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

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)

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 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.

See Also:  Hating Israel

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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

Gary Rosenblatt

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Gary Rosenblatt

Editor And Publisher, The Jewish Week 

OK, so there are these three guys in the hospital, and they’re very bad off, and the doctor is making the rounds. He goes over to the first patient, a Catholic, and explains that there’s nothing more he can do medically for him and asks him his last wish.

“I’d like to see a priest and make a confession,” the man says.

The doctor says fine, and moves on to the next patient, a Protestant. And when the doctor asks him his last wish, the poor guy says, “I’d like to see my family and say good-bye.”

So the doctor says OK, and comes over to the third patient, an elderly Jewish man.

“And what is your last wish?” the doctor asks.

“My last wish,” the old man whispers, “is to see another doctor.”

Funny? Well, according to some sophisticated research, the odds are you thought so — or at least there was a time when Jewish readers would have thought so. In a survey by Psychology Today, Jews among the 14,000 readers who sampled 30 jokes rated this classic joke higher than non-Jews.

But that was more than three decades ago, and it’s reasonable to wonder if things have changed. After all, the Golden Era of Jewish Comedy, marked by scores of Borscht Belt “tummlers” who went on to national fame, including Sid Caesar, Danny Kaye and Red Buttons, are gone or have faded from the scene. Who under 35 would remember Lou Goldstein, the Grossingers fixture who made “Simon Says” his own act? (“Simon says jump up…Come down.”) He died earlier this month at 90. And how could Generation Xers or Yers appreciate the nostalgic sadness over the recent fire that destroyed the former Browns Hotel, one of the last vestiges of the Catskill Resorts that spawned generations of comics?

Jewish humor has always been easier to enjoy than define. Bill Novak and Moshe Waldoks, in their classic “Big Book of Jewish Humor,” characterized the genre as “anti-authoritarian in tone, mocking pomposity, grandiosity and self-indulgence.” Our brand of ethnic humor is also known for a sense of superiority, with the little guy outsmarting everyone else, a kind of defense mechanism to ward off aggression and hostility.

But American Jews are far less insecure these days, with little to be worried about in terms of acceptance by the majority society. Once banned from Ivy League colleges, Jews now note with pride that most of those universities have, or in recent years have had, Jewish presidents.

So without all that angst is there still an audience for jokes about Jewish mothers (and mothers-in-law), rabbis and priests, food, doctors, elusive sex, unhappy spouses, getting old and dying?

Sam Hoffman and Eric Spiegelman can prove there is. After long enjoying his father’s stories and jokes, Hoffman, now in his mid-40s, got a group of 20 of his father’s friends and relatives to come to an abandoned storefront in his hometown of Highland Park, N.J., several years ago and tell some of their “good stories” in front of his camera. Spiegelman, a native of Los Angeles, did the same there. The result was a website called, simply, Old Jews Telling Jokes, which has had millions of page views. Then came a book (same name) two years ago, a DVD, and next week previews of an Off-Broadway play (same name) co-created by Peter Gethers and Daniel Okrent, and based on the website, will begin at the Westside Theater, reinventing classic jokes and adding a few songs.

Hoffman describes the jokes on the website as “time capsules, revealing the fears and anxieties and celebrating the joys of all aspects of life.” A lot more about the anxieties than the joys, from the ones I’ve heard, and definitely not for the prudish.

There’s something especially funny, though, about hearing a wide variety of everyday bubbes and zaides — all Jewish and over 60 — with a sprinkling of celebrities like former New York Mayor Ed Koch and former New York Times public editor Okrent, telling jokes that would make a stripper blush.

Hoffman says that about a quarter of the visitors to oldjewstellingjokes.com are under 35. “For them it’s comfort food,” he told New York magazine several years ago. “It’s a visit with Uncle Steve, who isn’t around anymore. And it channels an element of the culture that isn’t religion but still makes them feel connected.”

Max Weisberg, a 65-year-old insurance salesman in Phoenix, is one of the many gifted storytellers who appear on the site. He says his adult children think he’s funny but not his humor, and he worries about the generation gap.

“How do I translate to them ‘hock mir nisht kayn chynek’ [literally, Yiddish for ‘don’t knock me a tea kettle,’ but essentially, ‘don’t bother me’]?

“Jewish humor? I think it will disappear. But I hope not,” he says, adding, “All the guys that are dead I used to love.”

Al Kustanowitz, 72, of Fairlawn, N.J., is more optimistic. A 36-year-veteran of IBM, he now spends an average of an hour a day updating a popular website he launched from home in 2009, a labor of love called Jewish Humor Central (www.jewishhumorcentral.com), which features an entertaining mix of jokes, odd news items (“Gaza Zoo Adds Stuffed Animals”), music, new comedy videos and clips from classic routines.

As “blogger-in-chief,” he says he has written close to 800 blog posts, and admits “it’s getting harder to find clean material” to use on the site. (He includes a warning if a video has language “from the George Carlin list” of seven words you can never say on TV.)

Kustanowitz says his muse was his late wife, Shuly, who served as his “gentle censor.” Now he often runs material by his daughter, Esther, a prolific blogger and Jewish culture queen in her own right. (“The tree doesn’t fall far from the fruits,” Al jokes of his own talent.)

For some 25 years he published a family newsletter with funny news items around Purim time each year, noting that “you can’t make this stuff up.” Over time he sent it out to hundreds of family members and friends, but he abandoned the print edition now that his website has about 2,300 subscribers.

Besides, he says, “I started the blog because I couldn’t wait until Purim.”

Based on his success, Kustanowitz now offers a series of one-hour lectures. His talks include video clips and commentary, with more than two dozen topics to choose from.

“I don’t worry about theories” about Jewish humor and its sociological implications, he says.

“These jokes last forever.”

E-mail: Gary@jewishweek.org

Read more:

• Gary Rosenblatt
• bill novak
• Eric Spiegelman
• Humor
• Jewish humor
• Jewish Jokes
• Moshe Waldoks
• old jews telling jokes
• Sam Hoffman

• Gary Rosenblatt
• bill novak
• Eric Spiegelman
• Humor
• Jewish humor
• Jewish Jokes
• Moshe Waldoks
• old jews telling jokes
• Sam Hoffman

Copyright 2010 The Jewish Week

Source URL (retrieved on 04/29/2012 – 12:26): http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/gary_rosenblatt/ever_dying_art_jewish_humor

Hemorrhage of hatred

The general policy debate in the West about the nature of Middle Eastern politics is completely divorced from reality.

By Caroline B. Glick

Incidents that should make the world’s Front Pages but WON’T because of the ‘unacceptable Truths’ they would reveal

JewishWorldReview.com | Hatred of Jews is the central animating feature of the political and strategic reality of the Middle East. It is hatred of Jews that dictates the legal regimes, foreign policies, military aspirations, cultural mores, educational themes and even public health policies of our neighbors from Ramallah to Teheran.

Despite the centrality of Jew hatred in all aspects of public life in the Arab and Muslim world, our neighbors’ unrelenting and irrational abhorrence for Israel and the Jewish people remains a dirty secret that you aren’t supposed to mention in polite company. From Washington to Brussels, talk of the policy implications of Arab and Muslim Jew hatred is prohibited.

Omar Abu-Sneina, a convicted terrorist murderer is one of the thousand Palestinian terrorists that Israel released from prison in order to secure the release of Israeli hostage IDF Sgt. Gilad Schalit. Originally from Hebron, Abu-Sneina was released to Hamas-controlled Gaza. This week the IDF announced that since his release Abu-Sneina has returned to the terror business. The Israel Security Agency intercepted a memory card he sent his family in Hebron with instructions for how his fellow terrorists should go about kidnapping and holding IDF soldiers hostage. The instructions demonstrate how for Abu-Sneina, Israelis don’t even deserve to be treated like animals.

Among other things, he discussed how to hide a hostage. As he put it, "Avoid hiding [the captive soldier] in desolate places, tunnels or forests, unless the aforementioned [captive] is a corpse or a severed head. If the aforementioned is a live human, that must be visited at least once a week and provided with food and drink, it is best to hide him in a house, an agricultural farm, a workplace, etc."

Abu-Sneina’s coldblooded cruelty and rejection of the inherent value of the lives of Israelis is not simply a function of the fact that he is a terrorist. It is a reflection of the values of Palestinian society. Those values are continuously expressed and reinforced by Fatah and Hamas controlled media outlets, cultural and educational institutions and religious authorities. The ubiquitousness of Jew hatred in the daily lives of Palestinians is so overwhelming it is difficult to imagine any facet of Palestinian life that isn’t inundated by it.

Take grammar lessons. According to a translation provided by Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinian Authority’s Arabic language matriculation examinations for high school students include questions such as, "Punctuate the underlined phrase: Do not view the occupier as human." And "Punctuate the underlined phrase: We shall die in order that our land may live."

This week a Palestinian court sentenced Muhammad Abu Shahala to death for selling a home in Hebron near the Cave of the Patriarchs to Jews. Shahala was arrested shortly after several Jewish families moved into the house last month. He was reportedly tortured and quickly tried and sentenced to die by a PA court.

The PA was established in May 1994. The first law it adopted defined selling land to Jews a capital offense. Shortly thereafter scores of Arab land sellers began turning up dead in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in both judicial and extrajudicial killings.

Leaders of the Jewish community of Hebron wrote a letter to international leaders this week asking them to intervene with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and demand that he cancel Shahala’s sentence. They addressed the letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy, the Director General of the International Red Cross Yves Daccord as well as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. In it they wrote, "It is appalling to think that property sales should be defined as a ‘capital crime’ punishable by death. The very fact that such a ‘law’ exists within the framework of the PA legal system points to a barbaric and perverse type of justice, reminiscent of practices implemented during the dark ages."

They went on to make the reasonable comparison between the PA’s law prohibiting land sales to Jews to Nazi Germany’s Nuremburg laws that constrained and finally outlawed trade between Jews and Germans. The letter concluded with the question, "Is the Palestinian Authority a reincarnation of the Third Reich?"

The Palestinians of course are far from unique in their obsession with hating Jews. Their hemorrhage of hatred, their obsessive need to reject any move towards peaceful coexistence with Israel, or what the renowned late Palestinian poet Yousuf Al Khatib referred to picturesquely as "the Jewish filth of Europe" is matched in every Arab land. And of course, it is the primary obsession of the Iranian regime.

The parallels between Nazi laws and the laws of the PA and the Arab states that outlaw all cooperation with Israel and make such cooperation a capital offense are obvious and straightforward. Yet generally speaking, anyone who points out this fact is automatically dismissed as an alarmist or an extremist. Given the PA’s relative military weakness when compared with Israel and the Arab world’s current lack of interest in waging active war against Israel, noting their inarguable ideological affinity with the Nazis is considered socially and even intellectually unacceptable. The fact that they lack the ability to implement their ideology renders it improper to mention it.

The social prohibition on drawing parallels between the threats facing Israel today and those that faced the Jewish people seventy years ago is not limited to the discourse on Arab world’s conflict with Israel. It extends as well to polite society’s discourse on Iran’s nuclear program, which the Iranian regime has made clear repeatedly is aimed at destroying Israel.

In his address to the nation at the annual Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took aim at that taboo when he attacked those who accuse him of belittling the Holocaust by comparing the annihilation of European Jewry to the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Netanyahu said, "I know there are also those who believe that the unique evil of the Holocaust should never be invoked in discussing other threats facing the Jewish people. To do so, they argue, is to belittle the Holocaust and to offend its victims.

"I totally disagree. On the contrary. To cower from speaking the uncomfortable truth — that today like then, there are those who want to destroy millions of Jewish people — that is to belittle the Holocaust, that is to offend its victims and that is to ignore the lessons.

"Not only does the Prime Minister of Israel have the right, when speaking of these existential dangers, to invoke the memory of a third of our nation which was annihilated. It is his duty."

Netanyahu is right, of course. Unfortunately for Israel, raising the Holocaust in the context of a discussion about contemporary threats to the Jewish people is the rhetorical equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb. Just as no one is allowed to use a nuclear bomb, no one is allowed to mention the Holocaust. And that means that there is ultimately no way to speak about the violent hatred that animates our enemies in every aspect of their policy making. From the seemingly anodyne issue of property sales to the existential issue of nuclear weapons programs, the Jew hatred that lies at the foundation of their actions is out of bounds for discussion.

Actually, the situation is both better and worse than that. Netanyahu’s rhetorical boldness in drawing the parallel between Iran and the Nazis is arguably the only reason that the EU and the Obama administration have taken any actions against Iran. No, as their feckless negotiations with the mullahs, their foot dragging in implementing economic sanctions, and their outspoken opposition to military action against Iran make clear, they do not really mind the prospect of Iran acquiring the ability to wipe out the Jewish state. But the only reason they have adopted sanctions at all is because Netanyahu’s Holocaust rhetoric made them fear that Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear installations if they didn’t.

On the other hand, when it comes to their direct dealings with Jew haters, Westerners not only fail to confront them about their prejudice. They enable it. For instance, at a townhall meeting during her visit to Tunisia last month, Hillary Clinton was asked how US leaders can be trusted when during elections, "most of the candidates from both sides run towards the Zionist lobbies to get their support."

Rather than reject the anti-Jewish premise of the question — that Jews exert inordinate control over US politics or that there is something wrong with candidates expressing support for Israel — Clinton treated the question as legitimate.

Clinton said, "A lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention."

Clinton even congratulated her anti-Jewish questioner saying, "I think it’s a fair question because I  sometimes am a little surprised that people around the world pay more attention to what is said in our political campaigns than most Americans."

Similarly, a report on the behind the scenes goings on at last weekend’s nuclear negotiations with Iran published by Al-Monitor described the friendly discussion that took place at a dinner Friday night between EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian chief negotiator Saeed Jalili. According to a European diplomat, the conversation was aimed at breaking the ice. And it included a discussion of "political party funding in the US."

It is hard to imagine that such a discussion involved anything other than a group tongue clucking session directed against the inordinate impact of "Jewish money" on US electoral politics. That is, it is all but impossible to imagine that the discussion involved anything other than Ashton attempting to build a rapport with her Iranian counterpart based on shared hatred or contempt for Jews.

The fact that the West refuses to consider the policy implications of the most powerful force in Arab and Iranian policymaking and political life does not mean that Israeli policy makers should necessarily expand their discussion of the topic — although it would probably not hurt for them to do so. What it means is that the general policy debate in the West about the nature of Middle Eastern politics is completely divorced from reality.

Because the Americans and the Europeans refuse to acknowledge the elephant of Jew hatred in the middle of the room, they cannot be trusted to make reasoned or rational policy decisions. And since they cannot be trusted to act rationally, Israel cannot rely on the Americans or the Europeans as allies or partners when it confronts threats from its Jew obsessed neighbors.

Above all, Israel is a wondrous "adventure." I feel privileged daily to see the fulfillment of the prayers of generations longing for a return to Zion from forced exile.

David Harris  for Israeli Independence Day, 5 Iyar, 5772

Celebrated April 26, 2012

Author is Executive Director, AJC, and Senior Associate, St. Antony’s College, Oxford (2009-11)

What’s so special about a country’s 64th birthday?

Well, in the case of most nations, perhaps not all that much, unless the country happens to be Israel, which celebrates its birthday this year on April 25 and 26.

Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only U.N. member state whose right to exist is regularly challenged, whose elimination from the world map is the aim of at least one other U.N. member state, Iran, and whose population centers are deemed fair game by Hamas-controlled Gaza and Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. Thus, Israel’s sheer act of survival from year to year is itself noteworthy.

None of the countries that are serial human-rights violators — not Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Sudan, or any of the others — gets anything near the relentless, obsessive, guilty-till-proven-innocent scrutiny that democratic Israel receives from U.N. bodies, with their built-in, anti-Israel majorities, in New York and Geneva.

No other country is the target of such non-stop, well-funded, and highly-organized campaigns to discredit, delegitimize, and demonize a sovereign state.

No other country faces such systematic attempts to launch boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions against it, not to mention flotillas and flytillas, and all the while those behind the efforts, claiming to speak for human rights, blithely ignore places like Syria, where thousands were killed in the past year alone, because they can’t claim an Israeli connection.

And no other country has its right to self-defense challenged as Israel does, even though it does no more than any other nation would do if confronted by periodic terrorist assaults and deadly missile and rocket attacks.

I have enormous admiration for Israel — for its resolve, resilience, courage, and ingenuity.

Other nations might have succumbed, after 64 years of uninterrupted hostility, to the enemies trying everything under the sun to destroy them and, short of that, to demoralize and isolate them. But Israel has not flinched. It refuses to cave. It keeps confounding its foes.

Its commitment to a two-state accord with the Palestinians, polls reveal, remains unshakeable, even as many Israelis can’t help but wonder if the Palestinians, given one chance after another for sovereignty, truly share Israel’s aim of Jewish and Palestinian states living side by side in peace and harmony.

Moreover, in a recent global survey, Israelis came out the 14th "happiest" country in the world, and Tel Aviv ranks as one of the top "go-to" destinations for young people.

How can it be, Israel’s adversaries ask, that these "sons of monkeys and pigs," as radical Muslim preachers openly refer to the Jews, manage to stand tall, strong, and, yes, optimistic?

How can it be, its adversaries ask, that this nation of just under eight million, grown from only 650,000 at its birth in 1948, repeatedly defeats far more populous Arab foes that have been arrayed against it?

How can it be, its adversaries ask, that these Jews, seemingly led to slaughter like sheep by the Third Reich, suddenly learned how to defend themselves and vanquish larger Arab armies, within three years of V-E Day?

And how can it be, its adversaries ask, that Israel, with no natural resources to speak of until recent natural gas findings (yet to be exploited), could achieve a first-world economy, catapulting it into the OECD; double-digit winners of Nobel Prizes; and a top-three ranking in new NASDAQ listings?

Too often, Israel’s adversaries have come up with misguided, if self-satisfying, answers, usually elaborate conspiracy theories inspired by anti-Semitic tropes.

In reality, though, the answer is much simpler. It derives from an age-old connection among a land, a faith, and a people. Many have tried to sever the link. All have failed.

Consider the words of Ezekiel, expressed some 2,700 years ago:

Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all sides, and bring them to their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land, upon the mountains of Israel… And the desolate land shall be tilled… And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the Garden of Eden.

Or, to fast forward from the ancient prophet Ezekiel to the prophetic Winston Churchill:

The coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years.

Churchill added that the state’s establishment was "one of the most hopeful and encouraging adventures of the 20th century."

Indeed, it continues to be in the 21st century.

To be sure, Israel, like all democratic societies, is a permanent work in progress. Much remains to be done.

From grappling with a less-than-ideal electoral system to dealing with religious zealots who invoke a "higher authority" than the state, from addressing a yawning gap between rich and poor to balancing the Jewish and democratic nature of the country, from the decades-long pursuit of peace to the defense of the country in a turbulent region, Israel has no shortage of challenges.

But, above all, Israel is a wondrous "adventure." I feel privileged daily to see the fulfillment of the prayers of generations longing for a return to Zion from forced exile.

Witnessing Soviet Jews arriving in Israel as Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles came raining down, while Israel did not miss a beat in welcoming the newcomers, reveals the country’s character.

So, too, being in Rambam Hospital in Haifa during the Hezbollah missile attacks. One minute, a siren would sound and everyone would calmly go, or be moved, to the bomb shelters. The next minute, after the all-clear signal, the scientists would return to their labs to continue cutting-edge research in cancer, diabetes, and stem cell therapy.

Or being in Barzilay Hospital in Ashkelon, where victims of Hamas’ strikes against Israel were taken for medical care, and seeing Palestinian patients from Gaza in rooms adjoining the Jewish wounded.

Or getting to know Save a Child’s Heart, an Israeli program that provides life-saving pediatric heart surgery. Many of the children come from Arab countries that deny Israel’s very existence.

Or seeing the scrawling on a Tel Aviv wall shortly after 21 young Israelis were killed at a discotheque — "They won’t stop us from dancing."

Or watching an Israeli Arab Supreme Court justice — who, incidentally, refuses to sing Israel’s national anthem — sit on a panel that upheld the conviction of an Israeli ex-president on charges of rape.

No, this Israel may not feature prominently in the media, I’m sorry to say, but it is the Israel that pulsates daily with a love of life, of freedom, and of the land. It is the Israel I know and cherish.

Happy 64th Birthday, Israel!

A call to remember from the depths of our soul.

From Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, April 18, 2012

Tonight and tomorrow, the 27th of Nissan, we will be commemorating Yom HaShoah, the day set aside in the Jewish calendar for Holocaust remembrance.

During the nightmare years of the Shoah, one moment stands out for what it taught about the human spirit. It concerns a man almost unknown in Britain, the Polish-Jewish physician Janos Korczak.

Early on in his medical career, Korczak was drawn to the plight of underprivileged children. He wrote books about their neglect and became a kind of Polish Dickens. In 1911 he founded an orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw. It became so successful that he was asked to create one for Catholic children as well, which he did.

He had his own radio programme which made him famous throughout Poland. He was known as the “old doctor”. But he had revolutionary views about the young. He believed in trusting them and giving them responsibility. He got them to produce their own newspaper, the first children’s paper in Poland.

He turned schools into self-governing communities. He wrote some of the great works of child psychology, including one called The Child’s Right to Respect.

He believed that in each child there burned a moral flame that if nurtured could defeat the darkness at the core of human nature. When the time came for the children under his care to leave, he used to say this to them: “I cannot give you love of man, for there is no love without forgiveness, and forgiving is something everyone must learn to do on his own. I can give you one thing only: a longing for a better life, a life of truth and justice. Even though it may not exist now, it may come tomorrow if you long for it enough.”

In 1940 he and the orphanage were driven into the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942 the order came to transport them to Treblinka. Korczak was offered the chance to escape, but he refused, and in one of the most poignant moments of those years, he walked with his 200 orphans through the streets of Warsaw to the train that took them to the gates of death, inseparable from them to the end.

Janos Korczak’s actions were not unique; there are many inspirational and tragic stories of similar bravery and determination in the face of such adversity. What draws me to Korczak’s story is that it was about children.

The Nazis were determined to not just wipe out the Jews of their generations, but to exterminate the Jewish future.
The Nazis were determined to not just wipe out the Jews of their generations, but to exterminate the Jewish future.

They failed and many of those children who survived have spent the years since telling their stories, educating Jews and non-Jews about the dangers of intolerance and the need to respect the dignity of difference. These survivors made a commitment to live for what the victims of the Shoah died for.

As a people, we not only share a covenant of faith we also share a covenant of fate. Today, as the number of Shoah survivors sadly declines, the duty of remembrance falls on our generation and on future generations not yet born.

Yom HaShoah is a vital day in the Jewish calendar, providing us with a focal point for our remembrance. We cannot bring the dead back to life, but we can bring their memory back to life and ensure they are not forgotten. We can undertake in our lives to do what they were so cruelly prevented from doing in theirs.

In doing so we make a great affirmation of life. We ensure that out of the darkest night, the light of the survivors and their memories remains. Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.

Lo amut ki echyeh, says the Psalm: “I will not die, but I will live.”

The Shoah survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet. Remarkably, despite coming eyeball to eyeball with the angel of death, despite the unimaginable losses each of them suffered, so many of them fulfilled the words of Moses’ great command Uvacharta Bachayim, ‘choose life’ (Deut. 30: 19). In doing so, they chose life not just for themselves, but for their children, grandchildren and all future generations of Am Yisrael.

Yom HaShoah calls on us to remember from the depths of our Jewish soul. Janos Korczak was right. Whilst we can remember the past, we cannot write the future.

Only our children, the future of our community, can do that.

(This article was first published in The Jewish News)

PRAYER COMPOSED BY THE CHIEF RABBI FOR YOM HASHOAH

Today, on Yom HaShoah, we remember the victims of the greatest crime of man against man – the young, the old, the innocent, the million and a half children, starved, shot, given lethal injections, gassed, burned and turned to ash, because they were deemed guilty of the crime of being different.

We remember what happens when hate takes hold of the human heart and turns it to stone; what happens when victims cry for help and there is no one listening; what happens when humanity fails to recognise that those who are not in our image are none the less in God’s image.

We remember and pay tribute to the survivors, who bore witness to what happened, and to the victims, so that robbed of their lives, they would not be robbed also of their deaths.

We remember and give thanks for the righteous of the nations who saved lives, often at risk of their own, teaching us how in the darkest night we can light a candle of hope.

Today, on Yom HaShoah, we call on You, Almighty God, to help us hear Your voice that says in every generation:

Do not murder.

Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbour.

Do not oppress the stranger.

We know that whilst we do not have the ability to change the past, we can change the future.

We know that whilst we cannot bring the dead back to life, we can ensure their memories live on and that their deaths were not in vain.

And so, on this Yom HaShoah, we commit ourselves to one simple act: Yizkor, Remember.

May the souls of the victims be bound in the bond of everlasting life. Amen.

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