Settlements Aren’t the Problem? Tell the Troops
By J.J. Goldberg
Israel’s military brass is mildly frantic over a spreading phenomenon of political protest within the infantry ranks by soldiers threatening to disobey if ordered to dismantle settlement structures. Efforts to stem the threats are generating tensions between the military command and a network of army-linked yeshivas.
Twice in the past month soldiers in the West Bank-based Kfir Brigade have unfurled large banners declaring that their battalions would not “expel Jews.” Both incidents followed battalion operations to demolish illegal buildings in settlements.
A third banner was discovered today (November 19) at the Kfir training base in the Jordan Valley. Base commanders were uncertain who made it or when it was to be displayed, according to Ynetnews.com.
The first incident occurred October 22 at an induction ceremony at the Western Wall for recruits to the Shimshon Battalion, which had recently dismantled illegal buildings at Homesh, one of four settlements in the northern West Bank evacuated during the 2005 disengagement and now off-limits to Israeli civilians. The second incident occurred November 16 in the Nahshon Battalion, which had dismantled two illegal buildings at Neguhot, south of Hebron.
In all, six soldiers from the two units have been court-martialed and handed jail sentences ranging from 14 to 30 days. Four of them were demoted and permanently barred from combat units.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on November 17, the day after the second incident, that if “refusal” to follow orders gains ground, “it will bring about the collapse of the state.” Other leaders have issued similar warnings in recent weeks.
Within the army’s general command, particular attention is focused on yeshivot hesder, 41 military-linked rabbinical academies housing special army units that divide their army service between active duty and Talmud study. The deans of several Hesder yeshivas are said to have taught that soldiers must disobey commands contrary to religious law. The chief of the Israel Defense Force’s Manpower Division, General Avi Zamir, met with the five-man executive committee of the Union of Hesder Yeshivas November 17 and demanded that the union issue a clear statement condemning insubordination, according to various Orthodox and secular news outlets.
Unnamed army sources told Ynet that particular scrutiny was focused on the Elon Moreh yeshiva, headed by Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, and the Har Bracha yeshiva under Rabbi Eliezer Melamed.
According to a Ynet report that was only partially translated into English, Zamir warned that yeshivas that had not begun taking firm, explicit action against insubordination within a week would have their ties with the army reexamined.
Bibi Gets a Rude Lesson in France's 'Jewish Problem'
By J.J. Goldberg
The endemic antisemitism of the French has been a staple of modern Jewish public discourse and sober analysis for nearly as long as there has been modern Jewish public discourse. It’s commonly viewed as a continuum stretching back at least to the Dreyfus Affair, more than a century ago, and continuing right on up to the present day — straight through the reigns of such notorious prime ministers as Leon Blum, Rene Mayer, Pierre Mendes-France, Michel Debre and Laurent Fabius (*). Things have gotten so bad that in July 2004 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly called on French Jews to move to Israel, where they could be safe from anti-Jewish violence. This caused an international uproar
Well, the latest to navigate those treacherous narrows is Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He visited Paris right after leaving Washington last week for a meeting with his new BFF, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, only to get an earful about Israel’s “vanished” desire for peace from French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (pronounced KUSH-ner). Netanyahu took this as a personal slight, which it probably was, and before you could say Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli national security adviser Uzi Arad phoned up his French counterpart Jean-David Levitte and asked him to intervene with Sarkozy to clean up Kouchner’s mess. Not surprisingly for a European leftist, Kouchner has a reputation on Israel-related matters. Still, the dust-up had to be handled delicately: Kouchner is an internationally renowned human rights activist who famously attributes his commitment to the fact that his paternal grandparents were killed in Auschwitz, and Netanyahu, like any smart politician, wants to avoid offending Jewish sensibilities over the Holocaust.
But the bitter taste must linger. After all, imagine the humiliation suffered by Jean-David Levitte. Since time immemorial, it’s always been the Levite who gets called in to clean up the mess left by some Jew who outranks him. Why is it, Levitte must be thinking, that whenever Jews get together, my tribe is called up second? How gauling.
(*) The only country that has elected more Jewish prime ministers than France (did you count the same five I did?) is Israel, now at 12.
Science Meets Settler Theology, or How Frankenstein Embraced Godzilla
By J.J. Goldberg
Last week, in a blog post about Jewish terrorism and the implicit support of religious nationalist rabbis, I mentioned that Rabbi Shlomo Aviner of Ateret Cohanim yeshiva has a gutsy liberal side and that I would explain it in a later post. Well, here we go.
We’re going to get philosophical here. Aviner is a major intellectual figure on Israel’s political right, an outstanding defender of the theology of Greater Israel. He’s also a leader of the Hardal school of theologically hardline Zionists who move constantly rightward on questions like women’s rights and civil liberties.
So what makes him liberal? Quite simply, his defense of modernity. In an Orthodox world that is moving increasingly toward Haredi fundamentalism, Aviner is a fearless defender of science, rationalism and the rule of law.
Aviner is a major intellectual force in religious Zionism and the settler movement. He is the chief rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Beit El and dean of Ateret Cohanim yeshiva in East Jerusalem, the Irving Moskowitz-backed institution that won fame in 1990 for taking over a Christian site, St. John’s Hospice, causing an international uproar. Aviner became a focus of international controversy again during Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli incursion into Gaza last January, when it was reported that the rabbinate was handing out booklets to soldiers featuring an incendiary passage by Aviner – a warning to soldiers not to show mercy to enemies. (If you’re thinking he was misquoted, here is the full Aviner piece as published by his own yeshiva.) On top of that, last February he wrote that rabbinic law forbids Arab participation in the Knesset.
For all that, he has gained a reputation in much of the settler community as something of a leftist heretic for his opposition to soldiers disobeying orders when commanded to evacuate settlers. Last year he was prevented by right-wing rabbis from speaking in his own settlement. Some far rightists are calling him “the Shabak rabbi,” which is akin to calling someone an informer or turncoat. (Shabak is the Hebrew acronym for General Security Service, or Shin Bet.)
But there is a deeper liberalism in operation, and it’s important to know about it. This past July he was asked by a student at his yeshiva, during a lunchtime discussion that was transcribed, whether dinosaurs actually existed. This is a charged issue on the Orthodox right. Acknowledging that dinosaurs existed implies that the world isn’t 5,770 years old and, by extension, that the Torah isn’t literally true. The issue caused a crisis in Israel following the release of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” in 1993, when Tene (TEH-neh), one of the country’s largest dairy companies, lost its kosher certification for putting dinosaurs pictures on its flavored yogurt containers.
Aviner’s reply to the question was an eye-opener, and a stark reminder that there is still a difference between Modern Orthodoxy and Haredi or ultra-Orthodoxy, and that the settler movement is, in its own way, on the side of modernity (more on that in another post).
The motto of American Modern Orthodoxy, alert readers recall, is Torah u-Mada, “Torah and Science.” Modern Orthodoxy begins with the insistence that faithfulness to the Torah should not shut one off from the intellectual progress of the modern world.
Well, Aviner’s reply to the question about dinosaurs was, in a word: Hey, we’ve found their bones. We know they’re real. And if the Torah seems to say otherwise, that’s “irrelevant.” Citing the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loewe of Prague (1525-1609), Aviner says “that the purpose of science is to describe reality, while the Torah describes what reality should be, i.e. what is good and what is bad.”
Read Aviner’s words about dinosaurs and Rabbi Loewe, after the jump:
Jewsh Terrorism: 'You Can't Blame an Entire (Religious) Community' — 'Yes We Can'
By J.J. Goldberg
There’s an interesting debate unfolding in the opinion section of Ynet, Yediot Ahronot’s Web site, over the role of religion and settler ideology in the alleged crimes of accused West Bank Jewish terrorist Jack Teitel. Some of it appears in translation on their English site, and some of it doesn’t, either by coincidence or because someone thinks it’s Not for Public Consumption.
Background: The announcement of Teitel’s arraignment on November 1 set off an immediate round of defensive statements from settler movement spokespersons that their community abhors murder and violence and can’t be blamed for one person’s deranged actions. The mantra, repeated whenever there’s another incident of settler violence, is: Don’t blame an entire community (tzibur shalem) for the actions of a wayward individual.
The day after Teitel’s arraignment, November 2, Ynet published a column (here’s the English version) by Yair Borochov, a frequent Ynet contributor and editor of a Lubavitch Web site, Shturem.net (and relative of Ber Borochov? Dunno), with a quirky take on the issue. He argues that journalists have a habit of assigning catchy nicknames to celebrity bad guys, but only when they’re Orthodox. Examples: The Abusing Rabbi (an Israeli cult leader accused of serial sexual molestation). The Starving Mother (doesn’t translate well — she’s a Hasidic woman accused of starving her toddler son, and we would probably dub her Munchausen Mom). And now, the Jewish Terrorist.
By contrast, Borochov writes, non-religious criminals don’t get these catchy nicknames. He offers two examples of recent headliners, Michael Fischer and Asaf Goldring, both accused of killing their own children, both known in the press simply by their names.
He may have a point. Here in America, nicknames like that are routine for sensational crimes. Think of the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer or the Mayflower Madam. But I can’t think of any parallel examples from Israel that would disprove Borochov’s thesis. Maybe I’m blanking out.
Borochov is arguing a larger case, however, and here’s where he’s wrong.
The identity of the victims is irrelevant; regardless of whether they are Jewish or Arab, a murderer is a murderer, and if a person who murdered his wife and three children does not fit the “terrorist” category, I see no reason to do so when the victims are members of a different ethnicity or in case the murderer is religious.
In fact, he doesn’t really believe that the identity of the victim is irrelevant. Chabad, and much of the rest of the Jewish world, finds particularly deep meaning in the deaths of Jewish victims because of their identity and never hesitates to mention it. It’s called dying Al Kiddush Hashem, for the Sanctification of the Name. For that matter, I doubt whether Borochov objects to terms like Islamic terrorist or Shi’ite insurgent. Or Colombian drug kingpin. Or Nazi murderer. The monikers tell an essential part of the story, namely the motive and the political significance that makes the act more than a simple crime.
A telling counterpoint appeared that evening, in a column by Ariana Melamed, a Tel Aviv writer and literary critic, with the provocative title, “Yes, blame an entire community.” This one doesn’t appear in English for, um, some reason. So I’ll give you the thrust:
November 3, 2009, 10:06am
Somebody Is Stalking Me and Making Stuff Up
By J.J. Goldberg
My old buddy Jonathan Mark at the Jewish Week tipped me off this morning that I’m mentioned by name in an on-line Special Bulletin published yesterday (November 2) by Memri, the Middle East Media Research Institute. The bulletin features translated excerpts from a column about J-Street that was published the previous day in Al-Ittihad, a government-owned, Arabic-only daily newspaper in the United Arab Emirates. I was pretty excited to hear about this. There’s nothing a writer likes better than to see his name in print (other than Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, of course).
Imagine my disappointment, then, when the column turned out to be quoting somebody else, one J.J. Goldenberg. Weirdly enough, he’s also a journalist, and he seems to have written a book with the exact same title as mine (my lawyer will hear about this!). The thing is, the quote in the column is something I never said and wouldn’t say in a million years, so it must be somebody else. Here’s an excerpt from the excerpt:
A prevalent view in the U.S. and outside it is that the Jews determine and control America’s Middle East policy, mostly through [the Jewish lobby] AIPAC. But since President Obama’s July 13, 2009 address to the leaders of the Jewish-American organizations, [in which he] set out his Middle East policy, there have been accusations from Jewish circles that Obama is being manipulated by two of his Jewish aides who have renounced [the usual pro-Israeli views] - Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod.
Journalist J. J. Goldenberg, author of Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, thinks that one of the goals [of these aides] is to restrain the Jewish-American community by means of two organizations that attack Israel, namely ‘Americans for Peace Now’ and ‘J Street.’
Huh? Emanuel and Axelrod trying to “restrain the Jewish-American community”? Americans for Peace Now and J-Street “attack Israel”? I keep getting attacked, from both right and left, for not saying that stuff. One piece just the other day called me “a cranky old Yid,” essentially for my reluctance to draw those sorts of connections.
My first thought on reading this was that they had confused me with another J.J. Goldberg. So I Googled my name (try it — it’s way cool) and found two other J.J. Goldbergs, neither of whom seems a likely candidate. One is indeed a writer, but his expertise is cow teats (I’m not kidding). He has written such groundbreaking works as “Evaluation of a 1% Iodophor Postmilking Teat Sanitizer,” published in 1994 in the authoritative Journal of Dairy Science, a journal I’m familiar with from my Kibbutz Gezer days but never actually wrote for. I don’t see this Goldberg weaving conspiracies out of Rahm Emanuel and J-Street.
The other lives in Salt Lake City and has a Facebook page with a photo of himself and a woman in a wedding dress, presumably his bride. Again, possible but unlikely.
So then I looked up the columnist, identified as Dr. As’ad ’Abd Al-Rahman. I was thinking he might be a homeopath (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or a podiatrist, but a quick check on the Web showed that he is a political scientist, an “independent member” of the PLO executive committee and head of its refugee-affairs negotiating team. My on-line source, Palestine Who’s Who, gives his last known place of employment as the University of Amman, but the entry seems uncertain whether or not he’s still active or even alive. My guess is that if he had a column in Sunday’s paper, he’s probably still alive, but based on the column’s content, his current residence is Dreamland.
In the end, I must confess that I have no idea where that quote came from or what it was that ’Abd Al-Rahman or Al-Ittihad or Memri thought they were seeing. But it sure didn’t come from me.
As you can imagine, this is pretty upsetting stuff. If word gets around, it could damage my reputation, perhaps even to the point where I would no longer get my regular table at Deli Kasbah in the corner near the washing stand with the excellent view of the TV monitor showing nonstop videos of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s speeches in Yiddish. I would hate for anything to come between me and their outstanding shwarma.
On the other hand, “cranky old Yid”? I kind of like the sound…
Goldstone v. House of Representatives: The Unending Inquiry Into the War Crimes Inquiry
By J.J. Goldberg
There could be trouble brewing for the congressional resolution (PDF), now circulating for signatures in the House, that condemns the United Nations’ Goldstone Report on alleged Israel and Hamas war crimes in Gaza.
The House resolution, H.Res. 867, has collected 124 signatures so far for its appeal to the Obama administration to oppose any international consideration or endorsement of the report, which it calls “irredeemably biased.” The resolution was initiated by Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami and is co-sponsored by Democrats Howard Berman of Los Angeles and Gary Ackerman of Queens, along with Republican Dan Burton of somewhere in Indiana.
But Berman, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is having second thoughts about the resolution, according to this Friday blog post by Spencer Ackerman of the on-line Washington Independent. Berman’s staff is said to be consulting with Ros-Lehtinen’s staff about how to proceed. The reason: a hard-hitting letter to the committee from Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who authored the U.N. fact-finding report. Goldstone goes through the resolution paragraph by paragraph and points to a hefty list of distortions, misrepresentations and borderline fabrications about his 575-page report.
By way of background (if you’ve been following the case, skip this paragraph), Goldstone was appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council last spring to lead a fact-finding mission probing alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead last December and January. Goldstone’s report found evidence of war crimes by both Israel and Hamas. It was submitted September 15 to the Human Rights Council, which voted October 16 to refer it to the Security Council. The Security Council can send the report to the International Criminal Court for possible prosecution of suspected war-crimes perpetrators, unless Israel acts beforehand to launch its own independent investigation.
One point Goldstone has been making over and over since his report was published is that the international court may act only when a nation can’t or won’t conduct its own credible, independent inquiry into allegations of war crimes. Israel has conducted numerous such inquiries in the past, to worldwide acclaim. This time, for some reason, the Netanyahu government has been refusing to launch an inquiry, instead leaving it to the army to investigate itself.
Investigator: “Hey, O’Reilly, did you beat up that kid?”
Suspect: “Naah.”
Investigator: “Glad to hear it. Say hi to Marge and the kids.”
Israel tried at first to ignore the Goldstone commission. Now it’s waging an international campaign to discredit the report. Lehtinen’s resolution seems to be the campaign’s latest sortie; in fact, much of its language comes straight from Netanyahu government talking points. (I posted last week that Netanyahu now seems to be reconsidering his refusal to launch an inquiry.)
More on the details of the House resolution and Goldstone’s critique after the jump.
Israel Demolishes Illegal Structures in Post-1967 Areas, But Not the Ones You Think
By J.J. Goldberg
Pressure continues to mount on Israel to honor its commitments on West Bank settlement construction by dismantling illegally-built structures and halting new ones. It’s not going smoothly.
The latest critic to pile on the Jewish state is Dorit Beinisch, chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court. Beinisch ripped into the Israeli Defense Ministry during an October 28 hearing for repeatedly failing to carry out existing demolition orders and offering a shifting array of excuses. The court was hearing initial arguments in a suit filed by human rights groups over nine homes built in Ofra, a settlement near Ramallah, on privately-owned Palestinian property.
According to a Ynet report on the hearing, government representatives acknowledged that the homes were built illegally on private Palestinian property and are under court order for demolition. The government representatives told the justices that the decision to delay carrying out court orders had been made by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, because of the delicacy of the timing. Barak, alert readers will recall, is the embattled Labor Party leader who brought his party into the Netanyahu coalition, over the objections of most of his Knesset caucus, in order to protect the peace process.
“The court is aware, I’m sure, of the ongoing political process,” Barak’s adviser on settlement affairs, Eitan Broshi, told the justices, according to Ynet. “The defense minister has been wracking his brain with this question and we ask the court’s understanding on the matter.”
Beinisch’s reply: “You say ‘priorities,’ but there is no implementation of priorities. Illegality is being ignored. Ofra isn’t the first instance. There are so many cases up in the air. The impression is that you changed your position about your willingness to demolish.”
Associate Justice Ayala Procaccia added her own criticism of the government’s inaction, saying that “When there are allegations of stolen land, that has to be at the top of the list.”
Happily, the Forward can report that Israel is not entirely ignoring illegal construction in the areas captured in 1967. This week alone authorities demolished at least six illegal structures, a record five of them on a single day, October 27. It must be said that the added alacrity shown in this week’s demolitions might be connected to the fact that they involved Arab homes in traditionally Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The homes were demolished because they had been built “without proper construction permits,” in the words of municipal officials quoted in the Jerusalem Post.
The demolitions are part of a growing trend that could threaten the stability not only of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, but of Jewish homes in West Jerusalem and throughout Israel, as we’ll explain after the jump.
Why Bibi Is Considering an Independent Gaza War Inquiry. Why Labor Leader Barak Is Against It.
By J.J. Goldberg
Israel is softening its early hard line against creating an independent commission of inquiry into the army’s conduct during the Gaza war. Typically, though, the debate is being conducted via name-calling and exchanges of invective and ultimatums.
The floodgates were opened when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post in a Friday interview that he was “looking into” setting up an independent inquiry, though he insisted immediately that it was “not because of Goldstone but because of our own internal needs.” The publication of the interview on Saturday touched off an uproar of protest in Israel, and Netanyahu immediately changed his story. On Saturday night he released a statement through his office saying he saw “no need” for an independent inquiry. His aides are now hinting that if there is an inquiry it will be because of international pressure, not internal needs — precisely the reverse of what he told Weymouth.
The battle lines inside Israel are a bit surprising and a bit frightening. The strongest opponent is Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the chairman of what used to be the Israel Labor Party. His most important ally is Eli Yishai, chairman of the haredi Shas Party. Calling for an inquiry are, among others, Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor, one of the Likud’s top legal/constitutional minds and leader of the party’s humane wing (yes, there is one), and Minority Affairs Minister Avishai Braverman, who left the presidency of Ben-Gurion University to join what’s left of the progressive wing of what’s left of the Labor Party.
Barak and the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, are putting out a novel line of argument against the independent commission. They’re saying that bringing military personnel before a civilian inquiry is outright illegitimate, that it’s dangerous to morale and a threat to soldiers’ lives. That is, the civilian political system has no right to oversee the military. The army makes its own rules and it alone enforces them. It is above civilian law. That logic has the additional benefit of ending the painful debate over whether Israel is to be a democracy or a Jewish state. Do away with that pesky democracy stuff right now and be done with it.
One of the points that gets lost in the debate is a pragmatic one. If and when the Security Council takes up the Goldstone Report, it has the right to refer it to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. But, under the treaty that created the court, (in Article 17, for you legal eagles) the court must rule “that a case is inadmissible” if it “is being investigated or prosecuted by a State which has jurisdiction over it, unless the State is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution.” That is, if you conduct your own inquiry, the court can’t step in. If you don’t feel like, the international court will gladly do it for you. And no, having your army investigate itself does not qualify as an inquiry, except in the fertile minds of Gabi Ashkenazi, Eli Yishai and the leader of Israel’s social democratic labor movement, zichron tzadikim levracha.
Goldstone has been telling Israel for months that it should set up a commission, not as a confession of guilt, but as an opportunity to make the international court go away and decide its own guilt or innocence without international interference. Based on what Netanyahu has been saying this weekend, it seems he’s finally begun to figure that out.
Reforming the Vatican II Reforms: More on Benedict's Vision
By J.J. Goldberg
A very intriguing piece by Politico’s David Gibson in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section claims, much as I argued in a column back in August (but in greater depth), that Pope Benedict XVI is engaged in a sweeping campaign to remake the church. In large part what he’s trying to do is to roll back some of the reforms of Vatican II and make Catholicism what it once was, at least as he remembers it.
Thus far, Benedict’s papacy has been one of constant movement and change, the sort of dynamic that liberal Catholics — or Protestants — are usually criticized for pursuing. In Benedict’s case, this liberalism serves a conservative agenda. But his activism should not be surprising: As a sharp critic of the reforms of Vatican II, Ratzinger has long pushed for what he calls a “reform of the reform” to correct what he considers the excesses or abuses of the time.
Gibson sees the latest big-ticket change, inviting conservative Anglicans and Episcopalians into the Catholic church, as part of his overall strategy. It’s frankly a bit hard to see this particular reform as conservative; after all, he’s letting Anglican priests join with their wives, which theoretically opens the door to letting other priests marry. The bottom line, though, seems to be shoring up the church’s conservative wing by bringing in a whole new constituency. Some of the other changes we’ve noted, including the restoration in various places of prayers for conversion of the Jews, are part of this overall Ratzinger plan, Gibson writes. Worth a look.
October 19, 2009, 2:35am
Who Are You Calling Nazi? Why, Pretty Much Everybody.
By J.J. Goldberg
The Anti-Defamation League reports in an October 15 press release that it has received an apology from the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Liberty Commission, Richard Land, for a September 26 speech to the Christian Coalition in which he described the congressional Democrats’ health care reforms as “exactly what the Nazis did.” In the same speech Land also quipped that he had given “the Dr. Josef Mengele Award” to Ezekiel Emanuel, President Obama’s chief health care adviser (and Rahm’s brother), for his “advocacy of health care rationing.”
In an October 14 letter to ADL national director Abraham Foxman, Land said he had been “using hyperbole for effect and never intended to actually equate anyone in the Obama administration with Dr. Mengele.” He promised to “refrain from making such references in the future,” and added: “I apologize to everyone who found such references hurtful.”
Land was responding to an October 9 letter from Foxman, complaining that the “Nazi comparison is inappropriate, insensitive and unjustified. As a Holocaust survivor, I take particular offense. Such comparisons diminish the history and the memory of the 6 million Jews and 5 million others who died at the hands of the Nazis and insults those who fought bravely against Hitler.”
Foxman had a busy summer on the health-care-is-Nazism front. Among those he scolded was Rush Limbaugh, who, among other things, repeated Glenn Beck’s riff about the Obama health-care logo looking Hitlerian. Another scoldee was syndicated radio talk jockey Bill Press, who had accused opponents of health care reform of using tactics that were “straight out of the Nazi playbook.”
The battle didn’t start this summer, though. Holocaust abuse is a continuing theme among Jewish community advocates. Sometimes, as in the case of Land, it yields results. Other abusers, like Limbaugh, remain unbowed.
One of the most celebrated successes was the 1998 campaign by the Zionist Organization of America to derail the appointment of Holocaust scholar John Roth as chief historian of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Mysteries of the Church: The Bishops Blink ... Sort of
By J.J. Goldberg
America’s Catholic bishops, responding to Jewish protests, are backing away from a controversial policy statement they issued last June in which interfaith dialogue was portrayed as a forum for promoting Christianity.
Jewish organizations that partner with the church in ongoing, formal dialogue, here and in Rome, had warned in August that the controversial June statement could threaten the future of the historic, four-decade exchange. As I wrote in a column at the time, the dispute seemed to be the latest in a series of jolts to Catholic-Jewish relations since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
The bishops’ new statement looks like an attempt to calm the waters. It offers a revised version of the June statement that drops the offending passages. But, as I’ll show, the edited version looks like a clumsy job that leaves part of the offending passage firmly in place. Well, it’s either a mistake or an indication that they’re not really backing down, and that we have indeed entered into the Age of Benedict. And a close read of the bishops’ new “Statement of Principles in Catholic-Jewish Dialogue” suggests pretty strongly that it’s no mistake.
The controversial June statement was itself a reversal of an earlier statement from 2002, “Reflections on Covenant and Mission,” which had affirmed the post-Vatican II Catholic view of Judaism as a living covenant with God.
A deepening Catholic appreciation of the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people, together with a recognition of a divinely-given mission to Jews to witness to God’s faithful love, lead to the conclusion that campaigns that target Jews for conversion to Christianity are no longer theologically acceptable in the Catholic Church.
“Reflections” was the product of an annual dialogue between the National Council of Synagogues, representing the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist wings of Judaism, and the ecumenical affairs committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Two Orthodox participants, the Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America, broke away from the synagogue council in 1992 and have maintained their own separate dialogue with the bishops ever since.
What the bishops produced this past June, “Notes on ‘Reflections on Covenant and Mission’,” was bluntly critical of “Reflections.” Its central point was an apparent dismissal of the hard-won understanding, key to the post-Vatican II rapprochement, that the church no longer aspires to convert the Jews. “Note” was issued jointly by the bishops’ ecumenical committee and the more hard-line committee on doctrine, which appeared to have stepped in to restrain the ecumenicals’ overenthusiasm. The Jewish groups complained that there was no advance warning, undermining the spirit of partnership that was the dialogue’s supposed foundation. Here’s the “Notes” money quote:
In its effort to present a broader and fuller conception of evangelization, however, the document [“Reflections”] develops a vision of it in which the core elements of proclamation and invitation to life in Christ seem virtually to disappear. For example, Reflections on Covenant and Mission proposes interreligious dialogue as a form of evangelization that is “a mutually enriching sharing of gifts devoid of any intention whatsoever to invite the dialogue partner to baptism.” Though Christian participation in interreligious dialogue would not normally include an explicit invitation to baptism and entrance into the Church, the Christian dialogue partner is always giving witness to the following of Christ, to which all are implicitly invited.
The two Orthodox organizations responded immediately with a sharp letter to the bishops. The letter cites the first two of the three sentences I quoted, calling them
a dagger thrust into the heart of the entire enterprise of Jewish-Catholic dialogue on matters of religion. They undermine everything we were led to believe about that enterprise.
The Boycott and Its Discontents, or How Not To Defend Israel
By J.J. Goldberg
Every now and then, somebody you thought you knew does or says something so completely out of character that it catches you off-guard and forces you to look at things in new and surprising ways.
Take, for example, the recent statement by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, calling on “international academic and labor groups” to drop their “boycott campaigns against Israel.”
Whoa. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? I guess that ought to clear things right up.
Seriously, though, it’s hard to imagine whom the Wiesenthal Center thinks it’s going to convince. Its argument is essentially that the latest Nobel prize to an Israeli scientist shows that Israeli academia is doing a pretty good job and everyone should lay off. But the boycott crowd isn’t objecting to the quality of Israel’s academic or cultural opus. They’re trying to get Israel to change its policies toward the Palestinians, and they’ve identified these boycotts as an accessible pressure point.
Common sense dictates, therefore, that to dissuade them, you need to explain why these boycotts won’t help the Palestinians. And to do that with any credibility – to your target audience, that is – you ought to come to the table with some sort of track record of sympathy for the Palestinians. The Wiesenthal Center doesn’t quite fit the bill. Its most recent statement on the Palestinians was an August 19 press release dealing with “Palestinian self-delusion.”
A powerful example of a smart, effective argument against Israel boycotts was published recently in the New York Review of Books. It came in a letter from Vanessa Redgrave and two fellow culturati, Julian Schnabel and Martin Sherman.
No, that’s not a misprint. Vanessa Redgrave defending Israel. Here’s how:
To Understand Obama's Nobel, Think Not of America, but of America in the World
By J.J. Goldberg
Just about the best analysis of Obama’s Nobel that I have yet seen is this op-ed essay by Alon Pinkas, former Israeli consul general in New York and a close ally of Ehud Barak (that’s more a compliment to Barak than to Alon).
His main point is that, as I argued in an earlier blog post, the radically different American presence that Obama brings to the world stage is in itself a substantive achievement. Here’s how Alon puts it:
Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize because of an intellectual effort, rather than diplomatic action. He won for his attempt to shatter old thinking and formulate policy and diplomacy of cooperation, not because of his achievements…
Alon elaborates on how the Nobel committee treats such “intellectual efforts”:
A close examination of the history of Nobel Peace Prizes attests to considerable expansion of the term and conditions for granting the prize. Henri Kissinger was awarded a Nobel for the agreement to end the fighting and bring peace to Vietnam – but there was neither an end to fighting nor peace. The same was true of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Arafat, who received the prize in 1994. In both cases the Nobel was awarded for breaking paradigms, an effort to shatter an intellectual impasse, and political courage, rather than achievements.
The Dalai Lama worked for peace and received the prize in 1989. Yet it’s difficult to quantify his contribution to peace. It’s also difficult to say that IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei, who was awarded the prize in 2005, contributed to world peace in a more concrete manner than Barak Obama. The apex was of course in 2007, when the prize was given to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the expanding world of the term “peace,” Al Gore contributed to world peace by encouraging international cooperation on a worldwide problem.
Peace is mostly a journey, not a destination. The Nobel is memorable in large part because of its naming of the beacons that light the way forward, like the pillar of fire that was placed for us in Sinai.
Also useful reading on the Nobel is this blog post by E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post. He does a good job of going through the various takes (at least the minimally respectable ones) for and against the award and deconstructs them. One of his best points: he “liked Harold Meyerson’s take that the award should have gone to the American electorate for changing our country’s approach to the world.”
Late addition (call it my Monday-morning self-quarterbacking) is this counterpoint by Ross Douthat, the current conservative columnist on the New York Times op-ed page:
True, Obama didn’t ask for this. It was obvious, from his halting delivery and slightly shamefaced air last Friday, that he wishes the Nobel committee hadn’t put him in this spot.
But he still wasn’t brave enough to tell it no.
Obama gains nothing from the prize. No domestic constituency will become more favorably disposed to him because five Norwegians think he’s already changed the world — and the Republicans were just handed the punch line for an easy recession-era attack ad. (To quote the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, anticipating the 30-second spots to come: “He got a Nobel Prize. What did you get? A pink slip.”)
Overseas, there was nobody, from Paris to Peshawar, who woke up Friday more disposed to work with the United States because of the Nobel committee’s decision — and plenty of more seasoned statesman who woke up laughing. …
But by accepting the prize, he’s made failure, if and when it comes, that much more embarrassing and difficult to bear. What’s more, he’s etched in stone the phrase with which critics will dismiss his presidency.
...And a Very Happy Whatchamacallit...
By J.J. Goldberg
And to all dear readers, whatever your creed or background, a very happy and sweet Shemini Atzeret — or as a former editor of mine once referred to the festival, when I told him I had swapped shifts and would be out for yet another two days: You’re Making This One Up, Right?
hag sameach, ’id mubarak, have a good one, back Sunday night …
October 9, 2009, 12:59pm
Obama, the Double-edged Nobel Sword and that Little Blue Dress
By J.J. Goldberg
The Nobel committee may not have done President Obama much of a favor in awarding him the Peace Prize. At best it’s a double-edged sword. As Yediot Ahronot’s Washington correspondent Yitzhak Ben-Horin points out in a smart news analysis on the paper’s Ynet Web site (in Hebrew — not yet translated into English as I post this), the prize is apparently intended to encourage Obama’s efforts on the international scene. But it could very well boomerang on him back home by sparking ridicule and deepening public skepticism toward him.
Most of the ridicule of the prize is off-base. As admirers and critics alike are pointing out, the peace prize has been used over time in two different ways, sometimes to honor achievements and sometimes to recognize efforts in hopes of encouraging them and moving them along. The mere fact of Obama’s winning the presidency on a platform of multilateralism abroad and a stronger welfare state at home has changed the nature of discussion around the world. America came to be viewed during the Bush years as an obstacle to human progress in countless areas where it very much counts, particularly reducing tensions between the West and Islam and addressing climate change. America is now part of the game. There’s hope once again for progress on basic global crises. That itself is an accomplishment.
Still, it’s at home that his legacy will ultimately be determined. The American right tends to take the Nobel Peace Prize as a badge of shame, in line with its general views of Europe, the United Nations, multilateralism and the rest. Will ridicule of Obama’s prize hurt him politically and slow his legislative agenda? That’s the core question right now. He needs to pass credible health reform or he’ll lose momentum and credibility on every other front. He needs to find a way to get the economy moving on the ground, where it counts, in employment and access to credit. He needs to pass climate change legislation, or the whole Kyoto-Copenhagen will stall once again.
Speaking of Obama’s credibility, it’s worth checking out this essential analysis of the current moment in Israeli-Palestinian relations by Haaretz’s Aluf Benn. Among other things, Benn argues that the administration’s efforts to deflect the Goldstone report effectively touched off the latest rioting in Jerusalem. The administration bluntly pressured Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority not to push for action on the report in the U.N. Human Rights Council. That badly weakened Abbas politically. The Jerusalem riots are the response, the Palestinian Authority’s way of showing its public that it still knows how to stand up to Israel.
Israel's Got a New Plan. Gee, How Come No One Thought of This Before?
By J.J. Goldberg
Israel is preparing to adopt a new diplomatic strategy that is nothing short of breathtaking in its originality, according to a new report in Ynet, the Yediot Ahronot Web site. It’s all spelled out in a document that was submitted yesterday (October 8) to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Ynet reports.
The new strategy reportedly starts from the premise that there is no point in trying to forge a permanent peace accord with the Palestinians, because there is no realistic possibility of reaching agreement. Continuing to pursue futile peace negotiations, it’s feared, will create frustration in Europe and America that could lead, God forbid, to strained relations with Israel.
Instead, Israel is urged to negotiate long-term temporary agreements with the Palestinians that don’t entail Israeli withdrawal or Palestinian sovereignty. This, presumably, is a realistic possibility.
At the same time, Israel will work to improve its image around the world and end its international isolation. It will do this by focusing attention on economic and environmental matters.
“The age in which Israel could allow itself to be isolated is over,” the document says, according to Ynet.
The author of the document is said to be diplomat Naor Gilon, who was plucked out of Israel’s Washington embassy last April to become Lieberman’s chief of staff. The document reportedly will be discussed in the next few days by the Foreign Ministry’s senior staff, after which it is to be adopted formally as Israel’s official new foreign policy.
It sounds like a spoof from Yediot’s popular fake-news page, but that page only appears on Friday, so this must be intended seriously. If Ynet is right, the plan is on track to become Israel’s new diplomatic master-strategy. In essence, the plan is for Israel to explain to the rest of the world that since it has no intention of accepting a deal with the Palestinians, withdrawing from the West Bank or ending the occupation, everyone might as well calm down and accept what every single nation in the world has flatly rejected for an unbroken 42 years. The Palestinians will be asked to forget about their goals of independence and sovereignty and settle down under the Israeli rule that they have given up thousands of lives to be rid of. Avigdor Lieberman is going to explain to the European Union, the United Nations and the Arab League that they’ve all been operating under a silly misunderstanding which he would be happy to clear up.
To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be understood by a hostile world. It’s scary, though, to think that the Jewish state is now represented on the world stage by someone who’s delusional enough to think, even for a moment, that the world can magically be remade if one only wishes hard enough.
Incidentally, if the name Naor Gilon sounds familiar, here’s why: As political counsellor at the Israeli embassy in Washington, he enjoyed a moment of fame a few years ago when he came under FBI scrutiny as the suspected Israeli contact allegedly receiving classified material from former AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Just the guy you want as your good will ambassador in tense times.
October 5, 2009, 1:25am
Surprising, Yet Not Surprising: Ahmadinejad and Other Self-hating Jews
By J.J. Goldberg
The course of Middle East politics probably won’t be changed drastically by the news, reported October 3 in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born Jewish. But the disclosure is intriguing enough to spark a whole new line of speculation. The Forward’s Nathan Guttman suggests that Ahmadinejad’s obsessive Jew-bashing may be an extreme case of Jewish self-hatred. Nathan’s being playful, but the Telegraph quotes scholars who take the idea seriously.
According to the Telegraph, Ahmadinejad was born to a Jewish family named Sabourjian, which can be translated “tallis-weaver.” Mahmoud’s father Ahmad Sabourjian changed the name when the family converted to Islam — which took place, the paper says, after the future president’s birth.
The Telegraph actually isn’t the first to out Ahmadinejad as a Jew. Radio Free Europe carried the news back in January 2009, following a blog post on the topic by the son of a pro-Ahmadinejad cleric. But the Telegraph goes further: It found an official document that seems to confirm Ahmadinejad’s origins.
Not everybody is buying it. Politico quotes Iranian-born Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar, who wrote a biography of the Iranian leader, pooh-poohing the whole notion. On the other hand, it’s possible that Javedanfar is just peeved because he missed the scoop.
It’s important to recall that Ahmadinejad is not the first prominent Jew-hater with roots in the community. Indeed, he joins a proud line. Russian lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky, perhaps the most influential antisemite in post-Soviet Russia, admitted in a 2001 book — after years of denying it — that his father, Wolf Eidelshtein, was Jewish. Zhirinovsky himself bore the name Eidelshtein until he had it changed at age 18.
Then there’s Brooklyn-born chess master Bobby Fischer, who had a Jewish mother and a German father. He began spewing wildly antisemitic ideas during his eccentric, paranoia-plagued later years in self-imposed exile.
But no one has yet matched the self-loathing antisemitism of the champion antisemite of all time, Adolf Hitler. He may or may not have had a Jewish grandfather but he was haunted by the possibility that he might have. Hitler’s father Alois was born out of wedlock, and the identity of Alois’s father — Adolf’s paternal grandfather — remains unknown. One persistent theory is that the old guy was Jewish, possibly a businessman who employed Alois’s mother Maria as a domestic. Most respectable Hitler scholars dismiss the idea, but it seems unquestionable that Hitler himself was quite anxious about it, as psycho-historian George Victor wrote convincingly in his 1998 book “Hitler: The Pathology of Evil.” Among the bits of evidence of Hitler’s anxiety is the widely reported fact that Hitler went into a panic when his British-born nephew William tried briefly to blackmail Uncle Adolf in the 1930s by threatening to go public with the family secret.
An odd sidebar: Nephew Willy Hitler ended up settling on Long Island during the war years, and after a brief lecture tour (based on his Look magazine article, “Why I Hate My Uncle”) and a stint in the U.S. Navy he married and changed his last name in order to sever the family link. Three of his four sons still live in Patchogue, L.I., where they tried for years to avoid publicity and tried to keep their new last name secret. None of them ever married or had children, reputedly so that the Hitler line can come to an end. Curiously, though, Willy’s oldest son is named Alexander Adolf, something the son still says he’s at a loss to explain. And the family name that Willy chose for his sons to bear is Stuart-Houston, a seemingly transparent homage to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the father of the theory that Germany has a historic mission to destroy the Jews. Whoops.
Barak Warned To Leave England Ahead of Possible War Crimes Suit
By J.J. Goldberg
Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, was warned by Israeli government attorneys this week to leave England and head home after Palestinians filed suit for an international arrest warrant on war crimes charges.
Barak decided to ignore the warning and continue his visit, according to reports in Haaretz and Ynet/Yediot. He was scheduled to meet on Tuesday with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and on Wednesday with Foreign Minister David Miliband. He’s also scheduled to address a Labour Friends of Israel event at the annual Labour Party conference taking place in Brighton this week.
Barak is the second ranking Israeli official to face possible arrest in Britain under the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows countries to arrest and try foreign nationals for crimes committed in another country. Retired General Doron Almog, former chief of Israel’s southern command, went to England in September 2005 to address a conference on childhood autism, but returned home without even leaving his plane after Israel’s London embassy warned him about a warrant for his arrest in relation to the July 2002 airstrike against Gaza Hamas leader Salah Shehada, which killed 14 people including nine children. Britain later canceled the warrant.
The case against Barak is reportedly based on the Gaza war last winter. It comes just a few weeks after the release of the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council, on alleged war crimes in Gaza. The London suit doesn’t appear to be related directly to the report – except for the fact that it would be neutralized, along with other universal jurisdiction efforts against it, including the Goldstone allegations, if Israel were to mount a serious, independent investigation into Gaza-related allegations, along the lines of the acclaimed investigations it launched following the 1973 and 1982 wars. So far the Netanyahu government refuses.
Haaretz columnist Brad Burston recently wrote a powerful piece on the mounting efforts by Palestinians and human rights activists to isolate Israel, and the damage it does to the cause of peace they claim to be pursuing. It’s a cry from an increasingly helpless Israeli left, marginalized at home and now abandoned by its supposed allies abroad.
Here’s Doron Almog discussing the 2005 incident:
Here’s a British news report from last spring that sympathetically describes universal jurisdiction cases against Israel currently working their way through Spanish courts – also stemming from the Shehada bombing:
Here’s Philippines legal scholar Ralph Sarmiento discussing the legal theories behind universal jurisdiction:
Here’s Bob Dylan on the harmonica at a Chabad event, accompanying his son-in-law Peter Himmelman and actor Harry Dean Stanton in a lively if somewhat off-key rendition of Hava Nagila.
Knesset Moves To Ease (or Is it Tighten?) Conversion Rules
By J.J. Goldberg
While the attention of world Jewry was riveted on the United Nations, Israel’s Knesset quietly gave initial approval on September 22 to legislation that’s intended to ease the process of conversion to Judaism in Israel. The bill authorizes local rabbis to perform conversions at the request of would-be converts, permitting converts to seek out friendly rabbis and loosening the control of the national conversion court system. The bill also bars the growing practice of rabbinical courts unilaterally annulling conversions that were performed elsewhere, usually because a convert is not maintaining an Orthodox lifestyle.
The bill must pass two more Knesset votes to become law.
The measure was drafted by lawmaker David Rotem of the hard-line, Russian-immigrant-dominated Yisrael Beiteinu party, and is aimed primarily at helping the estimated 300,000 Russian immigrants who are not considered Jewish under Orthodox rabbinic law. It was initially opposed in committee by the Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, out of fear that it would loosen the strict standards now imposed on converts. They were won over before the floor vote, however. The bill passed its first reading by 54 votes to one.
Reform Jewish leaders are objecting to a provision in the bill that would formalize the Israeli chief rabbinate’s control over conversions. The provision is seen as a way to win backdoor approval for the long-debated “Who Is a Jew?” amendment that would legally bar Israeli recognition of any conversions other than Orthodox ones. Rotem has promised to correct that before the bill becomes law, but it’s not clear whether he can do that without losing crucial Haredi support.
September 18, 2009, 6:18pm
Reading Goldstone: Breathe Deep and Get a Grip
By J.J. Goldberg
It’s getting a bit frightening watching the unfolding of the Israeli government’s campaign to discredit the Goldstone report on suspected Gaza war crimes. The spluttering, frantic rage, the contradictory arguments, the transparent drafting of Diaspora Jewish organizations to put their credibility on the line — it adds up to a demeaning performance that can only weaken Israel’s credibility at a moment when it needs credibility more than ever. The Israeli defense strategy seems to be painting the report as though it were a death sentence from a Nazi commandant, rather than an initial fact-finding report by a distinguished international jurist. It only makes Israel look like it’s hiding something.
Some of Israel’s presumed defenders are claiming that the report gives Hamas a free pass and ignores the years of rocket attacks on southern Israel. Others are complaining that the report treats Hamas the same as Israel, ignoring the moral difference between a democratic state and a terrorist gang. But they can’t both be true. If the report is treating Hamas’s actions the same as Israel’s, then it obviously isn’t ignoring them. In fact, Hamas’s rocket attacks are treated seriously in the report and acknowledged as the trigger that prompted Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead. The report examines their physical damage to Israeli property and lives, their psychological impact on Israeli children and their demoralizing impact on the population. They’re anything but ignored. To say they’re ignored is simply a lie.
As for treating Hamas and Israel with moral equivalency, that indicates a failure of historical memory. Israel has been complaining for years that human rights organizations like Amnesty International criticize Israeli behavior but ignore worse behavior by terrorist organizations. For years Amnesty and other groups have replied that their mandate is to examine actions by governments, not non-state actors however heinous. Now, finally, a human rights investigation with the full backing of the United Nations has subjected Palestinian terrorist actions to the same scrutiny applied to Israel, and now the problem is that they shouldn’t get the same treatment.
There’s a larger problem with the moral equivalency argument. It’s been applied to the U.N. with increasing vigor in recent years by Americans, mostly conservatives, who don’t think the organization should allow the participation of dictatorships. They would rather see a league of democracies, and put the dictatorships beyond the pale. But the very purpose of the U.N. is to bring nations together without distinction, in order to maintain channels of communication, to seek some minimal standards that might be accepted on all sides and perhaps forestall armed conflict and save lives. It’s supposed to act as a neutral forum, and a forum can’t be neutral if it starts dividing participants into good guys and bad guys. It’s a bit like asking a court of law to treat nice people better than nasty ones when judging the facts.
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