The Border Between Israel and Palestine: The Elephant in the Map Room. By Frank Jacobs.

The Elephant in the Map Room. By Frank Jacobs. New York Times, August 7, 2012.

Small Homogeneous States Only Solution for Middle East. By Mordechai Kedar. IMRA, April 1, 2011.

The Arab Collapse. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, May 20, 2013. With related articles on the possible fragmentation of the Middle East on ethnic and sectarian lines.

Katy Perry: Roar

Katy Perry: Roar (Official). Video. KatyPerryVEVO, September 5, 2013. YouTube. Also here.

Katy Perry: Making of the Roar Music Video. KatyPerryVEVO, November 14, 2013. YouTube.

On the Crisis of Zionism. By Rick Perlstein.

On the Crisis of Zionism. By Rick Perlstein. Rolling Stone, May 2, 2012.

Perlstein:

As an adult, I’ve always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents’ circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal. What I didn’t fully comprehend, until now, was why. Beinart unearths a story of 1970s politics that was unknown to me – except as I so intimately lived it – showing that at the root of this sense of embattled tribalism was a transformation worked by the leaders of right-leaning American Jewish organizations, who traded in their founding (liberal) aspirations to universal justice for a wagon-circling parochalism.

 

I knew how the 1967 simultaneous Soviet-backed invasion of Israel by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which put Israel’s very survival at stake, profoundly intensified American Jews’ emotional connection to the Jewish state. (One marvelous detail Beinart uncovers: a small Oklahoma synagogue sold its building so they could send the proceeds to Israel to aid the cause.) What I didn’t realize was how deliberately establishment Jewish leaders of this period substituted victimhood – the sense that Jews always and everywhere were at risk of being wiped out, should they drop their guard – for liberalism, “as a strategy for defending Israel,” and as “the defining ideology of organized American Jewish life.” The president of the American Jewish Congress, for example, an organization founded in 1906 that once was so soppily universalist in focus they had considered changing their name to the “Institute for Human Relations,” lamented in 1970 that young Jews “lack a sense of ‘being Jewish’” because the Holocaust was not “seared into” their memories. So educational materials were developed to do the searing right quick – in part, by way of simulations “designed to help children imagine that they were experiencing the trauma firsthand.” (I remember those: We were supposed to pretend to be Jews in Germany, hiding from Nazis – though in my case the exercise was called off at the last minute when parents, to their credit, protested. We did, however, pretend to be Jews running the British blockade of Palestine.)

 

The next AJC president wrote in 1982 that the reason such trauma education was necessary was “so that our children will know who they really are.” Who we really are: a stunning admonition. Who we really were, as a 1974 book coauthored by the head of the Anti-Defamation League and quoted by Beinart were martyrs – and “tolerable” to the rest of the world “only as victims . . . and when [our] situation changes so that [we] are either no longer victims or appear not to be, the non-Jewish world finds this so hard to take that the effort is begun to render [us] victims again.” The usefulness of that bizarre, passively voiced tautology springs from its nihilism: Actually existing Jewish power can only be taken as evidence that the deluge must be right around the corner.

 

The notion that violent paranoia must be taught as the moral center of Judaism has persisted to recent times, as I learned on a trip to Israel where a young cousin of mine was Bar Mitzvahed at Masada (tellingly, a military site, not a religious one), and during which he and his unwitting friends were directed to read a poem about the Warsaw Ghetto while standing on a monument to destroyed European shtetls:

At my Bar Mitzvah, I lifted my voice and sang.

At his Bar Mitzvah, he lifted his fists and fought.

At my Bar Mitzvah, I wore a new tallit over a new suit.

At his Bar Mitvah he wore a rifle an bullets over a suit of rags.

At my Bar Mitzvah, I started my road to life.

At his Bar Mitzvah, he began his road to martyrdom.

It follows that the actual world we kids inherited, in which Jews now serving on the Supreme Court outnumber Protestants three to zero and a Jew serves as House majority leader and the Jew who used to be the president's chief of staff runs our third largest city, and in which Israel is a nuclear-armed regional superpower can really be only a mirage. “Is It 1939?” Malcolm Honlein, the head of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, asked in a 2010 speech. It just might be, was his answer. Which is why he displays in his office a photoshopped image of Israeli F-15s liberating Auschwitz. Six million Jews are once more getting ready to die.

 

This was the moral education that I found so dissatisfying in my youth, as it trickled down to medium-sized Midwestern burgs – a disingenous muddle of irrationalism, intellectual double standards, and whiny special pleading. I learned that because Israel was a “democracy,” with Arab citizens and political parties, discrimination against those Arabs was not a problem – but also that it was appropriate for the Israeli Defense Forces to harass Arabs at random because, I remember hearing, “they don't wear signs around their neck saying ‘good Arab’ and ‘bad Arab.’” I was solemnly informed that groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were biased against Israel and that the State Department was full of anti-Semites. I heard men who seemed otherwise utterly apolitical and non-intellectual rehearse elaborate they-started-it narratives starring conspirators like the Mufti of Jerusalem, who gulled Arabs into eagerly abandoning their homes, which happened to make room for Zionist pioneers who had never been anything but magnanimous toward them. I got the message, loud and clear, that those of us living lives of bland comfort far from enemy-circled Israel had no right, no standing to criticize the Jewish state; and to just shut up and send the check to Jewish organizations, the better to salve your conscience.

 

The ideology extended to theology. The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God’s name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel’s “miraculous” military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion’s side. (God had help, I later learned as a professional historian: More American materiel were shipped to Israel in just ten days during the 1973 Yom Kippur War than over the entire eleven months of the 1948 Berlin Airlift, which also helps explain why, in my youth, Richard Nixon was seen by many Jews to have got a raw deal on Watergate.)

 

All of which left me, in my youth, feeling utterly uninterested in Judaism, which to me appeared inherently barren: If you found dubious the proposition that Israel as it existed protected Jews around the world – rather than making them more vulnerable through the injustices it perpetrated – there was really nothing spiritual left.

 

And what has the embrace of victimhood wrought for American Jews? “In city after city,” Beinart points out, they “have built Holocaust memorials. . . . The Jewish schools in those cities are often decrepit, mediocre, and unaffordable, but there is no shortage of places to learn how Jews died. . . . When a community builds better memorials than schools – when it raises children more familiar with Auschwitz that with Simchat Torah [that means “rejoicing in the law”; proving his argument, I had to look it up] – the lesson of those memorials cannot be: Honor the dead by leading, informed, committed Jewish lives. Nor is the lesson: Honor the dead by acting justly toward those non-Jews which live under Jewish rule . . . Instead, the implicit lesson is: Honor the dead by preventing another Holocaust, this time in Israel.” The memorial-builders, he writes, “began hoarding the Holocaust.” Yes! This to me was stunning to read, remembering how a museum in the ghetto devoted to “America’s Black Holocaust” made Milwaukee Jews seethe: that word, “Holocaust,” belonged to us.

 

There are, of course, good reasons for Jews to be informed about the history of the bad intentions that much of the rest of the world has harbored toward us. Beinart elucidated them beautifully in a stunning essay in the magazine Transition, which I read when it came out sixteen years ago and remember indelibly. But even more powerfully, that essay also laid out the dangers of circling the wagons. He wrote about his grandmother, who said “Jews are like rats,” fleeing sinking ships. In The Crisis of Zionism he lists the ships his own family has been forced to abandon over the generations: first escaping “a Spanish town cleansed of Jews five hundred years ago”; then now-defunct Jewish communities in Greece and Turkey; then the war-torn Belgian Congo, whence they fled to South Africa.

 

In South Africa, Jews found “rich soil,” Beinart writes — “and poisoned soil as well.” In a system driven by a “mania for classification and segregation,” the South African state “used the traditional Jewish desire to remain distinct as a lever to guarantee their support for a political system based on racial separation and hierarchy.” But Beinart found something to admire in South African Jews, something revelatory: They were “less reliant on victimology. While American Jews pour money into Holocaust memorials, South African Jews have focused on Jewish education.”

 

The Crisis of Zionism raises up as heroes a new wave of liberal young people leading informed, committed Jewish lives right here among us. The facts he elicits about them should be profoundly sobering to establishment Jewish leaders like Malcolm Honlein with his Israeli F-15s: men and women in the “independent minyanim” movement (minyanim are small prayer groups), who “grew up Reform or Conservative [the less hardcore-religious branches of Judaism], but through Jewish school, summer camp, or adult study . . . gained a level of religious literacy far beyond that of most Reform or Conservative Jews.” Members of this Jewish renaissance marry other Jews 93 percent of the time: What ensures Jewishness, he concludes, “is not victimhood, but Jewish knowledge as a vehicle of Jewish meaning.” Even more stunningly, a survey of the new movement’s leadership found that although they “had spent more time in Israel than their elders and were more likely to speak Hebrew” – 56 percent had lived there more than four months at a time, double that of older leaders – and “only 32 percent strongly agreed that Israel was a very important part of their Jewish identity.”

 

But why? “They are,” Beinart says, “deeply troubled by Israel’s policies” – specifically its insistence on expanding settlements in the territory west of the Jordan River that Israel began occupying following the 1967 war. Though Israel is often described as the “only democracy in the Middle East,” these occupied territories are not democratic: Israeli settlers there, for instance, enjoy their own system of roads, from which Arabs are banned, and when Arabs violate Israeli law they are tried before military courts where only one percent are ever found innocent. And, he argues, since the settlers and their representatives – people like the settler who deliberately drove his car into a cabinet minister, then was made a representative of the settlers’ governing council; the settler who shot a classics professor in 2002 who was helping a Palestinian farmer harvest his vineyards, and went free; and the head of the West Bank’s rabbinical council who called Baruch Goldstein, the settler-assassin of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers, “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust” – are becoming more integrated into the governing institutions of Israel itself, this threatens the survival of a democratic Jewish state itself.

 

It is a debate I am unqualified to adjudicate. The deeply unsatisfying tribalism that marred the religious education of my youth laid an unpromising foundation; and though I respect the way in which many people I love have carved deeply satisfying spiritual lives for themselves in Judaism, many in the same independent minyanim movement Beinart so admires, my religious direction tended elsewhere. As for Israel, I don’t think of it much. Even in a career as a political writer given to disputation, the sheer viciousness (which you’ll see from the hate mail this piece produces: I plan to publish it) faced by those who criticize not merely Israel, but certain specific de rigeur formulations about Israel, turned me off the entire subject. Instead, and I’ve never admitted this publicly before, the deeply saturated irrationalism surrounding it as I was growing up was what made me fascinated with political irrationalism as such – and helps explain why I ended up a scholar of the American far-right.

 

That reflexive intimidation, in the end, is what most fascinates me about The Crisis of Zionism. I'd heard great things from friends about the book — but read almost nothing admiring about it in the public prints. People are cowed at the thought of taking on the shrieking Israel absolutists, the ones who imagine themselves every day saving six million lives and their critics as hastening the slaughter. Apropos: In one stunning story Beinart tells in his book, a group of young Jewish leaders declined to stand together at a Jewish gathering and sing the national anthem, but also declined to join a public resolution opposing settlement growth: “In the organized Jewish world, left-leaning young Jews often rely on establishment Jewish institutions for financial support. And publicly criticism is an excellent way to endanger that support.” Again and again, he prints quotations from unidentified sources, who apparently fear attaching their name to even innocuous opinions: like the former official of the American Defamation League who says it is “first and foremost a fund-raising organization”; and the “prominent Jewish journalist” who remarks that one major institutional conference “looks like the day room at the old-age home.”

 

Another anonymous source is a “senior State Department official,” who recently traveled with Secretary Clinton from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the West Bank: “There was a kind of silence and people were careful, but it was like, my God, you crossed that border and it was apartheid.” For the most prominent victim of this climate of intimidation, and the retreat from reason and empirical observation it enforces, is the president whose Chicago home sits across the street from a venerable synagogue where, Beinart argues, he learned from the Jewish community that embraced him a Zionism that was both deeply felt and opposed to settlement growth. But then Barack Obama moved into the White House, where he found it impossible to follow through on his convictions, thanks to “Jewish pressure,” as a revealing headline in Time magazine puts it.

 

Jewish pressure issues from people like Malcolm Honlein, not from any preponderance of actual Jews; polling finds “the gap between Jews and other Americans has not narrowed at all” on approval of Obama, and only 10 percent of American Jews make Israel their primary voting issue. “Members of Congress,” Beinart concludes, “worried that the administration did not fully grasp what he had gotten himself into” when he made a halt to the growth in settlements by the Israeli government a precondition for further diplomatic progress. Now, however, he has given up, and his statements sound like “they were faxed to his office by the Israeli prime minister’s office,” according to one Israeli commentary Beinart quotes. “‘If you’re going to pick a fight with a bully, you need to win.’” This quote is from a “Congressional staffer who works on Israel policy” – who, naturally, asked not to be named.

No Jewish People Without Israel. By Daniel Gordis.

No Jewish People Without Israel. By Daniel Gordis. Tablet, August 20, 2012.

Reconciling Modern Biblical Scholarship With Traditional Orthodox Belief. By Yair Rosenberg.

Reconciling Modern Biblical Scholarship With Traditional Orthodox Belief. By Yair Rosenberg. Tablet, September 18, 2013.

Avraham Avinu is My Father: Thoughts on Torah, History, and Judaism. By Rabbi Zev Farber, Ph.D. TheTorah.com.

Why National Identity Still Matters. By Robert Kaplan.

Who Are We? Why National Identity Still Matters. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, September 19, 2013.

The Decline of College. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Decline of College. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, September 19, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Syria Postmortem. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Syria Postmortem. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, September 19, 2013.

Syria’s Refugees: The Catastrophe.

Syria’s Refugees: The Catastrophe. By Hugh Eakin and Alisa Roth. The New York Review of Books, October 10, 2013. Also here.

Arafat Destroyed the Dream of Oslo for Palestinians. By Shlomi Eldar.

Arafat Destroyed the Dream of Oslo for Palestinians. By Shlomi Eldar. Al Monitor, September 13, 2013.

Will Bibi Trade Iran for Palestine? By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Will Bibi Trade Iran for Palestine? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, September 18, 2013.

Netanyahu to US: Iran for Palestine? By Ben Caspit. Al Monitor, September 17, 2013.

The Myth of Israeli Self-Reliance. By Ben Caspit. Al Monitor, September 13, 2013.

17 coalition MKs warn PM: We oppose a Palestinian state. By Raphael Ahren. The Times of Israel, September 17, 2013.

The Privilege of Marriage. By Amber Lapp and Bradford Wilcox.

The Privilege of Marriage. By Amber Lapp and Bradford Wilcox. National Review, September 30, 2013.

Balance, Not Parity. By Maggie Gallagher. National Review, September 30, 2013.

Capitalism’s Triumph. By Michael Tanner.

Capitalism’s Triumph. By Michael Tanner. National Review Online, September 18, 2013.

Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem. By Charles Murray. Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2012.

Ideology Trumps American Strategy in Syria. By George Friedman.

Ideology Trumps American Strategy in Syria. By George Friedman. Real Clear World, September 17, 2013.

Being Muslim in America After 9/11.

Being Muslim in America after 9/11. Video. Fareed Zakaria with Ayad Akhtar and Aasif Mandvi. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, September 16, 2013. Transcript.

Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, Season 2: Jerusalem.

Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, Season 2: Jerusalem. Video. ATTHET0PITTSJUSTUS, September 16, 2013. YouTube. Originally shown on CNN, September 15, 2013.

Anthony Bourdain explains the Israel-Palestine conflict through food. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, September 18, 2013. Also here.

TV chef Bourdain reveals Jewish heritage during show in Israel. By Jordana Horn. The Times of Israel, September 16, 2013.

Watching Anthony Bourdain in Palestine. By Maysoon Zayid. The Daily Beast, September 19, 2013.

Transcript of Fareed Zakaria interview with Anthony Bourdain. GPS. CNN, September 15, 2013.

Israel Relieves Suffering in Gaza, Egypt Intensifies It. By Walter Russell Mead.

Israel Relieves Suffering in Gaza, Egypt Intensifies It. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, September 18, 2013.

Mead:

We’re not holding our breath for the BBC and others to roll out the maps and discover that in fact Egypt also shares a border with Gaza that it likes to abuse and refuses to open. Nor are we calling for any “Israel Saves Palestinians from Arabs” headlines; Israel does not and should not get a free pass in reporting about Gaza. But the lack of  MSM enthusiasm for stories about the role neighboring Arab states play in Palestinian suffering is hard to understand given stories like these. It almost makes one suspect that something more than concern for the Palestinians’ suffering is at work.

Syria War Polarizes West Bank Palestinians. By Naela Khalil.

Syria War Polarizes West Bank Palestinians. By Naela Khalil. Al Monitor, September 17, 2013.

The Illusion of American Exceptionalism. By Deepak Tripathi.

The illusion of American exceptionalism. By Deepak Tripathi. Al Jazeera, September 18, 2013.

The end of American exceptionalism. By Mark LeVine. Al Jazeera, December 19, 2009.

Banking on West Bank Prosperity. By Dalia Hatuqa.

Banking on West Bank prosperity. By Dalia Hatuqa. Al Jazeera, September 12, 2013.

Why Some Palestinians Want to Learn Like Israelis. By Ben Lynfield.

Why some Palestinians want to learn like Israelis. By Ben Lynfield. The Christian Science Monitor, September 13, 2013.

Palestinian textbooks fall short where they are most needed – introducing “the other.” By Christa Case Bryant. The Christian Science Monitor, February 8, 2013.

Israeli-Palestinian School Book Project Research Materials.

The Dangers of Russian Unexceptionalism. By Alex Berezow.

The Dangers of Russian Unexceptionalism. By Alex Berezow. Real Clear World, September 17, 2013.

Muslims, Stop Blaming Israel. By Sinem Tezyapar.

Muslims, stop blaming Israel. By Sinem Tezyapar. Jewish Journal, September 11, 2013.

In an Ocean of Islamic Hatred We Discovered True Friends. By Yori Yanover. The Jewish Press, April 22, 2013.

Sinem Tezyapar: Personal Site.

Tezyapar:

Whenever calamities befall Muslim-majority nations, there is always a country to blame: Israel. Is there a revolution against a tyrant? Zionists are responsible. Who else could be at fault if there is a clash between Sunni and Shia groups? The Jews. Did a bomb explode on the other side of the world, or is there a problem with the economy? No need look any further than Israel. And where else would the control center for destabilizing the Arab world be? In Tel Aviv, of course!

The late Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi blamed Israel for the violence and unrest in Africa. Former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said that the turmoil in the Arab world is a pro-Zionist conspiracy. Saudi cleric Sheikh Ismae’il al-Hafoufi blamed Israel for the desecration of Islamic holy sites in Syria. Sheik Abd al-Jalil al-Karouri, a Sudanese cleric, pointed to Israel for the Boston and Texas bombings. And then there’s the belief that Zionists planned the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, to demonize Arabs and Muslims in the eyes of the world.

 

This madness of putting the blame on Zionists — and Israel in general — is a knee-jerk reaction with no basis in logic. The most surprising part is that so many people believe this without question and continue to disseminate such rumors far and wide.

 

Syria, Egypt, Iran and Lebanon all aggressively hold the “Zionist regime” responsible for their woes. While Bashar Assad accuses Israel of trying to destabilize Syria, the Syrian opposition blames Israel for assisting the Assad regime by giving them diplomatic cover. Both sides see Israel as responsible for all the bloodshed and unrest going on in Syria. Now with the possibility of an international intervention in Syria, Iranian legislators and commanders are issuing blunt warnings, saying any military strike from the United States on Syria would lead to a retaliatory attack on Israel. Israel’s staying out of the equation, it seems, is simply not possible. Even though Israeli politicians refrain from taking sides in the regional conflicts, all sides point toward Israel anyhow.

 

On the other hand, we have the Egyptian coup d’état, where we see both sides ascribe blame to Israel. Interestingly, the Egyptian grass-roots protest movement Tamarod blames Israel but urges the Egyptian government not to renege on the Camp David accords. If Israel condemns the violence committed against the anti-coup alliance, she is labeled as an enemy of Egypt and accused of collaborating to destroy the Egyptian army. Even the state-allied newspaper al-Ahram claimed that Israel is in an alliance to demolish the Egyptian army and to balkanize the country. Furthermore, in 2010, an Egyptian government official blamed Israel intelligence for a fatal shark attack off Egypt’s shores.

 

It must sound like a bizarre joke for some, but this tragicomic situation is quite serious for many in the Middle East. We are no longer surprised to hear Israel’s being the scapegoat for every single evil in the world, but Iran’s blaming the Zionist entity for the deadly earthquake in Iran was pushing the limits of credulity. This, despite the fact that Jews are a handful of people, a tiny population when compared to the overall population of the world.

 

Now let’s look at what is really going on in the Islamic-Arab world. There is a continuous and unending stream of hate — hate of the Shia, hate of the Wahabbi, hate of the Sunni, hate of the Alawi, hate of the Christians, hate of the Jews and so on. We also see slogans such as: “May God Destroy Israel,” “Down With the United States,” “Damn the West.” Hatred is deeply ingrained in their tradition, in their culture and in their own education. This fierce, venomous style is what is tearing the Islamic world apart; this is exactly what is happening in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and others — Muslims killing Muslims.

 

This outcome is the result of intense efforts by some Muslim clerics who encourage hatred of the “other.” Muslims kill each other and then both sides blame the Jews. Wahabbi scholars say that all Sunnis are unbelievers and should be destroyed. Sunni scholars say Shias are unbelievers and their death is obligatory. Shias say that it is obligatory to kill Sunnis, as they are enemies. These are Muslim clerics who are promoting the most violent brand of sectarianism, preaching hatred and calling upon their followers to commit massacres. How do Jews make Muslims kill other Muslims?

 

When Muslim followers heed these clerical calls for violence, these same clerics turn around and promptly blame the Jews. What about calls for Muslims to not kill each other? What about Muslims unifying to solve their own problems without resorting to violence? What about the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, with its 57 member states, or the League of Arab States, with its 22 states, both which seem utterly helpless to bring about any solutions?

 

Some religious scholars have led many ignorant people astray with their false teachings, which plant seeds of hate. They implement a faith they have largely invented under the name of Islam — a faith that includes hatred, violence, darkness, which attaches no value to human life. They espouse bloodshed in the name of Islam, spreading hatred toward Christians, Jews and even other Muslims. These loveless, misguided people are most definitely not Muslims, but bigots and radicals.

As Muslims, let’s stop pointing the finger at others for our problems. It is time for the Muslim world to take responsibility and to ponder what has gone so horribly wrong with the Muslim world. Why is there so much bloodshed? Superstitions, innovations, localized traditions and bigotry have replaced the Quran in some Islamic countries, and their religiosity is a deeply artificial one. This hatred has to stop and Muslims must embrace the true spirit of the Quran, which is love, compassion and brotherhood for all.

 

 

How Many Millions of Americans Wish They Never Married? By Dr. Keith Ablow.

How many millions of Americans wish they never married? By Dr. Keith Ablow. FoxNews,com, September 14, 2013.

Demonizing Putin Endangers America’s Security. By Stephen F. Cohen.

Demonizing Putin Endangers America’s Security. By Stephen F. Cohen. The Nation, September 16, 2013.