What archaeology tells us about the Bible. By Christa Case Bryant. The Christian Science Monitor, October 13, 2013.
Khirbet Qeiyafa, a contentious dig in Israel, delves into
the kingdoms of David and Solomon, stirring a debate over the veracity of the
biblical record.
Bryant:
True,
the Zionist movement that spearheaded Israel’s establishment was largely
secular. But it also drew heavily on the Bible. Founding father David
Ben-Gurion pushed aside the image of bespectacled Jews poring over rabbinical
teachings and championed instead the brawny heroes of the Bible, who overcame
insurmountable odds to conquer Israel’s enemies. These included David and
Solomon, who, according to the Bible, joined the tribes of Israel and Judah
into a kingdom known as the United Monarchy.
“For
Ben-Gurion, the image of a great United Monarchy with territorial expansion . .
. establishing a nation, establishing a big administration with monumental
architecture – this was an image that played back and forth, between that David
and this David, between King David and David Ben-Gurion, in a way,” says
Israel Finkelstein.
Archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel Announces Discovery of King David’s Palace at Khirbet Qeiyafa. NJBR, July 20, 2013.
Crying King David: Are the ruins found in Israel really his palace? By Julia Fridman. Haaretz, August 26, 2013. Also here.
The keys to the kingdom of David. By Asaf Shtull-Trauring. Haaretz, May 6, 2011. Also here.
Israel’s brain drain crisis. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, October 15, 2013. Also here.
Exodus? Israel’s Identity Crisis Over Brain Drain to U.S. and Germany. By Peter Münch. Worldcrunch, October 15, 2013.
Israel’s turn to ask: Do all Jews need to live in Israel? By Alissa Breiman. Haaretz, October 15, 2013.
Engaging the Israeli Diaspora: Toronto as a Case Study. By Alissa Breiman et al. The Reut Institute, June 2013. PDF.
Netanyahu Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews. By Jeffrey Goldberg. The Atlantic, Novmeber 30, 2011.
Yom HaZikaron: Israeli Memorial Day in America. Video. KlitaGov, September 20, 2011. YouTube.
The Middle East Pendulum. By Roger Cohen. New York Times, October 14, 2013.
Can Islam Accommodate Democracy or Democracy Accommodate Islam? By Benjamin R. Barber. Reset DOC, August 4, 2008.
Government shutdown unleashes racism. By Roger Simon. Politico, October 14, 2013.
Roger Simon Wishes Death on Ted Cruz, Accuses Him of Waging a “War Against Babies.” By Geoffrey Dickens. NewsBusters, October 14, 2013.
Playing the Racism Card in the Shutdown. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 15, 2013.
Roger Simon and Media Bias. By Jonah Goldberg. National Review Online, October 14, 2013.
Democracy After the Shutdown. By Michael P. Lynch. New York Times, October 15, 2013.
Syrian war’s brutality isn’t going away. By Peter Bergen and Jennifer Rowland. CNN, October 11, 2013.
The Personal Side of Megyn Kelly. Video. Media Buzz. Fox News, October 13, 2013. Also at Fox News Insider.
Gretchen Carlson Goes Makeup-Free in Segment on Empowering Young Girls. Video. Fox News Insider, October 11, 2013. Also here. YouTube.
After the Buzz: Pondering TV without hair and makeup. Video. Howard Kurtz and Lauren Ashburn. Media Buzz. Fox News, October 13, 2013.
Fox’s Gretchen Carlson Goes Without Makeup to Discuss Our “Sexualized” Culture. By Andrew Kirell. Mediaite, October 11, 2013.
So This Is What Gretchen Carlson Looks Like Without Makeup. By Becket Adams. The Blaze, October 12, 2013.
Gretchen Carlson Takes Off Her Makeup Because of Female Empowerment. By Kate Dries. Jezebel, October 11, 2013.
Fox News Let a Lady Go On TV Without Makeup. By Elizabeth Licata. The Gloss, October 12, 2013.
Fox News Turned Me Into a TV Slut. By Meghan Keane. The Gloss, May 31, 2011.
Ashkenazi Jewish Ancestry Confirmed European by mtDNA Tests. By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, October 10, 2013.
A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages. By Marta D. Costa, Martin B. Richards et al. Nature Communications, October 8, 2013. PDF. Also here.
Abstract:
The
origins of Ashkenazi Jews remain highly controversial. Like Judaism,
mitochondrial DNA is passed along the maternal line. Its variation in the
Ashkenazim is highly distinctive, with four major and numerous minor founders.
However, due to their rarity in the general population, these founders have
been difficult to trace to a source. Here we show that all four major founders,
~40% of Ashkenazi mtDNA variation, have ancestry in prehistoric Europe, rather
than the Near East or Caucasus. Furthermore, most of the remaining minor
founders share a similar deep European ancestry. Thus the great majority of
Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly
supposed, nor recruited in the Caucasus, as sometimes suggested, but
assimilated within Europe. These results point to a significant role for the
conversion of women in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and provide the
foundation for a detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history.
Genes Suggest European Women at Root of Ashkenazi Family Tree. By Nicholas Wade. New York Times, October 8, 2013.
Founding Mothers of Ashkenazi Jews May Be Converts, Study Finds. By Elizabeth Lopatto. Bloomberg, October 8, 2013.
Did Modern Jews Originate in Italy? By Michael Balter. Science News, October 8, 2013.
Ashkenazi Jews Trace Ancestry to Europe Not the Near East, Ancient Jewish Men “Married European Women.” By Zoe Mintz. International Business Times, October 8, 2013.
DNA Study Finds European Jewish Women Did Not Come From Middle East. By Jonathan Vankin. Opposing Views, October 14, 2013.
“Jews a Race” Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert. By Rita Rubin. NJBR, May 7, 2013.
Common Genetic Thread Link Thousands of Years of Jewish Ancestry. NJBR, April 28, 2013.
Tea party wants to take America back – to the 18th century. By Joseph J. Ellis. Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2013.
Their ultimate destination appears to be
the 1780s and our dysfunctional government under the Articles of Confederation.
Ellis:
When
matters become extremely dire and disheartening, as they have been in the
blatantly dysfunctional Congress, historians are usually the designated
dispensers of perspective. As bad as things are, we like to say, they have been
worse and the nation somehow survived.
But for
the life of me, I cannot recall an occasion when a minority of elected
representatives with such an absurdly partisan agenda was capable of stopping
the government of the United States in its tracks. To be sure, stoppages have
happened before, but not with a looming debt ceiling decision, which has
threatened to throw the American economy back into recession, send the global
financial markets into free fall and permanently damage America’s fiscal reputation.
Such mindless political and economic devastation is unprecedented.
Clearly,
most of the tea party radicals in the House of Representatives come from
gerrymandered districts, which function as cocoons that resist penetration by
alien ideas, like Keynesian economics, Darwinian evolution, global warming and
yes, the potential popularity of Obamacare. They live in a parallel universe in
which a rejection of any robust expression of government power is an
unquestioned and unexamined article of faith.
Where
does this irrational but obviously deep-felt impulse come from? Talk radio and
Fox News obviously feed the beast. But the seminal convictions of the tea
partiers defy any modern conceptions of government power. How far back in
history do they want to take us?
My
initial impression was that they wanted to repeal the 20th century. Radical
Republicans of the tea party persuasion object to all federal programs that
have an impact on our daily lives, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security and the Federal Reserve Board. Even though tea partiers, like all the
rest of us, are beneficiaries of these federal programs, especially Medicare
and Social Security, ideology trumps self-interest in their worldview, though
one wonders how they would respond if they had their way and their Social
Security checks stopped coming.
Now, I
believe these radicals want to go even further back in time. Though it wouldn’t
be fair to pin a defense of slavery on them, they agree with the states’ rights
agenda of the Confederacy and resist the right of the federal government to
make domestic policy, which is their visceral reason for loathing Obamacare.
But
their ultimate destination, I believe, is the 1780s and our dysfunctional
government under the Articles of Confederation. The states were sovereign in
that post-revolutionary arrangement, and the federal government was virtually
powerless. That is political paradise for the tea partiers, who might take
comfort in the fact that their 18th century counterparts also refused to fund
the national debt. Their core convictions are pre-Great Society, pre-New Deal,
pre-Keynes, pre-Freud, pre-Darwin and pre-Constitution.
This is
nostalgia on steroids, and an utter absurdity, defying more than 200 years of
American history. But this, I believe, is where radical Republicans are really
coming from. It makes comprehensible their deep disregard for the destructive
consequences of their anti-government policies, for they truly believe that
government is “them,” not “us.”
The
heartening news is that their like-minded predecessors over the last two
centuries have lost every major battle, starting with the Constitutional
Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and ending with the congressional vote and
the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare.
The
historical pattern is perfectly clear. They are going to lose again because
they are running against the main currents of history. But along the way they
are making all the rest of us pay a heavy price for their delusional agenda.
And they really don’t care.
Dysfunction
this deep strikes me as a new low in American history. This is not what the
founders had in mind.
“Cultural” Jew label grates on me. By David Laskin. USA Today, October 11, 2013. Also at Green Bay Press Gazette.
American Jews: Laughing But Shrinking. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, October 1, 2013.
Laskin:
The
findings of the recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public
Life Project nailed me. I am one of those 20% of American Jews “of no religion”
and among the 58% of American Jews who have intermarried. The Pew study pegs me
as a “cultural” Jew who honors his ancestors, feels proud to belong to the same
group as Moses, Kafka, Freud and Barbra Streisand, wishes he had videotaped his
grandmother making challah and chopped liver – but would sooner enter a church
to admire the frescoes than don a yarmulke to davan with the faithful.
And
yet, the more I think about it, the more it grates on me to be confined in this
category. Having spent the last three years researching and writing a book
about my ancestors – Orthodox Torah scribes who studied at the famous Volozhin
yeshiva – I can honestly say that I have never felt closer to my religion.
Does
this mean I am going to attend synagogue this coming Saturday? Highly unlikely.
What it does mean is that I spend more time reading books about Jewish history,
visiting Jewish neighborhoods and sites when I travel, discussing family
history and lore with far-flung relatives, pondering the Holocaust, and
studying the Bible.
My
oldest daughter, who was snippily informed by Orthodox classmates in college
that she was “Jewish on the wrong side” and thus technically not Jewish at all,
knows more about Judaism than I do – and I’m willing to wager more than some of
those classmates who excluded her from their community. Her knowledge derives
not from hours spent hidden away in the women’s section of an Orthodox
synagogue, but from reading, studying, thinking, analyzing, traveling and
discussing.
If she
has children, I’m sure my daughter will pass on as much of her knowledge and
reverence as the children are willing to absorb. The Pew study’s “Jews by
religion” will say none of that counts because my daughter isn’t Jewish and
thus her children won’t be Jewish either. I say these are narrow categories
that leave no room for imagination, for curiosity, for inspiration, for true
holiness.
As
Yossi Klein Halevi recounts in his brilliant new book, Like Dreamers, modern Israel was founded by cultural Jews of no
religion – Jews who were fiercely proud of their Judaism but who never set foot
in a synagogue. After the Six Day War in 1967, those cultural Jewish Zionists
were increasingly challenged by the religious Jews who spearheaded the settler
movement in the West Bank. Halevi tells the story of “Israel’s competing
utopian dreams – and how the Israel symbolized by the kibbutz became the Israel
symbolized by the settlement.”
The
clash between these two utopian dreams continues with no end in sight, but the
survival of Israel, the survival of Judaism, does not lie in one camp or the
other. My favorite figure in Halevi’s book is Meir Ariel, a kibbutznik who
became one of Israel’s most highly regarded folksingers. Ariel, a typical
kibbutznik atheist, grew increasingly religious as he aged. He studied Talmud
but sang in clubs on Shabbat when he had a gig. To my mind, he beautifully
straddled the categories of cultural and religious Jew.
On a
recent trip to Rome, I had the privilege of interviewing Riccardo Di Segni,
chief rabbi of Rome’s Jewish community. At the end of the interview, the
subject turned, inevitably, to anti-Semitism. “You know, there are many types
of anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Di Segni told me. “There is one type that does not
allow Jews to be Jews. Another type does not allow Jews to be non-Jews.”
To my
mind, there are many more categories of American Judaism than “Jew by religion”
and “Jews of no religion.” Folksinger Meir Ariel, who tragically died in 1999
at the age of 57, is my model of a good Jew – reverent, steeped in the language
of the Bible, flexible, open to the promptings of the spirit. Cultural and
religious.
The Rise and Fall of Israel’s Settlement Movement. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, October 14, 2013.
Goldberg:
Moments
after Hanan Porat and his fellow Israeli paratroopers had crossed the Suez
Canal as spearheads of a furious Israeli counterattack in the 1973 Yom Kippur
War, he was severely wounded in an Egyptian mortar bombardment. The Egyptians
and Syrians had surprised Israel on Yom Kippur, with an atrocious loss of life,
and crushed the country’s post-Six Day War belief in its own invincibility.
As
Porat lay recovering in his hospital bed, his chest ravaged by shrapnel wounds,
he thanked God that he wasn’t in the burn unit. And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi
writes in his new book, “Like Dreamers,” the next phase of Porat’s life mission
was revealed.
He
read, in his hospital bed, an article in a kibbutz newspaper by a writer named
Arnon Lapid, titled, “An Invitation to Weeping.” Porat wasn’t a member of the
secular kibbutz elite; he was a member of a more marginalized group of
religious Zionists, who envied the kibbutznikim, and respected them as well.
He was
stunned by what Lapid wrote: “I want to send you all an invitation to weeping .
. . I will weep over my dead, you will weep over yours . . . we’ll weep . . .
for the illusions that were shattered, for the assumptions that were proven to
be baseless, the truths that were exposed as lies . . . And we will pity
ourselves, for we are worthy of pity.”
Halevi
writes that when Porat read this lament he “felt as if his wounds were being
torn open. He would have shouted if he had the voice. Pity the generation
privileged to restore Jewish sovereignty to the land of Israel? What
small-mindedness, what weakness of character! Where would the Jews be now if,
in 1945, they had thought like this Arnon Lapid? Israelis would do now what
Jews always did: Grieve for their dead and go on, with faith and hope.”
Porat
would soon help usher into existence a new movement, a settlement enterprise
that would be self-consciously modeled on Israel’s original settler movement,
the socialist, Zionist and fiercely anti-religious pioneering formations that
built the original kibbutzim. The early kibbutznikim were the men and women who
laid the foundations for the reborn Jewish state and led that state through the
first decades of its existence, but by 1973 they appeared to be a spent force,
exhausted spiritually, morally and politically.
Porat’s
movement, which would cover the biblical heartland of the Jewish people with
settlements – a heartland the secular world referred to as the West Bank, but
which Jews knew by the ancient names of Judea and Samaria – would be driven by
devotion to God and his demands, not by a secular vision of Jews liberated from
the ghettoes and freed from the fetters of capitalism.
This
movement, which coalesced around Porat’s Gush Emunim – the “Bloc of the
Faithful” – has defined Israel’s political agenda for the past 40 years, just
as the kibbutz movement and its leaders shaped Israel and its priorities
through the early period of its existence. What is so fascinating about these
two movements is that, for all their transformative success, they have both
failed to complete their missions.
The
kibbutzim didn't turn Israel into a socialist paradise, and the hubris and
shortsightedness of the Labor elite, which sprung from the kibbutz movement,
brought Israel low in October 1973.
And the
religious-nationalist settlement movement has succeeded in moving hundreds of
thousands of Israelis into the biblical heartland, but it has never been able
to convince the majority of Israelis that the absorption of the West Bank into
a “Greater Israel” represents their country’s salvation, rather than a threat
to its existence.
The
thwarted utopianism of these two movements is the subject of “Like Dreamers,”
which is a magnificent book, one of the two or three finest books about Israel
I have ever read. Halevi tells the story of seven men – paratroopers who
participated in the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967 – who became leaders and
archetypes of Israeli’s competing utopian movements.
When I
met Halevi in New York recently, I was filled with questions about what this
history augured for Israel’s future. The first one to cross my mind: How did
the Orthodox settlers so easily supplant the leftist kibbutz elite as the
nation’s pioneering vanguard?
“The
left lost its vigor at precisely the moment that religious Zionism discovered
its own vigor,” Halevi told me. “The key here is 1973. After 1967, not much
happened. There were a couple of settlements, but the Labor government kept
everyone on a tight leash, and the religious Zionists were intensely
frustrated. The empowering moment for religious Zionists was due to Labor’s
failures in the Yom Kippur War. A generation of young kibbutznikim came out of
1973 deeply demoralized. People like Porat realized that the left had lost the
plot.”
Halevi
went on, “In Israel, you never naturally evolve from one state of thinking to
another. We careen. So we careened toward religious Zionism and the settlement
movement.”
But in
your book, I said, you suggest that the settlers have failed to gain legitimacy
for their movement among the mass of Israelis. How did they fail? “The
settlement movement failed during the first Palestinian uprising. Israelis
realized then the price of the occupation, that there was no such thing, as
settler leaders promised, as a benign occupation. That kind of illusion went in
the late 1980s.”
Halevi
noted one small irony here: If the first Palestinian uprising dispelled the
idea that Israel could occupy the Palestinians cost-free and in perpetuity, the
second Palestinian uprising – which began after the peace process failed in
2000, dispelled the left-wing argument that territorial compromise with the
Palestinians would be easily achieved once Israel opened itself to the
possibility of peace.
“The
second uprising was the end of the dream of the Peace Now movement, because the
worst terrorism in Israel’s history happened after we made the offer for real
territorial compromise at Camp David, and after the Clinton proposals, and
after we offered to redivide Jerusalem, becoming the first country in history
to voluntarily offer shared sovereignty in its capital city.”
So,
reality has discredited both the right and left. What comes next? The next great
ideological movement in Israeli history is centrism, Halevi said. “The Israeli
centrist believes two things: A. the Arab world refuses to recognize our
legitimacy and our existence; and B. we can’t continue occupying them. I
believe passionately that the left is correct about the occupation, and I
believe the right is correct in its understanding of the intentions of the
Middle East toward the Jewish state.”
I
argued that “centrism” possesses neither the magnetic power of socialist
transformation nor the messianic qualities implicit in the settlement
enterprise. Halevi disagreed. “Centrism is taking a people that hasn’t
functioned as a people, hasn’t functioned as a nation, for 2,000 years – that
is in some ways an anti-people, who have so many different ideologies and ways
of being – and learning how to function as a working nation. That’s a large
cause.”
Will
centrist Israel overcome the power of the right? And what is its program? In a
coming post, I’ll look at the ideological and practical challenges to the
solutions centrism puts forward to the Israeli-Arab crisis. In the meantime, go
out and read Halevi’s book; nothing explains more eloquently why Israel, more
than most any other country, lives or dies based on the power and justice of
its animating ideas.
Some things are far scarier than a map. By Rami G. Khouri. The Daily Star (Lebanon), October 14, 2013. More Khouri here and here.
Colonial Middle East strategy: Another complete fiasco. By Fadi Elhusseini. Daily News Egypt, October 7, 2013.
Khouri:
An
article and map in The New York Times’ Sunday edition two weeks ago examined
the possibility that current upheavals may cause some Arab states to break up
into smaller units. Written by the veteran foreign correspondent Robin Wright,
the article created lively discussion among Middle East-focused circles in the
United States, and in the Middle East it sparked wild speculation that it evidenced
a new plan by Western powers, Israelis and others of evil intent to further
partition large Arab countries into many smaller, weaker ones. The title of the
article, “How 5 Countries Could Become 14,” naturally fed such speculation, as
did the immediate linkage in millions of Arab minds of how British and French
colonial officials in 1916-1918 partitioned the former Ottoman lands of the
Levant into a series of new countries called Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and
Israel, while their colonial handiwork had also created new entities that
ultimately became independent countries such as Kuwait, Bahrain, the United
Arab Emirates and others.
Wright’s
article explored the possibility that Libya could fracture into three units,
Iraq and Syria into five units (of Druze, Kurds, Alawites, Sunnis and Shiites),
Saudi Arabia into five units, and Yemen into two units. Syria might trigger
such fragmentation across the region in stressed multisectarian societies. She
did not advocate this, but only speculated whether sectarian stresses and
conflicts might reconfigure countries that were not designed by the will of
their own people.
Most
critics of the article and map were horrified by the possibility that foreign
powers may once again be at work redrawing the map of the Middle East,
reaffirming two of the greatest lived traumas that have long plagued the Arab
world: the ability and willingness of external powers to meddle deeply and
structurally in our domestic condition, and the total inability of vulnerable,
helpless Arab societies to do anything about this.
I
understand the harsh reactions by Arabs who fear another possible redrawing of
our map by foreign hands, but I fear that this is not really the bad news of
the day; the really bad news is the state of existing Arab countries, and how
most of them have done such a terrible job of managing the societies that they
inherited after 1920.
The
horror map is not the one published in the NYT two weeks ago; it is the
existing map and condition of the Arab countries that have spent nearly a
century developing themselves and have so little to show for it.
Not a
single credible Arab democracy. Not a single Arab land where the consent of the
governed actually matters. Not a single Arab society where individual men and
women are allowed to use all their God-given human faculties of creativity,
ingenuity, individuality, debate, free expression, autonomous analysis and full
productivity. Not a single Arab society that can claim to have achieved a
reasonably sustainable level of social and economic development, let alone
anything approaching equitable development or social justice. Not a single Arab
country that has protected and preserved its natural resources, especially
arable land and renewable fresh water resources. Not a single Arab country that
has allowed its massive, ruling military-security-intelligence sectors to come
under any sort of civilian oversight. Not a single Arab country that has spent
hundreds of billions of dollars on foreign arms and other imports and found
itself able to ensure the security of its own land and people. And not a single
Arab country that has developed an education system that harnesses and honors
the immense wealth and power of millions of its own young Arab minds, rather
than corralling those minds into intellectual sheep pens where the mind’s free
choice is inoperative, and life only comprises following orders.
This
perverse reality of Arab statehood and independence – not any possible future
map – is the ugly reality that should anger us, even shame us. We have endured
this for over four generations now, unsurprisingly bringing us to the point
today where every single Arab country, without exception, experiences open
revolt of its citizens for freedom, dignity and democracy of some sort, demands
for real constitutional reforms, or expressions of grievances via social media
by citizens in some wealthy oil-producing states who are afraid to speak out
because they will go to jail for tweeting their most human sentiments or
aspirations.
There is
not much to be proud of in the modern era of Arab statehood, and much to fix
and rebuild along more rational, humane lines. I don’t much care about lines on
a map. I do care about the trajectories of our own national management
experiences, which have been mostly disappointing, and in some cases profoundly
derelict.
I am suffering from Islamofatigue. By Brendan O’Neill. The Telegraph, October 14, 2013.
O’Neill:
Behind
these wild exaggerations of both the hatred for Muslims and the threat posed by
Islamists, there lurk political agendas. Islam has effectively been turned into
a proxy for the expression of ideas that might otherwise prove difficult to
articulate. Among Leftish Islamophiles, ratcheting up panic about rampant
Islamophobia has become a PC way of expressing fear of the masses, particularly
the tabloid-reading white working classes. Claims that Muslims are constantly
at risk from ignorant haters is just a more acceptable way of expressing
prejudices about the volatility of the uneducated mob. And among the
Right-leaning panickers about Islamism, bashing extremism is a cop-out from
having a serious debate about the state of enlightened, reasoned thinking in
Britain. How much easier it is to wail “The Islamists are undermining our
values of free speech and tolerance!” than to examine the various homegrown trends, from environmentalism
to multiculturalism, that are really mauling the enlightened, universalist
outlook.
Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? By Guenter Lewy. History News Network, September 2004. Originally published in Commentary, September 2004.
The shutdown heralds a new economic norm. By Robert J. Samuelson. Real Clear Politics, October 14, 2013. Also at the Washington Post. And here.
Can Israel be both Jewish and democratic? By Ted Belman. American Thinker, October 13, 2013.
The Latest in Islamic Revisionism. By Joe Herring and Mark Christian. American Thinker, October 13, 2013.
Q&A: Maen Rashid Areikat. By David Samuels. Tablet, October 29, 2010.
The Time for a Palestinian State Is Now. By Maen Rashid Areikat. Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2012.
To Stand or to Kneel? By Jonathan Neumann. Commentary, October 12, 2013.
I Cannot Stand with Women of the Wall. By Aryeh Cohen. Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, October 1, 2013.
Neumann:
Aryeh
Cohen, a leading voice in the left-wing Jewish social justice movement, has
pointed out a hypocrisy on the left which has baffled some Jewish conservatives
for a while. He doesn’t stand with Women of the Wall–a liberal organization in
Israel looking to establish egalitarian prayer rights at the Western Wall
(Kotel)–because it is seeking to advance Jewish rights in an area not only
“occupied,” but where an Arab neighborhood once stood. In other words: how can
Jewish liberals promote Jewish egalitarianism in a place they don’t even
believe Jews should be?
Beyond
the particular question of egalitarianism, Cohen’s post in fact speaks to the
wider issue of American Jewish liberal treatment of Israel. How are the
competing claims of Jews and Arabs to be decided? “In some other world in which
peace and justice reign, and nobody harbors any agendas aside from bettering
the good of all,” Cohen writes, “everybody would be able to pray together, or
as they wished, at the Western Wall or on the Temple Mount itself.”
Unfortunately, as Cohen points out–and many conservatives would agree–this is
not presently possible. The conclusion seems, then, that for now the will of
one side must prevail over that of the other. The problem is that the American
Jewish left believes the side that should prevail is that of the Arabs. If only
one side of this conflict can pray on the Temple Mount, they say, it must be
the Arabs. If only one side can have access to the Kotel, they say, it must be
the Arabs. If only one side can have sovereignty in parts or all of the Land of
Israel, they say, it must be the Arabs.
This
sentiment crosses the border of self-effacement into the region of self-hatred.
To insist that the Jews owe so much to others and are themselves owed nothing
is to ask of one’s tribe to be nothing more than a doormat. Such an analogy
might describe much of Jewish history, yet now that, thanks to the achievements
of the modern State of Israel, it may no longer be applicable, the American
Jewish left is prescribing it. If
rights are to clash in the Middle East, they declare, the Jews should sacrifice
theirs. This, we are told, is “justice.”
We are
also told it is “peace”–thus compounding the perverseness of these liberals’
recommendations. If the route to reconciliation in the Middle East is through
the elevation of one side’s claims over the other’s, is peace likely to emerge
from Arab hegemony, under which Jews are denied most rights (including, as it
happens, the right to pray on the Temple Mount, which is administered by an
Arab authority), or through Jewish democracy, where Arabs are afforded maximal
rights?
(Those
who contest this last point are referred to Cohen’s admission that “Nothing in
Israel, or in the Middle East, is disconnected from anything else,” yet these
issues are treated by North American Jews as if they “exist in a vacuum.”)
The
Jewish left may think that the answer to Israel’s problems is to go back to the
1940s. Others, though, think “peace and justice” might come a different way.
The Shadow of the Palestinian Refugees. By Alon Ben-Meir. American Thinker, October 13, 2013. Also at AlonBen-Meir.com.
The Palestinian Refugees: A Reassessment and a Solution. By Alon Ben-Meir. Palestine-Israel Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4/Vol. 16. No. 1 (2008/2009). Also at AlonBen-Meir.com.
Facing the Truth About Jerusalem. By Alon Ben-Meir. AlonBen-Meir.com, September 26, 2013. Also at American Thinker.
Is Islam Compatible With Democracy? By Alon Ben-Meir. American Thinker, July 13, 2013. Also at AlonBen-Meir.com.
For Israelis and Palestinians, the two-stage option. By Dani Dayan. Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2013. Comments (mainly name-calling rants).
Dayan:
In the
coming weeks or months Palestinians will likely put an end to the latest peace
talks, just as they did in 2000 and 2008. Israel will of course be blamed;
however, the reality will remain the same as it has been for the last 20 years:
The so-called two-state solution is far from a solution but rather is a recipe
for disaster.
Even if
by some miracle Secretary of State John F. Kerry and the U.S. administration
are able to push through a historic compromise, it may only aggravate the
conflict, creating an extremist and belligerent entity on the hills of Judea
and Samaria (commonly referred to as the West Bank) overlooking Tel Aviv,
Jerusalem and Ben Gurion Airport.
With
Israel’s major population centers in close missile range, a new confrontation
would be almost inevitable, with dire consequences.
It
doesn’t have to be this way. If we admit the failure of the two-state formula,
we could slowly and realistically move toward peace and reconciliation.
The
time has come to replace the old two-state paradigm with a new and more
achievable goal: the two-stage
solution. The first stage is ensuring security, stability and prosperity for
both Israelis and Palestinians — what I call peaceful non-reconciliation. The
second would be a gradual move toward a final resolution of the conflict,
consolidating peace and political rights by bringing Jordan back into the
picture and dividing functions, not territory.
Stage
one is already under way without the need for lengthy diplomatic deliberations.
In game theory terms, a stable equilibrium is already being forged. The status
quo as it relates to Israelis and Palestinians is not an ideal situation, nor
does it fulfill all the aspirations of either population. But the players on
both sides know that they will not benefit from radically changing the current
reality, given the existing options.
With some
tragic exceptions, security for both Jews and Palestinians prevails. Both
economies have been growing at decent rates over the last decade. A modern
Palestinian city, Rawabi, is being built north of Ramallah, making it the
largest construction project in the area. The Palestinians fly their own flag
over their own government buildings. Their uniformed police patrol their
streets. In fact, about 95% of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and 100%
in the Gaza Strip are governed by their own brethren, not Israel.
In
addition, Israel and the international community can and should actively work
together with the Palestinians to improve their quality of life.
As long
as security is assured, checkpoints and even the entire security barrier can
and should be removed. The so-called refugee camps, in which the
fifth-generation descendants of the original refugees still live in squalid
conditions, can and should be completely rebuilt and modernized.
At the
same time, the Palestinians must abandon their policy of hatred, incitement and
glorification of terrorism to give a new generation of Israelis hope that peace
can be achieved.
Naturally,
even an improved status quo in Judea and Samaria would be a temporary
situation. However, if supported by the world, it could prevail as long as a
final-status agreement remains out of reach.
It may
take decades to recover from the last 20 years of negotiations, which raised
premature and irresponsible expectations that there can be two separate states
between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. However, once this has
begun to be achieved, the second stage of the two-stage solution can evolve. It
will have to include Jordan.
Situated
on what was once the eastern side of British Mandatory Palestine, with a
majority of Palestinians among its citizens, Jordan bears a great deal of
responsibility for the creation of the current territorial conflict.
Preventing
the establishment of a Palestinian state, Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria
after taking the area in the 1948 Israeli war of independence.
Then,
in 1967, Jordan joined forces with Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Palestine
Liberation Organization in an attempt to annihilate Israel. Israel prevailed,
liberating Judea and Samaria, but Jordan continued to assert some responsibility
over the Palestinians living there, despite the area being under Israeli
control. Those Palestinians were given Jordanian citizenship until 1988, when
Jordan conveniently relinquished its legal and administrative connection to
Judea and Samaria, thereby reframing the conflict as one exclusively between
the PLO and Israel.
The
strategic hills of Judea and Samaria are the ancient Jewish heartland and the
cradle of Jewish civilization; therefore, no other nation state but Israel can
exist west of the Jordan River. This doesn't mean the process of self-rule of
the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria should regress; it should advance.
For
instance, in what may well be a new and unique political model, Jordan could
take full responsibility for residents of the Palestinian Authority,
effectively replacing it with a Jordanian “functional exclave” while Israel has
overall sovereignty. Israel would continue to be responsible for the hundreds
of thousands of Israeli citizens who would reside in their own communities.
Amman would be the site of the Palestinians’ government, and they would receive
full political rights as Jordanian citizens, able to elect and be elected to
the highest positions of government. Gazans would have to decide if they wish
to join or remain isolated.
In the
rapidly changing Middle East, there are no quick-fix solutions. A new, gradual
approach is needed that takes into account the Palestinian choice of war over
compromise in 1947, 1967 and 2000. Israeli President Shimon Peres used to
advocate for the “Jordanian option” and a functional compromise for Judea and
Samaria, but he abandoned the idea for the sake of the Oslo accords. With the
20 years of hindsight, maybe the younger Peres was right.
