comparison between the two figures deeply troubling. There is no moral equivalence, they said, and to imply that there is, is insulting at best. I forged ahead, with great care. Contemplating the implications of moral equivalence, I discovered profound differences and fascinating parallels between the two.

Then I traveled to Israel and to Palestine and began interviewing people who brought their own stories forward. These individuals became powerful voices in my play. Voices that transcend singularity because of their complex and surprising points of view. I was getting beyond American-Jewish issues regarding Israel by hearing from Israelis and Palestinians whose daily lives are affected by the conflict.

Corrie and Pearl had served as emblems for me to explore a question Ari posed: can we be big enough, as a people, to grieve for all who’ve perished in this tragic story? They stayed in the play for several public readings as I made significant rewrites. And while the idea of grieving for the “other” remains a vital theme in the play, the central story outgrew the pairing of these two icons. They became a limiting polarity, the very trap the work seeks to transcend. The play has developed into the story of a man trying to untangle the competing narratives of the current struggle in Israel and Palestine. Amidst tremendous noise, he’s trying to listen to his conscience. A conscience that was forged at a young age in a political awakening at progressive Jewish summer camp.

Some of the material I threw out was good stuff! But I’ll have to leave it for another play.

You can find out about upcoming readings and more information about “A Jerusalem Between Us,” at aarondavidman.wordpress.com.

Israeli Security Fence: Ensuring security or ensuring separation?The plastic surgeon who specializes in breast implants had issues with my play. He intimidated the director of the theatre hosting the reading into canceling! In an email he wrote, “The last thing we want to do is offend the local Jewish community by showing some progressive lefty self-hating Jewish propaganda.” Only after 24 hours of intense lobbying by the artistic director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, who has nurtured the play and was producing the reading, and a letter from me to the artistic director and board of the theatre did reason prevail. The reading was back on.

Art: 1, Thought Police: 0.

In e-mails the surgeon disparaged me, the author and professor who would lead the post-show discussion, and the artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Program. We were either “self-hating Jews,” “anti-Semites,” or just plain ‘ole “ignorant.” The plastic surgeon hadn’t even read or seen the play.

But he did come to the reading.

What were his issues once he saw the play? That while I presented both literary and visual images of the controversial separation barrier that divides the West Bank from Israel, I did not present gruesome images of children killed or injured by suicide bombers that the barrier is there to prevent. During the Q&A, he told me and the rest of the audience in the crowded theatre that, as a plastic surgeon, he’s worked on such victims in Israel and he offered to provide me with x-ray images of ball-bearings, screws and nails embedded inside the skulls of children, to add to the projected images in the play.

I thanked him for his offer. And we heard from a number of other audience members who were not missing such imagery.

Sad to say, while he came to the reading—and I do give him credit for that—the surgeon didn’t hear my play. He didn’t hear the very personal story of an American Jew who loves Israel deeply and fears for her survival. He didn’t hear the story of internal conflict that so many of us share as we try to untangle the competing interests of our allegiance to our tribe and our commitment to social justice. I do respect and honor his efforts to help Israeli victims of terror attacks. But there is no gruesome imagery in the play. None. To present such imagery would be to use violence as pornography. A few years ago I spent a day with a sweet and broken-hearted father of a ten year-old boy who was murdered in a bus bombing in Haifa. He would be as outraged that an x-ray of his son’s remains would be used for someone’s political agenda as he was outraged that Israeli politicians have used funerals of suicide bombing victims to make speeches to bolster support.

That’s the theatre of politics, not political theatre.

For more information on my play, “A Jerusalem Between Us” go to: http://aarondavidman.wordpress.com

Why don't all pogroms boast such nice graphics?Here’s what really happened, in a nutshell:

At the 6th annual Zionist conference in 1903, as Jews in the pale of settlement faced increasing violence and anti-semitic victimization (and the utopian dream of Eretz Yisrael seemed all but unreachable), Theodor Herzl proposed Uganda as a temporary locale for a Jewish State. The Uganda Proposal caused enormous rifts among Zionist leaders and was eventually rejected (on claims of “unpractibility”) by theBritish in 1905.

But what if, in some alternate history, the Uganda Proposal had made it through the Zionist Congress, garnered British approval, and been put into effect?

What if that roughly 15,500 km of virgin land in land-locked east Africa had become a Jewish state? What if, among thetribal herdsman and pygmies and subsistence farmers, alongside the Arab traders and British explorers, where the savannah meets the jungle, came those waves of Russian and European Jews fleeing persecution in search of a place to call home? What might the Jewish state in Uganda look like today?

Gorillas! ...you get the gist.What, in other words, makes a place holy? Is it specific dirt and longitude and latitude? Biblical shout-outs? Is it a “promise” in an old, old book of questionable/mysterious authorship? Or is it spilled blood, sweat, and tears; lives being lived, children born and elderly dying and professionals wrangling and artists creating and politicians fucking up?

On the one hand, the notion of a State of Israel anywhere but in Palestine is almost too strange to indulge. On the other, do we educated liberals really believe a) in a God who parceled out the earth or b) that this God really parceled out a piece of earth especially for one religious group?

From the Ugandan Tourist Board:

Where else but in this impossibly lush country can one observe lions prowling the open plains in the morning and track chimpanzees through the rainforest undergrowth the same afternoon, then the next day navigate tropical channels teeming with hippo and crocs before setting off into the misty mountains to stare deep into the eyes of a mountain gorilla? Certainly, Uganda is the only safari destination whose range of forest primates is as impressive as its selection of plains antelope. And this verdant biodiversity is further attested to by Uganda’s status as by far the smallest of the four African countries whose bird checklist tops the 1,000 mark!

Entebbe’s modern and efficient international airport, with its breathtaking equatorial location on the forested shore of island-strewn Lake Victoria, it is clear that Uganda is no ordinary safari destination. Dominated by an expansive golf course leading down to the lakeshore, and a century-old botanical garden alive with the chatter of acrobatic monkeys and colourful tropical birds, Entebbe itself is the least obviously urban of all comparably sized African towns. Then, just 40km distant, sprawled across seven hills, there is the capital Kampala. The bright modern feel of this bustling, cosmopolitan city reflects the ongoing economic growth and political stability that has characterized Uganda since 1986, and is complemented by the sloping spaciousness and runaway greenery of its garden setting.

Sounds pretty darn great, no? Come on, World Zionist Organization, let’s think retroactively outside the box! Your great-great-grandchildren could’ve been teen-touring and teen-whoring on safari, for goodness sake! Learning about wildlife by day and disco-ing away the night on the shores of Lake Victoria! At the goddamn source of the Nile! And would it be over the top to suggest that perhaps Jews in the Ugandan homeland might've even evolved into better dancers, too?

The source of the Nile: Wo-owThe Haganah certainly would’ve had its hands full with tribal inhabitants -- including the Bantu, the Luo, and the Ateker -- the descendants of whom would surely be susceptible to all manner of religious fanaticism, possibly even resorting to terrorist tactics in frantic attempts to reclaim for themselves some of what they understood to be “their” land. But hey, build some refugee camps and a big old wall and forget about ‘em. Easy enough! (This, dear reader, is what some 21st century earthlings sometimes call “irony”, so chill.)

Things might have gotten a wee bit sticky with our African brethren here in America, though, given the obsessive identification of the American Jewish lobby. Admittedly. And sure, the Jewish state in Uganda would be surrounded entirely by hostile nations, but hey: what else is new?

Ignoring, for the sake of a little fantasy, the reality that there is in fact a contemporary community of approximately 500 Jews currently living in Uganda.

Just imagine it: a Jewish homeland in the “pearl of Africa”. If we can spin it into satire, it is no dream.

It's not life-threatening, though:

“I will be able to function fully before the treatment and a few hours after it,” he said. “I will be fully able to carry out my role.”

Rumors about the state of Mr. Olmert’s health swirled throughout the morning following the unexpected announcement of the news conference, and, according to Israeli radio, the uncertainty had pushed down the Israeli stock market. After the news conference, the market stabilized.

Imagine having a 3% approval rating and still being able to influence the stock market.

Dihydrotestosterone: It causes male-pattern baldness, prostate enlargement, and tough ethnic conservative responses to terrorism.

 

The Zionist Federation has underwritten a tour of England for one Nathan Shaked, "Mr. Gay Israel" and "Mr. Gay International." (This is an even greater accomplishment than it appears: Nathan is a 37 year-old lawyer.) The ZF wanted to emphasize that Israel is a place of tolerance and diversity. All well and good, until of course they rubbed up against orthodox rabbis of England. David T at Harry's Place spins a nice little morality tale, complete with Biblical analogy:

Rabbi Barry Marcus, who holds the Israel brief in the Chief Rabbi’s cabinet, said the “absolutely repugnant” move is a case of “an organisation that should embrace everybody alienating a large section of the community”. He predicted, and said he favoured, a boycott by the religious community of the ZF.

Rabbi Marcus said that he does not object to gay individuals taking a role in communal life, but does oppose the use of mainstream communal organisations to present favourably a lifestyle which, he says, contravenes Jewish law.

The ZF “by association, has supported something that can not be justified [religiously] and, by giving it a platform, makes it look kosher and acceptable”.

He said: “I would not have anything to do with them, and would not be prepared to host another event of theirs or display their posters, and many of my colleagues will feel the same.

“The ZF has weakened any future plans it may have with the mainstream community. The US and Orthodox Jewry will not want to be seen as partners to anything they do.”

Mr Eugenides emails in the following announcement:

Daniel Lubetzky, President of the PeaceWorks Foundation that helped conceive the OneVoice Movement, added "We are very heartened by the steadfast support of all the dignitaries and celebrities, like Bryan Adams, who committed to stay on board and join us as soon as we can re-group to fulfill our vision—for him to perform both in Israel and Palestine. This was a setback for 600,000 moderates. But our work will not cease till we achieve our mission of breaking the shackles of extremism and seizing back the agenda for moderates to live in peace."
 
In the meantime, as a response to the postponement, the group has already aligned a partnership with Yahoo! to highlight the power of the people. "We invite people across the world to join us on October 18, 2007 at 7pm Jerusalem time (1pm EST) at video.yahoo.com/onevoice to experience something they have not seen before," said Lubetzky.

For as long as there have been wars, there have been people willing to do the craziest things to bring about peace. The women of Aristophanes’ Athens refused to let their men bone them until they called a ceasefire, a dangerous tactic with all those well-oiled young Greek hoplites around. John and Yoko famously staged a bed-in for peace, with rather less success. (I myself have managed to combine lying in bed with not having any sex for ages now, but seemingly to no avail.)

But in the last few days, PACBI (the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) has found a new way to bring peace closer; by wrecking a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace concert.

One Voice is one of the most dynamic peace-building organizations in Israel and Palestine today. Over 3,000 activists, equal numbers of young Palestinians and Israelis many of whom are students, have been working from Gaza City, Ramallah and Tel Aviv, touring the towns, villages and cities mobilizing citizens to demand conflict resolution through political process. One Voice isn't a dialogue organization and it's not trying to make Israelis and Palestinians love each other. Its approach began as iterative, parallel consensus building which has given 180,000 Israelis and Palestinians the opportunity to vote and comment on the ten most contentious aspects of the conflict - the issues which need to be resolved prior to a lasting peace settlement, and the issues which the elected representatives must keep in mind in order to represent their people. One Voice's work highlighted findings from other surveys that the majority (here 76%) of both Israelis and Palestinians want a two state solution.

One Voice had organized huge peace concerts to take place in Jericho stadium and Hayarkon Park in Tel Aviv this Thursday in advance of November's peace talks. At the satellite-linked events activists, performers and citizens would call on their respective leaders to act 'against violent extremism, occupation and terror'. The event would be free, with signing the One Voice mandate a condition of entry. Steps had been taken to amplify the call and satellite-linked support, or 'echo', events had been scheduled across the world that evening, including one at the Friends Meeting House in London.

These events have now been derailed.

The story is almost painfully predictable to relate. PACBI identified One Voice with suspicion from the very start, because its founding principles – dialogue and negotiation with a view to a two-state solution, supported by nearly 600,000 Israelis, Palestinians and others – are entirely at odds with the tactics employed by PACBI and its various satellite organizations. Hosting a joint peace concert and “People’s Summit” was judged to break the terms of their “Boycott and Divestment Campaign”, and so they began to call on the artists involved, as well as participants on the Palestinian side, to withdraw – including members of the One Voice board like Saeb Erekat and Sheikh Taysir al-Tamimi, the Islamic Chief Justice of Palestine.

In addition, a pressure group called “Another Voice” (cute, huh?) sent out a press release denouncing the concerts as a “celebration of apartheid”. “Like many other diplomatic misadventures” [Oslo?], “the OneVoice campaign overlooks the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and repackages dangerous concessions…” [Yeah, Oslo] “…into an initiative that looks nice on the surface. It is misleading, and many are starting to realize that”. In other words, any body that calls for a negotiated two-state solution is our enemy, and we’re going to bring you down.

Coupled with the public campaign was a series of anonymous, unattributed threats against the One Voice campaign, including threats against performers in the Jericho event and a bomb threat against the group’s HQ in Ramallah. To their credit, many of the performers expressed their determination to take part nonetheless, but the pressure was too great. In the face of continuing intimidation, the Jericho concert was called off late last week, and on Monday, One Voice released a press statement announcing the cancellation of the Tel Aviv event in solidarity. An excerpt:

Fringe groups waged a slanderous campaign to incite threats against OneVoice staff and supporters claiming that a survey OneVoice released five years ago represented a policy document on final status negotiations. […]

A campaign of lies against OneVoice was launched by radical groups, including PFLP, who oppose the goal of Israel and Palestine living side by side. This then evolved into an intimidation campaign against those due to take part in the OneVoice Summit.

Apparently, the irony of threatening to blow up anyone who took part in a peace concert was lost on these scumbags. To the radical fringe groups like the International Solidarity Movement and the PFLP that helped derail this initiative, anything that even smells of “normalization” of the “occupation” is treasonable. So the moderates are, once again, sidelined.

The backers of the One Voice movement are putting a brave face on their disappointment, but ending a 60-year conflict through the power of Bryan Adams was always a big ask anyway. The fact that the concerts can’t even be held in safety suggests that real peace is still some way off.

Perhaps the best that can be said about this shabby affair is that if it opens a few people’s eyes to the reality of what is happening in the Holy Land, One Voice’s efforts will not have been in vain. There are plenty of supporters of the so-called ‘divestment campaign’ who are well intentioned, and honestly believe that boycotting Israel is the only way to help end the conflict. These range from the good and conscientious people who buy Palestinian arts and crafts from church fairs in Britain to the so-called “keffiyeh kinderlach” who think that the progressive look is going to get them laid.

But these people need to realize that there are darker forces at work; they’re in bed, however inadvertently, with people who simply aren’t interested in peace, at least not as we understand the word. The sort of people who see a peace concert as a threat, dialogue as collaboration, and an Israeli and a Palestinian state living together side by side as a second nakba, not belated and imperfect closure to this appalling and bloody mess.

Don't they know that intermarriage will get it done eventually? 

A right-wing Jewish extremist has been disseminating calls for the assassination of leftists and Ashkenazim on Internet sites in Israel and abroad.

One film clip posted on YouTube, for instance, declares: "You are about to view a handful of leftist Ashkenazim that Hitler and Eichmann did not manage to incinerate. Before we begin, please remember: 90 percent of the moderate left are Ashkenazim!! 100 percent of the extreme left are Ashkenazim!!"

You have got to be kidding me.

The [Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs] has presented UNESCO with a draft resolution for the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust and prevention of its denial.

Oh, stuff it.

The historic proposed decision, concerned with preservation of the memory of the Holocaust and prevention of its denial, is part of a campaign conducted for the past three years by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in conjunction with international communities in general and with the United Nations[.]

Why is the ministry of foreign affairs doing this, and why is the UN indulging this juvenile "politics of gesture"? Relations with Iran are exquisitely sensitive at the moment, and as we know, Iran does not recognize the Holocaust. It is foolish and pointless to antagonize Ahmadinejad and the mullahs over something that happened sixty years ago. However regrettable the events of WWII may have been--and make no mistake, they were regrettable--we need to focus on today, and not waste our energies revisiting old tragedies. </satire>

The MFA has managed to harness 70 countries from all continents to the initiative, including one Arab state. Voting on the decision will take place at the 34th session of the UNESCO General Conference, to be held in Paris from 16 October to 3 November 2007.

So voting starts today. I hope everyone votes yea, but only after insisting on a brief amendment stating the obvious: that it is equally imperative to preserve the memory of other genocides, such as the Armenian Genocide, and to prevent their denial.

Meanwhile, in other news, Armenian-Americans continue to plead with Jewish- American organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, as well as with the foreign ministry of Israel, to stop abetting Turkish efforts to destroy the memory of the Armenian Genocide.

Alik Arzoumanian, a granddaughter of survivors of the genocide, delivered this speech to the Massachusetts Human Rights Association last Friday:

------------------------

Continue reading...

Hat tip: Will

I'm sure some of our uncanny commenters will find a way to rain on this parade, but for now, good news:

Israel's highest court ruled on Wednesday that the country's labour laws must apply to thousands of Palestinians who work for Israeli bosses but who were previously subject to discrimination.

Nine supreme court judges accepted a petition from Palestinian workers in the West Bank who linked up with Israel's main Histadrut trade union, after their complaint of discrimination was rejected by the national labour court.

"Applying foreign law on the Palestinian workers as opposed to applying Israeli law on the Israeli workers violates the Palestinian workers' basic rights and subjects them to discrimination," said the supreme court.

There are a host of multi-dimensional links between Kurds and Jews (to say nothing of the many thousands of Kurdish Jews.) It is sometimes claimed that Abraham was Kurdish. Historically, a good number of Kurds felt positively toward Israel and were none too happy with Palestinian support for Saddam. The Kurdish people, being victims of persecution and genocide, looked to Israel as a sort of hopeful model for their own liberation. Furthermore, DNA research shows that Kurds are Jews’ closest genetic relatives. So, perhaps this Kurdish-Jewish romantic comedy was inevitable. From The Seattle Times review of "David & Layla."

Inspired by the real-life marriage between a Kurdish Muslim refugee and a Jewish New Yorker, the movie hits all the requisite plot points, some hopelessly contrived (like a first kiss disguised as the need for CPR) while others earn big, fat, non-Greek belly laughs.

David (David Moscow) is an agnostic Jew who hosts a Brooklyn public-access TV show called "Sex and Happiness," for which he conducts highly personal man-in-the-street interviews. He's got a Jewish fiancée (Callie Thorne) but is truly smitten with Layla (Shiva Rose), a smart, sexy Kurdish refugee for whom marriage is the best defense against imminent deportation

You can pretty much guess the rest. But while writer-director Jay Jonroy (an Iraqi Kurdish exile with a tragic family history under Saddam Hussein's tyranny) fumbles with occasionally forced humor — including a terribly written infidelity scene that's played for slapstick and left unexplained — he's remarkably adept at exploring complex divisions between well-meaning but prejudiced families united by love.

If there is a Hell, I’d have to guess this movie is running on a continuous loop in Saddam’s sulfurous suite.

Apparently the film doesn’t shy away from politics and gets big points for addressing the U.S.’ previous betrayal of the Kurdish people. The movie is being independently released and seems pretty hard to find, but I’ll make sure to see it one way or another. I should add here that I highly recommend the 2004 Kurdish Iranian film “Turtles Can Fly,” in spite of its horrific title. It’s an achingly beautiful movie about the children of a Kurdish refugee camp on the eve of the U.S. attack on Saddam.

One of the fringe benefits of liberation is enjoying the talents of the liberated. With their emerging proficiency in film the Kurds may find they have yet something else in common with Jews.

It's the last Friday of Ramadan and you know what that means: It's Quds Day. Quds is Arabic for Jerusalem.

From Khomeini's original declaration of the holiday in 1979:

Quds Day is the day of Islam; it is the day when Islam should be revived, so let us revive it and implement Islamic laws in the Islamic countries. Quds Day is the day when we must warn all the superpowers that they can no longer keep Islam under their control by means of their evil agents. Quds Day is the day to give life to Islam. The Muslims must awaken, they must come to realise the power they have, the material power and the spiritual. What are the Muslims, who form a population of one billion, enjoy divine support and have Islam and their faith behind them, afraid of? . . . The governments in the world should know that Islam will not be defeated, Islam and the teachings of the Qur’an should prevail in all countries. Religion should be the religion of God and Islam is the religion of God so it should advance on all regions of the world. Quds Day is the day to announce such a matter, the day to announce ‘Muslims, advance!’ Advance on all the regions of the world. Quds Day is not confined to (matters pertaining to) Palestine alone, it is the day of Islam, the day of Islamic government, the day when the flag of an Islamic Republic should be raised in all (Islamic) countries, the day when the superpowers should be made to realise that they can no longer advance on the Islamic countries.

Breitbart reports on festivities in Iran:

 

Tens of thousands of Iranians marched through Tehran on Friday proclaiming solidarity with Palestinians and chanting "Death to Israel" in the Islamic republic's annual protest against the Jewish state.

Iranians of all ages began the march through the centre of the capital to Tehran University to mark Quds Day, calling for Jerusalem and Israel to be handed to the Palestinians.

Coloured bibs were haIrnded out to protestors with the legend "Death to Israel, Death to United States" while "Palestine will only be free with fighting and faith" was the slogan on one banner.

Despite the heavily politicised nature of the demonstration, there was a festive mood with the numerous children present having their faces painted as cats and rabbits in entertainment laid on by the municipality.

Bunnies and kitties, that's sweet.The AFP reports how it went down in Gaza:

Thousands marched in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip Friday, torching the flags of Israel, the United States and Britain in an annual day of protest called by Iran in solidarity with Palestinians.

Demonstrators marched from the town of Beit Lahiya to Jabaliya in the north of the territory where the Islamist Hamas seized power in mid-June.

Urging on the crowd as it burned the flags, Khader Habib, an official with the radical Islamic Jihad group that organised the march, promised to continue resistance against Israeli occupation.

"Israel is a cancerous tumour that has sprouted in the region, but we will continue the jihad and the resistance until Jerusalem is liberated," he said.

Finally, here's some warm and fuzzy Quds-ing in Pakistan, from the Post.

 

Hasan Zaidi, Divisional President, Imamia Students Organisation, told The Post that Al-Quds rallies would disseminate the message of love, peace and unity among the oppressing nations and pay the way for the freedom of Baitul Muqaddas, which was the first Qibla and the most sacred place for the Muslims all over the world.

 

 

 

Hindu-Jewish Leadership SummitYesterday's New York Times ran a story about Indian-Americans finding an activist role model, and sometime partner, in American Jews.

Indians often say they see a version of themselves and what they hope to be in the experience of Jews in American politics: a small minority that has succeeded in combating prejudice and building political clout.

Sanjay Puri, the chairman of the U.S. India Political Action Committee, said: “What the Jewish community has achieved politically is tremendous, and members of Congress definitely pay a lot of attention to issues that are important to them. We will use our own model to get to where we want, but we have used them as a benchmark.”

One instance of Indians following the example of Jews occurred last year when Indian-American groups, including associations of doctors and hotel owners, banded together with political activists to win passage of the United States-India Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Act, which allows New Delhi to buy fuel, reactors and other technology to expand its civilian nuclear program.

I remember when Bush announced the passage of the United States-India Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Act. One of the administration's finer foreign policy moments. An overlooked commitment to global outreach at a time when the U.S. was taking a lot of flack for its supposed unilateralism and cowboy diplomacy.

I think the U.S. relationship with India these days has taken on a similar tint to our relationship with Israel in the following aspect: Its a non-zero-sum game. On the biggest issue of the day The U.S, India, and Israel are up against the same menace. As the Times article goes on to say: "[A]mong Hindus, who are a majority in India and among Indian-Americans here, some assert that a vital bond they share with Jews is the threat to India and Israel from Muslim terrorists."

Although, some Indian-Americans are leery of emphasizing that commonality.

This makes me relatively suspicious, because there is the desire to reduce the complexity of the issues in a conflict,” said Vijay Prashad, professor of South Asian history at Trinity College in Hartford.

The India Community Center in Milpitas, Calif., represents the nonsectarian approach many Indian-Americans take to replicating the experience of American Jews. When Anil Godhwani began talking to other Indians in Silicon Valley about opening a center, “more than one person talked to us about making this a Hindu community center — sometimes in very strong terms,” he said. That was never his intention, though he was raised Hindu.

Indians have worked with The American Jewish Committee on immigration and hate crimes legislation. The American Jewish Committee has also organized group trips to Israel for Indian Americans.

This is a golden opportunity, one that must not be wasted. Jewish Americans and Indian-Americans must join forces and figure out how to conquer that most formidable of our common antagonists: our over-protective mothers.

The American Prospect's Gershom Gorenberg says Hillary's Israel-Palestine position paper is for the birds:

The Israeli consensus that the city must never be divided has broken down. Vice Prime Minister Haim Ramon is reportedly pushing a plan to turn most Arab neighborhoods over to Palestinian rule, even if other members of the ruling Kadima party would rather give up less land in Jerusalem. Your position paper defends a stance that is already spoken of here in past tense, in a tone reserved for the naiveté of youth.

I'd like to believe that what you really mean by "undivided Jerusalem" is what your very closest adviser laid out in his parameters for an Israeli-Palestinian peace at the end of his term as president in January 2001: Jerusalem should be an "open and undivided city" but the capital of two independent states, with Palestinian parts of the city under Palestinian rule. Turning those parameters into reality would require inspired negotiating, with immense American investments of time and prestige, and such investments dried up completely very soon after Bill laid out his vision. As we all know, his successor doesn't do negotiating.

 

If you had to guess at Colbert's position, what would you say it is?

Gary Kasparov is not the only chess prodigy making waves these days. Natan Sharansky has a piece on today’s Wall Street Journal Opinion page about the ongoing legal battle in France over media coverage of the alleged killing of Mohammed al-Dura. Al-Dura was the 12-year-old Palestinian boy seen huddling with his father behind a barrel amid a hail of Israeli bullets in September of 2000. The horrifying footage was (understandably) inescapable around that time and became an iconic media byte, launching anti-Israel rallying cries the world over. It certainly added heat, and blood, to the second intifada.

In a clip released soon after the attacks of September 11, Osama bin Laden said:

In the epitome of his arrogance and the peak of his media campaign in which he boasts of 'enduring freedom,' Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and Iraq. If he has forgotten, then we will not forget, God willing.

But almost immediately after the al-Dura footage aired, the circumstances surrounding the incident were called into question and the legitimacy of the 59-second clip itself became a matter for some contemplation. An inquiry by the IDF concluded that it would have been nearly impossible for al-Dura to have been hit by bullets fired from the Israeli’s positions. For those who doubt the findings of such an interested party, The Atlantic, sighting sources outside of the IDF, ran a fairly exhaustive and thought-provoking breakdown of the evidence. The New Republic, Commentary, and a German documentary also weighed in with similar conclusions.

 

Continue reading...

Today The Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli authorities have started to talk about the September 6 IAF attack on targets in northern Syrian. Up until now Israeli officials had been uncharacteristically mum on the incident, leaving everyone to speculate on the nature and intent of the operation. The Jerusalem Post's round-up:

The Washington Post reported that the target had been a facility involved in a joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear project - a claim backed by former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton.

Britain's Sunday Times, meanwhile, reported just over a week ago that soldiers from the IDF's elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal) had seized North Korean nuclear material from a secret Syrian military installation before it was bombed by IAF jets.

The paper claimed that the IAF attack on September 6 was sanctioned by the US after the Americans were given proof that the material was indeed nuclear-related. It also stated that Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who used to head the unit, personally oversaw the operation.

Someone who claims to have access to Binyamin Netanyahu told me that the strike was essentially a test of Iranian surveillance capability - to see what Iran could catch and how soon. Sounds far fetched, but who knows?

I was shocked from the start that this story wasn't a much bigger deal. It would seem to me that a nuclear nexus of Iran, Syria, and North Korea pretty much defines our worst nightmare. This comes, by the way, two months after a mysterious accident in northern Syria, widely believed to be the result of chemical weapons development, killed both Syrian and Iranian engineers.

What I find most interesting about this is that Victor Davis Hanson said a long a time ago we would start to see Saudi Arabia and Turkey and others in the area give Israel the implicit okay to take out regional threats to stability. Hanson said they'd condemn Israel publicly, but not do a thing about it. I'm not sure I've even seen the public condemnation.

 

So much for that, then. Of course, the boycott never had much of a chance of gaining wide support, and it'll be far more effective to its proponents as a martyred cause.

Email from UCU to UCU members:

Dear colleague,

This is single item update to inform members about today’s decision by the union’s Strategy and Finance Committee

Union told academic boycott of Israel would be illegal

UCU’s Strategy and Finance Committee was unanimous in today agreeing a recommendation from general secretary Sally Hunt that any academic boycott would be illegal to undertake and cannot be implemented.

Following the passing of resolution 30 at Congress, extensive legal advice was sought in order to best protect the union from any legal action.

At today’s meeting, the following legal advice was drawn to SFC’s attention:

"It would be beyond the Union's powers and unlawful for the Union, directly or indirectly to call for or to implement a boycott by the Union and its members of any kind of Israeli universities and other academic institutions; and that the use of Union funds directly or indirectly to further such a boycott would also be unlawful."

His review in TNR will no doubt get a lot of attention (Matt Yglesias, one of Mearsheimer and Walt's defenders, is already mentioning his own Jewish grandparents -- never a good early sign in intellectual combat).

Going on some of the quotes Jeff pulls, I have to say, his critique seems devastating:

They do not deny, though, that "there is anti-Semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist." This is a bizarre and foul passage, its foulness easily clarified by a simple act of substitution. Imagine Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing the following sentence: "We would not deny that there is some racial prejudice among whites, some of it provoked by the misbehavior of African- Americans, and some of it straightforwardly racist."

Or, to go for the more obvious example: "We would not deny that there is some racial prejudice among Israelis, some of it provoked by Palestinian behavior, and some of it straightforwardly racist." A sentence like that would be a scandal in all the usual places, wouldn't it?

M/W's blunder here comes at the expense of a topic they're most tetchy about: the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The above rationale for why anti-Semitism is on the rise again suggests that the two phenomena are inextricably linked. Yet M/W elsewhere swoop down like diver pigeons the minute anyone suggests that a condemnation of Israel necessarily has anything to do with condemnation of Jews as an ethnic group.

Whistling through contradictions of analysis and having it both ways depending on which way suits you better-- such are the hallmarks of the "realist" school of foreign policy. Perhaps the greatest irony of the whole sorry debate is how effusively The Israel Lobby has been taken up in Arab media, despite its open dedication to Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations. It's as if Henry Ford were handing out copies of Das Kapital in Detroit.

Here's Jeff again:

In their discussion of these matters, Mearsheimer and Walt seem not just mendacious but also shallow. They are dilettantes in the subject, tourists in the conflict. Consider an example. After cherry-picking quotations from jihadists to support the view that America's ties to Israel brought us the attacks of September 11, they raise the subject of Sayyid Qutb's anti-Americanism. Qutb was a terribly important Egyptian Islamist, and Al Qaeda's main intellectual inspiration. Mearsheimer and Walt instruct that "Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian dissident whose writings have been an important inspiration for contemporary Islamic fundamentalists, was hostile to the United States both because he saw it as a corrupt and licentious society and also because of U.S. support for Israel." But wait. Qutb was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966, almost a year before the Six Day War. It was not until after that war that America replaced France as Israel's chief protector and arms- supplier. In fact, throughout the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration was often quite hostile to Israel. So Qutb's objection, then, was not to American support for Israel, but to American recognition of Israel. If this is the case, then Islamist anger at America predates our support for the usurping Zionists. And if this is so, then Al Qaeda would have attacked the United States whether or not America was Israel's patron, and whether or not the pro-Israel lobby existed. Therefore, as far-fetched as this may seem, the Jews should not be blamed for the attack on the World Trade Center.

In all fairness, Jeff's review is not without a contradiction of its own, namely its treatment of M/W's blame-Israel-first disposition on Al Qaeda and 9/11. Early on he writes:

It is rather uncontroversial to call Osama bin Laden an anti-Semite. He is the easy case. But since many people in the West are queasy about attaching the label of anti-Semitism to almost anybody, regarding the charge of anti-Semitism as itself proof of prejudice, let me begin by describing bin Laden's view of history less inflammatorily--not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric. He believes that Jews exercise disproportionate control over world affairs, and that world affairs may therefore be explained by reference to the Jews. A Judeocentric view of history is one that regards the Jews as the center of the story, and therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is a single- cause theory of history, and as such it is, almost by definition, a conspiracy theory.

But then he claims: "Never mind that Mearsheimer and Walt exaggerate the centrality of the Jews in bin Laden's worldview."

Judeocentrism, by definition, plants the Jews at the center of one's historical outlook. So either Bin Laden suffers from the pathology or he does not. The failure here may be only linguistic rather than logical, but one simply cannot exaggerate the centrality of the Jews in a Judeocentrist worldview.

This past Friday night Bill Maher continued his slide from politically incorrect to merely incorrect. The habitual defender of Israel had this to say about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"[T]he main reason we hate Ahmadinejad is because of what he said about Israel. At least that’s what sticks in my craw. And I think most people – certainly the New York papers – because he said “Israel should be wiped off the map” – some people say it’s a mistranslation. Whatever. Horrible thing to say. And he denies the Holocaust. But, those are things he says to get elected. Okay? There are Jews in the Iranian Parliament. He can’t be that anti-Semitic. I think those are the equivalent of when the Republicans in this country say, “Gay marriage will lead to death."

Continue reading...

I've had an ongoing fascination with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's thesis and its very public discontents. By now everyone knows the story: A year and a half ago a pair of academics out of the realist school of foreign policy published an essay in the London Review of Books. Titled "The Israel Lobby," it argued that a group of high-octane American Jews were more or less controlling which countries the U.S. warred against and that they were doing so out of heated concern for Israel's interests. As with all good polemic/propaganda, countervailing evidence was ignored. You had to seek elsewhere for Eisenhower's response to the 1956 Suez crisis; our continued alliance with Saudi Arabia; Bush Sr.'s coercion of Israel's non-retaliation policy during the first Gulf War; Israel's early about-face in support of the second Gulf War; its uncharacteristic hesitance to bomb a neighboring state's nuclear facilities; its attempted rapprochement with Syria, which, up until two weeks ago anyway, was accompanied by much nail-biting at the U.S. State Department. Etc.

The scandal this essay engendered was as predictable as it was inevitable. A few all-star questions included: Were Mearsheimer and Walt anti-Semitic? Had they drafted a new Protocols for the 21st century? Was it slightly uncomfortable to see this stuff published in a British periodical ("How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews")? Noam Chomsky called the authors "brave" but unenlightening. Tony Judt rushed to their defense saying that they had got it right and oh, by the way, a binational state of Jews and Muslims living together side by side was the only way forward in the holy land, demographic parity be damned. Most recently, in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum discussed his own personal involvement in the "Lobby," and how the newly expanded book edition of Mearsheimer and Walt's case has misquoted him on the touchy question of a potential second Holocaust. (The one-word designation "Lobby," incidentally, has became the noisiest tocsin of creepiness in the whole affair; like Freemason, Illuminati, or Madonna, a single utterance hints at worlds of epistemology, opinion and cant.)

I've been meaning to write more about the Lobby. Problem is, I haven't read the book yet. It's not for lack of trying, I assure you. Jewcy ordered it way back when I spotted it in the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Fall catalogue, and I've every day been checking our snail mail to see if Amazon's packaging for this eagerly awaited volume is nearly as cool as the Muggle-themed box that carried the final Harry Potter installment. (Are we talking a banal Magen David-studded U.S. flag? I want my money back.)

This unusual delay of service has got me thinking. Jewcy's taken some calculated risks in the past -- talking to Joanna Angel's mom, soliciting work from Justin Raimondo, doing Jeiger shots with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Mercer Kitchen. However, we've never asked for a book whose publisher might have been suspicious of dispatching a copy to an address with such an avowedly Semitic tendency. (Joey gets all his Kevin Macdonald sent straight to home.)

Consider where other advance copies must have gone. The Forward could be the name of any lefty rag; Tikkun sounds like Kanye West's girlfriend; Nextbook defies opacity of intent; The Jewish Week is what Mearsheimer and Walt would be writing if they wrote filler for VH1.

So I ask you: Is there now an Israel Lobby Lobby being run by good, Scowcroftian isolationists and anti-Zionists who keep saucy texts about the tribe from falling into Jewish hands? If there is, how on earth do they do it? And has Abe Foxman, whose own The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control, taken a number out of their playbook by also keeping his review copy away from Jewcy's in-box? We're right there in DUMBO. Easy to get to. The Poland Spring guy finds us just fine every week. Honest.

The Israeli security cabinet's latest decision to reclassify Hamas as an "enemy entity" is a nice recognition of the obvious, but does nothing to explain its more dangerous proposal of withholding electricity and fuel to the Gaza Strip, which is now also re-designated "enemy territory." (Thanks for clearing that up.)

As someone who's been a vocal opponent of Islamism in both its cave-dwelling and people-powered manifestations, I'm left queasy at the prospect of blacking out an entire region that, at least under its current political leadership, is already living in the Dark Ages. Under international law, the Occupied Territories are still within the demesne of Israel, meaning that Israel is in effect giving the signal to take one of its own neighborhoods off the grid.

This is a scandal for even a nasty neocon like myself because one of the acknowledged early snafus of securing a post-Baathist Iraq was the Army Corps of Engineers' failure to get basic utilities like water and power up and running on time. As the last few years have demonstrated, these were utilities that would have gone, per force, to plenty of sectarian thugs and Al Qaeda riffraff skulking in the midst of -- and in some cases, governing -- the innocent and suffering. If the U.S. now admits that it should have run the risk of unintentionally giving this kind of aid to the enemy in Iraq, then why is Israel more reluctant to do so with respect to Palestine?

As I've said before, the surge is really a militarily-implemented rescue operation of Iraqi infrastructure, and it is being conducted under much more violent conditions than what now exist in Gaza. Gen. Petraeus rightly understands that an occupier's inability to deliver basic resources for daily living is a fine way of doing the enemy's recruiting for it. (Hamas is already losing steam because of its own rancid ideology. Why allow even the hint of a chance for it to regain momentum by pointing to the evil Zionist pigs as the source of all its constituents' heating and lighting woes?)

Collective punishment is morally and pragmatically wrong.

Israel should learn from its past mistakes. As recently as last month, Tel Aviv decided to stop the shipment of paper into Gaza, thus threatening the on-time publication of schoolbooks for Palestinian students. The proffered rationale for this blockade -- that those textbooks would instruct young minds in the ways of jihad -- didn't quite wash because the schools in question were run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and thus had an international charter. Moreover, even if Haniyah-worshiping lesson plans did manage to find their way into the curriculum, this would have only proved the point of Israeli hawks: another feckless attempt at "peace-keeping" by the dire and irrelevant U.N.

Largely thanks to the efforts of Gershon Baskin and Hanna Siniora of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, enough textbooks and paper were eventually approved by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in late August so that Gazan UNRWA students were prepared for the first term.*

Pro-Israel Jews should fax Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (her number is: +972-2-5303506) and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (his is: +972-3-697-6218) and let them know fighting Jew-hating militants and rocket launchers is a worthwhile and necessary cause, but denying an entire population energy and fuel is not.

* In my original post I mistakenly said there should be enough textbooks for the second term. The IPCRI has only requested this of the Defense Ministry. Sorry for the error.

By bombing Syria:

"They dropped bombs over Syria and they dropped fuel tanks on Syrian soil," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said in Ankara Monday, while briefing Turkish officials on the incident. Turkey, which has strong military and diplomatic ties to Israel, described the overflights as "unacceptable," and has demanded an explanation from the Israeli government.

Now will Foxman recognize the Armenian Genocide?

File under Oy: 

Israel believes that North Korea has been supplying Syria and Iran with nuclear materials, a Washington defense official told the New York Times. “The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” he said.

The official added that recent Israeli reconnaissance flights over Syria revealed possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials estimate might have been supplied with material from North Korea.

As a former JJBL All-Star, I feel obligated to report this:

Israel rallied behind Yaniv Green's 26 points and 12 rebounds to beat Serbia 87-83 Wednesday, sending the Serbs to their earliest exit from the European Championship in 60 years.

The highly favored Serbian squad featured NBA players Darco Milicic and Marco Jaric. 

Earlier today, the Israelis completed an unprecedented Serbo-Croatian sweep by upsetting Croatia 80-75.

While a number of Israelis have starred in the NCAA and others have been selected in the NBA draft (Israel team players Lior Eliayahu and Yotam Halperin were both 2nd round picks in 2006), we are still awaiting the first Sabra to join the NBA.  For now, Israelis will have to be content with Eurobasket victories and the  success of  the Toronto Raptors' Anthony Parker, the former Maccabbi Tel Aviv star who in a shout-out to his Israeli fans wears the number 18.

The findings in the most recent Kelman/Cohen studyare not as blazingly obvious as "men want hot women", but they are nonetheless unsurprising.

 

Based on the responses of more than 1,700 non-Orthodox American Jews of all ages, the study indicates that successively younger age groups show a greater detachment from the State of Israel.

According to the report, which was based on statistics collected as part of the 2007 National Survey of American Jews between December 20, 2006, and January 28, 2007, less than half of Jews under the age of 35 believe Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy, compared to 78 percent of those over 65. Sixty-six percent of Jews aged 50-64 believe it would be a personal tragedy, compared to 54% aged 35-49.

 

Continue reading...

More wheezes and gasps of the classical left:

The economic crisis exposed a festering ideological one. The second generation of kibbutz offspring — who slept in communal children’s houses with assigned caregivers — began to rebel. With the lifetime security that the kibbutz was supposed to offer in jeopardy, young people began to leave.

“By the end of the 1990s,” said Gavri Bargil, executive director of the Kibbutz Movement, an umbrella organization, “you could find kibbutzim with no young generation at all.”

Worse, after decades of hard work, the kibbutz founders, now in their 80s and 90s, were left with not even an apartment or a pension to call their own.

Part of the recovery involved selling the Israeli dairy giant Tnuva, a cooperative half-owned by the kibbutzim. The sale provided them $500 million to establish pension funds.

In the past, kibbutz members were rewarded equally, whether they milked cows or managed a large industry. On the new kibbutz, members earn salaries or receive end-of-month allowances reflecting the income they bring in.

 

Brilliant Rabbi, brilliant outfitOvadia Yosef is, without doubt, the most highly regarded Sefardi* rabbinical figure in Israel and the de facto kingmaker of the Shas political party. He also used to be the Sefardi chief rabbi of Israel. The prestige of being chief rabbi, which is normally a ten year term, was so thoroughly enjoyable, that he refused to return the clown suit that goes with the privilege and wears it to this day. He still thinks he’s chief rabbi. Or maybe he just plays one on TV.

It seems like Rav Ovadia, in spite of having an allegedly encyclopedic memory and being a posek (interpreter of Jewish law) of great renown, just might be a bit retarded. Just what does it mean for the rabbinate and its followers when rabbis like Yosef barf out gems like,

It is no wonder that soldiers are killed in war; they don’t observe Shabbat, don’t observe the Torah, don’t pray every day, don’t lay phylacteries on a daily basis – so is it any wonder that they are killed? No, it’s not.

The monumental idiocy of such a comment, offered last Saturday night on Ovadia’s kick-ass public access show (video clip here), is simply mindblowing. Not only is it stupid on an astonishing scale, but it’s mean-spirited, vicious and offensive to anyone who,...well, to anyone, I suppose. I wonder what Ovadia has to say about all the dead soldiers who did observe Shabbat and the mitzvot? Nothing, apparently. I wonder if he even knew any soldiers killed in any of Israel's wars. Oh, that's right, he's Haredi. Sorry.

Continue reading...