Since taking office this past January, President Obama has pressed for renewed peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. While he has exhorted both sides to make concessions, the bulk of his effort, at least publicly, has been to pressure Israel to respect his demand to immediately freeze all construction in its settlements. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected the demand saying that freezing construction in Israeli settlements when new apartments, schools, roads, etc. were needed, was tantamount to "freezing life" in those settlements, and therefore "unreasonable."

Ask average, albeit somewhat informed, Americans what feelings or images they associate with Israel, and you're likely to receive responses that range from the extreme positive to the extreme negative but are mostly somewhere in between. Ask the same group about Israeli settlers, however, and you're likely to elicit an overwhelmingly negative response. The word "settler" has become a pejorative term. It is, for many people, including those who are not anti-Israel, synonymous with violent fanatic.

One would have to write a book to adequately address the issue of Israeli settlements, which is much more complicated than most news sources would have us believe. Suffice it to say, we should be troubled that the media use the same word, "settler," to describe, on the one hand, an ideologue committed to a "Greater Israel" and, on the other, a regular citizen of any political persuasion who is motivated by economic concerns. I'd venture to guess that when most people hear the word "settler," they think of the former. But in reality, as David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy notes in his article Beyond Settlements: US Policy Options Going Forward, "80% of [the 285,000] Israeli settlers live in less than 5% of the West Bank -- largely, but not completely, adjacent to the pre-1967 boundaries." Thus, one could argue that 57,000 settlers, the other 20%, stand in the way of a future Palestinian state. But, Makovsky continues, "an equal amount of land within Israel could be swapped in exchange [for the 5% of the West Bank where 80% of settlers currently live], allowing [both Israeli and Palestinian leadership] to claim victory." In other words, 228,000 settlers, the 80% majority, can be absorbed into Israel without any sacrifice by the Palestinians, and therefore cannot be considered an obstacle to the peace process.

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It's hard to believe, but in this year, 2009 CE, only about 64 years after Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were forced to end their systematic destruction of the Jewish people, there are some who deny that the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jewish men, women, and children, ever happened.  Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is the most prominent leader of today's Holocaust denial movement and his views enjoy plenty of support in the Arab-Muslim world and in Europe.

As a Jew who is proud of his Jewish heritage, I've always been wary of the tendency of many Jews to focus on the Holocaust to the exclusion of other aspects of Jewish history.  After all, we were around for several thousand years before the Holocaust.  Judaism is the first Religion of the Book; hell, we came up with the Book, the Book out of which Christianity and Islam were born.  We invented monotheism, the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient God who resides in heaven.  And did I mention the foundation of Western morality, aka the Ten Commandments?  That was our contribution too.  In sum, there is more to our heritage than our slaughter by the Nazis.    

Unfortunately, Holocaust deniers ensure that the issue of the Holocaust, about which there really isn't much to discuss, remains in the fore.  Holocaust denial is a rallying cry for anti-Semitism because it allows Jew-haters to deny us our claim to suffering, to effectively shut off the capacity to feel any sort of empathy for us.  Needless to say, it's difficult to have constructive dialogue with an adversary who denies you your humanity.

Enter Facebook. "The mere statement of denying the Holocaust does not constitute a violation of our policies," says Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.  As you might imagine, Facebook, which prohibits pornography, or speech that is "threatening" or "hateful," has come under fire for this policy.  As well it should.  While Facebook might argue that Holocaust denial groups are not inherently "threatening"-these groups don't necessarily speak of inflicting physical harm on Jews-it cannot with any kind of integrity argue that Holocaust denial groups are not inherently hateful.  Theoretically, perhaps, one could deny the Holocaust's existence and not have an agenda against the Jewish people.  But the theoretical here is insignificant.  As attorney Brian Cuban points out in his open letter to Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, common sense dictates that in practice, "The Holocaust denial movement is nothing more than a pretext to allow the preaching of hatred against Jews and to recruit other like-minded individuals to do the same."  

So what if Holocaust denial is hateful?  In the United States we are free to hold hateful, bigoted views, as long as we don't threaten or harm anyone.  That was Columbia University's president Lee Bollinger's argument for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak on his campus.  Bollinger felt that by granting that monster an international stage, he was championing the cause of freedom of speech.

His reasoning always made me cringe.  Even if Holocaust denial can and should be legal here in the U.S., why should our desire to uphold the First Amendment prompt us to make a mockery of it by granting such a prestigious forum to Holocaust denial or any other disgusting view?  There can be no purposeful discourse with a Holocaust denier or any other bigot committed to hate, so why engage his vitriol?  Holocaust denial and the like should be relegated to the fringe.  It belongs as far away as possible from acceptable conversation.               

There is a difference, however, between Facebook's situation and Bollinger's empowerment of a hate-monger.  Facebook doesn't invite hate groups to form on its pages.  It simply provides a platform, and the bulk of the groups it houses are perfectly legitimate.  If I worked for Facebook, I would respond to Cuban's point by noting that within the realm of legality, it is not up to Facebook to draw red lines about morality or what is and is not appropriately controversial.  If Facebook were to determine that five of ten Holocaust denial groups were not kosher for its pages, and it were to delete these five, would the remaining five be somehow Facebook-sanctioned?  

Facebook maintains that its decision to allow Holocaust denial and other hate groups is a principled one. "We have a lot of internal debate and we bring in experts to talk about it," Schnitt said in a CNN interview.  "Just being offensive or objectionable doesn't get it taken off Facebook. We want it [the site] to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones."

Call me a cynic, but I'm skeptical of that explanation.  Facebook's stated desire to be a hub for controversial ideas seems awfully convenient given that it can't possibly have the resources to monitor every single group that's established on its pages.  According to a survey released on May 13th by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the number of Web pages and shared online documents promoting racism or other forms of hatred has surged to 10,000, a 25% increase from last year.  Given that Facebook houses the highest percentage, 30% of these instances of hate, that's 3,000 (and growing) hate groups for it to identify, let alone contend with. 

I can't prove it, but I imagine that there's a certain type of "hateful" and "threatening" speech that gets a group tossed from Facebook's pages every time: Speech that is illegal and speech that is actionable.  It is illegal to threaten someone with physical harm.   Therefore, any Facebook pages that do so are removed as they're discovered.  Defamation of character and other grievances frequently result in lawsuits and hefty fees for the defendants.  If I'm the CEO of Facebook, or any other corporation for that matter, my service terms are dictated by nothing loftier than what I can get away with and what will get me sued.   

Facebook ended up removing two of the groups that Cuban identified as offensive when users posted comments on those pages that did violate service terms.  So what does that say about the other "controversial" groups?  Until Facebook defines exactly what it means by speech that is "hateful" and "threatening," we won't know for sure.   

Yesterday, Israel celebrated Yom Ha'atzmaut, Independence Day. Across the country, people gathered in celebration. There was singing, dancing, drinking (this may very well have preceded the singing and dancing), fire-works, and everyone's favorite Israeli musicians. It was a time to let loose and for a short 24 hours, ignore reality. But when the smoke cleared and the cacophony subsided one couldn't help but acknowledge that even now, 61 years after the birth of the modern state of Israel, it's not easy being Israeli.

People often comment that the average Israeli looks about 10 years older than the average American of the same age. Granted the anti-smoking campaign hasn't caught on in Israel and people drive as if they're annoyed that the government would dare to inconvenience them with traffic laws, but these can't be the only reasons for the disparity.

Israelis look so much older than they should because their country is surrounded by governments and terror-organizations-in the case of Hamas and Hizbollah these are one and the same-hell bent on, "driving the Jews into the sea" or to quote the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "wiping Israel off the map." To the south west and north, respectively, are Hamas and Hizbollah, both trained and funded by Iran. To the North-East is hostile Syria, which also backs Hizbollah and hosts Hamas' current leader, the exiled Khaled Meshal.

The West Bank, on Israel's eastern front, is run by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, whose leader Mahmoud Abbas made a speech on Tuesday expressly refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state: "A Jewish state, what is that supposed to mean?" asked Abbas. "...I don't accept it and I say so publicly." Abbas, who at one point denied the existence of the Holocaust, is considered "a moderate." No, it doesn't take a pessimistic outlook on life to conclude that for Israel-the one Jewish country in the world-the prospect of peace is pretty bleak.

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