Saturday 14 November 2009

And the world is silent…


Three events, occurring over the same 48 hours, in three different locations:

In New York, the UN General Assembly endorsed the Goldstone Report into Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ against Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

In the waters off the coast of Cyprus, the Israeli navy intercepted a vessel containing 300 tons of weaponry and explosives destined for Hizballah, dispatched by Iran.

In Iran itself, mass crowds gathered to curse the ‘Great Satan’, the United States, on the 30th anniversary of the US Embassy hostage crisis which followed the revolution that overturned the Shah’s secular autocracy and ushered in the Islamist reign of the Ayatollahs.

Saturday 31 October 2009

Remembering Rabin


Last week Israel commemorated 14 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.  Predictably, there was much discussion in the press – and I dare say in the cafes and on the street – about his legacy.

The left have claimed his memory – he did, after all, begin the peace process with the Palestinians and make peace with Jordan.  However, prior to his (second) premiership in 1992 he was not part of the ‘Peace Now’, anti-occupation left.   Rabin was a tough, security-obsessed military man – a hero of the War of Independence, IDF Chief-Of Staff during the Six-Day War and a hawkish Defense Minister.

Saturday 3 October 2009

UN-surprising


Israel’s relationship with the United Nations has been turbulent to say the least.  In 1947 the UN General Assembly (GA) passed resolution 181 dividing what had been the British mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. At that point the new international body was a hero for the Jewish people, granting international legitimacy to the notion of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael.

However, the GA is entirely a reflection of its members – the nations of the world.  If in 1947 those countries were well-disposed towards Zionist aspirations, it did not set a precedent. The Soviet Union, which was the first country to voice support for the partition plan, would, within a decade of that vote, have thrown its support behind the Arab states committed to Israel’s destruction.  Before long, the Soviet bloc and the Arab and Muslim world could command an automatic anti-Israel majority in the GA.  The nadir was reached in 1975 when resolution 3379 was passed, equating Zionism with racism.  Although the resolution was rescinded in 1991 (against the backdrop of the USSR’s collapse and an Arab world courting American approval) it would serve as a warning of what was to follow. In the years since, Israel has been subjected to more condemnatory GA resolutions than any other country; while there has never been a single GA resolution condemning any act of violence or aggression by any Arab state or terror organization against Israel.

Saturday 27 June 2009

Return of the rejectionists


A quick history lesson.

1937: The British government recommends partitioning Palestine into an Arab state on roughly 80 percent of the land and a Jewish state on the rest.  The Zionist leadership accept this offer of a mini-state on 20 percent of the territory.  The Arabs refuse.

1947: The UN votes in favour of Resolution 181 – the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, this time roughly 50:50. The Jews accept, the Arabs refuse and, for good measure, declare that they will strangle the new Jewish state at birth.

Friday 15 May 2009

Beware the prophets of certainty

“There is something very un-Jewish about certainty…” So said the writer and thinker Rabbi Daniel Gordis during an event launching his new book Saving Israel.

I was reminded of his comment as I spent Shabbat a few days later with my friend’s family in Kfar Adumim, a settlement in the West Bank; potentially one of those evacuated as part of a final two-state solution with the Palestinians. Gordis was positing that, whether left-wing or right-wing, it is un-Jewish to be certain that our position is the correct one; we should always question.

The traditional left-wing position is that Kfar Adumim is one of many settlements built on land which Israel itself has not formally made part of the state and which prevent Palestinians from having a state of their own. The traditional right-wing view is that Kfar Adumim was built on territory that the Jewish people have a historical and religious connection to and which was not the sovereign territory of any other people when Israel took control of it in 1967.

Both of these statements are correct. But the certainty with which both sides proclaim their positions masks the more complex reality.

Friday 3 April 2009

Enemies of the state

Hanin Zouabi is the first female Member of Knesset for an Arab party. Despite this milestone, interviews she has given indicate that Arab women’s issues will not be her main focus. A protégé of the former leader of her Balad Party, Azmi Bishara, it appears that she shares his agenda – to campaign for the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state.

(Bishara is currently living in Jordan to escape his arrest by Israeli security services on charges of espionage and aiding enemies of the state, specifically Hizballah.)

Some 20 percent of the population of Israel is Arab, almost 1.5 million people. The vast majority of them are law-abiding and, though they frequently voice opposition to Israeli policies in the territories, the number of Israeli Arabs that have been involved in supporting or perpetrating acts of terrorism is tiny. Nevertheless, when prominent figures in the Arab community, like MKs, use their public platform as a pulpit from which to support antisemitic terror organisations and to call for Israel’s demise, it creates understandable fear of an Arab “fifth column” and strengthens extremists on the Jewish side.

Monday 9 February 2009

4 comments on the election...

1. Yisrael Beiteinu and ‘loyalty to the state’

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu claim that their policy of demanding that all Israeli citizens sign a pledge of “loyalty to the state” is not racist because while they have Israelis Arabs in mind with this proposal, it is not based on their ethnicity but their behavior – their suspected disloyalty. In this case, I wonder whether certain Jewish Israelis would also have a problem pledging their loyalty to the state. I am thinking in particular of those extremist West Bank settlers who insist that the democratically elected government of Israel has no authority over them because they answer only to God and His interpreters, their Rabbis. Would those residents of Hebron who attacked Israeli soldiers and their Rabbis who called Olmert and Barak enemies of Judaism be regarded as loyal to the State under Lieberman’s definition? And would those Charedim who regard Yom Haatzmaut and Yom Hazikaron as irrelevant to them be able to sign a loyalty pledge in good conscience?