Their Sense of Belonging

A historian vividly reconstructs Eastern Europe as a place of Jewish life rather than of Jewish death… Eastern Europe has a Jewish history, and Jews have an eastern European history.

By TIMOTHY SNYDER, May 19, 2012

Day to day, memory is what we choose to forget. A major Jewish experience of the last century has been one of emigration, be it to the United States or Israel. The integration that follows means forgetting the old country, right down to its name. American and Israeli Jews often know little about the place of birth of their great-grandparents, which was usually in eastern Europe. Emigration in conditions of want and discrimination have left a bitter taste, and the Holocaust made eastern Europe seem like a place of Jewish death rather than Jewish life. Yet for half a millennium, as Antony Polonsky records in his exemplary and formidable three-volume work of historical synthesis, Poland and Russia were the world Jewish homeland.

The most important country in early modern Jewish history is one that few Jews can name: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As Jews were expelled from western and central Europe between 1300 and 1500, they were welcomed in Polish lands. In 1569, the Polish kingdom joined the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form this new constitutional union. As a result of this change, the Polish part of the new entity took from its Lithuanian partner the lands known as Ukraine.

The Polish colonization of Ukraine in the 16th and 17th centuries permitted the emergence of a certain synthesis between Polish landowners and their Jewish clients, who helped them turn their property into profitable estates. It was in these conditions that the "shtetl" emerged: a private town owned by a Polish nobleman, distant from royal authority, with a Jewish-majority population generally permitted to manage its own affairs. In history, as opposed to memory, these were usually stable sites of Jewish communal life, places where the major trends in Jewish religious thought and practice emerged in the centuries to come.

The Jews in Poland and Russia, volume 1: 1350-1881

By Antony Polonsky

Littman Library, 534 pages, $59.50

Under the commonwealth, Jews experienced what Mr. Polonsky calls a "sense of security." The political system of the commonwealth was a kind of aristocratic republic, in which nobles formed the legislature and elected their king. This marginalized the two estates that had the most obvious interest in discriminating against Jews: the Christian burghers of the cities and the Roman Catholic Church. For the landed nobles the suppression of the cities and the humiliation of the church were often points of pride.

As Mr. Polonsky authoritatively records in "The Jews in Poland and Rus–sia," Jewish communal autonomy became an integral part of the Polish political system. Jews appointed their own rabbis and communal authorities and collected their own taxes, for their own communities and for the state. The assignation and collection of taxes meant an organized relationship, through Jewish councils, with the highest authorities of the commonwealth. Jews suffered when the Commonwealth suffered, as in 1648, when some 13,000 Jews were killed during Bohdan Khmelnyts’kyi’s Cossack rebellion against the Polish colonization of Ukraine.

The Jews in Poland and Russia, volume 2: 1881-1914

By Antony Polonsky

Littman Library, 518 pages, $59.50

Getty Images

Young men study the Talmud in Uzhorod, now Ukraine, in 1937. The city, then part of Czechoslovakia’s Ruthenia province, was a center of Hasidism and traditional religious study. Uzhorod’s Jews were rounded up and transported to Auschwitz shortly after Passover in 1944.

The great problem for Jews in the commonwealth was the transformation of a regime of early modern communal toleration into a modern regime of individual liberty. The arrangement between the Jews and the Polish state—in effect, taxes and commercial services in exchange for religious freedom and local autonomy—only worked so long as the state was too weak to reach the individual. As states centralize, they dispense with traditional mediators, such as Jewish communal authorities, and begin to draft and tax individuals. In a liberal state, this individual is a citizen, who in exchange for this new treatment receives individual rights, which protect the citizen against both the state itself and the previously dominant religious elders.

The Jews in Poland and Russia, volume 3: 1914-2008

By Antony Polonsky

Littman Library, 1,040 pages, $69.50

This process of emancipation in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as Mr. Polonsky presents it, was a delicate political negotiation rather than some inevitable outcome of progressive human liberation. In the best of circumstances, wise leaders of a strong state would prepare members of minorities for the new arrangement by creating institutions that both preserved religious distinctiveness and allowed for social integration. As Mr. Polonsky chronicles, more or less the opposite happened in the commonwealth. The Polish-Lithuanian state weakened in the 18th century, as a result of the perversion of parliament by the wealthy aristocrats and by the incursions of the neighboring Russian, Habsburg and Prussian empires. This left Jewish communities facing two transitions at the same time: into foreign rule, and into modernity.

This was the epoch of the development and spread of Hasidism among Jews. The Hasidim were, in one way, no more than an expression of the traditional respect for religious piety. They were scholars in communities where learning was respected. But they offered a broader experience of religiosity, with a more accessible idea of the relationship between knowledge of texts and experience of holiness. Even women, normally excluded from the learning of Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of learning, could sometimes take part. The Hasidim were not political rebels, but their emphasis upon individual religious experience suited a time when traditional institutions were dying and new ones could not yet be born.

"Jews," Mr. Polonsky writes, "were the only significant non-Christian group tolerated in Western Christendom, and they flourished in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth." When the commonwealth was dismembered by its imperial neighbors between 1772 and 1795, most of its Jews fell under Russian rule. In a single blow, a state without Jews became the largest Jewish state in the world.

In the far west of the Russian Empire, where Poles for a time enjoyed autonomy within a subordinate kingdom, some rebels and reformers sought to enlist Jews in the struggle for Polish liberation. But the steady suppression of Polish autonomy by Russian imperial institutions meant that modern Polish politics began in circumstances inauspicious for Jews. There was no Polish state that might have sponsored integrative policies, only revolutionary movements that sought to organize peasants and workers. In practice, this sometimes meant the mobilization of traditional Christian prejudices against Jews who now lacked traditional protection.

In the rest of the Russian Empire, as Mr. Polonsky demonstrates, the situation was worse. The Russian Empire first perverted traditional communal institutions and then destroyed them, and the czars blamed Jews for the failure of their own policies. From the 1880s, Russian subjects killed Jews in pogroms, believing that they were doing the will of their rulers. The accusation of Jewish ritual murder, ridiculed by Polish rulers a century earlier, was believed by Russian czars and their advisers. In this environment the Hasidim flourished, while Jews generally came to see themselves as they were being seen, not only as members of a religion but as a people, a nation.

Mr. Polonsky misses very few connections. One of the few links between his themes that he might have pursued is that between imperial Russian and modern German anti-Semitism. As the Russian Empire fell after the revolutions of 1917, its defenders—the commanders of the so-called Whites—presented the Jews as the enemies of Christianity and the backers of Bolshevism. Mr. Polonsky describes the modern anti-Semitism of the late Russian Empire but might have emphasized that the "Judeo-Bolshevik" idea, brought west by Russians and Baltic Germans after the Bolshevik victory in Russia’s civil wars, became an integral part of Hitler’s own vision.

The Holocaust had something to do with this eastern European form of anti-Semitism. As Mr. Polonsky rightly notes, the Holocaust was a product not only of German ideas but also of German wars. Poland, independent again after 1918, was home to some three million Jews; it was invaded in 1939. The Soviet Union, home to four million more, was invaded in 1941. By the autumn of that year the traditional Jewish homeland was under the rule of a single state for the first time since the destruction of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. That state was Nazi Germany.

Mr. Polonsky, as much as anyone else, has created the field of modern Jewish history as a subject to be considered and understood rather than simply a tragic past to be mourned. He is too good a historian to confuse the history of Jewish life with the German policies that brought Jewish death. Though he sees interwar Poland as politically incapable of integrating Jews, he presents Jewish accomplishment in the professions and culture with the bravura it deserves. The Soviet Union had provided Jews with something that they had never before known, the possibility of individual assimilation, but at the price of the total renunciation of traditional life, including religion.

Usually we read of the Holocaust as a matter of German policy, with the Jewish victims appearing just before, or even just as, they are killed. The Holocaust figures in the last volume of Mr. Polonsky’s exemplary study as a Jewish experience, because Mr. Polonsky has already established all the Jewish geographical, social and even literary references. After 2,500 or so pages, the reader’s sense of this Jewish world is vivid, deep and rich. The world that is lost is real.

Mr. Polonsky’s account of the Holocaust resounds because death is ceaselessly visited upon individuals whose individual Jewish commitments, fears and hopes we can feel that we understand, thanks to Mr. Polonsky. We understand Jewish responses to the Holocaust better because we understand the world before the Holocaust. The Holocaust in Mr. Polonsky’s telling is not part of any historical logic, no lesson that Jews had to learn. Its bottomless reality, as Mr. Polonsky shows, is worse and truer than any story that can be told about it.

Mr. Polonsky’s tender skepticism of myth and memory allows him to complement the story that many readers will want, that of armed Jewish resistance to the Holocaust with the ones that are less familiar but perhaps more characteristic. As Mr. Polonsky does not forget, many Jewish fathers did not fight because they would not leave their families. What of the father, he asks us, who accompanies his son to the shooting pit in order to point to the sky and avert his son’s eyes just before the bullets come? These are the realms of emotion that reduce many historians to personal attacks and political posturing; Mr. Polonsky is entirely free of both. The barely visible commitment in these three wonderful volumes is to rescue a world from polemic, for the sake of history.

Generation to generation, memory is about what we choose to record. Eastern Europe has a Jewish history, and Jews have an eastern European history. In bringing the peoples together, Mr. Polonsky is making no simple attempt at national reconciliation and pays no homage to stereotypes or taboos. With gentle persistence he records catastrophe, but also, despite everything, continuity—between the old world of Poland and the new world of Israel and America. What he has produced is a grand history in the old 19th-century style, a result all the more remarkable because he cannot have the confidence in progress that historians of that age possessed, and all the more erudite because he uses the most recent literature from the region as well as from North America and Israel.

By the end, after 1945, literature replaces life a bit in Mr. Polonsky’s account, as the Jewish survivors of eastern Europe themselves turn to recording of catastrophe and then to the mood of nostalgia. Here especially he is a sure guide: When he pauses to praise or translate the extraordinary Polish-language poet Julian Tuwim (1894–1953) or the grand modernist novelist Der Nister (1884–1950), you know you are being introduced to writing that is not only representative but excellent. The writers, like the historian who records and interprets, must lose confidence when confronted with the 20th century. But the best of them, like Antony Polonsky himself, work on to give shape to the shapelessness and sense to the senselessness. They enable, in the deepest sense of the word, memory.

—Mr. Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale and the author of "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin."

A version of this article appeared May 19, 2012, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Their Sense of Belonging.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

When sectarianism and tribalism become institutionalized, it often follows that politicians become preoccupied with holding on to personal rewards of power instead of tackling national problems

by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
Ha’aretz
May 18, 2012

http://www.meforum.org/3234/south-sudan-chaos

When the state of South Sudan came into existence last July, with great fanfare, Israel was one of the first nations to recognize it, having provided support for South Sudanese leaders since the 1960s during the first civil war. Indeed, in late December, Salva Kiir Mayardit – the president of South Sudan – came to Jerusalem, where he discussed the unique prospect of locating the country’s embassy there. It was therefore no surprise that President Shimon Peres spoke so enthusiastically of the visit as a "moving and historic moment" for him and Israel.

Now, less than a year later, in light of Israel’s plans to deport South Sudanese refugees, it is worth taking a look at how the world’s youngest nation is faring.

Arguably, the worst problem the country faces is tribalism, despite the unity that was cultivated among South Sudanese rebels during decades of resistance to Khartoum’s aggressive campaigns of Islamization against the animists and Christians in the south, prior to independence.

Early signs of this malaise became apparent when low-level clashes between the Lou Nuer and Murle tribes in Jonglei state in the east of the country – going as far back as 2009 – suddenly intensified in August 2011. By the start of 2012, over 3,000 were dead and more than 100,000 displaced. The origins of these tensions lie in the mutual theft of cattle.

In an attempt to calm tensions, an agreement was signed early this month to end the violence, by tribal leaders representing six ethnic groups in Jonglei: the Dinka (who are regarded as politically dominant in South Sudan’s government), Kachipo, Jie, Nuer, Anyuak and Murle.

Stability in Jonglei is crucial to South Sudan’s economic future, because it offers a potential pipeline route that can go through Ethiopia to Djibouti, making it possible for the country to export its vast oil reserves without having to rely on its northern neighbor. However, Sudan has not only imposed heavy transit fees on South Sudan; it has also permitted itself the liberty of seizing part of the oil production when those fees haven’t been paid.

Yet the unilateral decision to respond to Sudan’s policies by suspending oil production before it had laid an alternative pipeline can only be described as folly on the part of the leadership in Juba, the capital.

As a confidential World Bank report recently leaked to the Sudan Tribune revealed, the shutdown of the oil industry – together with the austerity measures subsequently adopted by the government – could increase the poverty rate from 51 percent this year to 83 percent by 2013, while infant mortality is expected to double in the same period.

The reason such startling statistics could become reality is that, like post-Saddam Iraq, South Sudan is extremely dependent on petroleum, with oil exports accounting for 98 percent of government revenue. Unfortunately, Mayardit and his cabinet appear to be oblivious to the implications of their decision-making.

Meanwhile, it is not only in the rural areas of South Sudan that tribalism is evident. The phenomenon extends even to the university campus in the capital. As the Dubai newspaper The National reported, a minor incident at a soccer match on March 27 among Juba University alumni led to a square-off between 100 students the following morning. Since then, the university has been closed.

The newspaper also interviewed the president of the student union at the university, Ajang Ajang, who pointed out that "people still think about their tribes first, their nation second." Many members of the union sought to expel him after he decided to ban tribal associations on campus in February.

If such tribalism is evident on the country’s main university campus among students who will likely constitute South Sudan’s future elite, then it should come as no surprise that the president appears to be displaying authoritarian tendencies.

For when sectarianism and tribalism become institutionalized, it often follows that politicians become preoccupied with holding on to personal rewards of power instead of tackling national problems, and so a leading figure will probably emerge to assert himself as a strongman. Mayardit has been behaving in precisely this manner.

For example, The National recently highlighted the case of James Okuk, an employee of South Sudan’s foreign ministry. When he returned home from a trip to Brazil in October he was arrested by police, held at an abandoned house for four days and charged with "offending the president" simply because he wrote some articles critical of Mayardit’s tenure.

Okuk is now on trial. The case may partly have to do with the fact that Okuk’s uncle is Lam Akol, who broke away from the country’s ruling political faction – the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM ) – to form the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement: Democratic Change (SPLM-DC ) in 2009.

Akol has reportedly been resented by the Dinkas who dominate the SPLM for quite some time, but he has the support of the Shilluk people of the country’s northeast. Of course, Akol’s residing in Khartoum while his children finish their schooling there hardly helps his image.

When South Sudan declared independence, there were high hopes for a model democratic country in sub-Saharan Africa, but developments so far point to a country plagued by tribalism, government authoritarianism and disastrous economic policies that could greatly exacerbate poverty levels in the country, such that one may have to agree with the World Bank’s fears of a "state collapse." A bleak outlook indeed.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and an adjunct fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Reprinted from Daily Alert, May 16. 2012

• The Meaning of Nakba Day – Jonathan S. Tobin
  Nakba is an Arabic word which means disaster, and that is what those who participated in the protests consider the founding of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948. The focus on 1948 is significant. For those who claim the Middle East conflict is about borders or Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the prominence given Nakba commemorations ought to be an embarrassment. It highlights that the goal of the Palestinians isn’t an independent state alongside Israel. Their goal is to eradicate Israel and replace it with yet another Arab majority country.
      The Nakba narrative draws no distinction between the pre- and post-1967 borders. The Jewish presence within the internationally recognized borders of the State of Israel is treated as just as illegitimate as that of the settlers in the territories. This is not a minor point, because for the Palestinians, the desire for the descendants of the 1948 refugees to "return" to Israel is tantamount to demanding the dismantling of the Jewish state.
      The war that created the refugees was one started by Arabs whose goal was not to share the land but to prevent Jewish sovereignty on any part of it. That they and their descendants still regret this reversal of fortune may be understandable, but it is not a point on which they have any right to demand the world’s sympathy. (Commentary)
• For Jews from Arab Lands, a Different History of Displacement and Loss – Matti Friedman
  I have spent a great deal of time in the past four years interviewing people born and raised in Aleppo, Syria. Some are descended from families with roots in Aleppo going back more than two millennia, to Roman times. None of them lives there now. On November 30, 1947, a day after the UN voted to partition Palestine into two states, one for Arabs and one for Jews, mobs in Aleppo stalked Jewish neighborhoods, looting houses and burning synagogues.
      One man I interviewed remembered fleeing his home, a barefoot nine-year-old, moments before it was set on fire. Abetted by the government, the rioters burned 50 Jewish shops, five schools, 18 synagogues and an unknown number of homes. In Damascus, rioters killed 13 Jews, including eight children, in August 1948, and there were similar events in other Arab cities.
      At the time of the UN vote, there were about 10,000 Jews in Aleppo. By the mid-1950s there were 2,000, living in fear. Today there are none. Similar scripts played out across the Islamic world as some 850,000 Jews were forced from their homes. In Aleppo, Tripoli, Baghdad and elsewhere, the people who live in or around the Jews’ old homes still know who used to own them and how they left.
      Roughly half of the 6 million Jews in Israel today came from the Muslim world or are descended from people who did. The simple narrative of Nakba Day conveniently erases the uncomfortable truth that half of Israel’s Jews are there not because of the Nazis but because of the Arabs themselves. (Times of Israel)

Palestinians Riot on Nakba Day – Khaled Abu Toameh and Tovah Lazaroff
One Israeli soldier, three border policemen and 270 Palestinians were lightly hurt, mostly from tear gas inhalation, in clashes in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem Tuesday as Palestinians marked the "Nakba," meaning "catastrophe," their loss to Israel in 1948. In Ramallah, children marched into Martyr Yasser Arafat Square beating drums and wearing black T-shirts that read "1948." PA representatives including Prime Minister Salam Fayyad led the rally. "The right of return is sacred and cannot be compromised," Fayyad told the crowd. (Jerusalem Post)

    See also Nakba Day Defanged – Mitch Ginsburg
On May 15, "Nakba Day" demonstrations were limited to the West Bank. Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights worker, attributed the relative calm to the state of Palestinian society, which he described as frustrated, fractured, tired and hopeless. "The back of Palestinian society has been broken by the Hamas-Fatah separation," he said, noting that within the West Bank, the rifts within Fatah were so deep there was no hope of any coordinated uprising. "There cannot be an intifada so long as we have an intrafada," he said. (Times of Israel)

    See also Israel: Palestinians Should Direct Anger at Their Own Leaders – Herb Keinon
Rather than demonstrating against Israel, the Palestinians should be directing their "Nakba Day" anger at the extremist Palestinian leadership that 64 years ago rejected any accommodation, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev said Tuesday. "The Palestinian leadership in 1947 and 1948 adopted an extremist and maximalist position. Unlike the Jewish leadership, they rejected partition and refused to accept a Jewish state even in truncated borders."  (Jerusalem Post)

“People are fed up with politics and are looking how to improve their daily lives. If they have skills, they can get work.”

by Kathleen Peratis | May 15, 2012 10:01 AM EDT

Gaza City, Gaza—

Is the two state solution dead? I don’t think so but the conversation is being radically transformed into one that no longer accepts the binary “two states or bust” paradigm and begins to imagine—or live—alternatives.

I spoke to young people, officials and activists in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the last two weeks.  I was surprised at what I heard.

Palestinian school children do their homework on candle light during a power cut in Gaza City. (Mohammed Abed / AFP / Getty Images)

A large chunk of the Gaza economy comes from international donations, money from UNHRW and other multilateral organizations.  A pretty young blogger in Gaza City, Jehan Al Farr, told me that these governmental programs for job creation are “nothing but machines that pull people in and suck out their creativity and motivation.”  True entrepreneurship, she says, occurs outside the box, not inside a donor-welfare society. I told her she sounded like a member of the Tea Party.  Having spent a year at a Colorado high school (she speaks perfect English), she knew exactly what I meant. She laughed and told me that she is fed up with politics (she is 25) and believes she and her generation can only end the occupation when they stop caring about it and instead, try to go about a normal life of book clubs and social events.  “No more death, no more blood.  Just focus on the positive.” The siege has become “more mental and internalized,” she said.  For her, the survival technique is evading that box that is affected by borders and the siegek with blogging and other IT enterprise. Gaza City hotelier Jawdat Al Khodary said much the same thing.  “People are fed up with politics and are looking how to improve their daily lives.  If they have skills, they can get work.”

These coping strategies and this hopefulness seem to me to be a lot of whistling in the dark.  Things look worse than they did six months ago when I was here last—more garbage on the streets, more closed shops, less construction.  And while Jehan told me she didn’t feel constrained by her sex at all, the statistics tell a different story. Everything that goes wrong for women in poor and depressed places happens here too. One trivial but stark visual was the offices of the Hamas-affiliated media group Airessaiah (print, web and radio station). The editor in chief, Wasam Afifa, regaled me with his liberal values and harsh critique of Hamas and then showed me around the offices. The main reporters’ space is large, light and airy; the women reporters’ room (at least there are some) is small dark and shabby. When I told Jehan and showed her the pictures I had taken, she shrugged and said, “Well, that is the culture.”

I also asked her about the lack of any palpable reaction on the street to the hunger strikers, the settlement of which was, on the day of our conversation, two days away.  She said she blogs about it, but as for activism in the old sense, there is none.  In fact, shop owners in Gaza City had previously been asked by local activists to close up for two hours in support of the hunger strikers. Hotelier Al Khodary told me that only two agreed to do so.  He himself thought the effort fatuous. The demonstration in Gaza City—about 1000 people—on the day the settlement was announced had been carefully managed by Hamas.

The West Bank too is remarkably quiet, apart from important but small-scale nonviolent resistance to the path of the security barrier.  I asked people in the West Bank and in Israel what they make of that. Are Palestinians just ground down from oppression, knowing any protest might be (and sometimes is) met with fierce Israeli opposition?  Is the footprint of military occupation getting a bit smaller, with fewer checkpoints and fewer nighttime raids? Is increased prosperity enough to make the “struggle” not worth the candle?

Palestinian Israeli human rights activist Ghaida Renawie-Zoabi  was stunned by my question and a little shamed by what looks like Palestinian passivity. She promised me that she will give much thought to this question, so I am staying tuned.

Khaled Sabawi, a young Canadian-born Palestinian entrepreneur in Ramallah, credits both apparent prosperity and exhaustion. And, he says, sounding what was becoming a familiar theme, he just wants to get down to business. He has given up thinking about one state-two states, and believes his people will gain their freedom through economic freedom and human rights, which are “more important than the flag.” He goes further and accuses Salam Fayyad and Abu Abbas of perpetuating the illusion of a dynamic Palestinian economy, which is in fact systemically dependent on donor aid. 

Regarding the continuing struggle for a Palestinian state, Sari Nusseibeh, now president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, made much the same point several years ago. Forget statehood for now, he urged.  Focus on human rights and improving day-to-day life. Nusseibeh was never a nationalist, and so he was always an odd duck in the Palestinian nationalist struggle, but this thesis marginalized him even more.

Yesterday, I had a perhaps historic conversation in Gaza with nine Islamists, eight of them Hamas members or supporters, in which we spoke for over two hours about the American Jewish community. We spoke of the anti-occupation tool of massive nonviolent resistance. They told me that just as the second intifada was not launched until Arafat approved it, no mass non-violent demonstrations will be allowed anywhere in Palestine until President Abbas gives his hekhsher. Which he will not, they assured me, knowing the risk that such demonstrations could turn violent and perhaps be directed against the Palestinian Authority itself.

What about mass protests in Israel?  Activists are gearing up for another summer of social protests focusing on economic inequality.  However, no one has confidence that the protest leaders will explicitly connect social gaps with the price of occupation. And more surprising to me, plenty of traditional lefties and long-time peace activists do not condemn that strategy.

Dan Goldenblatt, new director of the Israel Palestine Center for Resarch and Information (IPCRI), told me that all his life, he had believed it the “two states or bust” paradigm.  Now, he too and a group of intellectuals he is leading are at least start imagining other alternatives, alternatives that will afford human rights and dignity to Palestinians.

I for one have not given up hope, but I believe the keys, or at least one of them, is in the hands of the Palestinians themselves, in the form of the very collective action that seems so out of reach—but is it?

My hotel in Gaza City has 80 rooms.  Eight are occupied.  There are blackouts repeatedly throughout the day and night and blocks of time with no electricity at all, due largely to the decreased fuel supplies from Egypt. A meeting I had on the twelfth floor of an office building could not be scheduled in the morning because there is no electricity until 11 AM.

Gazans, who have been tolerant of siege-related deprivation because they regard it as collective punishment from Israel, are now blaming Hamas for the current fuel crisis.  “After five years, the government has a responsibility,” Afifa, the newspaper editor, said.

If I ever heard a universal message, that was it.

©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

It is noteworthy in this context that the Jewish people constitute the ultimate success of an indigenous people reclaiming sovereignty and rights in their historic space. Jews have been there from the time of the Bible.

by Shoshana Bryen
American Thinker
May 11, 2012

In early 2011, President Obama announced that the United States would sign the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Now the U.N. wants us to give Mt. Rushmore to the Indians. James Anaya, U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, spent twelve days in the U.S. meeting with representatives of Native Americans. Returning to Geneva, he urged the government to turn over control of lands considered sacred to the tribes, including the Mt. Rushmore site.

It was bound to happen.

With typical overstatement, the president said as he announced U.S. participation in the Declaration, “The aspiration it affirms, including respect for the institutions and rich cultures of native peoples, are ones we must always seek to fulfill.”

Always? Americans happily adapt and adopt parts of other people’s cultures (Chinese food unlike anything served in Beijing, pizza Italians wouldn’t recognize, St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo parties) and respect other parts (forms of dress, holy days and fasting for Ramadan). But there are aspects of “native” cultures that simply do not warrant respect: honor killings, female genital mutilation, slavery, stripping trees for cooking fuel, clubbing baby seals, and governance by the sword come to mind.

The Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a prescription for endless warfare. “Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired,” according to Article 26. Article 28 states that qualified groups “have the right to redress,” which can include “restitution” or “just, fair and equitable compensation” for land or resources that have been “confiscated, taken (or) occupied.”

Applied to American Indian tribes, it not only covers Mt. Rushmore, but also may include reparations and mineral rights.

Applied to Palestinians and Kurds, not to mention minorities from Azeris in Iran to Uighurs in China to Armenians, Hmong tribesmen, and Guatemalan Indians, it could wreak havoc.

The Kurds form a tribal/national grouping that spans Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. They are unquestionably an “indigenous people” with a distinct language and culture. Is the United States prepared to support border changes to allow them the right of self-determination? American lives were expended in the quest for a unitary Iraq, and we supported Turkey’s determination not to allow Kurds to secede during the PKK war. But how can we deny the Kurds while supporting a Palestinian “right to self determination”?

This raises the question of whether the Palestinians are actually a separate grouping outside their multigenerational refugee status and determination to erase Israel. Certainly they are less separated from West Bank, Israeli, and Jordanian Arabs than the Kurds are from Turks and the Arabs of Iraq. Palestinians are largely descended from the people of the Ottoman vilayet of Syria and the British Mandate. But Jordan’s King Abdullah is a Hashemite from the Hejaz of Arabia.

This in turn raises the question of which set of people is the “indigenous” one, and which is the usurper. How long does it take before a former indigenous people are lost to history and their usurpers become the new indigenous people? Those who call themselves “Palestinians” are not the descendants of the indigenous Philistines; they are the descendants of Arab tribes that arrived in the 7^th century.

Today, one of the few things upon which Hamas and Fatah agree is that all of Israel and Jordan are “occupied” Palestinian territory. While it is surely pushing for the establishment of Palestine in part of the old British Mandate territory, is the United States prepared to turn Jordan over to its “indigenous peoples” so they can have the rest of it? Or replace Israel with “Palestine”?

It is noteworthy in this context that the Jewish people constitute the ultimate success of an indigenous people reclaiming sovereignty and rights in their historic space. Jews have been there from the time of the Bible. Most but not all of them were expelled in the early part of the last millennium, but Jews maintained religious, cultural, linguistic, and tribal ties to the land until the establishment of the Third Jewish Commonwealth in 1948.

The conferring of “rights” on “peoples” implies a corresponding debt to be paid to them by others. Doing so without responsibility (the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is non-binding) is a prescription for demands by people determined to wrest something from others who may not be prepared to pay or even acknowledge that the debt is real. And the debt may not be real.

Far from a harmless exercise in multicultural sensitivity, the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples sets the stage for an endless series of “small wars” that may have big consequences. Mt. Rushmore is only the beginning.

By BRUCE ACKS
May 1, 2012

Most Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, could live in secure peace with each other, if only their leaders gave them a real chance.

Almost every visitor to Jerusalem knows about the Central Bus Station. It is beautifully built, made from white Jerusalem stone, and a large clock sits in the center against a background of dark blue windows. What many tourists (and Israelis) do not know, however, is that there is actually another Central Bus Station in Jerusalem. This station is not as grand, fancy, or comfortable as the first, but its buses go to destinations that only they can reach.
This is the Central Bus Station in east Jerusalem. For almost 30 years, on dozens of visits to Jerusalem, I was ignorant of its existence. Yet on many occasions I stood less than 100 feet away from it. On my most recent visit, solely by chance, I finally discovered it.
One day, after touring the Old City, I exited through the Damascus Gate. That day, curiosity led me to explore Nablus Road, which pretty much juts straight out from the gate. To my astonishment, I encountered an active and lively bus station. Learning about this station led to a most amazing journey.
It is amazing how one can live in complete ignorance for so many years. Although I am a curious person by nature, I never really wondered how the nearly 300,000 Arab residents of east Jerusalem get around. Egged buses are certainly not commonly seen on the streets of east Jerusalem. So, if they do not walk, and do not have a car, how do they traverse the “other” half of Jerusalem? The answer is east Jerusalem bus lines.
The station, however, does not only deal with intercity travel. Buses also depart to all the areas of the West Bank that are under Palestinian control. For less than seven and a half shekels, you can find yourself walking around in Ramallah. The ride, which takes less than an hour, takes you to a completely different world.

It is strange how most tourists in Jerusalem are likelier to travel to Eilat (312 km.) or Meron (197 km.), than to a city only 14 km. away.
Why would someone travel so far north to see the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the second most visited religious site in Israel, when it is far closer and cheaper to visit Joseph’s tomb in Nablus (63km.)? Of course, traveling that short distance can be quite difficult. Not because of the walls, checkpoints or barriers, rather, the most difficult hurdle to overcome is psychological.
As an American Jew, an ordained rabbi, and a fervent Zionist since early childhood, my focus was never on Palestinian cities. For many years, I even believed that the term “Palestinian” was an invented description hijacked by the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza.
Discovering the ease and simplicity of travel to Ramallah led me to want to go there myself. Usually, however, travel is more enjoyable with company. Therefore, I started thinking about who would accompany me. I contacted everyone in Jerusalem I knew, but not even one person was willing to join me on this trip. I went anyway.
The data show that reluctance to travel to Palestinian-controlled areas is common. Unfortunately, finding exact statistics for tourism in the Palestinian areas is extremely difficult.
Finding data for the same periods in both Israel and Palestinian cities is that much more difficult.
However, 2008 is one year where a semblance of data is available for both locations.
That year, the total number of tourists arriving in Israel was 2.6 million people. Jewish tourists accounted for 25 percent of that number, or roughly 650,000 people.
For the same year, an estimated 1.3 million tourists visited the West Bank. How many of those tourists were Jewish? It is hard to know, but data collected in Bethlehem, one of the most visited Palestinian cities, during the months of July and August indicate that only about 1% of tourists were Jewish. Such data were unavailable for Ramallah or other Palestinian cities, but they can be assumed to be roughly similar.
Why would people who spend countless dollars travelling the world ignore a vibrant and interesting culture that is so close to Jerusalem? Practically every tourist to Israel visits Jerusalem. The Western Wall is in fact the most visited tourist site in Israel. Once in Jerusalem, why do these same tourists not even consider traveling the short distance to Ramallah, or any of the other Palestinian-controlled cities? I think the answer, in a single word, is fear. Of course, nothing in life is as simple as one word. For Israeli citizens it is actually illegal to enter Palestinian-controlled areas.
Though it is not the Palestinians who prohibit their entry, but the government of Israel. Still, the multitudes of foreign Jewish tourists who visit Israel do not entertain the idea of visiting Ramallah, or even Nablus and Jericho for that matter.
The last two cities have significance to Judaism. They include, respectively, the burial site of Joseph and the Prophet Elisha’s well (as described in the Bible), among other sites. Even if the tourist was completely uninterested in anything Palestinian, there are enough sites important to Judaism to justify traveling there.
Jews travel to Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and other Arab countries to visit Jewish heritage sites. Yet the thought of visiting sites that are less than an hour away does not cross their mind.
What prevents them? Why would none of my American friends join me? In fact, most told me I was foolish to go, and some even predicted my death. Again, I think the reason is unfounded fear. For so many years, Palestinian and Israeli leaders have been demonizing the other side that it has become very difficult to differentiate fact from fiction.
The only emotion that exists now is blind fear. Is it possible, perhaps, that Palestinians would welcome Jewish tourists, especially given the economic boost that they provide to the Palestinian economy? I had a positive and welcoming experience in all the Palestinian areas that I visited. Over a few days, I traveled to Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem and two refugee camps. Not once was I intimidated or frightened. In most places, I was greeted with open arms, and the locals eagerly directed me to the sites I sought. I even met two English-speaking Palestinian university students who gladly accompanied me to Nablus in a shared taxi, and made sure that I saw the important sites, such as Joseph’s tomb.
I believe that both sides have become so used to thinking in broad, overarching terms, that the common, individual person has been forgotten. Does every single Israeli or Palestinian like each other? Probably not. But most, I believe, could get along just fine. Most are able to view each other as fellow human beings. Most can interact with each other without being afraid that they will be murdered because of their religion or nationality.
Perhaps, most importantly, most Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, could live in secure peace with each other, if only their leaders gave them a real chance.

The writer, a frequent visitor to Israel, is an ordained rabbi and practicing social worker who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

by Khaled Abu Toameh
April 26, 2012 at 5:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3035/pro-palestinian-anti-israel

It would also help immensely of these activists came to the West Bank and Gaza Strip to offer advice on, and help in building, proper government institutions, and in combatting administrative and financial corruption. But as far as many of the pro-Palestinian activists in the West Bank and Gaze are concerned, the interests of the Palestinians are not as important as hating Israel.

Pro-Palestinian groups and individuals in the US and Europe are doing Palestinians injustice by devoting all their energies only against Israel.

There is a feeling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that most of these groups and individuals are more interested in campaigning against Israel than helping the Palestinians.

Being pro-Palestinian does not necessarily mean that one also has to be anti-Israel.

The pro-Palestinian camp in the West should raise its voice against violations of human rights and media freedoms under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

In the past few weeks, six Palestinian journalists, bloggers and cartoonists were arrested by security forces belonging to the Palestinian government in the West Bank.

The pro-Palestinian activists around the world chose to turn a blind eye to the ongoing crackdown on freedom of expression in the West Bank.

They also failed — even refused — to condemn the Palestinian Authority government’s decision to block web sites that are critical of Palestinian leaders in the West Bank.

The pro-Palestinian activists in the West also refuse to examine what is happening under Hamas in the Gaza Strip. They apparently do not care, or do not want to see, that there are executions, arbitrary arrests, and assaults against women and torture in Hamas prisons.

The pro-Palestinian activists and organizations also do not seem to care if the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are brainwashing Palestinian children and filling their minds and hearts with hatred.

Those who care about the Palestinians should come to the Gaza Strip and work toward promoting human rights under Hamas — of children, women, and journalists.

It would help immensely if hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists came to the West Bank and Gaza Strip to teach Palestinian children English and expose them to the benefits of democracy and Western values, such as equal justice under law, free speech and a free press, and financial transparency and accountability

It would also help immensely if these activists came to the West Bank and Gaza Strip to offer advice on, and help in building, proper government institutions, and in combatting administrative and financial corruption.

But as far as many of the pro-Palestinian activists in the West are concerned, the interests of the Palestinians are not as important as hating Israel.

Anti-Israel messages and campaigns serve only the radicals in this region who do not want either peace or coexistence.

The time has come for the emergence of a genuine pro-Palestinian camp in the West that would focus less on Israel and more on helping the Palestinians.

By Caroline Glick, April 27, 2012

Israel is a great country and a great nation. Zionism is in. Judaism is in. Post-Zionism is out. Post-Judaism is out. It’s taken decades, but Israel is finally learning not to hate itself

JewishWorldReview.com |You can learn a lot about a nation’s health by watching how it celebrates its national holidays. In Israel’s case, compare how we celebrated our fiftieth Independence Day in 1998 to what celebrations involve today.

During the 1990s, Israel’s elite took a vacation from reality and history and they brought much of the public with them. Then foreign minister Shimon Peres said that history was overrated. The so-called "New Historians," who rummaged through David Ben Gurion’s closet looking for skeletons were the toast of the academic world. Radicals like Yossi Beilin, Shulamit Aloni and Avrum Burg were dictating government policy. The media, the entertainment establishment, and the Education Ministry embraced and massively promoted plays, movies, television shows, songs, dances, art and books that "slayed sacred cows."

Everywhere you turned, post-Zionism was in. Post-Judaism was in. And Zionism and Judaism were both decidedly out.

As he is today, in 1998 Binyamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister, and then as now there were prominent voices seeking to blame him for the absence of peace and every other terrible blight on the planet.

In 1998, the government invested a fortune in marking Israel’s 50th Independence Day. The main official celebration was a massive affair called Jubilee Bells that took place at Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem. More than two thousand performers participated. But rather than serve as an event that unified Israeli society in celebration of fifty years of sovereign freedom, the event exposed just how far Israel’s political and cultural elite were willing to go in attacking basic societal values.

The Bat Sheva Dance Troupe was scheduled to participate in the program and present a dance set to the traditional Passover song "Echad mi yodea," (Who knows one). The song contains 13 stanzas that praise the Almighty, praise Jewish law, and outline the Jewish life cycle. In the number Bat Sheva was scheduled to perform, the dancers come on stage dressed as ultra Orthodox Jewish men and by the end of the song, all they are wearing is underwear.

The choreography enraged members of Netanyahu’s cabinet including then Education Minister Yitzhak Levy. They insisted that the program shouldn’t contain material that insulted sectors of Israeli society. The organizers tried to forge a compromise. But the dancers chose to boycott festival.

Israel’s cultural and media establishment expressed shock and horror at what they viewed as the government’s attempt to infringe on artistic freedom. The Association of Israeli Artists demanded that a public commission be formed to ensure that the government would be unable to interfere in artistic freedom in the future. Major cultural icons declared cultural war against religious Jews.

The question of whether the dance was appropriate for an official, state financed celebration of Independence Day was never asked. So too, no one asked whether a dance portraying ultra-Orthodox Jews moving sensuously to a traditional Jewish song while taking off their clothes reflected the values of society.

To understand the distance Israel has traveled since then, consider Tuesday night’s Memorial Day ceremony at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. None of the performers attacked their fellow Israelis. And the best received artist and song was Mosh Ben Ari and his rendition of Psalm 121 — A Song of Ascent. The psalm, which praises the Almighty as the eternal guardian of Israel became the unofficial anthem of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-2009. And Ben Ari’s rendition of the song propelled the dreadlock bedecked, hoop earring wearing world music artist into superstardom in Israel.

It was impossible to imagine Pslam 121 or any other traditional Jewish poem or prayer being performed as anything other than an object of scorn in 1998. Back then, it would have been impossible to contemplate a crowd of tens of thousands of non-religious Israelis reverently singing along as Ben Ari crooned, "My help is from G0d/ Maker of Heaven and Earth/ He will not allow your foot to falter/ Your Guardian will not slumber/ Behold he neither slumbers nor sleeps – the Guardian of Israel."

It’s not that the crowd would have necessarily booed him off the stage. He simply never would have been allowed on the stage to begin with. The 1990s was the decade that launched Aviv Gefen, the most prominent secular draft evader to stardom.

Israel is no longer in the throes of an adolescent rebellion. It has regained its senses. True, its celebrities look like Ben Ari and not like Naomi Shemer. But the message is the same. Israel is a great country and a great nation. Zionism is in. Judaism is in. Post-Zionism is out. Post-Judaism is out.

When last year a group of performers announced they would boycott the Ariel Center for Performing Arts, the public reacted with anger and disgust, not understanding. Fearing a loss of state funding, their theater bosses quickly sought to distance themselves from the performers.

Israel’s return to its Zionist roots is the greatest cultural event of the last decade. It is also an event that occurred under the radar screen of the rest of the world. No one outside the country seems to have noticed at all.

The outside world’s failure to take note of Israel’s cultural shift owes to its failure to recognize the significance of the failure of the peace process with the Palestinians on the one hand and the failure of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza on the other hand. The demise of the peace process at Camp David in July 2000 and the terror war that followed launched the Israeli public on its path away from its radical post-Zionist rebellion and back to its Zionist roots. The failure of the withdrawal from Gaza, and the international community’s response to Operation Cast Lead marked the conclusion of the journey.

The Oslo peace process was based on the radical belief that it is possible to make peace by empowering terrorists and giving them land, political legitimacy, money and guns. To embrace this nonsense, the public had to be willing to tolerate the notion that there was something unjust about the Zionist revolution. Because if Zionism and the cause of Jewish national liberation are just, then it is impossible to justify empowering the PLO, a terrorist movement dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the delegitimization of Zionism.

Most Israelis never adopted the post-Zionist narrative. But they did accept the doctrine of appeasement. And they shared the belief that if appeasement failed, the world would rally to Israel’s side.

Consequently, the beginning of society’s awakening to the lie of post-Zionism at the heart of the peace process was a function not only of the massive Palestinian terror onslaught that began after Yasser Arafat rejected peace and statehood at Camp David. It was also a function of the August 2000 UN Durban Conference and its aftermath in which the international community rallied to the Palestinians’ side. The latter demonstrated that just as Israel’s transfer of land and guns to the PLO had endangered the lives of its citizens, Israel’s conferral of political legitimacy on the PLO endangered the international standing of the country.

The lesson that Israelis took from the failure of the peace process was that Israel has no Palestinian partner for peace. And until the Palestinians change, Israel has no one to talk to. While a slight majority of Israelis still support partitioning the land between Israel and a Palestinian state, the overwhelming majority of Israelis believe that Israel has no one to make peace with and therefore no possibility of successfully partitioning the land.

This is not the lesson that foreigners took. From Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Tony Blair to Barack Obama to Nicolas Sarkozy, foreign leaders have insisted that the Oslo process had nearly succeeded and that its failure was a fluke. The most the parts of the international community that are not completely anti-Israel have been willing to grant about the failure of the peace process is that it failed due to a lack of courage. By this telling, the problem isn’t the concept of appeasing terrorists with land, guns and legitimacy. Rather the problem is narrow minded, cowardly leaders. And so the way forward for them is also clear: figure out a more attractive appeasement package for the Palestinians and put Israel’s feet to the fire to make it cough up the required concessions.

Then there is the aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was a traumatic national event. The forced expulsion of thousands of Israelis from their homes led Israeli society to the brink of disintegration.

The move represented the last hope of the peace movement. If the Palestinians won’t sit down with Israel, so the thinking went, Israel can still appease them by simply giving them what they want without an agreement.

But not only did the withdrawal bring no peace. It brought Hamas to power. It brought tens of thousands of projectiles down on southern Israel. Israelis expected the world to recognize the significance of this string of events. But that didn’t happen.

Instead of seeing the lengths Israel had gone to appease the Palestinians and side with it when its appeasement failed again, the international community refused to even acknowledge that Israel had withdrawn from Gaza. Condoleezza Rice forced Israel to continue supplying electricity and water to Gaza and providing medical care for Gazans in Israeli hospitals as if nothing had happened. No one accepted that Israel was no longer in charge.

As far as most Israelis were concerned, the final end of our vacation from reality came with the publication of the Goldstone Report in the aftermath of Cast Lead. Here was Israel, forced to defend itself from Hamas-ruled Gaza that was waging an illegal missile war against Israeli civilians. Rather than stand by Israel that had done everything for peace, the UN’s commission accused Israel of committing war crimes.

Undoubtedly one of the reasons so few outsiders have drawn the same lessons as the Israeli public from the failure of the peace process and the Gaza withdrawal is because the only Israelis they listen to are the few remaining holdouts from the 1990s. People like former Shin Bet Director Ami Ayalon can expect to have every withdrawal-from-territory and destroy-the-settlements op-ed they write published in the New York Times whereas Richard Goldstone wasn’t even able to get the Times to publish his admission that his eponymous commission’s conclusions were false.

This open door policy for Israeli radicals was defensible in the 1990s when a significant portion of the Israeli public supported them. Now it constitutes nothing more than an anti-Israel propaganda campaign.

From Obama to J Street to the EU, international actors interested in forcing Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians cannot understand why their attempts continue to fail. How is it possible that despite their best efforts, Netanyahu remains in power and the Left can’t get any traction with the public?

For the answer, they need to look no farther than Mosh Ben Ari, his dreadlocks, and his rendition of Psalm 121. Israel’s adolescent rebellion is over. Post-Zionism is so 1990s.

JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where her column appears.

No country in the history of the world has ever contributed more to humankind and accomplished more for it’s own people in so brief a period of time as Israel has done

From Ron Jager, April 26, 2012

As Israel celebrates its 64th Independence Day, all of us can take a step back and view Israel from a different perspective than is usually depicted daily by the global media and internet.

Can you imagine hundreds of millions of viewers watching and acquiring a sympathetic portrayal of Israel that has nothing to do with war, terror, and the never-ending conflicts of the Middle East?

Imagine Israel being depicted as a global center of innovation, academic excellence, heading the global efforts towards renewable energy and water preservation.

Imagine learning that no country in the history of the world has ever contributed more to humankind and accomplished more for it’s own people in so brief a period of time as Israel has done.

Whether it is the fact that Israel exports more life-saving medical technology per capita than any other nation in the world or is turning the vast arid wastelands of Africa into blooming fields through the introduction of Israeli produced slow-drip irrigation technologies, there is much about which to be proud.

There is an organization that exists for this purpose alone, they call themselves; Israel Up Close (http://www.israelupclose.org) , and they are very serious about getting the good word about Israel out there.

American Jews constitute a mere 2% of the U.S. population, and are even a smaller minority in Europe. Israel Up Close does not direct its activities to Jews exclusively, but reaches out to the vast majority of people of the world, who are not Jewish.  Many of the messages and stories that are produced speak about ideas and experiences that appeal to large groups of people in the Western World, showing Israel in a whole new perspective and understanding.

Reaching out to the world, attempting to close the enormous gap between the complex realities here in Israel and the biased and false narrative that is so commonly portrayed – and with exceeding effectiveness – is no easy job. Many will claim that Israel is failing on the public relations battleground, leading to an increasing anti-Israel sentiment that nurtures cultural, academic and commercial boycotts.

How better to counter this sentiment than by broadcasting a pure, unadulterated, positive message about Israel. The idea is not to change minds but to open minds to the real Israel, by having produced over 120 filmed video features that have been picked up by CNN, PBS, CBN, Eurovision and hundreds of other national and local television and internet outlets that have broadcasted to hundreds of millions of viewers.

As we all know, its no big deal to preach to the choir, but Israel Up Close goes way beyond the choir by providing interesting and professionally produced filmed video narratives to the four corners of the world that may have never ever heard a good word about Israel. Producing positive, inspirational current events and human interest stories is what Israel Up Close is all about.

Harvey Karp, the legendary founder of Israel Up Close, knows what it means to overcome uphill battles. As a streetwise kid from the streets of Jersey City in the 1940′s, with 40 bucks in his pocket and a lot of grit, he hitched a ride to California, allured by the attraction of Hollywood. From modest beginnings as a clerk, Harvey worked his way up becoming a stockbroker, developing a system for commodities trading and eventually establishing his own firm. After visiting Israel in 2003, Harvey decided that he wanted to inform people outside of Israel to see the real Israel and not just what the headlines depicted.

He decided to show different perspectives about Israel, relating on a human level, allowing people from all over the world who have never ever been to Israel to easily connect. As Harvey reminisces; "I wanted to show that Israel was about life and about human experiences".

His intention in creating Israel Up Close was to reflect human relationships within Israel and show the human side of life in Israel – the side beyond the media images of war, terrorism and political unrest. Many of the human interest stories were quite compelling, empowering viewers to respond with a strong emotional connection to Israel. Many of the video productions dealt with technological innovations that have a direct impact on the quality of life of many of the viewers throughout the world, by identifying, researching, and reporting on how Israeli innovations improve the daily lives of people throughout the world.

By enabling the viewers to relate to the human side of Israel and the people of Israel who made all these innovations possible, Israel Up Close has made major strides in bridging the gap between the reality and the false narrative conveyed, evoking images of Israel that strengthens supporting and identifying with the State of Israel.

Israel Up Close’s mission is so important that I would classify their effort as a moral obligation. Improving Israel’s image is no simple task, it’s a deep problem with deep roots. What Israel Up Close does is share important facts and news about Israel and her interaction with the world, sharing many of Israel’s contributions to humanity with powerful statements and pictures to promotes Israel’s many gifts to the world.

Take a few minutes and look for yourself. Happy Yom Ha’atzmaut!

The choice was obvious: I had to stand with Israel, with this tiny nation, free, democratic, making huge strides in medicine, research and development, yet the victim of the same lies and hatred that nearly consumed me.

Kasim Hafeez, April 25, 2012

I am a Zionist, a proud Muslim Zionist, and I love Israel, but this was not always the case. In fact, for many years I was quite the extreme opposite. I experienced the high levels of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activity taking place on British university campuses, because I was the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel activist.

Growing up in the Muslim community in the UK I was exposed to materials and opinions at best condemning Israel, painting Jews as usurpers and murderers, and at worse calling for the wholesale destruction of the "Zionist Entity" and all Jews. In short, there was no accommodating a Jewish State in the Middle East.

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To grow up around this constant barrage of hatred directed at Israel has a massive effect on an individual’s own opinions. More disturbingly, many of these people weren’t radical or extreme, but when it was about Israel the most vicious of rhetoric poured out, coupled with the casual anti-Semitism that seemed too prevalent, when the phrase "stop being a Jew" used as an insult.

My father, however, was much more brazen in his hatred, boasting of how Adolf Hitler was a hero, his only failing being that he didn’t kill enough Jews.

By the time I had reached 18 I was completely indoctrinated to the fold of radical Islamism. My hate for Israel and for the Jews was fuelled by images of death and destruction, set to the backdrop of Arabic melodies about Jihad and speeches of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah or Osama Bin Laden.

These views were reinforced when I attended Nakba Day rallies, where speakers predicted Israel’s demise as Hezbollah flags were waved proudly in the centre of London.

The Case for Israel

Was there a case for Israel? In my mind, of course not, there was no shadow of doubt. Even the most moderate clerics I came across refused to condemn terrorism against Israel as unjustified; the Jews must obviously deserve it, I believed.

So what changed? How could I go from all this hatred to the great love for and affinity with Israel and the Jewish people? I found myself in the Israel and Palestine section of a local bookstore and picked up a copy of Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. Given my worldview, the Jews and Americans controlled the media, so after brief look at the back, I scoffed thinking "vile Zionist propaganda."

I did, however, decide to buy it, content that I would shortly be deconstructing this propaganda piece, showing that Israel had no case and claiming my findings as a personal victory for the Palestinian cause.

Hafeez in Israel in a visit that changed his life

As I read Dershowitz’s arguments and deconstruction of many lies I saw as unquestionable truths, I searched despairingly for counter arguments, but found more hollow rhetoric that I’d believed for many years. I felt a real crisis of conscience, and thus began a period of unbiased research. Up until that point I had not been exposed to anything remotely positive about Israel.

Now, I didn’t know what to believe. I’d blindly followed others for so long, yet here I was questioning whether I had been wrong. I reached a point where I felt I had no other choice but to see Israel for myself; only that way I’d really know the truth. At the risk of sounding cliché, it was a life-changing visit.

No apartheid state

I did not encounter an apartheid racist state, but rather, quite the opposite. I was confronted by synagogues, mosques and churches, by Jews and Arabs living together, by minorities playing huge parts in all areas of Israeli life, from the military to the judiciary. It was shocking and eye-opening. This wasn’t the evil Zionist Israel that I had been told about.

After much soul searching, I knew what I had once believed was wrong. I had been confronted with the truth and had to accept it. But I had a bigger question to confront, what now? I’d for years campaigned against Israel, but now I knew the truth.

The choice was obvious: I had to stand with Israel, with this tiny nation, free, democratic, making huge strides in medicine, research and development, yet the victim of the same lies and hatred that nearly consumed me.

Doing this is not easy and that’s something that has become very obvious. I have faced hostility from my own community and even some within the Jewish community in the UK, but that’s the reality of standing up for Israel in Europe today. It is not easy, and that’s what makes it so necessary.

This isn’t about religion and politics; it’s about the truth.

When it comes to Israel, the truth is not being heard, the ranks of those filed with blind hatred continue to swell, yet many have not been exposed to the reality, away from the empty rhetoric and politically charged slogans they are so fond of.

We can change this situation but we need to be strong and united. Israel is not just a Jewish issue – it’s about freedom, human rights and democracy, all the values that Western nations cherish. It’s also about trying to be a light among nations.

Israel’s international humanitarian aid work speaks for itself, but if we don’t get the message out there, no one will. We don’t have to be head-bowed apologists leading with :Israel’s not perfect…" – we should never be afraid to say: I am a Zionist and I’m proud. I stand with Israel. Now I ask, will you do that?

Kasim Hafeez is a British Muslim and former Islamist who is now a proud Zionist and stands with Israel. He runs www.theisraelcampaign.org and has a blog on this site. He is also on the advisory board of StandWithUs in the UK and recently completed a university speaking tour