The Arabs, though some may be talented, have a lot of loud-mouthed activists who scream and spew hatred.

By RAY HANANIA
Jerusalem Post, 24/01/2012

If Palestinian groups would band together, perhaps they would achieve something- after 100 years of failure.

If the Israelis wanted to defeat the Palestinians, Israel would immediately recognize a Palestinian State in Gaza, the West Bank and even east Jerusalem rather than embrace policies that push Palestinians to unite. If they did that, all the Israelis would have to do is sit back and watch as the Palestinians tear themselves apart.
Yes, the tragedy of the Palestinians isn’t that they are victims of injustice at the hands of the Israelis. It is their own tendency to destroy themselves from within.
The most powerful factor keeping Palestinians together as a people is the anger they share in response to injustices by Israel. But that’s a pathetic reason for unity. Worse, anger easily turns into hatred and hatred easily turns into violence, terrorism and killings. And violence undermines even the most just of causes.
Palestinians hate Israelis but they hate themselves even more.
Palestinian activists spend as much time bashing their own people as they do bashing Israel. The truth is that for the Palestinians, bashing Israel results in nothing but more defeats and losses. Bashing other Palestinians makes them feel better, and serves to distract their community from their inherent leadership failures.

Yes, it’s true. The Palestinian leadership is a failure, and the activists who lead the hatred, for example against Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate Palestinian like myself, and against anyone who dares to challenge their fanaticism, are the primary cause.
Let’s define failure. In nearly 100 years of battling Jewish immigrants and then the Israeli people, the Palestinians have failed to establish sovereignty over one inch of historic Palestine.
THE DIFFERENCES between Israelis and Jews on one side and the Palestinians and the Arab World on the other is striking.
For example, Israelis and Jews recognize that the American public is the single most important public constituency in the world. The Arab World marginalizes the American public, brushing them off as “ignorant” and “uneducated.”
That may be. But there’s a reason the most powerful lobbying group in the world, AIPAC, operates out of Washington, DC, not London, Paris or the Hague.
And recognizing the importance of the American public means recognition of the significance of American politics. Some of the wealthiest people funding the presidential candidates in the United States are not Arabs who have billions at their disposal, but Jews.
Newt Gingrich this week pulled to the front of the Republican field of candidates seeking to unseat Democrat President Barack Obama in November’s presidential election.
Gingrich did that with the backing of one of the wealthiest people in the world, Sheldon Adelson.
Adelson is the publisher of an Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, and the owner of lucrative casinos in Las Vegas. He put up more than $5 million to fund a “Super Pac” that has been bashing Mitt Romney and that is helping Gingrich.
Although Arabs hate Gingrich because he called the Palestinians an “invented people,” the fact is that Gingrich has very moderate views on Israel and Palestine. In interviews with my journalist colleague Ali Younes, who covered the South Carolina Republican primaries, Gingrich explained that he would recognize and support a Palestinian state if Hamas and the Palestinians recognized Israel and renounced violence.
Forget about the politics of Gingrich’s words. Mainstream Palestinians renounced violence years ago and continue to live in the limbo of occupation, while Hamas goes back and forth, one day pretending to be moderate and the next vowing retaliation for brutal Israeli air strikes.
But as a veteran journalist and now columnist, I know presidential candidates will say anything to win elections. In other words, that Gingrich called Palestinians an “invented people” is meaningless in terms of what he might do to bring about compromise if elected president.
The bigger question, though, is where is the Palestinian or Arab version of Sheldon Adelson who is willing to put up much of his wealth to support the interests of his people? Arabs do not own newspapers, television stations or put any real money into the Palestinian lobbying. Pro-Israel groups have donated more than $51 million to candidates, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. In contrast, Arabs have only donated $61,000.
The Arabs, though some may be talented, have a lot of loud-mouthed activists who scream and spew hatred. There’s the great jazz musician whose hatred of Israel borders on anti-Semitism. There’s the talented writer at the Electronic Intifada whose words are driven by hatred of Jews.
These hate-driven activists have compromised mainstream Arabs, putting them in a headlock of oppression. Moderate Arabs are discouraged from expressing their views or espousing moderation in the face of the bullying and threats from the fanatics who spend more time and energy beating up their own people than turning legal claims against Israel into meaningful reality.
I was sitting with a group of Arab journalist friends recently at al-Manar restaurant outside of Chicago in Bridgeview, which is the hub of the local Palestinian Muslim community.
What struck me as odd was the restaurant was empty, save for our group. It was lunchtime on a Sunday. Down the street, Arabs were standing in line at two American restaurants owned by Greek Americans.
The real secret is that the Israelis don’t have to work hard at defeating the Palestinians. All they have to do is let Palestinians undermine themselves.

The writer is an award winning columnist and radio talk show host. He can be reached at www.RadioChicagoland.com

Judaism believes that asking questions and welcoming questions is a necessary part of education and growth. The time of the Exodus is a case in point.

From Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, January 27, 2012

It is no accident that parshat Bo, the section that deals with the culminating plagues and the exodus, should turn three times to the subject of children and the duty of parents to educate them. As Jews we believe that to defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education. Freedom is lost when it is taken for granted.

Unless parents hand on their memories and ideals to the next generation – the story of how they won their freedom and the battles they had to fight along the way – the long journey falters and we lose our way.

What is fascinating, though, is the way the Torah emphasizes the fact that children must ask questions. Two of the three passages in our parsha speak of this:

And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.’” (Ex. 12: 26-27)

In days to come, when your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ say to him, ‘With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. (Ex. 13: 14)

There is another passage later in the Torah that also speaks of question asked by a child:

In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. (Deut. 6: 20-21)

The other passage in today’s parsha, the only one that does not mention a question, is:

On that day tell your son, ‘I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’ (Ex. 13:

These four passages have become famous because of their appearance in Haggadah on Pesach. They are the four children: one wise, one wicked or rebellious, one simple and “one who does not know how to ask.” Reading them together the sages came to the conclusion that

[1] children should ask questions,

[2] the Pesach narrative must be constructed in response to, and begin with, questions asked by a child,

[3] it is the duty of a parent to encourage his or her children to ask questions, and the child who does not yet know how to ask should be taught to ask.

There is nothing natural about this at all. To the contrary, it goes dramatically against the grain of history. Most traditional cultures see it as the task of a parent or teacher to instruct, guide or command. The task of the child is to obey. “Children should be seen, not heard,” goes the old English proverb. “Children, be obedient to your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing to the Lord,” says a famous Christian text. Socrates, who spent his life teaching people to ask questions, was condemned by the citizens of Athens for corrupting the young.

In Judaism the opposite is the case. It is a religious duty to teach our children to ask questions. That is how they grow.

Judaism is the rarest of phenomena: a faith based on asking questions, sometimes deep and difficult ones that seem to shake the very foundations of faith itself. “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” asked Abraham. “Why, Lord, why have you brought trouble on this people?” asked Moses. “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” asked Jeremiah.

The book of Job is largely constructed out of questions, and God’s answer consists of four chapters of yet deeper questions: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? … Can you catch Leviathan with a hook? … Will it make an agreement with you and let you take it as your slave for life?”

In yeshiva the highest accolade is to ask a good question: Du fregst a gutte kashe. Rabbi Abraham Twersky, a deeply religious psychiatrist, tells of how when he was young, his teacher would relish challenges to his arguments. In his broken English, he would say, “You right! You 100 prozent right!  Now I show you where you wrong.”

Isadore Rabi, winner of a Nobel Prize in physics, was once asked why he became a scientist. He replied, “My mother made me a scientist without ever knowing it. Every other child would come back from school and be asked, ‘What did you learn today?’ But my mother used to ask: ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’ That made the difference. Asking good questions made me a scientist.”

Judaism is not a religion of blind obedience. Indeed, astonishingly in a religion of 613 commandments, there is no Hebrew word that means “to obey.” When Hebrew was revived as a living language in the nineteenth century, and there was need for a verb meaning “to obey,” it had to be borrowed from the Aramaic: le-tsayet. Instead of a word meaning “to obey,” the Torah uses the verb shema, untranslatable into English because it means [1] to listen, [2] to hear, [3] to understand, [4] to internalise, and [5] to respond.

Written into the very structure of Hebraic consciousness is the idea that our highest duty is to seek to understand the will of God, not just to obey blindly. Tennyson’s verse, “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die,” is as far from a Jewish mindset as it is possible to be.

Why? Because we believe that intelligence is God’s greatest gift to humanity. Rashi understands the phrase that God made man “in His image, after His likeness,” to mean that God gave us the ability “to understand and discern.” The very first of our requests in the weekday Amidah is for “knowledge, understanding and discernment.” One of the most breathtakingly bold of the rabbis’ institutions was to coin a blessing to be said on seeing a great non-Jewish scholar. Not only did they see wisdom in cultures other than their own. They thanked God for it. How far this is from the narrow-mindedness than has so often demeaned and diminished religions, past and present.

The historian Paul Johnson once wrote that rabbinic Judaism was “an ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals.” Much of that had, and still has, to do with the absolute priority Jews have always placed on education, schools, the bet midrash, religious study as an act even higher than prayer, learning as a lifelong engagement, and teaching as the highest vocation of the religious life.

But much too has to do with how one studies and how we teach our children. The Torah indicates this at the most powerful and poignant juncture in Jewish history – just as the Israelites are about to leave Egypt and begin their life as a free people under the sovereignty of God. Hand on the memory of this moment to your children, says Moses. But do not do so in an authoritarian way. Encourage your children to ask, question, probe, investigate, analyze, explore.

Liberty means freedom of the mind, not just of the body. Those who are confident of their faith need fear no question. It is only those who lack confidence, who have secret and suppressed doubts, who are afraid.

The one essential, though, is to know and to teach this to our children, that not every question has an answer we can immediately understand. There are ideas we will only fully comprehend through age and experience, others that take great intellectual preparation, yet others that may be beyond our collective comprehension at this stage of the human quest.

As I write, we don’t yet know whether the Higgs’ boson exists. Darwin never knew what a gene was. Even the great Newton, founder of modern science, understood how little he understood, and put it beautifully: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

In teaching its children to ask and keep asking, Judaism honoured what Maimonides called the “active intellect” and saw it as the gift of God. No faith has honoured human intelligence more.

www.israelnationalnews.com

Photo by: YouTube / Al Jazeera

Film shows Palestinians, Jews saving lives

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Jerusalem Post, 27/01/2012

Film shows cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian volunteer paramedics in United Hatzalah.

No one believed it could happen, but it has: An Israeli living in England has made a politics-free film about cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian volunteer paramedics for the Orthodox Jerusalem organization United Hatzalah, who save lives together in the capital’s western and eastern neighborhoods.
The 25-minute program has been broadcast four times this month by the global Arab TV network Al Jazeera in English, which has also put it online for all to see.
It is an unusual sight: Arabs wearing orange vests printed with the red Star of David team up with haredi (ultra- Orthodox) Jews wearing black kippot, their sidecurls and tzitzit (ritual fringes) blowing in the wind. And the partners have only praise for each other.
“I don’t care which person I’m saving. I even go to [the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of] Mea She’arim on Shabbat,” says Fadi, one of 100 Arabs currently volunteering for UH.
“Saving lives is a religious act for me. Forget all the politics and the mess. People need to live.”
“The Arabs are so devoted,” says a haredi paramedic.
“Their chest compressions are incredible. They respect Jewish sensitivities, especially on Shabbat.”
Eli Beer, the haredi founder and head of the lifesaving rescue organization, commented Thursday, “It’s amazing to see how well we all get along together, without conflict.
Everybody knows and respects each other.”
In a phone interview from London on Thursday, the filmmaker, Keren Ghitis, told The Jerusalem Post how the piece came together.

“I started teaching people how to make videos in Latin America and Africa so they could tell their own stories. I made this video as part of the Ir Amim Initiative, which solicited ideas for films from Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers.
We were asked to tell things that usually do not get attention,” she said.
She submitted it to Al Jazeera, which, she said, was very interested in broadcasting it. Nothing was censored or dictated to toe any line. The first showing was on January 16 at prime time.
“The comments from around the world, including the Arab world, have been very positive. There has also been a lot of mention of it on Facebook. A Palestinian community in the US even asked us for permission to use it for educational purposes,” she said, adding, “It broke a lot of stereotypes.”
The Al Jazeera Network has more than 65 bureaus around the world, with a staff of 3,000 – including more than 400 journalists from more than 60 countries. There is a bureau that hires Israeli Jews and Arabs. The English station has more than 1,000 experienced staffers of more than 50 nationalities and broadcasts to some 220 million households in more than 100 countries.
“I wanted to reach people and see more collaboration between Arabs and Jews,” Ghitis explained when asked why she chose the subject. “More support is needed for medical services in east Jerusalem.”
The UH-trained Palestinian paramedics note in the film that there are often delays in Magen David Adom reaching the sick and wounded in east Jerusalem because no ambulance can get there without being accompanied by a police or military escort. UH Arabs and Jews often get there first on their ambucycles. In addition, many streets are unnamed, and houses have no identifying numbers.
Beer said Al Jazeera had set no conditions for the broadcast.
Speaking to the Post from Davos, he said he had just met Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, who received the Nobel Prize.
“He was amazed,” he said.
“He and lots of people from all over the world tell me that the fact that I am a proud Jew and Israeli makes Israel look very good.”
Beer wants to have Arabs all over the country working hand-in-hand with haredi, religious and secular Jews for his rescue organization. “I want about 3,000 volunteers, about 15 percent of of them Christian and Muslims.”
Jews and Muslims do not oppose working together, he says, despite the invisible boundaries and suspicions that separate their communities.
“In the beginning, I met a few who were surprised about working together, but after they saw that they are great people and really professional, they all like it,” said Beer.
The Jews also work on Shabbat and festivals in an emergency, and the Muslims on Fridays and Ramadan.
The film follows volunteers like Hezi – a former yeshiva student who works in a fishmonger’s shop and has volunteered with UH for 15 years – and Fadi, a security guard at Al-Aksa Mosque.
Fadi, presented as a loving father hugging his young children at home, has been an assistant to the Jewish owner of a Mea She’arim hardware store since the age of 14. His family encourages him to go any time he gets an emergency call, as does Shlomo, the shop owner. “He is like a son to me,” says the Mea Shearim retailer.
Hezi is not worried when dispatched to the Damascus Gate in east Jerusalem, and works with Red Crescent medics.
“Since they started working together in 2010, hundreds of lives have been saved,” Ghitis concluded.

Four Jewish pilgrims from the US who sought access to Joseph’s Tomb were arrested at gunpoint by PA police in Shechem.

Gavriel Queenann, January 27, 2012

Four Jewish pilgrims from the United States were arrested before dawn on Friday in Shechem as they sought to pray at Joseph’s Tomb.

The four, associated with the Bratslav Hassidic group were confronted at gunpoint by Palestinian Authority police and taken into custody before reaching the grave site.

They were handed over to Israeli police and taken to the Ariel police station.

“Americans are allowed to stay in Nablus and their summary arrest is a violation of international law,” a friend of the four detainees said.

David Ha’ivri of the Shomron Liaison Office who has been directly involved in efforts to allow access for Jews to Joseph’s tomb also decried the arrest.

“This arrest show the irony of the false claims that Israel is apartheid. While Arabs have free access to all areas in Israel, Jewish people are denied access to holy places that are in PA areas administrated by the PLO,” Ha’Ivri said.

“It is outrageous that this discrimination and harassment is going on while the PA is supported through funding of the American and EU governments. Joseph’s tomb must be reopened for full free access for all Jewish people regardless to their citizenship,” he added. 

Israel ceded security and administrative control of Shechem to the Palestinian Authority on 2 October 2000 under the auspices of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Upon handing the site over to the PA it was pillaged and extensively vandalized by local Arabs.

The next morning the bullet-riddled body of Rabbi Hillel Lieberman, a US citizen who immigrated to Israel and resided in Elon Moreh, was found on the outskirts of Shechem, where he had gone to survery the damage done to the tomb

After these events Barak’s government restricted Israeli access to the site.

Israelis did not return to Joseph’s Tomb until after Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, after which Israelis were allowed access to the site only with an IDF escort.

However, security coordination between IDF and PA forces has been sporadic and the size and frequency of Israeli visits has been limited.

Under this situation, many frustrated Bratslav Hassidim have sought to covertly visit Joseph’s Tomb under the cover of darkness.

Vandalism by local Arabs is routinely reported by Jewish worshipers who reach the site. In late 2009, a group of Jewish worshipers found the headstone smashed and swastikas painted on the walls, as well as boot prints on the grave itself.

Reaching the gravesite without an IDF escort has proved a dangerous undertaking for Jews.

On 24 April 2011, Israeli Ben Yosef Livnat was gunned down in cold blood by a PA security officer in the pre-dawn hours as he sought to reach the tomb. Four of his companions were wounded.

The PA inquiry into the incident found that the men who shot at Livnat acted in “breach of the protocol” for opening fire.

However, the commander of the IDF’s Samaria Brigade said in closed conversations that Livnat was murdered and that the PA police officer who opened fire intended to kill Jews.

Livnat, the son of US immigrants to Israel and nephew of Minister Limor Livnat, was declared a victim of terror by current defense minister Ehud Barak.

www.israelnationalnews.com

By Dexter Van Zile, Algemeiner

January 25, 2012

It’s time for journalists, human rights activists and church leaders in the U.S. to confront the prospect of Christianity’s destruction in the region of its birth.

That’s the message that came out of a one-day conference that took place in Framingham, Massachusetts on Jan. 21, 2012. The conference, titled The Persecuted church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East was sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2012.
Andrea Levin, CAMERA’s executive director said the goal of the conference was to draw attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East.

“If the media shines a light consistently and clearly on the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians, that can make a crucial difference in restraining potential violence,” she sa“Silence on the other hand may do the opposite.”

Walid Phares, a Maronite Christian from Lebanon and author of The Coming Revolution: The Fight for Freedom in the Middle East said Christians and other minorities have been the victims of violence for decades. “I lived through it in the 20th century. Now we’re all living it, trying to witness for it,” he said. “We have crossed the threshold of a new century and yet it’s still happening.”

Attendees of the conference heard testimony from Juliana Taimoorazy, founder of the Iraqi Christian relief council and Egyptian human rights activists Cynthia Farahat. Taimoorazy, who reported on the plight of Assyrians in Israq stated that since June 2004, churches in Iraq have been bombed more than 80 times. Sometimes, multiple churches would be bombed at the same time as part of a coordinated attack.

“Most of these attacks happened on Fridays, marking the day of Islamic prayer,” she said. Clergy have been routinely kidnapped and killed on a regular basis. Even children have been killed by Islamists, Taimoorazy reported.

“In October of 2006 – in the 21st century – a 14-year-old boy was crucified in Basra, in the center of the city,” she said.

Farahat reported that Copts are second-class citizens in their homeland

“But for me, as a woman and a Copt, I am a fourth-class citizen,” she said. “The first class citizen is the Egyptian Sunni Muslim male, the second class is the Sunni female. The third is the Christian male. The fourth is the Christian female. I’m a fourth-class Egyptian citizen with absolutely no legal rights.”

The plight of religious and ethnic minorities in Muslim and Arab majority countries in the Middle East has largely been ignored because of an obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict, Phares said during his keynote address. Phares first witnessed this after immigrating to the U.S. from Lebanon in the 1990s.

“In the 1990s, if there as an incident in the West Bank, the son-in-law, the mom, the uncle of both sides would be interviewed and the psychologists would come in and talk about the deep roots of the conflict,” Phares said. “At the same time, two villages were burned in Egypt or the Kurds would be gassed. Zero [coverage] in the New York Times.”

Franck Salameh, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College, echoed Phares’ complaint.

“There’s clearly a prevailing hierarchy in the media’s treatment of Middle Eastern violence,” he said. “Some victims get airtime on prime time, all the time. Others simply don’t. Middle Eastern Christians are not a top priority. Those uncouth, cross-wearing primitives are not cause for curiosity. They are too Christian in a world plagued by political correctness, cultural relativism and a false conception fo the Middle East as an Arab Muslim preserve.”

Documenting attacks on Near Eastern minorities is not fashionable, Salameh said, because it is viewed as being anti-Arab and anti-Muslim and part of a Western attempt to divide a cultural and linguistic monolith. If this thinking were applied to North America, no one would talk about the plight or fate of Native Americans because it would be regarded as subversive to the Anglo-European paradigm.

“Middle Eastern minorities, Christians and Jews, are the native Americans of the Middle East,” Salameh said. “The dominant Arab-Muslim culture is indeed the colonizing intruder culture here.”

Richard Landes, associate professor of history at Boston University and author of Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millenial Experience reported that Islamists have worked assiduously to disarm Westerners by engaging in cognitive warfare against democracies. This cognitive warfare is pursued, Landes explained, by using self-criticism and concern for the other to undermine the ability of democracies to defend themselves. “The purpose of cognitive warfare is to turn your own people into patriots and your enemies into pacifists,” Landes said.

This strategy has had “staggering success” over the past few years, he said. The success is due to “an unholy marriage between pre-modern sadism and post modern masochism,” Landes said.

“The pre-moderns accuse us of the most vicious things in the world and we say, ‘You’re right, I’m sorry,” Landes joked.

Posted by Ted Belman, January 25, 2012

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch

Senior Rabbi, Stephen Wise Free Synagogue

Posted: 01/25/2012 4:38 pm

In early Jan. 15 senior rabbis, ministers and imams traveled together to Israel and the Palestinian territories. We are from among New York City’s leading religious institutions. Collectively, our houses of worship are home to tens of thousands of prominent New Yorkers.

Anyone who appreciates the hectic schedules and unique demands upon congregational clergy realizes that it is no small matter to bring 15 spiritual leaders together for five days. So why did we leave our congregations for a week? Why did our congregants insist that we go and even pay for our mission?

In the post 9/11 world, religious rapprochement is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity. To ignore dialogue is to invite destruction. If we do not find ways to live together in dignity we will die together in agony. Religious moderates must build new bridges of coexistence or religious extremists will burn the last bridges of peace.

Our presence in the Middle East was intended to broadcast that we can live together, work together, travel together, dream together and build together. In a world awash in religious conflict, we wish to model a different way: the way of coexistence, respect and peace.

It was a tough trip. We did not paper over our differences. We visited the heart of the conflict. There were moments of despair. We met with presidents, prime ministers, members of parliament and mayors on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. We met with priests, imams and rabbis. We met with journalists, academics, students, villagers and farmers.

Daily headlines do not begin to tell the story. None of the people we met — not one — believed that the Middle East is closer to peace today than ten years ago. If this is the truth, we need to hear it. Progress rests upon the solid rock of reality, not the shifting sands of fantasy.

Despite it all, many of us returned to New York guardedly optimistic. None of the people we met — not one — felt that the status quo was sustainable. Everyone understood that a way must be found to break out of the suffocating reality. There is broad agreement that the present is not working and that a new future must be forged.

People of faith have a unique role to play. Both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad urged us to engage. Both of them emphasized that religion could be a source of enormous support as the politicians seek a political solution. We can help to create a context that is conducive to peace.

Religion specializes in hope. We are good at articulating our common humanity and giving voice to the better angels of our nature. We were also cautioned that if we do not step up the forces of religious intolerance will continue to drag the rest of us towards war. Our era has placed a sacred obligation on the forces and figures of religious moderation to speak out and act out.

There are many good people working to build bridges. In Haifa we met Christians, Muslims and Jews who have built a true house of coexistence. In Tel Aviv we met doctors, nurses and hospital staff who treated illness without regard to race, religion or creed. Even on the Gaza border, in Israeli towns that were fired upon in a barrage of missiles, there were people who were reaching out to the other side.

Peace is made piece by piece, from the bottom up. Progress is advanced day by day, person by person, each laboring in their own corner of the universe, connecting with others who together create an irresistible force. We should connect with those people and strengthen their hand. This daily labor is heroic work.

Jewish sages ask: Who is a hero? They respond: He who turns an enemy into a friend.

This is our task: person by person to help turn enemies into friends.

Posted By David Solway On January 25, 2012, In Daily Mailer,FrontPage

I have often written, sometimes bemused, sometimes incensed, about what is surely the strangest fact of Jewish life, namely, its self-division. Since time immemorial, the Jewish people have been at war with themselves, both in the Holy Land and the Diaspora, allowing themselves to succumb to one of history’s most mordant ironies. In turning against themselves, they have effectively collaborated with those who would suppress, conquer or extinguish the Jewish community.

The template was already established in the Book of Genesis, where we read how one brother slew another in jealousy and resentment and a group of conspiratorial brothers sold their sibling into slavery. From that point on, the biblical archive presents a saga of recrimination, envy, hatred and fratricidal strife that in different degrees has imperiled the very survival of the Jewish “nation.” The pattern was consolidated in the story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, the three rebels who “rose up” before Moses and challenged his authority. As the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen these people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people” (Exodus 32:9).

Brother against brother, prophet against people, king and priest, and even nation against nation form an indelible part of the Jewish chronicle. The history of the Two Kingdoms provides a continuingly relevant object lesson. After the death of King Solomon, the Israelite communality broke apart into the two warring monarchies of Israel and Judah. The shedding of kinship blood critically weakened the two kingdoms, leading to the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians and the reduction of Judah first by the Chaldeans, then by the Egyptians, and finally by the Babylonians. The Jewish epic may be described as: divide and be conquered. Indeed, surah 59:14 of the Koran tells us something very true about Jews: “There is much hostility between them: their hearts are divided…” It seems that the wise counsel of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah has no resonance for the backsliders: “All of Israel and those who are joined to it are to each other like brothers. If brother shows no compassion to brother, who will show compassion to him?”

The fault line in the Jewish sensibility is tectonic in its dimensions and destructive in its effect. Perhaps the single most resonant case study in self-division involves the institutional founder of the Christian faith. The story of St. Paul is too well known to require much in the way of comment, yet it is richly instructive. A rabid persecutor of the followers of Jesus, Saul of Tarsus experienced a blinding conversion to the new faith and was shortly thereafter  called by the name of Paul (Acts 13:9). He then became the Apostle of Christianity, considering his Jewish identity a mere rehearsal for a larger identity and at times expressing strong disapproval of Jews who held to their traditional beliefs and identity. (His quarrel with the Desposyni, the “servants of the Lord,” led by James the brother of Jesus who wished to preserve the purity and exclusivity of the original faith, is a matter of historical record.)

But the details of the Apostle’s former activities and subsequent religious convictions are specific to the time. Jews today do not persecute Christians. Indeed, they are the ones who are relentlessly persecuted—by Muslims, by secular antisemites and unhinged fanatics from both sides of the political spectrum (though massively from the Left), and by several Christian denominations associated with The World Council of Churches, replacement and liberation theologians, and the Quaker-Presbyterian axis promoting its BDS campaigns. More to the point, and the most indigestible perversion of all, countless Jews harry and denounce their own congeners. The tendency to a kind of binary kinesis seems inherent in the Jew, whether it is himself he loathes or his own people he reproaches and undermines. It is the psychic split itself, not its local content, that transcends the ages. In this respect, the Saul/ Paul fracture represents a longstanding Jewish archetype.

This history of self-estrangement, political strife and cultural rupture has been played out from the biblical era through the centuries of religious factionalism and reciprocal excommunication culminating in our own epoch. The profound antipathy between assimilated Jews and their irredentist counterparts in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron, as well as the caste-like contempt of Western Jewish intellectuals for the Ostjuden, that is, their assumed “plebeian” and “uneducated” East European brethren, are facts of modern Jewish history. The shame of many of the Jewish Councils in Nazi Europe that collaborated with their murderers (not all, as Gershom Scholem justifiably argues in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis) cannot be forgiven, despite attempts to explain it away as the least of worst alternatives. The legacy of the celebrated Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the equally acclaimed Jewish political writer Hannah Arendt, who could never forget their German patrimony and were corrosively suspicious of the Zionist project, has been broadly and unambiguously noxious. In the present moment we observe their offspring, that is, left-wing “peace activists,” liberal rabbis and “post-Zionist” intellectuals, who strive to erode the Jewish character of the state of Israel and so deprive it of its legitimacy. The Jewish Left, as it dances around the golden calf of a fictitious peace, represents perhaps the gravest danger to the survival of the country.

Many Jews, as I wrote in Hear, O Israel!, tend to transpose the fight against iniquity and oppression to other nations and communities rather than press for the rights of their own people. Or they believe, “in traditionally Marxist fashion,” as Sol Stern writes in City Journal, “that the way to fight anti-Semitism was through the broader struggle for international socialism.” Thus they pursue their fugitive merit. Like Paul, their main focus falls on the Corinthians and Ephesians et al. of the time. Indifferent to the reality of their own condition—ignoring the rain clouds until they are drenched and catch pneumonia, as the 19^th century Jewish philosopher Max Nordau noted—these are the ostensibly benevolent Jews who wish to “repair the world” (Tikkun Olam). That it would be a world in which their place would nevertheless remain precarious escapes them entirely.

The benevolent Jews are bad enough. Their spirit of pharisaic charity, however, is exceeded by that of the reprobate Jews, who take their “idealism” to the next level of unctuous self-effacement. They struggle against injustice by reprehending, for example, not Palestinian terrorists and Hezbollah jihadists but Israeli Jews themselves whose right to national legitimacy they perceive as an affront and do everything in their power to misrepresent. Again, like Paul, they regard their own people as “those who please not God, and are contrary to all men” (1 Thessalonians 2:15).

But both the benevolent Jew and the reprobate Jew, the supposedly reasonable and the plainly irrational, work against their own long-term interests in a pusillanimous and delinquent flight before the Accuser. These are the “degraded” Jews whom the great Jewish patriot Vladimir Jabotinsky deplored. They are reminiscent of the spies that Moses sent out to reconnoiter enemy territory, ten of whom on returning compared themselves to frail grasshoppers before the fearsome Anakim and recoiled from their destiny (Numbers 13: 33). They do not  understand, in the words of Nurit Greenger, that “Israel is the last station in the Jews’ Via Dolorosa” and that “beyond this station is the Jews’ final crucifixion,” nor do they realize how profoundly they themselves are at risk. They have forgotten that the Jewish sense of security is always a false sense of security—that over the past 2000 years, as Melvin Konner points out in Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Jews have been expelled from 94 countries—and do not think to ask themselves why the future should be any different.

Renegade Jews especially have much to answer for. They are always happy to become token Jews, showcased at antisemitic seminars and congresses—where, as Alan Dershowitz writes in an article titled “Why Anti-Semitism Is Moving Toward the Mainstream,” the “red lines separating legitimate criticism of Israel from subtle anti-Semitism” are now being crossed at will. These turncoats pose as principled anti-Zionists, but their anti-Zionism is nothing more or less than a kosher antisemitism. In so being and doing, they acquire what historian Robert Wistrich calls “historic dissident status” by willfully providing their enemies with the ammunition they need to advance their cause while disguising their intentions. There is not much doubt that what we are looking at is a pathology of the first magnitude, what the Talmudic sages called sin’at akhim, or brotherly hatred, an element of Jewish life sufficiently pronounced to merit a name of its own. The 1930s Zionist Labor leader Berl Katznelson was very explicit about this. “Is there another People on Earth,” he asked rhetorically, “so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape, robbery committed by their enemies fill their hearts with admiration and awe?” The syndrome has come to be known as Jew Flu.

Jews do not have the privilege enjoyed by all other peoples in the world, that is, the luxury of hating one another or, for that matter, of hating themselves. Other groups can get away with intramural conflict, the Islamic umma being the chief example of a community that can inflict enormous damage on itself, sundered between Sunni and Shia, nationalists and pan-Arabists, despotic regimes and the equally tyrannical Muslim Brotherhood. Due to its numbers, its domination of the United Nations, its vast oil reserves and its energy stranglehold on the rest of the planet, it survives robustly and continues to exercise global power. Jews have no such exemption.

A Jew who hates another Jew or who is mortified by his own Jewishness has given hostages to fortune and rendered his own prosperity and well-being, let alone his survival, hypothetical. The universal human prerogative of hating one’s fellow man, whether members of one’s race, ethnicity or nation, should be anathema to Jews since they of all peoples can least afford it. No less than Cain hated Abel or Jeroboam hated Rehoboam or Paul hated Saul, the pathology continues to work its harm or, at the very least, to produce an etiology of dislocation in the self. It is only a small step from this ancient matrix to the current mob of anti-Zionist Jewish Jew-haters we are all familiar with, schismatics like George Soros, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Amos Elon, Naomi Klein, Richard Falk, the late Tony Judt and, most recently, Gilad Atzmon asserting in The Wandering Who? his “contempt for the Jew in me.”

In his important book United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, Jamie Glazov states that “Two of the most outstanding Jewish characteristics are the love of life and the enduring struggle to survive.” There is much truth in this observation; how else explain Jewish survival into the modern world against all the odds? Yet I fear that this is only part of the story and that in our ceaseless squabbles and conflicts with one another, our misdirected skepticism and historical amnesia, we may one day bring about our own demise. It is as if there is something in the Jewish soul that, despite its love of life, paradoxically hungers for its own extinction, as if the very quick of life, of practical wisdom, ethnic solidarity, love of the better part of heritage, faith in the political miracle known as Israel, and the stubborn desire to persist, will often lie dormant.

Under these circumstances, it is hard not to sympathize with the pungent and despairing remark of the Przysucha Hassidic Rebbe, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, who said: “I could revive the dead, but I have more difficulty reviving the living.”

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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/25/the-scourge-of-jewish-self-division/

By Ira Sharkansky, Tuesday Jan 24, 2012

We are never far from a reminder that the Israel-Palestinian conflict has a strong element of religious animosity.

Those who aspire to solve this with a simple agreement about lines on a map will be better off refereeing a football match (American or European). The Middle East is not for them.

The latest reminder occurred at an anniversary of the Palestinian political movement Fatah. It currently rules the West Bank, although tenuously, with help from Israel and other outsiders. Hamas and other extremists are nipping at its heels, and may enjoy the support of most residents.

Featured at the “moderate’s” celebration was a master of ceremonies who introduced the Mufti of Jerusalem by saying “His words are necessary because our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs is a war of religion and faith.”

He then introduced the Mufti of Jerusalem, the family member of the Mufti who incited deadly riots in the 1920s and 1930s, and later collaborated with the Nazis.

The present Mufti said, “In both collections of the Hadith . . . Judgment Day will not come before you fight the Jews, and the Jew will hide behind a stone or a tree, and the stone or the tree will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him, with the exception of the gharqad tree, and this is why it is common to see gharqad trees around the (Jewish) settlements.”

The comments received condemnations from Britain’s Foreign Office, and calls from Israel’s President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu for judicial authorities to open an investigation about incitement. Even the Jewish peace group that typically condemns Israeli actions, Americans for Peace Now, condemned the comments as

“belligerent anti-Jewish . . . We are appalled by these comments, coming from the most senior Muslim cleric on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll . . . What we find particularly disturbing is that these vile comments were broadcast on the Palestinian Authority’s official television channel, amplifying their “inciting” effect . . . People in positions of religious authority, on all sides, bear a heavy responsibility of avoiding incendiary rhetoric. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a dispute between two national movements with conflicting claims to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Clerics on both sides must prevent this conflict from being perceived as a religious conflict and from becoming one.”

The Mufti, for his part, described the Hadith as an end-of-times prophesy, not a political precept. “”There is nothing in my speech that calls for killing. . . I was speaking about my people, its steadfastness and its existence in this land until the hour (of resurrection)”.

According to the PA religious affairs minister, “Our political position remains unchanged. We believe in peace. He (Hussein) was simply quoting a Hadith that talks about destiny, about what could happen in the future.”

For the sake of candor and balance, I should note that the Palestinian News Agency Maan is as good a source as any for the details on this issue. http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=454753

The Mufti of Jerusalem is not alone among those who play on the borders of fanatacism and the endorsement of peace. Also indicative of Muslim extremism are school books that show maps of Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, and Turkey’s fanatic insistence that Armenian genocide is a reason to break diplomatic relations with France. Those who look at www.memri.org see no end of mad Mullahs who preach the most hateful of doctrines about Jews, as well as indications that large segments of Muslim populations and politicians view The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a legitimate description of history and current reality.

Initial feelings at all these indications  can be intense rage, a wondering if we can co-exist with them, or should employ our military might before it is too late.

Then come thoughts about Jewish equivalents, and the problems of the democratic and rational Jewish state to deal with them. Recent incidents include rabbis who endorsed a text that justifies the killing of Gentiles, including children, and the rabbis of Safed who called on people of the city to avoid renting apartments to Arabs. In both cases, judicial authorities dither about pursuing actions against incitement. (See http://www.irac.org/NewsDetailes.aspx?D=1128;

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/07/05/117043/israels-probe-of-radical-jewish.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Shapira)

No less troubling then religious extremism hereabouts is the naivite heard from American and European officials and commentators. Simplistic actions, such as don’t build here or there, may be appropriate for local disputes in Omaha, Oxford, or Leiden, but not in the Middle East. Buidling restrictions against Jews would not longer be acceptable in any of those places overseas. Here the explosive material is in the air, capable of being exploded by a traffic accident or a comment.

Beyond cursing their house and our own, there may be no alternative beyond hoping that the religious devil remains well capped in its bottle, and that there is enough sanity in both communities to pursue the paths of politics, compromise, and accommodation.

For our friends elsewhere, best to watch football until someone wiser than the present crowd comes up with a bright idea.

Israelis of all colors and races must join Ethiopian community’s war on racism

Yoel Esteron,  January 22, 2012

Mazi Tazazo was born in Sudan en route to Ethiopians in Israel. Just remember that it’s only a matter of time until they get used to the new color and the most important solution lies in your hands – fit in, don’t look the easy way out and get an education – that’s the tool with which you’ll prevail.”

Mazi did as her parents instructed; she joined the military and served as an observation post commander in Rafah. When she finished her military service, she got a degree in law and business administration from the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and went on to work for a well-known law firm.

Recently, Mazi decided to focus on real estate development and together with another young attorney, Efrat Hinitz, established Eitanut – a joint venture for the management of projects in the National Outline Plan 38 for building reinforcement.

I first met Mazi Tazazo when she was a student and had the great pleasure of following her sweet, Hollywood-like success story. However, Mazi Tazazo is not resting on her laurels; last week, she visited the reportedly racism-ridden community of Kiryat Malachi and was appalled by attempts on the part of several neighborhood committees to get flat owners in the city to avoid the selling or renting of flats to people who look like her.

She was also dismayed to see that most of the protestors at the demonstration held in response were people who looked like her. Mazi wants Israelis of all colors and races to fight racism. She hopes the demonstration scheduled for next week in Tel Aviv will have a massive turnout.

Racism did not abate

Mazi fears that her parents might have been wrong after all. Racism did not abate as time went by; rather, it changed its face. Mazi is indignant with the “Unscrupulous, ignorant and cowardly people who insisted that my friend, who has a prefect Israeli accent, come for a job interview because she seemed perfectly qualified for the job but they saw the ‘horrifying sight’ in the office lobby, sent her home in the pretext that the interviewer is busy and they don’t have vacancies at the moment because the position has already been filled and that they apologize for the inconvenience.”

She has already planned what she is going to say to you, to us, at the demonstration in Tel Aviv: “I hope there will be those who stand shoulder to shoulder with me, and at times instead of me, to put in their place all those racist and heartless people who reduced me to tears while callously judging me by the color of my skin and separated me from my friends as I they banned me from entering a night club.”

There are 120,000 Ethiopians living in Israel today, a third of which were born here. There are more than a few organizations that have been supporting the Ethiopian community for years. There are well-intentioned people who occasionally speak up against racism. But it seems that new winds are blowing in the community; determined, talented and fearless youngsters the likes of Mazi Tazazo and Molet Araro – the student from the “United Ethiopians’” movement who has begun his march last week from his Kiryat Malachi home to the demonstration site at the Knesset in Jerusalem and who is calling on his friends to join the large political parties – have come to realize that they will have to stand at the forefront of change.

They believe in themselves. Let’s give them a hand.

The article was originally published by Calcalist:

http://www.calcalist.co.il/local/articles/0,7340,L-3559253,00.html

See Also:

Ethiopian Community

Jerusalem: Thousands protest against racism  / Yoav Malka

Some 5,000 rally in Independence Park after march to protest discrimination against members of Ethiopian community

Full story

Israel does not need to avoid the core point of conflict – Israel’s control of Judea and Samaria. On the contrary, Israel has a solid claim to this region and provides benefits for its population, both Arab and Jew. We can stop apologizing and stand up with pride, proclaiming the truth. Israel is committing no crime by building and developing its heartland.

From David Haivri, January 23, 2012

There are battles going on every day against Israel. The battlefields are University campuses and grocery stores near you, and they appear on your TV screens and web browsers. Like at the time of Yehuda Maccabee in his war against the Greeks, we are again few in number and up against a large, powerful and well equipped army. They have well funded student groups supported by local professors in all major Universities. They have support from anti-establishment anarchistic types around the world who are always good for some provocation and a good – or even an ugly – fight. They have talented writers, bloggers and social media geeks all ready to type away and pepper cyberspace with deliberately manipulated messages. And the news media is most often on their side, showing its full support through over exposure and through interpreting events in ways that make Israel look like “the bad guy.”

Their attacks are focused on anything that comes under the heading of “Occupation,” “West Bank,” “Apartheid” or related issues. Israel’s strategy of Hasbara (promoting a positive image through Public Relations and apologetics) has mainly turned its back on these sticky issues, since they are not considered Politically Correct, and diverted their efforts to promote a focus on Israel’s achievements in technology, worldwide humanitarian aid, great beer and beautiful bikini-clad women on the beaches of Tel Aviv and Eilat.

The problem I see is mainly that Israel’s advocates are not addressing the particular issues for which Israel is under attack. By avoiding and not responding to the accusatory claims, it appears that Israel doesn’t have a good answer. We thereby help prove their points by our silence. We need not offer this great advantage to the anti-Israel machine. When our advocates point out that Intel inside every computer was developed in Israel, the anti-Israel propaganda spokesmen are right ask “So what?” and “How does that justify occupying someone else’s land?” There must be a better answer, and I believe that there is.

Israel does not need to avoid the core point of conflict – Israel’s control of the West Bank. First of all, Israel won this area fair and square in a war that was forced on her by neighbors who occupied the land before the war. Basic international standards don’t require countries to give back land that they won in wars. Israel controls these lands only because the IDF has the means to protect our borders – not due to any kind of international approval.

I could proceed along this path, but I would like to suggest another strategy that I have found extremely effective – display the reality on the ground. The facts themselves should be our strongest arguments, because they alone can demolish the anti-Israel campaign. Guests who visit the Shomron (the Northern West Bank area I represent) see these facts for themselves and form a very different picture than the one drawn by the anti-Israel misinformation movement.

Those who wish to boycott products manufactured in Jewish communities in Yehuda and Shomron disregard the fact that thousands of local Arabs (Palestinians) work in these factories alongside Jewish Israelis, both receiving the same salaries and all workers’ benefits entitled by Israeli law – which happen to be much higher than the established norm in areas under the Palestinian Authority’s control. This means that Palestinians who are lucky enough to find employment in the “settlements” are taking home three times what they would be making in their own villages.

Seeing firsthand the University Center campus in Ariel, with its 14,000 students (including hundreds of Arab students), research departments, sports and cultural centers quickly diminishes the misconception that the “settlements” are in any way limited to temporary structures that can just be folded up and moved to another location on a whim. Witnessing this, guests realize that the image of a lone trailer-home on a barren hilltop has been placed in their imaginations by media outlets wishing to portray Jewish existence in this area as something built on a weak foundation. The reality shows how communities throughout Judea and Samaria are very well established and totally integrated into the scenery of the land. They are not something that is about to just go away.

My point is that I believe advocates of Israel need not avoid the issue of Israel’s control of Judea and Samaria. We have very good answers that can be offered with our heads held high. Israel has a solid claim to this region and provides benefits for its population, both Arab and Jew. We can stop apologizing and stand up with pride, proclaiming the truth. Israel is committing no crime by building and developing its heartland. Standing up to the core of the argument with good answers has proven very effective, where it has been tried.

I strongly suggest that all advocates for Israel come to spend a day in the Shomron and see the sights for themselves. Just one day will equip each of them with background information and renew their efforts to balance the debate and give them the advantage in their struggle to speak the truth – Israel is in the right.

www.israelnationalnews.com