~OTHER VOICES ...

By Rabbi Dow Marmur
“BAD NEWS. START WORRYING. LETTER FOLLOWS.”

We made our way to the Hebrew University where its Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism hosted an evening on the theme, “Radical Islam’s War against the West.”

It began with the screening of the documentary Obsession that offers ample, familiar, and frightening illustrations. The film draws parallels between the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the rise of radical Islam in our day. Though the Arabic jihad does indeed originally mean (inner) struggle, it has now become the term for holy war against all infidels. As a former terrorist remarked on screen, the German Mein Kampf may also refer to “my (inner) struggle,” but that’s not how it has played out in history.

The one to draw the most chilling parallels with the 1930s was Sir Martin Gilbert, the distinguished historian and Churchill biographer. He spoke about the culture of denial then, and implied a similar culture today. Is there a Winston Churchill in the wings now?

After the screening, Professor Bernard Lewis, arguably the greatest Western expert on Islam, addressed the large gathering. What he said had strong echoes of what he has written in his books, notably What Went Wrong? He asserted once again that Judaism’s two daughter religions, Christianity and Islam, have fought for hegemony in the world since the latter’s inception. A few hundred years ago, Islam became weak and Christianity strong. The time has come, many Muslims say, to return to the centre of world history and defeat the infidels once and for all.

“In the same way as Nazism undoubtedly has its roots in Christianity, it would be wrong to say that Nazism is Christian. The same may be true of radical Islam;
it has roots in Islam but it’s not really Islam.”

This is the aim of the so-called radicals. Though they shouldn’t be identified with all the billion Muslims in the world, between 10% and 15% belong to that category. They view the collapse of the Soviet Union as their doing, because of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, and have now turned to what they perceive to be the weaker superpower, the United States and its many allies around the world, including Muslim states. The US debacle in Iraq, largely caused by Muslim insurrection, coupled with Western liberals’ clamor against the war, gives great courage to extremists.

ARE THEY TRUE MUSLIMS? Although Nazism undoubtedly has its roots in Christianity, Lewis said, it would be wrong to say that Nazism is Christian. The same may be true of radical Islam; it has roots in Islam but it’s not really Islam.

The most vexing US ally from this radical point of view is Israel. In the propaganda against the Jewish state the standard anti-Semitic and Nazi images are applied. In Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s version, the struggle has taken on apocalyptic proportions. Unlike in the cold war with the Soviet Union, mutually assured destruction doesn’t work, because in the apocalyptic scheme of things, such destruction is welcome and inevitable.

Hence the danger that Israel is facing. The solution, therefore, if I understood Lewis correctly, isn’t to bomb Iran. It must come from the Iranians themselves. The present regime has to implode from within. But can Israel afford to wait until that happens? But then, can it really afford to attack and take the consequences?

I came away from the evening thinking of the famous telegram: BAD NEWS. START WORRYING. LETTER FOLLOWS. Perhaps worry is more bearable when it’s shared. Hence this piece.

—the writer is Rabbi Emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto and a former professor at the Toronto School of Theology, St. Michael’s College.

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LAST MONTH, the video of a Hebron settler woman cursing a Palestinian woman from the Abu Aisha family was seen worldwide on news channels and prompted wide Israeli and international outrage. For most people who have done voluntary service in Hebron, what the settler woman was doing in the video seemed tame when compared to the settler violence they had witnessed since 1995.
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By Tommy Lapid,
former member of the Israeli Knesset
“I reacted with silence to this when I was justice minister too.”
Stop the Jewish Barbarians in Hebron

That Jewish woman, Yifat Alkobi, who confronted, cursed, spat on, and threatened her Arab neighbor in Hebron—she who is imprisoned in her own home—seemed somehow familiar to me. Gradually, from the cobwebs of my childhood memories, I dredged up the image of a Hungarian neighbor in Novi Sad, who used to stand at the entrance to her home and curse us every time we went into the street—just like Yifat Alkobi.

When we decide, and rightly so, to never under any circumstances compare the behavior of Jews to that of Nazis, we are forgetting that anti-Semitism only reached its height at Auschwitz. It had existed, was active, frightening, harmful, and disgusting—exactly like Alkobi’s image—in the years that preceded Auschwitz too. And behind shuttered windows hid terrified Jewish women, exactly like the Arab woman of the Abu-Isha family in Hebron.

“I am not referring to crematoria or pogroms, but to the persecution, hounding, stone-throwing, undermining of livelihood, scare tactics, spitting, and contempt.”

It is unthinkable that the memory of Auschwitz should serve as a pretext to ignore the fact that living here among us are Jews that behave toward Palestinians exactly the way that German, Hungarian, Polish, and other anti-Semites behaved toward Jews. I am not referring to crematoria or pogroms, but rather to the persecution, hounding, stone-throwing, undermining of livelihood, scare tactics, spitting, and contempt.

It was all of these things that made our lives in the Diaspora so bitter and harrowing, even before they began the wholesale killing of Jews. I was afraid to go to school because little anti-Semites lay in wait on the way and beat us. In what way is a Palestinian child in Hebron any different?

Even those who justify the occupation for ideological or religious reasons—or perhaps especially those that seek to justify the occupation—should be ashamed, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said of himself, when seeing these pictures. We all bear responsibility for the suffering of the Palestinians, but it would not have been possible to establish a Jewish state without causing them some harm.

“We forget that this hounding of the Palestinians in Hebron
happens not only at the moment we see it on television,
but rather day after day, every day of the year.”

But there is no reason or justification for the thuggery of the kind demonstrated time after time by the residents of the Jewish settlement in Hebron toward their Arab neighbors. The settlement of Jews in Hebron is the original sin. Now, they are adding insult to injury. And at best, we, the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel say, “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

We forget that this hounding of the Palestinian neighbors in Hebron happens not only at the moment we see it on television, but rather day after day, every day of the year (with the exception of Yom Kippur). The truth is that I too only pipe up occasionally and pay lip service by means of articles such as this. Even worse: I reacted with silence to this when I was justice minister too. We left the task of protest to the extreme leftist groups, who provoke well-deserved loathing from us all other days of the year.

We are familiar with the excuse, “We didn’t know.” So, for the record: We do know. We will never be able to forgive ourselves—our consciences won’t let us—and neither will our children if we do not make our army and police put an end to the Jewish barbarism in Hebron.
—from the Jerusalem Post

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By Ellen W. Horowitz
Loving Us to Death
“Like it or not, the future of the relationship between Israel and the US
might very well hinge far less on America’s Jews than on its Christians.”

When it comes to Israel’s flourishing relationship with Christian Zionist and Evangelical groups, many of us across the Jewish religious spectrum—in both Israel and the Diaspora—continue to grapple with feelings of uncertainty and suspicion. It’s an alliance which offers promise and, at the same time, arouses complex and ambiguous feelings.

Indeed, it would seem that the Talmud sanctions such hesitation by suggesting that the proper approach to a relationship where the motives remain unclear would be to employ the formula of “respect them and suspect them.”

I believe that the reservations we Jews have vis a vis Christian charitable intentions and expressions of support transcend theological differences, historical angst, an aversion to end-of-days fervor, or fears of missionary activity and hidden agendas. In fact, I am quite certain that all of the aforementioned very real concerns pale in comparison to what’s truly haunting us—and it has little to do with the foundations of Christianity. This is an exclusively—and deeply-rooted—Jewish problem.

Could it be that our reliance on Christian support and the relatively easy money we receive from a variety of non-Jewish groups for our charitable institutions, has caused our thinkers, activists, and fundraisers to become lazy and subsequently alienate and abandon what was, for many years, a fervent and devoted Jewish Zionist sector? Based on a piece he penned last month, Michael Freund appears to encourage this unsettling development:

“This approach to Jewish philanthropy may appear at odds
with the unconditional, no-questions-asked Christian take on charity.”

Our unconditional acceptance of the outpouring of “unconditional” love and devotion showered upon us by the Christian Zionist/Evangelical community has quelled the innate Jewish desire to connect to, inspire, and support Am Yisrael [the people of Israel]. It has stifled our ability to effectively plead for and pray for our people within our own camp. This lack of and rejection of challenge has dulled all of us.

TUGGING AT HEARTSTRINGS in order to loosen purse strings is part and parcel of process that is almost obligatory for Jews, and it used to be second nature (that is, until we opted out of the struggle and embraced an easier path). This push/pull process has little to do with being miserly. Pulling the teeth of our brethren in order to secure a donation or gift serves a profound purpose, and is in fact a form of prayer.

This approach to Jewish philanthropy may appear at odds with the unconditional, no-questions-asked Christian take on charity. But I suggest that the Jewish methodology is downright biblical in a very big way. Our Sages tell us that the reason the biblical matriarchs were barren or conceived with great difficulty was because G-d loved and treasured their tears, prayers, and pleas for children. They needed to cry and He needed to hear it, before He delivered the goods. This formula works on a microcosmic level, too, and it’s how we emulate a Divine process.

The ability to articulate, hear, and respond doesn’t come easily, but it’s something we Jews have always strived for—that is until we lost our voice and ability to communicate with our own people. This was the unifying link that, in a crisis, bridged the gap between Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews, across the political spectrum, in both Israel and the Diaspora. And this is possibly the highest, simplest, and most powerful and direct form of prayer, the “Oh G-d, please heal her!” that Moses uttered on behalf of Miriam.

Continuing to develop and nurture Israel’s relationship with those Christian groups which take a moral and biblical stand on behalf of the Jewish state, may be a worthwhile endeavor. I imagine the debate will continue over the merits and complications of soliciting Christian support. Until the verdict is in, I’ll continue to exert my energies in a more difficult, but perhaps more rewarding direction—pleading for my people, through my people.
—published in israelinsider

By David Newman
A Green Line in the Sand
“The Green Line’s removal from maps was meant to signify that it existed no longer…”

Nearly 40 years after it was removed from official maps, atlases, and school books, the Green Line has made a significant comeback. Israel’s education minister, Yuli Tamir, has ordered the Green Line border, which separates Israel from the West Bank, to be reintroduced in all texts and maps used in the Israeli school system. From now on, Israeli children will know exactly where the Green Line is and what it signifies—a political border that, at some point, will almost certainly become the line separating neighboring Israeli and Palestinian sovereign territories.

It was shortly after the Six-Day War of 1967 that the Green Line was removed from atlases produced by the Israeli government. The border, hastily drawn at the Rhodes armistice talks after Israel’s war of Independence in 1948, had always been regarded as nothing more than an artificial line of separation eventually to be reworked. For most Israeli leaders in 1967, the occupation of the West Bank was a sign that the future territorial order would be vastly different from the one they had lived with for the previous 19 years.

“…the more elastic and less permanent the boundary,
the easier it would be to change in the future.”

According to Abba Eban—Israeli ambassador to the United States and the United Nations in the 1950s and foreign minister at the time of the Six-Day War—his attempts to negotiate with the Arab states to transform the border into a permanent recognized international boundary had been rejected in the early 1950s by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who had argued that the more elastic and less permanent the boundary, the easier it would be to change in the future—as seemed to be the case in the aftermath of the 1967 war.

The Green Line’s removal from maps was meant to signify that it existed no longer, but in reality it never disappeared. It remained the administrative boundary separating Israel from the occupied territories, with one law for the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, and quite another one for the stateless Palestinian residents of the West Bank. Even Israeli settlers who moved to the occupied territories and continued to enjoy Israeli citizenship were ultimately subject to the military authorities—just to show the world that Israel had not formally annexed these territories or, as the Israeli government preferred to put it, had extended civilian law to these areas over which they did not enjoy sovereign rights.

“…the International Court of Justice has ruled it illegal.
Many Palestinians are caught in a state of territorial limbo.”

But in the past decade, for most Israelis, the Green Line has once again become the line separating the relatively safe roads of Israel from the danger of the West Bank. Few Israelis, other than the settlers, venture beyond it, even when doing so would make their route shorter. It is along the Green Line that the unilateral West Bank separation barrier has been constructed in large sections.

Where the barrier has deviated from the Green Line, in practice annexing some parts of the West Bank to Israel, the International Court of Justice has ruled it illegal. Many Palestinians are caught in a state of territorial limbo: they live east of the Green Line inside the West Bank, but west of the separation barrier, in effect spatial hostages to this exercise in redrawing the border.

If some Israelis were unclear about the long-term significance of the Green Line, the education minister’s decision to return the border to the geography and history textbooks will have left no one in doubt.

—Newman is professor of political geography at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and co-editor of the journal, Geopolitics

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By Art Gish, CPT
Clowns and Soldiers
An advent season highlight for churches in this region was the visit of high-profile religious leaders to Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

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