Levitt Letter Extra News

By Evelyn Gordon, www.CommentaryMagazine.com

When the Oslo process began in 1993, one benefit its adherents promised was a significant improvement in Israel’s international standing. And initially, it seemed as if that promise would be kept: 37 countries soon established or renewed diplomatic relations with Israel; a peace treaty was signed with Jordan; five other Arab states opened lower-level relations.

But 16 years later, it is clear that this initial boost was illusory. Not only is Israel’s standing no better than it was prior to the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House Lawn in September 1993, it has fallen to an unprecedented low. Efforts to boycott and divest from Israel are gaining strength throughout the West, among groups as diverse as British academics, Canadian labor unions, the Norwegian government’s investment fund, and American churches. Israeli military operations routinely spark huge protests worldwide, often featuring anti-Semitic slogans. References to Israel as an apartheid state have become so commonplace that even a former president of Israel’s closest ally, the United States, had no qualms about using the term in the title of his 2007 book on Israel. European polls repeatedly deem Israel the greatest threat to world peace, greater even than such beacons of tranquility and democracy as Iran and North Korea. Courts in several European countries, including Belgium, Britain, and Spain, have seriously considered indicting Israeli officials for war crimes (though none has actually yet done so). And in October, when the United Nations Human Rights Council overwhelmingly endorsed a report that advocated hauling Israel before the International Criminal Court on war-crimes charges, even many of Jerusalem’s supposed allies refused to vote against the measure. In academic and media circles, it has even become acceptable to question Israel’s very right to exist—something never asked about any other state in the world. None of these developments was imaginable back in the days when Israel refused to talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization, had yet to withdraw from an inch of “Palestinian” land, and had not evacuated a single settlement.

Yet even today, conventional wisdom, including in Israel, continues to assert that Israel’s international standing depends on its willingness to advance the “peace process.” That invites an obvious question: if so, why has Israel’s reputation fallen so low despite its numerous concessions for peace since 1993?

The answer is unpleasant to contemplate, but the mounting evidence makes it inescapable: Israel’s standing has declined so precipitously not despite Oslo but because of Oslo. It was Israel’s very willingness to make concessions for the sake of peace that has produced its current near-pariah status.

Why should this be so? There are several reasons.

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First, Oslo led Israel to sideline its own claim to the West Bank [Judea and Samaria] and Gaza, which all Israeli governments (and international Jewish leaders) had stressed to some extent before 1993. Though there had long been a lively debate as to whether Israel ought to hold on to these territories in practice, until 1993 all sides were ready to assert that it had a valid claim to them in principle. The argument in favor of Israel’s right to sovereignty there was simple: these territories are the historic Jewish homeland, the heart of the biblical Jewish kingdom. They were explicitly allotted to the future Jewish state by the 1922 League of Nations Mandate, which was never legally superseded. Although the 1947 UN partition plan allotted part of the land to a putative Arab state—a plan that Palestinians and other Arabs rejected as a matter of principle—it was merely a nonbinding “recommendation” (as its own language stated). Thus once the Arabs rejected it, the measure had no more validity than any other unsigned deal. Nor did any sovereign state ever replace the Mandate on this territory: though Jordan and Egypt conquered the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, in 1948, neither conquest was ever internationally recognized. Legally, therefore, the territories remained stateless lands whose ownership is disputed; over time, the Palestinians simply replaced Egypt and Jordan as the Arab claimants.

None of this precludes an Israeli cession of these areas; countries often waive territorial claims to secure peace agreements. But only if Israel has a valid claim can the act of ceding these lands be a “painful concession” that could arouse sympathy and admiration from the world. If Israel has no claim, it is nothing but a thief. And no one would admire a thief for returning some, but not all, of his stolen property, or for offering to return some, but still not all, of the rest if granted sufficient compensation. Such behavior would be universally condemned. Indeed, if Israel has no claim to this land, even conditioning withdrawal on an end to Palestinian terror becomes harder to justify. If the land is Israel’s, Israel can obviously refuse to cede it unless it receives peace in exchange. But if the land belongs to the Palestinians, many might argue that it should be returned unconditionally.

This latter notion, however, is precisely the picture Israeli discourse has increasingly painted since 1993. Perhaps because pro-Oslo Israelis viewed Israel’s own rights as too self-evident to need restating, they inevitably focused on defending the Oslo accord’s new and domestically controversial claim: that Palestinians, too, have “legitimate and political rights” in the West Bank and Gaza. Thus, for instance, Labor party chairman (and later prime minister) Ehud Barak said in a 1998 television interview that had he been a Palestinian, he would have joined a terrorist organization, because “there is legitimacy for a Palestinian to fight.” Such claims were rarely heard from mainstream Israelis prior to 1993: while the moderate Left had always favored ceding territory, it historically framed this as a necessity of peacemaking rather than a matter of Arab rights.

Moreover, as repeated Israeli concessions brought only more Palestinian terror, making them harder to justify in the name of peace, even right-of-center Israeli leaders increasingly justified them in the language of Palestinian rights. Then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, for instance, stunned the Knesset in 2003 by declaring, “I think the idea that it is possible to continue keeping 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation—yes, it is occupation, you might not like the word, but what is happening is occupation—is bad for Israel, and bad for the Palestinians.”

But if Palestinians have “legitimate rights” to this land, it must belong to them. And if Israel is “occupying” the land, it must not belong to Israel. That, in plain English, is what “rights” and “occupation” mean.

The problem was exacerbated by Sharon’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and Ehud Olmert’s election the following year on a platform of unilaterally quitting most of the West Bank. Until then, Israel had deemed evicting settlers from their homes a personal and national tragedy that merited sympathy and compensation. But then two successive Israeli prime ministers declared that for both demographic and security reasons, uprooting settlements was an Israeli interest. A plurality of Israelis even endorsed this view in a national election. And if so, dismantling settlements cannot be a “painful concession” for which Israel deserves to be rewarded.

Granted, much of the world was disposed to accept the Palestinian claim even before Oslo. But as the sage Hillel famously said 2,000 years ago, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Oslo marked the moment when Israel stopped defending its own claim to the West Bank and Gaza and instead increasingly endorsed the Palestinian claim. And with no competing narrative to challenge it any longer, the view of Israel as a thief, with all its attendant consequences, has gained unprecedented traction.

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This alone would be devastating to Israel’s image. But the problem has been compounded by another unanticipated consequence of Oslo: the territorial withdrawals it entailed have resulted not only in more dead Israelis but also in more dead Palestinians. Nothing undermines a country’s image more quickly than pictures of bleeding victims recycled endlessly on television and computer screens. That is precisely why worldwide protests against both the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last January—operations aimed at halting terror launched from territory Israel had evacuated to the last inch—drew far larger crowds than protests against Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank. Death causes more outrage than occupation.

Statistics compiled by B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) clearly reveal the correlation between withdrawals and increased Palestinian fatalities. During the first intifada, from 1987 through 1993, when Israel controlled the territories, Israeli forces killed 1,070 Palestinians. That is only slightly more than the 1,015 killed in a single year (September 2001 to August 2002) of the second intifada, which erupted after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had already left much of Gaza and the West Bank, and less than 30 percent of the 3,713 killed during a six-year period of the second intifada. Indeed, it is fewer than the number killed in just three weeks in the January 2009 Gaza war: the lowest estimate of Palestinian fatalities, which comes from the IDF, is 1,166.

Moreover, Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank, which peaked at 667 in the second intifada’s second year (September 2001 to August 2002), dropped dramatically after Israel reoccupied this territory in Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. They plunged by almost two-thirds in the third year, to 242, then to 199 in the fourth, 105 to 125 in each of the next three, and 52 in the eighth, which ended in September 2008 (B’Tselem has yet to publish statistics for 2009). In Gaza, by contrast, Palestinian fatalities soared after Israel withdrew in August 2005. In fact, the second intifada’s eighth year, which produced the lowest number of West Bank fatalities since the fighting began, produced the highest number of deaths in Gaza—532, almost 100 more than the previous worst year. And the following year was worse yet: the number of Gazans killed during the January 2009 war alone—1,166 (at least)—is seven times the 162 killed in Gaza’s single worst month until then.

This data flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which holds that a continuous IDF presence increases the likelihood of deadly encounters. But when the IDF controls an area, it can usually arrest suspected terrorists rather than kill them. Israel cannot arrest suspects in territory it has ceded to Palestinian control. Thus the only way to fight terror emanating from territory the IDF has quit is by military means—namely, killing the terrorists. And military action inevitably involves collateral civilian casualties as well. That is true even of the most civilian-friendly form of military action, precision aerial bombing. Haaretz reported that by 2007, the IDF had reduced collateral civilian deaths to less than 3 percent of all those killed in Israeli air strikes. Yet, since human beings are imperfect, some mishaps will always occur: faulty intelligence will leave the army unaware of nearby civilians, or pilot error might send a bomb off course. And ground operations are far deadlier: just as the Gaza war was the worst month of the intifada for Gazans, so was Israel’s April 2002 incursion into the West Bank for residents of that territory, with a Palestinian fatality level 50 percent higher than in the second-worst month.

Clearly, withdrawals would not have required military action, with its resultant Palestinian casualties, had the Palestinians not turned every bit of territory they received into a launching pad for terror attacks. But that is exactly what they have done. In the first two and a half years after Oslo, Palestinian terrorists killed more Israelis than they had in the preceding decade. In 2000-04, according to the Shin Bet security service, Israel’s terror-related casualties exceeded those of the preceding 53 years. And between the mid-2005 disengagement from Gaza and the 2009 war, Gazan terrorists fired almost 6,000 rockets and mortars at southern Israel, according to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. Hence, every withdrawal has faced Israel with a stark choice: sit with folded hands while its citizens are attacked, or take military action that will inevitably produce Palestinian casualties and consequent international outrage.

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Israeli withdrawals have also had another unintended consequence: they have energized anti-Israel radicals who, despite their small numbers, have contributed greatly to the anti-Israel climate by propelling the boycott and divestment movement. Because groups such as labor unions and churches are generally viewed positively, when a wide variety of such groups throughout the West all start targeting one particular country for boycott and divestment, people without any prior knowledge of the facts might naturally assume that the accused country must indeed be guilty to merit such treatment. What those people fail to realize is that boycotts and divestments are usually approved not by an organization’s full membership but by a handful of activists, which enables a few radicals to hijack the debate. When the British lecturers’ union, NATFHE, approved an academic boycott of Israel at its annual conference in May 2006, for instance, the New York Times noted that only 198 of its 67,000 members actually voted, and of those, a bare majority—106—-voted in favor. Theoretically, these delegates represent the members. In practice, few members choose delegates based on their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; most have more pressing concerns.

And while boycott initiatives are popularly viewed nowadays as a response to Israeli “war crimes,” not only did most such boycotts predate the major military operations of 2006 and 2009, but many were launched during periods when Israel was seemingly moving rapidly toward withdrawal. After Israel removed every last settler and soldier from Gaza in August 2005, for instance, Ehud Olmert ran for prime minister on a platform of doing the same in most of the West Bank. Polls showed him winning the March 2006 election handily, which he did. Hence, until the Second Lebanon War erupted in July 2006, one might have expected the boycotters to rest on their laurels. Instead, this period witnessed an unprecedented spate of high-profile boycott activity, including an article headlined “Boycott Israel” in the prestigious magazine published by the Davos World Economic Forum, a cover story in the Guardian entitled “Israel and Apartheid: A Special Report,” the adoption of a commercial boycott by the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ Ontario chapter, and the British academic boycott.

This seemingly counterintuitive behavior has a simple explanation: among anti-Israel radicals, Israel’s increasingly frantic pursuit of peace has aroused not admiration but rather the instincts of a predator scenting blood. Over the past 16 years, even as Palestinian positions have remained unchanged, Israel has repeatedly ditched red lines that enjoyed massive consensus pre-Oslo, including no negotiations with terrorist organizations, no Palestinian state, no concessions on Jerusalem, no negotiations or withdrawals under fire, and no unilateral pullbacks. Worse, these retreats occurred in exchange for ever diminishing returns, and often in response to pressure. This convinced the radicals (and Palestinians as well) that Israel could be pressured into abandoning any red line if the heat was turned high enough. Hence the Ontario boycott, for instance, is explicitly designed to continue until Israel grants a Palestinian “right of return,” thereby requiring Israel to commit demographic suicide.

The retreats from Israel’s previous positions began the minute Oslo was signed. The last Israeli cession of territory—the return of Sinai to Egypt in 1982, and the subsequent handover of the Taba resort seven years later—followed a nine-year cease-fire and a full-fledged peace treaty backed by international guarantees, including a multinational force in Sinai. In contrast, Israel’s 1994 handover of Gaza and Jericho to the PLO came in the wake of six years of terrorist violence (the first intifada) and a mere interim agreement, with no international guarantees. The Palestinians promptly violated their side of the Oslo deal, which was to end terror: in the 30 months after Oslo, as previously noted, Palestinian terrorists killed more Israelis than they had during the entire preceding decade. Yet in 1995-97, due in part to American pressure, Israel transferred six more West Bank cities to the Palestinian Authority (PA), in exchange for nothing but renewed Palestinian pledges to end violence. In July 2000, Israel offered the Palestinians some 88 percent of the territories, including most of East Jerusalem. The Palestinians responded by launching the second intifada. But despite this gross violation of Oslo, Israel capitulated to American and international pressure and offered more territory, including the Temple Mount, in Washington in December 2000 and at the Taba talks in January 2001.

Over the next four years, Palestinian terror claimed more Israeli victims than in all the years from 1947 through 2000. Yet international pressure for Israeli concessions continued, and Israel again capitulated: in August 2005, it evacuated 25 settlements—something it had previously conditioned on a full-fledged peace treaty—for no recompense at all. And when the Palestinians responded with daily rocket fire from evacuated Gaza, as well as with a landslide electoral victory for Hamas, Israel responded by electing Olmert, who campaigned on a promise of unilaterally quitting most of the West Bank and evicting some 80,000 settlers (10 times the number removed from Gaza). Finally, when the ongoing barrages from Gaza and the Second Lebanon War combined to kill that plan, Olmert’s response was to sweeten Israel’s final-status offer. He proposed a withdrawal from 94 percent of the West Bank; territorial swaps to compensate for the remainder; international Muslim control over Jerusalem’s holy sites; and the resettlement of several thousand Palestinian refugees in Israel.

To Israelis, these ever growing concessions with no quid pro quo reflect the depth of their desire for peace. But to their enemies, they signal panic—a conclusion reinforced by verbal declarations like Olmert’s famous 2005 statement to the Israel Policy Forum that Israel “desperately needs” peace because “we are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies.” Or his even more shocking statement to Haaretz in November 2007 that if “the two-state solution collapses . . . the State of Israel is finished.” If Israelis wrongly believe that their country’s survival depends on reaching a deal, they are clearly vulnerable to being pressured into concessions that really will endanger its survival. Sixteen years of unrequited concessions have convinced anti-Israel radicals that Israel is indeed vulnerable to this kind of pressure. Thus Israel’s very pursuit of peace has spurred its enemies to go for the jugular.

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Yet this desperate quest for peace also failed to win Israel points among the general public, because each new initiative raised new hopes of a peace that was in fact never achievable. And it is human nature to be angrier over disappointed hope than over having never hoped at all. What is worse is the very fact that whenever negotiations broke down, it was Israel, rather than the Palestinian side, that came back with a better offer, created the impression that both sides thought peace would be achievable if Israel just gave enough. Thus the lack of peace must be Israel’s fault.

In fact, though, it became clear almost immediately after the Oslo deal was signed that peace was unachievable, because Israel’s initial territorial concessions produced such a sharp rise in terrorist violence. Whether this stemmed from Yasir Arafat’s unwillingness to control terror or his inability to do so was irrelevant: if ceding land for peace instead produced war, there were no grounds for believing that ceding more land, as Oslo required, would produce anything but more war.

Nor did this pattern change after Mahmoud Abbas replaced Arafat in 2004. Even during Abbas’s year in sole control of the PA, before Hamas triumphed in the Palestinian elections in 2006, terror continued. According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Palestinians killed 54 Israelis and wounded 484 that year (2005), while nonfatal attacks numbered in the thousands, including 1,059 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza. The rocket attacks are particularly significant, because the IDF left Gaza in August 2005, which meant Abbas could not accuse Israeli forces of impeding his efforts there. Yet not only did he never order his own forces to stop the attacks, he explicitly and repeatedly declared that he never woulddo so. Indeed, he began cracking down on Hamas only in 2007, after the Islamic group’s takeover of Gaza made him realize that it threatened his own power, and has repeatedly offered to reverse this crackdown as part of a proposed reconciliation with Hamas (which Hamas has so far rejected). Again, it makes no difference whether he was genuinely reluctant or merely felt powerless: Israel cannot cede land if that land will become a base for terror attacks against it.

Equally important, however, is that Palestinian negotiating positions preclude any deal. While it was initially plausible to believe that these positions would eventually moderate, a decade and a half with no movement whatsoever has proved otherwise. No Israeli government, for instance, could sign a deal forfeiting all Israeli connection to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, to which Jews have prayed three times a day for millennia. To do so would be cultural and spiritual suicide. But even worse is the Palestinians’ insistence on a “right of return” to Israel for 4.7 million descendants of Palestinian refugees (according to the UN’s almost certainly inflated figure). Added to Israel’s 1.5 million Arab citizens, these “refugees” would outnumber its 5.6 million Jews and could thereby simply vote the Jewish state out of existence. That would not be cultural and spiritual suicide but actual physical suicide. And how can peace even be seriously negotiated with someone who insists that its price is your disappearance from the map?

Yet rather than stating clearly that peace is not and never will be possible unless the Palestinians end terror and stop insisting that any deal result in the Jewish state’s eradication, Israeli prime ministers never stopped assuring their fellow citizens and the world that a deal was possible. It began with Yitzhak Rabin, who instead of acknowledging that the upsurge in terror proved Oslo a failure began incanting a mantra about fighting terror as if there were no negotiations, and negotiating as if there were no terror. The implication was clear: terror is not an insurmountable obstacle; peace is still achievable.

In his first go-round as prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu continued the illusion: he not only campaigned in 1996 on a slogan of bringing “peace with security,” again implying that peace was possible, but he continued negotiating with, and ceding territory to, Arafat. These would have been reasonable moves in the context of a viable peace process, but would be senseless if peace were actually unachievable and territorial concessions only produced more terror. To the uninformed, the obvious conclusion was that peace was achievable—in which case Netanyahu’s visible distaste for both negotiations and concessions would certainly be an impediment.

Similarly, when Palestinians responded to Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s July 2000 offer with the second intifada, Barak did not declare peace unachievable; he went to Washington and Taba and offered additional concessions. Again, the implication was that he still thought peace was possible if he offered enough—so if peace remained elusive, the fault must lie with Israel’s stinginess. Then, despite Abbas’s failure even to respond to Olmert’s far-reaching offer of September 2008 (Abbas remained mute for nine months, until long after Olmert had left office—finally telling the Washington Post that the offer was unacceptable), Olmert nevertheless told Haaretz in September 2009 that Abbas was not to blame for the talks’ failure and was still a partner. And today, in his second stint as prime minister, Netanyahu is again paying lip service to the idea that peace is achievable.

American and European leaders are also guilty of endlessly proclaiming that peace is achievable, even though they know better (this knowledge explains why most European leaders are less hostile to Israel than their publics). But they cannot be more Catholic than the pope. As long as Israel’s government maintains this fiction, other world leaders can do no less. And so the world is constantly being told that peace is around the corner only to be constantly disappointed, which inevitably produces frustration and rage. And even worse, Israel’s very efforts to achieve peace—its refusal to acknowledge that peace is unachievable, its habit of responding to every failure with a better offer— has led the world to conclude that Israel is to blame for the endless disappointments.

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Reversing the devastating damage Israel’s international standing has suffered since 1993 will be difficult at best. But it will not be possible at all unless Israel and its friends overseas understand that the desperate pursuit of peace is not the solution but the problem. Only then can Israel and its supporters halt the destructive behavior of the past 16 years and start doing what is needed to reverse the decline.

First, Israel and its supporters must reiterate Israel’s own claim to the territories at every opportunity. While many have grown accustomed to disavowing Israel’s right to this land, Israelis of all political stripes were outraged by President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, in which the only justification for the existence of a Jewish state was assumed to be the Holocaust—while the Jews’ historical claim to the land of Israel was thrown down the memory hole. By taking this stand, Obama may have unwittingly provided the impetus for reviving a broad-based assertion of Jewish rights. For instance, on July 17, the left-wing Haaretz’s star columnist Yoel Marcus wrote that Obama’s “disregard of our historical connection to the land of Israel” was “extremely upsetting.” Marcus concluded that “as a leader who aspires to solve the problems of the world through dialogue, we expect him to come to Israel and declare here courageously, before the entire world, that our connection to this land began long before the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Holocaust, and that 4,000 years ago, Jews already stood on the ground where he now stands.” If even a hard-core Oslo supporter such as Marcus can be provoked into reasserting Israel’s claim to the land, then there is hope for reviving such sentiments across the Israeli political spectrum.

Second, Israel must cede no more land until the Palestinians prove they can and will keep it from becoming a base for anti-Israel terror. And if rocket fire from Gaza resumes, Israel will have to consider reoccupying it, as that may be the only alternative to periodic wars that inevitably cause heavy Palestinian casualties. There is not currently much of an appetite for such a course of action within Israel, but that could easily change if the rocket barrages resume, just as Israelis’ initial reluctance to return to the West Bank was swept aside by escalating terror from that territory in the early part of this decade. And while a return to Gaza would certainly cause an initial wave of outrage abroad, so did Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, when Israeli troops returned to Palestinian cities in the West Bank following a wave of deadly suicide bombings. Yet that criticism died down fairly quickly, and today Israel hears very few complaints about the IDF’s ongoing total control over the West Bank. What it does hear complaints about, on an almost daily basis, from both world leaders and human-rights activists, is evacuated Gaza—not just Israel’s military operations there but also the blockade, another defensive measure aimed at compensating for the absence of troops. So it seems reasonable to assume that a reoccupation of Gaza would follow the same pattern: initial outrage that would gradually die down as the Palestinian death toll dropped and life in Gaza improved, thanks to the end of the blockade, resumption of trade across the border, and improved employment opportunities.

Third, Israel and its supporters must start telling the truth about the impossibility of peace at present—and about the reasons for the impasse. This is by far the hardest task for those seeking to change the “peace process” culture. And that is true not just for the international arena but for Israeli domestic opinion as well. Most Israelis know perfectly well that peace is not currently possible, and why, but they still think it is essential to speak as if this were not true. Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s leadership represents a unique opportunity because, in marked contrast to most Israeli politicians, serving as the national explainer is something at which he excels. Both his speech at Bar-Ilan University in June 2009—where he outlined his approach to the peace process—and his address to the United Nations General Assembly in October struck a real chord with mainstream Israelis. Netanyahu is capable of explaining, in a way Israelis can readily understand, why his country’s national discourse about peace needs to change. The same principle applies to overseas opinion; in 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, Netanyahu was not even a member of the government, but he was still one of the most sought-after, if not the most sought-after, Israeli interviewees by the foreign media. This is a moment in history when someone must finally start telling the world the truth about the situation, and the prime minister is uniquely qualified to do it.

Finally, Israel must stop projecting a sense of panic, through both words and deeds, which merely emboldens its enemies. Israel has not only survived for 61 years despite the absence of peace; it has thrived. Its population has increased more than seven-fold; its per capita income has risen nine-fold; it has maintained a strong democracy in a region where democracy is otherwise unknown. And it can continue surviving and thriving without peace for as long as necessary.

That is, unless its own mistakes destroy it. Right now, that is what is happening: Israel’s growing pariah status poses a far more serious long-term danger to its survival than any extant military threat. Yet because this pariah status is largely due to its own actions, Israel has the power to reverse the trend. That process must begin with recognizing where the problem truly lies.

Evelyn Gordon is a journalist living in Israel.

Al-Ahram credits Meir Dagan with single-handedly stalling Iranian nuclear program for eight years

By Roee Nahmias, www.YNetNews.com

Egypt’s Al-Ahram reported last weekend that Iran was being prevented from developing staggering nuclear capabilities by Israel’s Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, whom the paper dubbed “Israel’s superman.”

“The Iranians definitely know who is behind the assassination of nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi in Tehran on Tuesday. Every Iranian official understands the magic word – Dagan. Without this man the Iranian nuclear program would have taken off years ago,” the report says.

“The head of the Israeli Mossad, unknown to many because he works in silence and away from the media tumult, has delivered painful blows to the Iranian program over the past eight years and caused it to stall despite the hubbub surrounding it. This fact has made Dagan the superman of the Jewish state.”

The report was written by the paper’s former chief of Gaza Strip affairs, Ashraf Abu al-Haul.

“Those who follow occurrences within Israel know that the current Mossad chief has achieved things no one could have imagined in everything from the Iranian nuclear program and the capabilities of the Syrian army to Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. However he has never published his activities, and publications have always come from the other side,” he wrote.

Al-Haul credits Dagan with “very brave actions taken in the Middle East,” including the assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008, the bombing of the Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007, and a strike on an arms convoy headed from Iran to Gaza through Sudan last year.

Who Was Jesus’ Grandfather?

What the two genealogies of Christ, found in Matthew and Luke, are really trying to say.

By Grant Osborne, www.ChristianityToday.com

Few aspects of the Bible seem less relevant to daily life than genealogies. Yet for Gospel writers Matthew and Luke, they were absolutely essential for understanding Jesus.

Genealogies fulfilled multiple purposes in the ancient world. Society was organized around kinship patterns, so every family needed lists that described their ancestral pedigree. Such family trees determined a person’s social relationships. For instance, two families planning the marriage of their children would compare family lines to check kinship ties to ensure the two were “compatible.” And rulers used genealogies to justify their power, rank, and status.

So why are the genealogical trees in Matthew and Luke so different? Matthew begins his Gospel with Jesus’ genealogy, while Luke places it, strangely, between Jesus’ baptism and temptation. Matthew has an ascending list, moving from Abraham up to Jesus, while Luke has a descending list, moving from Jesus down to Adam. Matthew’s list is partial; Luke’s is complete. And most significantly, while the two lists are virtually identical from Abraham to David, they diverge greatly from David to Jesus.

Several solutions have been proposed to explain the differences. Martin Luther said that Matthew gives Joseph’s line and Luke Mary’s line. Others, such as Tertullian, reversed this. Yet the explanation fails in both directions, because the Gospels clearly state that they are listing Joseph’s line (Matt. 1:16; Luke 3:23). Julius Africanus proposed that Matthew follows Jesus’ natural descent and Luke his legal descent. Neither Gospel indicates such an approach, though, and it is best to allow the authors to speak for themselves.

Examining each genealogy closely reveals the authors’ different purposes. Matthew’s list resembles those used by rulers to justify their rank and status, and by families to determine connections to a common ancestor. Matthew arranges his genealogy into three groups of 14 names each. In Jewish gematria—a kind of numerology stemming from the fact that letters of the Hebrew alphabet were also numbers—names have numerical value. The three consonants for David add up to 14. So Matthew underscores Jesus’ kingly ancestry by working in groups of David, or 14.

Matthew portrays Jesus as the long-awaited Savior whose pedigree demonstrates His claim to be the Son of David and royal Messiah. Another unique feature of his genealogy is the presence of four women—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Each had a scandalous aspect of her life, thus paving the way for Mary as an unwed mother. And all were (or were married to) gentiles, foreshadowing the gentile mission so important in Matthew’s Gospel.

Luke, on the other hand, begins his genealogy with “the son, so it was thought, of Joseph” (3:23), and concludes with “the son of God” (3:38). At Jesus’ baptism, God declares Jesus “my Son” (3:22), and Jesus’ temptation begins with Satan recognizing Him as “the Son of God” (4:3). Placed between Jesus’ baptism and temptation, Luke’s genealogy is meant to proclaim that Jesus is, indeed, God’s only Son.

Luke does not group the names like Matthew does but provides a simple succession of ancestors. The list contains many more common names (some of which we know nothing about) and seems to underscore Jesus’ humanity as well as his divine Sonship. Moreover, by going all the way back to Adam (the ancestor of all humanity), Luke maintains a universal thrust, emphasizing that Jesus came for all mankind. The list ends with Adam, and then Luke moves into the story of Jesus’ encounter with Satan in the wilderness, in which Jesus rises above temptation as Adam did not. The message is clear: In Jesus, all human beings find their sins overcome.

Are there difficulties in reconciling the genealogies? Can they be harmonized? The answer in both cases is yes. Matthew’s and Luke’s lists stem largely from Old Testament genealogies (see Gen. 10-11 and 1 Chron. 1-3) and Jewish sources, and the differences between the names occur largely because each evangelist was selective in whom he included.

After Nathan in Luke’s account and after Zerubbabel in Matthew’s, no names adhere to other biblical passages, but few doubt that both lists are following traditional sources. We may never know whether Jesus’ paternal grandfather through Joseph was Jacob (Matt. 1:15) or Heli (Luke 3:23b), and it could well be that they were brothers, with Heli the uncle and legal line of Jesus, and Jacob the physical line. Either way, each genealogy reveals something about Jesus.

Grant Osborne is professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.

www.JTA.org

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel has sent a delegation of experts to Haiti and U.S. Jewish groups are collecting donations in the aftermath of a massive earthquake.

The Israel group sent to the Caribbean nation includes engineering, medical, logistics, and rescue experts from the Israel Defense Forces’ Home Front Command.

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Tuesday afternoon was the strongest in Haiti in 200 years. The National Palace and United Nations peacekeeper headquarters were among the many buildings that suffered damage.

Israel’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic, who also serves Haiti, said Wednesday morning that the embassy had not been able to reach Jewish families in Haiti due to downed telephone lines.

The Israel Forum for International Humanitarian Aid, a coordinating body of Israeli and Jewish organizations and other interested parties based in Israel, also was set to dispatch a 12-man search-and-rescue team, which includes emergency medical staff. IsraAID also was considering sending a field hospital, including doctors and medical equipment, as well as humanitarian aid.

By Roger Boyes, www.TimesOnline.co.uk

The sign was broken into three pieces.

A former leading European neo-Nazi has claimed that he was the middleman in the theft of the Auschwitz sign bearing the three most powerful words from the Holocaust: “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

According to Polish and Swedish investigators, the theft was organised by Anders Hoegstrom — who set up the virulently anti-immigrant National Socialist Front in Sweden in the 1990s. “My role was to get the sign in Poland,” he told the Swedish tabloid Expressen. “I was the middleman and was supposed to take care of the sale.”

Mr Hoegstrom claims that he turned himself in to the Swedish authorities when he suddenly became aware that the sign was to be sold to a collector and the money used to fund a campaign to disrupt the Swedish election campaign this year, if necessary with violence.

“That was not something I wanted to be involved in or carry out in any way,” he said.

The wrought-iron lettering — meaning Work Sets You Free — was nailed by the Nazis to the gate leading into the concentration camp where more than a million Jews were killed.

The sign was stolen last month by a gang of five Poles, apparently to be shipped to Sweden and then sold. It has since been recovered and the gang believed to be responsible is under arrest.

The Swedish intelligence agency SaePo has confirmed that it is investigating reports of a neo-Nazi plot to blow up the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, and the home of the Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt. The leader of the Polish gang, named only as Marcin A by the Polish authorities, got to know Mr Hoegstrom two years ago while doing odd jobs on his family estate in southern Sweden.

When Mr A returned to his small building company in Poland, the two men stayed in touch.

Last autumn Mr A received word from Sweden that he should put together a group of experienced thieves to unscrew the sign and smuggle it out of the country.

The gang, aged between 25 and 39, with nicknames such as “Old Mouse” and “Sparrow”, realised that it was out of its depth when the theft on December 18 prompted an international outcry and a nationwide manhunt. The sign had been broken into three parts and hidden in woodland. Communication was reportedly then made between the Poles and Mr Hoegstrom, and the Swede decided to turn himself in to the police.

“I contacted the police immediately as soon as the sign was stolen and gave them all the information I had,” he said. “I haven’t committed any crime. I was the one who saw to it that the sign was found.”

The plot then thickens and indeed begins to resemble the bestselling thrillers of Stieg Larsson, who first made his name as a journalist investigating the far-right fringe in Swedish politics. Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement has shown itself capable of violence in the past. In 1999, for example, far-right attackers shot the trade unionist Bjoern Soederberg.

It was this and other attacks that spurred the journalistic endeavours of Mr Larsson — who worked for a while as the Scandinavian correspondent for the Britsh anti-fascist magazine Searchlight — and persuaded Mr Hoegstrom to change sides.

He renounced his party, which has since splintered and renamed itself, and now co-operates with a group that helps former neo-Nazis to return to normal life.

This leaves several questions unanswered. Why should Mr Hoegstrom be involved in such a high-profile and apparently ideologically driven theft if he has renounced his ways? Who was being lined up to be the final buyer of the sign? And who, if anybody, was really trying to raise cash to blow up parliament?

By Ben Harris, www.JTA.org

Israeli warplanes struck four targets in the Gaza Strip in response to a rocket that landed near Ashkelon.

The Israel Defense Forces said the targets included several smuggling tunnels in southern Gaza, as well as a weapons manufacturing facility, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The January 7 night raid followed the firing of a Katyusha rocket at the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. The rocket caused no casualties.

Palestinians said one person was killed and two wounded in the strikes.

There are thought to be hundreds of tunnels along the border.

By Christian Fraser, news.BBC.co.uk

Egypt has begun constructing a huge metal wall along its border with the Gaza Strip as it attempts to cut smuggling tunnels, the BBC has learned. When it is finished the wall will be 6-7 miles long and will extend 60 feet below the surface.

The Egyptians are being helped by American army engineers, who the BBC understands have designed the wall. The plan has been shrouded in secrecy, with no comment or confirmation from the Egyptian government. The wall will take 18 months to complete.

For weeks local farmers have noticed more activity at the border where trees were being cut down, but very few of them were aware that a barrier was being built.

‘Impenetrable’

That is because the barrier, made of super-strength steel, has been hidden deep underground.

The BBC has been told that it was manufactured in the U.S., that it fits together in similar fashion to a jigsaw, and that it has been tested to ensure it is bomb proof. U.S. officials have though denied to the BBC that they are involved in building or supplying the wall. The reports say the wall cannot be cut or melted – in short it is impenetrable.

Intelligence sources in Egypt say the barrier is being sunk close to the perimeter wall that already exists. They claim two-and-a-half miles of the wall has already been completed north of the Rafah crossing, with work now beginning to the south.

The land beneath Egypt and Gaza resembles a Swiss cheese, full of holes and tunnels through which the Palestinians smuggle the everyday items they are denied by the blockade. But the Israelis say the tunnels are also used to smuggle people, weapons, and the components of the rockets that are fired at southern Israeli towns. The wall is not expected to stop all the smuggling, but it will force the Palestinians to go deeper and it will likely cut the hundreds of superficial tunnels closer to the surface that are used to move the bulk of the goods.

Gazans protest barrier at Rafah border crossing with Egypt

Gazans protest barrier at border with Egypt

This excerpt complements information contained in the February 2010 Personal Letter archived on this website. To receive our pamphlet “28 Ways You Can Help Israel,” please send your name and address to staff@levitt.com.

By George Berkin, blog.

America—and the West—should think long and hard before possibly making a regrettable mistake – abandoning Israel. Neighboring Iran seems bent on obtaining nuclear weapons, and threatens to use them against Israel. Israel announced a few months ago that it might take unilateral action if Iranian plans to build nuclear weapons are not derailed. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently said that he won’t come clean about Iran’s nuclear program until the U.S. gets rid of its atomic arsenal.

Western support for Israel is jeopardized by the following:

Support for Israel may fade as the Holocaust begins to fade from memory. That tragic history is now six decades old, and there are fewer and fewer survivors of the Nazi wickedness. For decades, the testimony of those survivors has served as a living reminder of our failure to respond promptly to anti-Semitism, and our need to support Israel in the face of anti-Jewish hostility. The loss of the living witness does not bode well.

An economic downturn may also weaken support for Israel, especially if the downturn includes a spike in the price of Arab-produced oil. Unfortunately, economic fears often cause general good will to disappear. Many people who support Israel if it doesn’t cost them anything extra at the gas pump may turn sour if gasoline and heating oil prices go up.

Then, if a terrorist strike destroys an American (or other Western) city, there may well be a huge outcry for the affected country to retreat from the international stage. This will be crucial if it is America. The pressure will be to abandon any overseas commitments, including Israel. The mood may turn very ugly, especially if support for Israel is seen as one so-called “reason” for the strike.

Why, in light of all this, is support for Israel so crucial for America’s and the West’s future? There are lots of reasons, both for Believers and for secular policymakers. From a biblical perspective, the Jewish people are God’s chosen people and Israel is the piece of real estate that God has set his special favor upon. The biblical text promises that God will bless those who bless Israel. (Genesis 12:1-3)

From that perspective, it is a good thing to get in line with the divine purpose. It’s no coincidence that Evangelicals worldwide are among the strongest supporters of Israel.

From a secular perspective, it is important to support Israel because we are in the habit of supporting legitimate governments. By any decent reckoning, Israel is a legitimate government, much as is America or Germany or Australia. (Israel has always considered its neighbors, despite their undemocratic traditions, to be legitimate governments, and has thus sought to live and let live. Meanwhile, many Arab leaders, captured by radical religious ideas, have continued to poison relations by publicly calling for Israel’s destruction.)

Were America and the West not to support Israel, a legitimate government, it would give tacit approval to those who would undermine other legitimate governments, including our own.

With or without help from America and the West, Israel is worth supporting because it is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East. In a sea of anti-Western nations, Israel holds “American/Western” values (which are biblical, Judeo-Christian values). A diminished Israel would only embolden Islamic radicals in their war against the West. Plainly speaking, our survival is tied to Israel’s survival.

Those radicals, be it understood, mean business. After Ahmadinejad came to power in 2004, the Iranian leader declared himself committed to destroying Israel and bringing in the “Mahdi”—the 12th Imam, the Islamic “messiah.”

But Israel is unlikely to stand by, contemplating its own destruction.

As leaked in The Times of London last year, the Saudis have given Israel permission to fly over Saudi Arabia in an airstrike against Iran. That “flyover” is not outside the realm of possibility. The Saudis dislike Iran because the Saudis are Sunni Muslims, while Iran is Shiite Muslim. Theirs is a rivalry over which group is the “true” Islam, and those two factions have been fighting since the founding of Islam more than a dozen centuries ago. If the Israelis use the Saudi route to take out the nuclear facilities in Iran, the Saudis will be rid of their enemies (while blaming “the Jews” as a cover).

With Israel determined to defend itself in a preemptive manner, and events moving rapidly, it would be wise for American and other Western policymakers to think proactively – so as to not be merely in “reactive” mode.

George Berkin, a graduate of Columbia University (degree in history and Russian studies) was a Star-Ledger (NJ) reporter for nearly 15 years.

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By Michael Valpy, www.GlobeandMail.com

The six-month exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls closed January 3 in Toronto, with scholars baffled by the Jordanian government’s last-minute request to Canada to stop the ancient manuscripts from going back to Israel.

The request, delivered to the Canadian chargé d’affaires in the Jordanian capital of Amman, underscores the tortuous history of the region, where custody of the 2,000-year-old fragments of Jewish spiritual writings has become entangled in the politics and warfare of perhaps the world’s most fought over piece of geography.

Since the opening of the exhibit last June – at the Royal Ontario Museum in partnership with the Israeli Antiquities Authority – the huge lineups and laudatory reviews of the display have received extensive coverage in news media both inside and outside Canada.

However, Jordan waited until two weeks ago to ask Canada to take custody of the scrolls in keeping with requirements of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, an international protocol to which Canada is a signatory.

Jordan claims Israel seized the scrolls from a Jerusalem museum under Jordanian control in the Six-Day War of 1967.

The Canadian government has replied by saying Jordan, Israel, and the Palestine Authority should sort out who owns the scrolls and Ottawa will not intervene – a response which, legally, the Canadian government likely had no choice but to make, said Prof. Lawrence Schiffman, chair of New York University’s department of Hebrew and Judaic studies and a Dead Sea Scrolls specialist.

Ottawa, he said, was likely party to an indemnification agreement signed before the scrolls left Israel to come to Canada. The agreement – a conventional document protecting cultural property – would guarantee that Israel would get the scrolls back.

What has puzzled scrolls experts is not just Jordan’s timing but Jordan’s intervention. Why did it wait until just before the exhibit closed? And why did it make the request when 20 years ago it declared that its previous interests in the area, such as the museum in east Jerusalem that once housed some of the scrolls that came to Canada, were now in the hands of the Palestinian Authority.

Eibert Tigchelaar, professor of religion at both Florida State University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and a world-renowned scholar on the scrolls, said: “All I can say is that I am amazed that now not the Palestinian Authority but Jordan has entered the scene.”

In fact, Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper in April, saying that the Israelis had no authority to let the scrolls come to Canada, although it doesn’t appear that the Palestinians asked Ottawa to keep the scrolls now that they’re here.

In any event, the application to the scrolls of the 1954 Hague Convention is not clear-cut.

In 1947 – the year the scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd boy around the Qumran wadi (desert) northwest of the Dead Sea – the United Nations voted in favor of the partition of the former British Palestine Mandate into separate Jewish and Arab states with Jerusalem to be placed under international supervision.

The Palestinian Jewish leadership accepted the plan, but Palestinian Arabs didn’t, and the British refused to implement it because there wasn’t agreement on both sides. Jewish inhabitants of Palestine then unilaterally proclaimed the state of Israel in 1948. Troops from Jordan invaded and occupied Jerusalem, and Jordan annexed the West Bank where the scrolls had been found.

Thus the legal custodianship of the scrolls appears murky.

Moreover, Prof. Schiffman said the scrolls have been exhibited in several cities in Britain and the United States without any action taken by Jordan.

Hindy Najman, director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto, said, “The main principle here should be the proper conservation and exhibition of artifacts that were a part of Jewish history and that, as a result of the survival of Judaism and its influence on both Christianity and Islam, have become part of universal history.”

By Anav Silverman, www.FrontPageMag.com

Sderot New Year gathering

Sderot, Israel:  Hours before the new year, as hundreds of pro-Palestinian and -Arab demonstrators gathered at the Erez Crossing chanting “Katyushas on Ma’alot, Qassams on Sderot,” Israeli demonstrators at another Gaza viewpoint a few meters away gathered together to communicate a very different message.

“A New Decade for Hope and Peace,” was the theme behind the Sderot Rally for Hope, initiated by Sderot Media Center, a social media organization dedicated to bringing the voices of Sderot residents to the attention of the international community. Over 300 supporters, including Israeli youth and international students from France, Australia, South Africa, United States and Canada, were led by the Sderot mayor, David Buskila, and the Israeli Minister of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, Yuli Edelstein.

The marchers, carrying Israeli and international flags, along with signs that read “Children for Hope, Not for War,” trekked up a muddy hill to release white balloons with peace messages that children from a local Sderot Elementary School had written to Gaza children a day before.

Edelstein noted that the there has been a year of relative quiet following Operation Cast Lead, “with only 286 rockets fired at Israel.”

Sderot mayor, David Buskila, stated on the hilltop that “we want the leaders of Hamas to know, who  are unfortunately are still continuing to prepare for war, that Sderot residents come today in peace. And we will never leave this part of Israel.”

Earlier in the day, Hamas leader, Ismail Al-Haniyeh spoke to Gaza supporters gathered on both sides of the Erez Crossing via Israeli Arab MK Tal A-Sana’s mobile phone. Haniyeh stated that Palestinians would never stop fighting for a state and that Hamas had become even stronger thanks to international support. On the Gaza side, 100 participants in the Gaza Freedom March, mobilized by Jewish activist, Medea Benjamin, gathered together to show solidarity exclusively with Gazans.

Other anti-Israel rhetoric that came out of the Gaza solidarity demonstrations were directed from Israeli-Arab MK Jamal Zahalka, who stated in front of international press that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak “enjoys classical music and killing children in Gaza.”

Back in Sderot, marchers convened together in the only rocket-proof theater in the western Negev, to hear 22-year old Sderot resident, Moshe Amar perform John Lennon’s song, Imagine. Amar also shared his family’s harrowing experience following a direct Qassam explosion on their home two years on December 13, 2007, which destroyed their home. Both US President Barack Obama and US Senator John McCain visited the site of the Amars’ home during their US presidential campaign in 2008.

“Try to imagine that everything you love, the things that are supposed to be the most secure in your life– your home and your family—are directly terrorized,” said Amar to the audience. “For almost a year, we were left homeless. To this day, that Qassam attack still traumatizes my family—we will never be the same.”

The Sderot Rally for Hope also featured a former member of the Zambian Parliament, the Hon. Dr. Saviour Chishimba, who is also the 2011 Presidential candidate for Zambia’s United Progressive People’s Party.

Mr. Chishimba told the Sderot rally supporters that ” There is no single nation in the world that would allow a single rocket to be fired onto her soils and just watch without retaliation. Israel has a right to defend her territorial integrity and the right to exist. Hamas is a terrorist group, which should not be given power to govern anywhere in the world.”

“It is time that Africa stand up with Israel,” Mr. Chishimba concluded.

Range of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel