Confronting the End of European Jewry. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Confronting the End of European Jewry. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, August 12, 2013.

The Death of European Jewish Culture. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, August 31, 2013.

You Only Live Twice. By Michel Gurfinkiel. Mosaic, August 2013.

Vibrant Jewish communities were reborn in Europe after the Holocaust. Is there a future for them in the 21st century?


Tobin:

Last year the U.S. State Department noted that a “rising tide of anti-Semitism” was sweeping through Europe. It was a significant acknowledgement of a critical problem. But as serious as this warning was, the dilemma of European Jewry remains a marginal issue that only gains sporadic attention when there is an egregious crime or a move to ban Jewish religious practices in a specific country. As much as the murder of four Jews in a shooting spree in Toulouse by an Islamist terrorist or the attempts to ban circumcision or kosher slaughter makes headlines, the revival of Jew hatred on the European continent is not so much the function of egregious incidents as it is a historic process that is leading to what seems like an inevitable conclusion. In is in this context that Michel Gurfinkiel’s essay “You Only Live Twice” on the subject in this month’s edition of Mosaic magazine must be seen as an important contribution to Jewish historiography. After decades of celebrating the unexpected revival of European Jewry after the Holocaust that created new vibrant communities where desolation had existed in 1945, we have now reached the moment when the cycle of hatred has turned around again. In a brilliant tour de force of historical perspective, Gurfinkiel reminds us that the virus of Jew hatred has not merely revived but threatens to write what may be the final chapter in the long saga of European Jewry.

 

Gurfunkiel puts the steady drip of depressing stories about anti-Semitism in context. But it is important because it dares to draw conclusions about the problem that many sober European commentators refuse to approach. Instead of merely lamenting a sad trend, he demands that Jews draw the proper conclusions from events. That is something growing numbers of European Jews are doing, as many are immigrating to Israel. But his conclusion should send a chill down the spines of not only Jews but also all civilized persons who might otherwise be inclined to take a less alarmist view of events:

A mitigating view of today’s situation might have it that, at the very least, divine providence did beneficently afford to about two million European Jews a brief golden age, a true rebirth, which in turn brought fresh luster to European civilization as well as encouragement and inspiration to millions of their fellow Jews around the world, most especially in the Jewish state. True enough; but what is no less certain is that the end of European Jewry, a millennia-old civilization and a crowning achievement of the human spirit, will deliver a lasting blow to the collective psyche of the Jewish people. That it will also render a shattering judgment on the so-called European idea, exposed as a deadly travesty for anyone with eyes to see, is cold comfort indeed.

The desire to avoid drawing such a stark conclusion about the problem is natural and it is based in no small measure, as Gurfinkiel notes, on the fact that European Jewry “looks healthy and secure.” The postwar revival of Jewish life in France and even Germany has created substantial communities and a population that is invested in the future of these countries. They have enjoyed a golden age that created a superficial similarity to the strength and security of American Jewry. But the comparisons no longer make sense. With anti-Semitism raging on the left and the right and with the unprecedented growth in the population of Muslim immigrants in Europe (especially in France), you don’t need to be an alarmist to understand that “catastrophe may lie ahead.”

 

What Gurfinkiel sees as the “seeds of a new anti-Semitism” were sown in France by Charles de Gaulle who repudiated his country’s alliance with Israel after the Six-Day War and embarked on a campaign of delegitimization of the Jewish state that did not exclude frankly anti-Semitic utterances. But while de Gaulle deserves a large amount of the blame, the problem was bigger than the enormous ego of that hero of the Second World War. Post-war European intellectuals were weaned on a belief that imperialism was the original sin of European civilization and wrongly categorized Zionism as part of the colonial endeavor rather than as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. While Europe enjoyed a brief period of philo-Semitism as part of the reaction to the Holocaust, the movement seeking to brand as illegitimate the expression of Jewish identity simmered under the surface. Just as Muslim anti-Semitism “has been intimately connected with classic European anti-Semitism for more than a century” and freely borrows from the Hitlerian playbook, as the historian notes, “the two brands share a common language, and each sees in the other a mirror image of itself.” The comeback of Jew hatred in Europe is inextricably tied to its rise in the Muslim and Arab world.

The problem is that the “new” anti-Semitism that focuses on Israel is merely a variation on the old themes that once ravaged the European continent. Perhaps the most important insight in an essay full of them is Gurfinkiel’s pointing out that whereas in the aftermath of the Enlightenment European Jews thought they could gain equality and acceptance by jettisoning their specific Jewish identity and faith, so, too, do some now think they can escape the anti-Semitic tide by distancing themselves from Israel.

For the most part, in France and throughout Western Europe, that price was fully and willingly paid. Generations of Jews eagerly pledged their allegiance to the ideals of democracy, patriotism, and religious tolerance, pouring their prodigious talents and energies into making Europe a better place. Over the centuries, in fair weather, the bargain held; in foul, the price would be successively raised, the conditions of acceptance revised, the bargain hedged, until at last the offer was finally, brutally, rescinded in wholesale massacre.

 

Now, busily building monuments and museums, Europe ostentatiously engages in celebrating and mourning its lost dead Jews of yesterday, whose murder it variously perpetrated, abetted, or (with exceptions) found it could put up with. Meanwhile, it encourages and underwrites the withering of Jewish life today. Once again, Jews are accepted on condition: that they separate themselves from their brethren in Israel and join the official European consensus in demonizing the Jewish state; that they learn to accommodate the reality that so many ethnic Europeans hate them and wish them ill, and that Islamists on European soil seek their extinction; and that in the interest of justifying their continued claim to European citizenship, they accept Europe’s proscription of some of the most basic practices of their faith.

 

To the dead Jews of yesterday, everything; to the living Jews of today, little and littler.

This juxtaposition of affection for the dead and indifference or hostility to the living is a common theme in much of the world after 1945, but especially so in France and Europe. As in the past, those who think they can escape hate by turning their back on their own people may someday discover that they have given up much in exchange for little or nothing. Though some may hope that it is not too late for the tide of anti-Semitism to be reversed, it is difficult to argue with Gurfinkiel’s conclusion. Even more to the point, it is a powerful argument for even greater support for a Jewish state that provides the only fitting memorial to the Holocaust and the only effective answer to anti-Semitic hate.

 

 

Terrorism Expert Erick Stakelbeck: Muslim Brotherhood “Spawned Al Qaeda.”

Terrorism expert: Muslim Brotherhood “spawned Al Qaeda.” Video. Martha MacCallum with Erick Stakelbeck. America Live. Fox News, August 14, 2013.

Ten-Year-Old Christian Girl Murdered in Egypt Leaving Bible Study Class.

Christian girl murdered in Egypt leaving Bible study class. Video. Martha MacCallum and Lisa Daftari. America Live. Fox News, August 13, 2013. Also here. YouTube.

Core Roots of Palestinian Terrorism. By Louis René Beres.

Image of Black September hijacker Leila Khaled on the Israeli security wall in Bethlehem.

Core Roots of Palestinian Terrorism. By Louis René Beres. Ruthfully Yours, August 13, 2013. Originally in the Jerusalem Post. Also U.S. News and World Report.

Please Not Again: Releasing Terrorists for “Peace.” By Louis René Beres. Arutz Sheva 7, July 28, 2013.

Beres (Core Roots):

Jerusalem will soon have to confirm its final Road Map decisions on “peace.” Then, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will need to determine whether the still-fractionated Palestinian side is willing and able to overcome some of its deepest cultural roots. Without such a determination, any formal agreement could be perilous.

 

Here, insight requires memory. Before a resurgent medievalism took hold in the Islamic Middle East, the fraternity of Palestinian terrorist groups had contained many disparate bedfellows. Virtually every Arab enemy of Israel was more-or-less welcome to join in a battle for “national self-determination” against the “Zionists.” Today, the fight has changed from a preeminently secular and tactical one, to a struggle that draws heavily upon still-underlying commitments to religious sacrifice.

 

In ancient Greece, Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Mothers identified the exemplary female parent as one who had reared her sons for civic sacrifice. Such a Greek mother was always relieved to learn that a son had died “in a manner worthy of his self, his country and his ancestors.” There are lessons here for Israel. The deepest roots of jihadist terror originate from current cultures that embrace similar views of sacrifice. In these mostly Arab cultures, the key purpose of sacrifice extends beyond any presumed expectations of civic necessity. This rationale goes to the very heart of individual fear, to the palpable human dread of death.

 

In the Arab Middle East, acts of terror have increasingly become a sacred expression of religion. In these cultures, sacrifice derives, in part, from a desperately hoped-for conquest of personal death. By adopting such an atavistic practice, the jihadist terrorist expects to realize an otherwise unattainable immortality.

 

The attraction is clear. A jihadist murderer kills himself or herself, together with assorted innocent others, to ensure a personal life that will never end. The so-called “death” that he or she actually expects to suffer in consequence of this “suicide,” therefore, is no more than a transient inconvenience. However faith-based, the Shahid or martyr can rationally calculate that an anticipated suicide is “cost-effective.” In Islam, “martyrdom” has always been associated with Jihad. Unequivocal and celebratory invocations for sacrificial killing can be found in the Koran (9:111), and, more explicitly, in the canonical hadith. “Do not consider those who are slain in the cause of Allah as dead,” instructs the Koran, “for they are living by their Lord.” For Hamas, there are obligatory aspects of sacrificial terror that must never be overlooked. This two-sided nature of terror/sacrifice – the sacrifice of “The Jew,” and the sacrifice of “The Martyr” – is codified in the Charter of Hamas as a “religious” problem.” In 2003, late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s own appointed clergy, preaching on the Temple Mount, reaffirmed a core religious precept: “Palestinians spearhead Allah’s war against the Jews. The dead shall not rise until the Palestinians shall kill all the Jews. . . .” The jihadists’ terror of death leads them to commit a murderous form of “suicide.” Because dying in the act of killing “infidels” and “apostates” is expected to buy freedom from the penalty of non- being, these terrorists aim to conquer mortality by “killing themselves.”

 

Of course, Israel and its terrorist enemies have very different orientations to “peace.” This stark asymmetry puts the Jewish State at a noteworthy disadvantage.

 

Israel faces a still-expanding threat of unconventional war and unconventional terrorism. Faced with opponents who are not only willing to die, but who might ecstatically seek their own “deaths,” Jerusalem must quickly understand the critical limits of ordinary warfare, national homeland defense, and strategic deterrence.

 

The root “peace process” problem is jihadist fear of death, and the consequent compulsion to sacrifice certain despised “others.” This compulsion, in turn, stems from a doctrinal belief that killing unbelievers, and also being killed by unbelievers, is the best available path to immortality. In short, Islamist terrorist unwillingness to accept personal death leads to the killing of others, specifically in order to escape this death.

 

For many of Israel’s terrorist enemies, killing Jews always offers the optimal immunization against personal death.

 

Resembling more explicitly sacrificial elements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the military wing of Fatah is now oriented toward much more than a purely nationalistic “armed struggle.” It is dedicated to religious sacrifice, a commitment that promises its followers not just military victory over “Zionist occupiers,” but, much more appealingly, immunity from death. For the Palestinian terrorist, violence and the sacred remain closely intertwined. Israel, therefore, must think in terms of desacrilizing this relentless adversary, and somehow convincing him that ritual murders of “Jews” will lead not to paradise and limitless sexual pleasures, but rather to the “terrors of the grave.” Can such a desacrilization ever be accomplished through ordinary politics and the US-brokered “peace process?” To be persuasive, it would have to originate among certain influential Islamic clerics themselves. How could this origination be made to work? What is the correct “peace” strategy for Israel? As Palestinian statehood is already being validated in the UN, Mr. Netanyahu will quickly need to acknowledge the fallacy of accepting a Palestinian state because it has agreed to “demilitarization.” Every state, he will need to recognize, maintains an “inherent” and irreducible right of self-defense. This right would not be withdrawn from “Palestine,” whatever else its leaders might have agreed to in pre-independence negotiations.

 

The “Road Map” coaxes Israel along a twisting excursion to unending war and terror. By ignoring the core roots of Palestinian terrorism, this “Map” can only offer the Jewish State an utterly contrived “Two-State Solution.” Should Netanyahu agree to follow US President Barack Obama’s lethal cartography, he will have misunderstood the deepest, ineradicable origins of Palestinian terrorism.

 

For Palestinians, the terror-based struggle against Israel has never been about land or “settlements.” It has really been about God.

Owning the Mideast Peace Process. By Barry Rubin.

Owning the Mideast Peace Process. By Barry Rubin. Real Clear World, August 13, 2013.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks Won’t Solve the Jewish State Problem. By Peter Beinart.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks Won’t Solve the Jewish State Problem. By Peter Beinart. The Daily Beast, August 13, 2013.

One-State Dream, One-State Nightmare. By Roger Cohen.

One-State Dream, One-State Nightmare. By Roger Cohen. New York Times, August 12, 2013.

The One-State Solution Would Be a Nightmare. By Carlo Strenger. NJBR, June 30, 2013. With related articles.

Enter the Neo-Canaanites. By Bret Stephens. NJBR, June 20, 2013. With related articles.

Cohen:

TEL AVIV — Let us deal, on the eve of the first direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians in almost three years, with the idea of one state. It hovers out there — as dream and as nightmare — and is best laid to rest.

 

First the dream: That somehow after all the wars and accumulation of hatred, Israelis and Palestinians can learn overnight to live together as equal citizens in some United States of the Holy Land, a binational and democratic secular state that resolves their differences and assures their intertwined futures.

 

Oh, what a seductive illusion (at least to some). Let’s set aside for a moment that the regional examples of such multiethnic states — Lebanon, Iraq and Syria come to mind — are not encouraging. Let’s set aside that such a state would have a hard time every May deciding whether to mark a Day of Independence for its Jewish citizens or a Day of Catastrophe for its Arab citizens.

 

Let’s set aside whether the Jabotinsky Streets of the imaginary country dear to the one-state brigade would become Arafat Streets, or vice versa, and whether to have a Begin Avenue or a Grand Mufti al-Husseini Boulevard. Let’s even set aside the fact that the two principal communities would be in constant, paralyzing battle, causing the best and the brightest to go elsewhere in search of opportunity and sanity.

 

The central issue is this: One state, however conceived, equals the end of Israel as a Jewish state, the core of the Zionist idea. Jews will not, cannot and must not allow this to happen. They have learned how dangerous it is to live without a certain refuge, as minorities, and will not again place their faith in the good will of others, nor trust in touchy-feely hope over bitter experience.

 

That is the ineradicable legacy of diaspora persecution and of the Holocaust. Emerging in the 19th century from the static ghetto into the Sturm und Drang of the modern world, the Jews saw two principle routes to emancipation: assimilation and Zionism.

 

The former was seductive. At first it offered rapid advancement, before it became clear that in this very advancement lay danger. It was a wager on acceptance that the Jews of Europe lost to Hitler: No citizen was more patriotic than the prewar German Jew.

 

Zionism, by contrast, placed no faith in others’ good will. It sought, rather, to usher Jews to the full realization of their nationhood and so, in a sense, normalize them — make them patriotic about something that was their own.

 

The world, in the form of the United Nations, upheld this quest in 1947, voting for the division of Mandate Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Arab armies went to war — and the rest is history, including the now almost half-century-old occupation of the West Bank and Israeli dominion over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians.

 

And that brings us to one state as nightmare, which is what Israel, an extraordinary success story in many regards, faces today. The only way out of this nightmare is two states, one Israeli and one viable, contiguous Palestinian state living in peace and security beside it.

 

I sat with Yair Lapid, Israel’s centrist finance minister, son of a survivor of Nazi-occupied Hungary, grandson of a Hungarian Jew slaughtered in the camps, and he told me of his father’s repeated lesson: that he came to and fought for Israel so that Jews would “always have a place to go to.”

 

He said: “I have a lot of respect for the ethos of Greater Israel. I grew up in a house using this language. But we do understand that in the long term, if we stay there, that will be the end of the Zionist idea. We cannot live in one state. This will be a version of one state for two nations, and that this is the end of Zionism. Eventually the Palestinians will come to us and say, O.K., you decided we are not going to have a country at all, so we want to vote. If you say no, you are South Africa in its worst days. If you say yes, it is the end of the Jewish country, and I want to live in a Jewish country.”

 

Lapid argued that the all-the-land absolutists — Economics Minister Naftali Bennett and Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin among them — are, in their rejection of the two-state idea, undermining the idea of a Jewish state over time and so undercutting the core of Zionism and his own father’s life-shaping message. He is right.

 

Lapid later issued a statement criticizing Israel’s decision to publish construction bids Sunday for more than 1,000 housing units in contested East Jerusalem and several West Bank settlements. “To poke sticks in the wheels of peace talks is not right,” he said, “and not helpful to the process.” Right again.

 

One state as delusional fantasy of some Middle Eastern idyll and one state as nightmarish temptation involving the indefinite Israeli subjugation of another people are equally unacceptable.

 

As the Talmud says, hold too much and you will hold nothing.

The Palestinian Authority Rewrites Jewish History. By Itamar Marcus.

PA flag superimposed on picture of Western Wall on Abbas’s Presidential Guard’s Facebook page. By Itamar Marcus. Palestinian Media Watch, August 12, 2013.

PA TV doc: Arab homes will be built at Western Wall, Jews’ praying there is “sin and filth.” By Itamar Marcus. Palestinian Media Watch, August 17, 2011. YouTube.

Transcript:

They [Israelis] know for certain that our [Palestinian] roots are deeper than their false history. We, from the balcony of our home, look out over [Islamic] holiness and on sin and filth (Jews’ praying at Western Wall) in an area that used to have [Arab] people and homes. We are drawing our new maps. When they [Israelis] disappear from the picture, like a forgotten chapter in the pages of our city’s history, we will build it anew (residential area). The Mughrabi Quarter will be built here (on the Western Wall Plaza).

A World-Historic Find in Jerusalem. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

A World-Historic Find in Jerusalem. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, February 2010. Also here.

In Arabic, Jerusalem is Jewish. By Simcha Jacobovici. The Times of Israel, August 14, 2013.


Tobin:

The greatest threat to the hopes of those who think parts of Jerusalem should be off-limits to Jews comes not when Jewish-owned buildings go up in the city, but rather when Jews start digging into the ground of East Jerusalem. Because the more the history of the city is uncovered, the less credible becomes the charge that Jews are alien colonists in what the media sometimes wrongly refer to as “traditionally Palestinian” or “Arab” Jerusalem.

That’s the upshot from the release of an amazing archeological dig conducted just outside Jerusalem’s Old City. The excavations conducted by archeologist Eilat Mazar in the Ophel area revealed a section of an ancient city wall of Jerusalem. According to the press release from the Hebrew University, under whose auspices the project was carried out, the dig uncovered the wall as well as an inner gatehouse for entry into the royal quarter of the ancient city and an additional royal structure adjacent to the gatehouse as well as a corner tower. While ancient buildings are not uncommon in the city, the significance of this discovery is the fact that these edifices can be dated to the 10th century before the Common Era — the time of King Solomon, credited by the Bible for the construction of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Pottery found at the lowest levels of the dig is dated to this era.

Even more telling is the fact that bullae — seal impressions — with Hebrew names were found, as well as seal impressions on jar handles inscribed with the words “to the king,” which means they were employed by the Israelite state in that time. Inscriptions on the jars, which Mazar says are the largest ever found in Jerusalem, showed them to be the property of a royal official.

Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman funded the dig. They are a New York couple whose funding is supporting both the dig and the preservation of the site for public viewing as part of the national park that exists around the Old City walls. You can view pictures of the site here.

The significance of this extraordinary find is that it provides new proof of the existence and power of the Davidic monarchy, the Israelite state that it led, and the more than 3,000-year-old Jewish presence in Jerusalem. These new discoveries, along with those of a previous dig in a different area of the city of David, contradict contrary Palestinian claims that the Jews have no claim to the area. They also debunk the assertions of some Israeli archeologists who have sought to portray the kingdom of David and Solomon as an insignificant tribal group and not the regional empire that the Bible speaks about. Indeed, Mazar believes that the strength and the form of construction required to build these structures correlates with biblical passages that speak of Solomon’s building of a royal palace and of the Temple with the assistance of master builders from Phoenicia (modern-day Lebanon). Moreover, contrary to those who speak of the Jewish presence in the city as a passing phase in ancient times, the discovery of Jewish seals, which speak directly of an Israelite state, proves that what Mazar has found are not the remains of a Jebusite fort conquered by the Jews but rather of a great city built by David and his son Solomon.

While finding ancient Jewish artifacts as well as the traces of Solomon’s city in Jerusalem may seem nothing out of the ordinary, for the last century and a half, a great many academics and intellectuals have attempted to put down the existence of the ancient Jewish kingdom — which has always served as a symbol of Jewish nationhood — as a religiously inspired fiction. This deconstruction of both biblical literature and history has sought to undermine the very idea of the historical truth about ancient Israel, as well as the notion that Jewish nationhood had its roots in the past. This has been put to use by anti-Zionists and Arabs who have thought that if they could destroy the idea of King David’s existence as a historic figure, they could delegitimize modern Israel. Thus, Palestinian propagandists and the Palestinian Authority itself, which has steadfastly denied any Jewish connection to the Old City, the Temple Mount, or even the Western Wall, have copied revisionist scholarly work doubting Jewish history and incorporated that work into their negotiating position about the city’s future. The Muslim religious authority that controls the site of the Temple Mount has vandalized the area, destroying a treasure trove of antiquities in the ancient place because its officials fear that any find revealing the Jewish origins of the place will undermine their fallacious claims that seek to portray Jews as foreign occupiers in their own ancient capital.

It serves the purposes of the enemies of modern Israel to pretend that there is no such thing as biblical history or an ancient kingdom of Israel. But what Eilat Mazar and her colleagues have done is to illustrate once again just how deep the roots of Jewish Jerusalem run. Three thousand years.

Palestinians Build a Settlement. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Palestinians Build a Settlement. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, August 11, 2013.

Another Sign the Middle East Talks Are Fake. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, August 12, 2013.

Tobin (Palestinians):

Though it was entirely unintentional, the New York Times deserves credit today for pointing out the hypocrisy of critics of Israel’s settlement building. No, the paper hasn’t reversed its policy of treating the presence of Jews in the heart of their ancient homeland as wrong or an obstacle to peace that is reflected on its news pages as much as it is on their editorial page. What they did was something more subtle than that and will require some context for their readers to understand. They published a feature about the Palestinians doing something that Israel hasn’t tried in more than two decades, the building of an entirely new city in the West Bank.

 

What’s wrong with that? Actually, nothing. If the planners of Rawabi own the land where they are constructing a town north of Ramallah, then why shouldn’t they build new homes and places of business for Arabs who want them? But the story about the effort and the travails of the planners—who are, ironically, under attack from Palestinians for their efforts to cooperate with Israel and Israeli businesses and contractors to get the job done—should remind us that doing so is no more of an obstacle to peace than the builders of homes for Jews.

 

The point about the West Bank that cannot be reiterated enough is that the conflict about ownership of the land is one in which both sides can muster arguments in their favor. Should the Palestinians ever reject their culture of violence and delegitimizing of Jewish rights to any part of the country, peace will be possible and the land will have to be divided, however painful that would be for both sides. Such a negotiation would be difficult but, assuming that the Palestinians were ever actually willing to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders were drawn, it would not be impossible. And since it is likely that if such a partition were ever to take place, Rawabi would be part of the Palestinian state, then why would Israelis complain that building on the site would make peace impossible?

 

Of course, Israelis aren’t making such a protest, any more than they speak out against the building going on in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem or any other place in the West Bank.

 

But when new homes are built in existing Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem or in those towns and communities in the major settlement blocs in the West Bank that everyone knows would be retained by Israel in the event of a peace accord, they are bitterly condemned by the Obama administration, the Europeans, and the liberal media.

 

In fact, Israel hasn’t done anything on the scale of Rawabi in many years. Outside of scattered hilltop camps with trailers, it hasn’t actually built a new settlement since the Oslo Accords. What Israel has done is added new housing developments to existing places. But the Arabs have done the same and in the case of Rawabi, they are seeking to expand their hold on the land by establishing new facts on the ground that strengthen their claims.

 

Of course, Israel’s critics assert that Arabs have a right to live in Rawabi while the Jews don’t have a right to live in “stolen land” on the West Bank. That argument rests on the fallacy that history began in 1967 when Israel came into the possession of the West Bank as a result of a defensive war. But in fact, the “West Bank” (a name for the territories of Judea and Samaria that only came into existence when the Kingdom of Jordan illegally occupied the land to differentiate it from their territory on the East Bank of the Jordan River) is part of a territory set aside by international authorities for a Jewish homeland where Jews, as well as Arabs, had rights. Though the international community has sought to abrogate Jewish rights there, they cannot be extinguished in this manner. The resolution of the dispute over the land requires a negotiation in which each side must be prepared to compromise rather than, as the Palestinian Authority continues to do, simply dictate.

 

Contrary to the claims of Israel’s critics, if both sides continue doing as they are now and building at the same pace, peace won’t be any easier or harder to reach in the future than it is now. The same boundaries will be there to be drawn with Jews and Arabs on Israel’s side and Arabs only on the Palestinian side (as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have repeatedly made clear), then as they are now. The building of new settlements, whether Jews or Arabs populate them, won’t stop peace if both peoples truly want it. Israel has already demonstrated that it is prepared to do so, as it has repeatedly offered and made territorial withdrawals while the Palestinians have never given up their maximalist demands that aim at Israel’s destruction, not coexistence. The reason the Palestinians focus on settlement building as a threat to their future is not because these places are actually obstacles to peace but because they are opposed to Jews living in anywhere in the country.

 

Rawabi also demonstrates the priorities of Israel’s foes. Many of them are, as the Times makes clear, opposed to it, because building it undercuts the attempt to boycott Israel. Much like the efforts to prevent the descendants of the 1948 refugees from being resettled so as to keep them as an issue to hold over Israel, they’d rather keep Palestinians from having a new town so long as it doesn’t mean doing business with Jews.

 

If the Palestinians that will live in Rawabi and elsewhere in the West Bank truly want peace with Israel and to gain self-determination in exchange, they will get it. Moreover, if Palestinians persist in building on lands they are likely to keep and Israel keeps building in those places they will retain, it won’t put off peace by a single day. Let’s hope that, like its Jewish counterparts in Maale Adumim and Ariel, Rawabi will raise the quality of life for its inhabitants. Perhaps in doing so it will undermine the efforts of those Palestinians that continue to foment the hatred of Jews and Israel that remains at the core of the conflict.

Are French Women Perfect? By Anne Penketh.

Are French women perfect? The myths of foreign beauty . . . By Anne Penketh. The Independent, August 12, 2013. Photo Gallery.

French women aren’t effortlessly perfect – they just fake it! Gallic beauty myths busted by one of their own in Le Figaro magazine. By Deni Kirkova. Daily Mail, August 13, 2013.

French women lie about gorging on buttered baguettes - and they smoke. “Natural” blondes scour salons for best colourists. Invest in expensive anti-wrinkles creams from age of 25. Work hard to keep up with new trends.

A French woman’s real beauty secret? Fake it. By Katy Young. The Telegraph, August 13, 2013.

Why French women look younger than their British counterparts. By Katy Young. The Telegraph, March 21, 2013.

Thanks to an early uptake of anti-aging skincare, studies say French women look on average seven years younger than their British equivalents by the time we reach 40.

The French woman is “an American dream.” By Peggy Frey. Le Figaro, August 12, 2013. Google translation. French original.

Penketh:

Are French women perfect? Judging by the piles of American and British books attempting to nail their je ne sais quoi, it would appear that the rest of us are filled with a mix of envy and insecurity when contemplating France’s glamorous fair sex.

 

The way they walk, the way they dress, the way they do their hair, and the way they raise their families. It has all been put under the microscope in books ranging from French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano to Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé. Le Figaro decided to get to the bottom of the French feminine mystique and came up with a startling conclusion – it’s all a lie. Or “an American dream.”

 

The journalist Peggy Frey set about exploding the myths, one by one, starting with the “natural beauty” of the French woman.

 

Her trim figure? Don’t believe the myth that French women never diet, says Le Figaro. It’s true that they never talk about dieting, just “being careful”. If you consider that almost half of French women smoke it’s hardly surprising that their appetites are suppressed.

 

Her sexy appearance? The paper quotes from a recent study showing that French women spend €97 on lingerie – or only a fifth of what American women spend. As for her “natural” blonde highlights, they come straight out of a bottle, except that the French woman is likely to have spent months finding the right hairdresser and will never give you the address.

 

Forget the image of a French cook slaving over a hot stove, preparing dishes whose recipes were handed down from generation to generation. The modern French woman spends two minutes 30 seconds heating up dishes in the microwave.

 

Her exquisite innate fashion tastes? Don’t be duped. Not everyone has the wherewithal of a TV presenter like Laurence Ferrari – who comes as close as anyone to the stereotypical “perfect” French woman – and most people make do with “putting on a bit of everything and any old thing … in any old way.”

 

According to the paper, the secret of French women is “to do everything falsely: [they are] falsely coiffed, falsely dressed, falsely fatal.”

 

To sum up, the French woman is a wizard of pretence. “What she does is to apply the motto: less is more – in almost every domain. A talent which apparently not everyone has!” the paper concludes.

 

France itself has been so in thrall to its image of women that a real woman is used as the model for the Marianne national emblem whose bust stands in every town hall. The models for past Mariannes include actresses such as Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. But even the French seem to be doubting the strength of their own myth: this year, the Marianne on the nation’s stamps was inspired by a Femen activist (Inna Shevchenko) from Ukraine.

TV newscaster Laurence Ferrari, who at age 47 typifies the ideal of the fashionable,
 ageless French woman.

Casualties of Syria’s War Find Medical Salvation in Israel. By Inna Lazareva.

“I lost consciousness in the blast. When I woke up I was in a hospital in Israel”: Casualties of Syria’s war find salvation in an unlikely place. By Inna Lazareva. The Independent, August 8, 2013.

Why Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks Will Fail. By David Suissa.

Why peace talks will fail. By David Suissa. Jewish Journal, August 7, 2013.

Suissa:

The conventional wisdom is that the revived Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are doomed to fail. The popular reason cited is that “the maximum the Israelis can offer is less than the minimum the Palestinians can accept.”

 

From a pragmatic view, that may well be true, but I think there’s an underlying emotional reason why these talks are doomed to continue the failures of the past.

 

No one wants to negotiate — let alone compromise — with a thief.

For several decades now, the Palestinians have successfully sold the world and themselves on the narrative that Israel stole their land. This has given them zero incentive to compromise.

 

Over time, as this unchallenged narrative has taken on the aura of accepted truth, it has undermined all attempts to reach a final peace agreement, as well as expose Israel to a global campaign of boycotts and condemnations.

 

To make matters worse, whenever there is more settlement construction, the perceived level of “criminality” has only gone up.

 

I get why Israel never made a big deal of challenging the “illegal occupation” narrative. Because it has already shown its willingness to dismantle settlements for the sake of peace, it probably figured, “Why bring up this red herring? What purpose would it serve?”

 

Israel’s mistake was to overlook a crucial  truth of the Middle East: Honor trumps all. If you don’t defend your honor, you’re worthy of contempt, not respect. It’s not a coincidence that Palestinian leaders have consistently used contemptuous language in accusing Israel of every possible sin.

 

Concentrating on pragmatic issues while ignoring this emotional poison is like cooking a rotten fish with a tasty tomato sauce. Eventually, you’re bound to bite into the fish.

 

We saw another example last week of how dismissive the Jewish world can be about defending Israel’s honor.

 

A petition signed by 1,000 jurists from around the world was delivered to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton asserting that the E.U. is wrong in holding that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal, and that the term “1967 lines” does not exist in international law.

 

Remarkably, I couldn’t find any mention of this initiative in the Jewish media, except for the right-wing Israeli news site Arutz Sheva.  No coverage in the mainstream media; no supportive statements from major Jewish organizations.

 

The jurists who signed are certainly no slouches. As reported on Arutz Sheva, among the signatories are former Justice Minister Yaakov Ne’eman, former U.N. Ambassador Meir Rosen, Britain’s Baroness Ruth Deech, and law professors Eliav Shochetman and Talia Einhorn, as well as legal scholars from more than 20 countries around the world.

 

It’s well known that when prominent Jews release public statements encouraging Israel to make “courageous concessions for peace,” they get major coverage.

 

But apparently, when prominent jurists release a statement defending Israel’s honor, it’s not even worth a news mention.

 

Even if you’re a J Street-supporting peacenik whose definition of Mashiach is the two-state solution, this state of affairs should trouble you. It’s bad for peace.

 

However impractical you might think it is to defend Israel’s honor and assert her land rights, in this case there is one very practical advantage: If you have a legal right to the land, it makes your concessions worth something. The concessions of a thief are worthless.

 

Sadly and ironically, Israel could have made a compelling legal case regarding her land rights. The settlements may be a bad idea, but that hardly makes them illegal.

 

As the man behind the initiative, Alan Baker, explained to Arutz Sheva, “It is true that most of the world thinks so [that the settlements are illegal], but that does not make it true legally. Legally, the clause in the Geneva Convention that they use to say that settlements are illegal was not intended to refer to cases like our settlements, but to prevent the forced transfer of populations by the Nazis. This is not relevant to the Israeli settlements.”

 

Baker is Israel’s former ambassador to Canada and legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, who was also a member of the three-person committee headed by former Supreme Court Judge Edmond Levy, which pronounced last year that Judea and Samaria were not occupied territory.

 

Beyond the issue of the strategic or moral wisdom of Israeli settlements, the Levy committee showed there’s plenty of evidence supporting Israel’s legal right to settle the disputed land — including binding international agreements that predate the United Nations and were never abrogated.

 

In their well-intentioned zeal to challenge the wisdom of these settlements, the pro-Israel peace camp has tragically reinforced the enemy’s narrative that the settlements are a criminal enterprise. The real tragedy is that it’s probably too late now to correct this libelous narrative.

 

At this moment, it’s clear that external conditions — such as the presence of Hamas, the wide gap between the parties and the instability of the region — mitigate against the success of the peace talks.

 

But we should never underestimate the power of internal, emotional conditions.

 

Because even if external conditions were to improve, one human truth will remain: As long as you enter negotiations with the mark of “thief” on your forehead, good luck trying to get the other side to compromise.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel Plays History Teacher on Berlin Wall Anniversary.

Merkel plays history teacher on Berlin Wall anniversary. AFP. Yahoo! News, August 13, 2013.

Netanyahu Tells Kerry That the Palestinians Are Inciting Against Israel. By Dan Williams.

Netanyahu tells US mediator Palestinians inciting against Israel. By Dan Williams. Reuters. Yahoo! News, August 11, 2013.

Abbas: Arabs in Israel; No Jews in Palestine. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, July 31, 2013.

Rick Santorum Says Social Conservatives are Getting Beat by Popular Culture. By Charlie Spiering.

Rick Santorum: Social conservatives are getting beat by popular culture. By Charlie Spiering. Washington Examiner, August 12, 2013.

Rick Santorum: The Family Leadership Summit. Video. Caffeinated Thoughts, August 10, 2013. YouTube.

Oprah Winfrey Faces Fahsion Retail Racism and Size Bias. By Heidi Moore.

Oprah faced not just fashion retail racism, but size bias too. By Heidi Moore. The Guardian, August 9, 2013.

Palestinian Leaders Must Halt the Hatred. By Andrea Levin.

Palestinian leaders must halt the hatred. By Andrea Levin. Boston Globe, August 8, 2013.

Levin:

As renewed negotiations get underway between Israelis and Palestinians, it’s vital for the success of the endeavor to identify what went wrong in earlier discussions.

 

Secretary of State John Kerry wisely stressed in his July 30 briefing with Israeli and Palestinian leaders the central aim of “ending the conflict” and he emphasized as well the “end of claims” against Israel. These are basic tenets of any rational definition of peace and would mean, finally, the end of the drive to remove the Jewish state. They would mean genuine acceptance by Palestinian Arabs of the sovereign rights of a Jewish nation in what is an overwhelmingly Muslim-dominated region.

 

Notwithstanding the many previous signed agreements, hand shakes and photo ops, such acceptance has been largely cosmetic. While Palestinian leaders have endorsed coexistence in speeches for Western audiences, including at Washington think tanks and international gatherings, too often for the audience that counts most — Palestinian Arabs who live next door to Israel and who need to hear their leaders’ clear affirmation of the legitimacy of the Jewish state — the message has been the opposite.

 

Indeed, the Palestinian leadership over the two decades since the signing of the landmark Oslo Accords in 1993 has failed disastrously to prepare the Palestinian people for peace with their Jewish neighbors.

 

Ironically, before Oslo, there was no Palestinian-controlled TV to demonize Jews, but after Israel’s ceding of territory and authority, official media outlets came into existence that regularly glorify terrorist violence, deny Jewish ties to the land of Israel, denigrate Jews in crude stereotypes, vow expulsion of the Jews and claim all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as Palestine.

 

Regrettably, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas continues to play a double game. Thus on May 26, 2013, at the World Economic Forum, Abbas offered up the familiar public rhetoric, declaring: “We don’t teach and we don’t educate our children to hate or even discriminate against any religion, be it Judaism or any other.” He said: “We strive to spread the culture of peace among our people.”

 

Yet, for example, on July 3 another of hundreds of broadcasts on Palestinian television directly controlled by Abbas’s Palestinian Authority featured young girls reciting crude anti-Jewish bigotry:

 

Oh, you who were brought up on spilling blood

 

You have been condemned to humiliation and hardship.

 

Oh Sons of Zion, oh most evil among creations

 

Oh barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs. (Palestinian Media Watch)

 

The murderers of Jews are constantly extolled in what is cast as a fight to the death with Israel. On May 9, 2013, for instance, a TV segment was devoted to praising and thanking Abdallah Barghouti, currently serving 67 life sentences for his participation in such terror attacks as the Sbarro Pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem. In that attack families were singled out for particular slaughter and included Malki Roth, a 15 year old who was lunching with her best friend. They’re buried next to one another.

 

Extreme fabrications regarding Jewish history may seem to the uninitiated too ludicrous to take seriously – the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, is said to have no Jewish connection despite vast archeological, biblical and other evidence. Jesus is said to be a Canaanite Palestinian teaching Islam, a claim that repudiates Jewish and Christian history together. Moses is said to be Muslim. Newspaper columns and broadcasts in official Palestinian media deny any ancient Jewish ties to any of the land of Israel, relentlessly altering place names and substituting Muslim ones. The ferocity of the campaigns in every aspect of society, saturating Palestinians in false beliefs – and hatred – make the prospects of normalization almost impossible to imagine. Indeed, the content of the invective against Jews and Israel is so violent – one Gazan speaker urged the harvesting of Jewish skulls – that many in the West seem prone to averting their gaze from what is clearly genocidal rhetoric with vague claims that progress in the peace talks will help do away with the unpleasantness.

 

But the cycle of indoctrination and violence cannot be broken without facing up to its existence, to the need for Western media attention and, above all, to the necessity for the Palestinians’ own leadership to halt the hatred and declare clearly in Arabic to Arab audiences that Israel and its people have a rightful place in the Middle East.

Egypt Blockades Gaza. Where Are the Flotillas? By Khaled Abu Toameh.

Egypt Blockades Gaza. Where Are the Flotillas? By Khaled Abu Toameh. Gatestone Institute, August 9, 2013.

Peace Is More Than a Piece of Paper. By Emily Schrader.

Peace is more than a piece of paper. By Emily Schrader. Jerusalem Post, August 10, 2013.

Schrader:

Obama’s public condemnation of Israel rapidly sent his entire first term down the wrong path for American supporters of Israel.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, obviously wiser than all the leaders of Israel as well as every secretary of state who preceded him, is now overseeing the resolution of the longest-running conflict on earth – the conflict between Arabs and Jews. And he and the Obama administration appear quite certain that peace is just around the corner.

 

This unparalleled arrogance is nothing new. The Obama administration has repeatedly strong-armed Israel from the start, perpetuating the myth, believed by many European countries, that Israel takes unnecessary actions that harm the prospects of peace with the “oppressed” Palestinians. Obama’s public condemnation of Israel as one of his first actions as president rapidly sent his entire first term down the wrong path for American supporters of Israel (which happen to be most Americans). With every word he spoke, he seemed to place all blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict squarely on Israel’s shoulders, all the while ignoring the racist incitement, corruption and hypocrisy from Palestinian leaders in the West Bank.

 

In March 2013, however, it almost seemed as if Obama had turned a new page with Israel, visiting for the first time and delivering a rousing speech in support of the Jewish state. But alas, with John Kerry as secretary of state, it seems any improvement was fleeting and the administration is back to its old tricks: Israel concedes, but not the Palestinians.

 

What has Israel done to restart peace talks? In addition to setting no preconditions, when the Obama administration wanted a settlement freeze, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu conceded.

 

The response? The Palestinians still refused to come to the negotiating table and blamed Israel for not extending the settlement freeze.

 

When Obama pressured Israel to negotiate with Hamas for a cease-fire during Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel bit its tongue and negotiated – even taking no action when rockets were repeatedly fired immediately preceding the cease-fire agreement.

 

And now, not only has the US government strong-armed Israel into releasing over 100 cold-blooded terrorists in order to appease the Palestinians, but it has simultaneously ignored Abbas’ statement to the Egyptian press that Palestine will be Judenrein. One can’t help but wonder what the reaction would be if Netanyahu had stated that no Arabs will live in the State of Israel.

 

Kerry stated on Tuesday that “two states deserve countries to call their own” and that “the time has come for a lasting peace” – but Mr. Kerry, this is not what lasting peace looks like. Lasting peace is two parties coming to the negotiating table equally because they truly want to resolve this conflict. The Palestinian Authority has made it abundantly clear that peace is not their objective – so where is American pressure on the PA? The answer is that it’s non-existent.

 

The Americans place no pressure on the PA; this administration seems to have achieved a level of willfully ignorant arrogance that allows it to believe it doesn’t need to.

 

The first example of this is illustrated by the Obama administration operating from the false premise that if Israel surrenders sufficient territory, the Palestinians will stop the conflict. History of course teaches exactly the opposite.

 

What’s more, the PA can’t even control its own population, demonstrating time and time again its ineptitude at enforcing existing peace agreements and preventing violence.

 

Second, the Obama administration seems to think that because Obama visited Israel and showered Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres with praise, Israel will now do this administration’s bidding, even making unprecedented concessions. This proposition, both arrogant and naïve, relieves the Palestinians of virtually any responsibility at all.

 

But the height of both naiveté and arrogance is that the Obama administration appears to honestly believe that a peace agreement signed by the leaders of Israel and the PA will actually bring peace. This is undoubtedly, and sadly, the most dangerous aspect of Obama’s misguided hubris, and one need look no further than Oslo for proof.

 

Peace can only come when the people of Palestine learn to value individualism and life, and have representation that believes in those same principles of liberty.

 

Instead, they have leaders who blame others for their shortcomings and demand the world pay for their services because of irresponsible and corrupt leadership. Of course, what Kerry and the Americans are missing, or refuse to accept, is that the Palestinian leadership doesn’t want to stop the conflict.

 

In addition to radical factions opposing the existence of a Jewish state in the first place, the PA itself has no interest in resolving conflict because it’s how its leaders prosper. At the end of the day, the PA could not enforce an agreement even if one were to be reached. For the Obama administration to think otherwise is dangerously imperious.