An article published this past Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle, a once great newspaper that now is just struggling to stay alive, is a wonderful example of the absurdity of much commentary on Israel.

The writer, Joel Brinkley, is a professor at Stanford and has a Pulitzer on his shelf from his days as a correspondent for the Times, so I suppose that absolves him from the rules of evidence and fact that the rest of us mortals must live by. But for something published in a paper that retains a name by someone with top-notch credentials, this (hopefully) qualifies as a new low.

Much of the article, while chronicling as new an argument that has been going on for at least four years now, is not objectionable. It notes that the standard rhetoric about demographic realities in Israel might not be as real as most claim and that political activists on both the right and the left use demographic predictions mostly to bolster their favored policies, not as tools in the search for the good. Not terribly interesting (a reference to Damocles and a personal vouch for Yoram Ettinger don’t do much for anyone who has grown out of their sophomore-year convictions), but fine as far as it goes.

But in the last three paragraphs Brinkley enters the realm of the absurd. First, he casually refers to Gaza as a “territory/prison” (Now that it’s been referred to that way by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and on a segment of NBC News I suppose the fact has been established for all right-thinking people, and requires no further elucidation.)

Then he uses his two concluding paragraphs to spin out the prediction that the possibility that Jews might in fact be a stable majority in all of the territory currently controlled by Israel means that Israel can successfully absorb Palestinian refugees demanding the “right of return” while retaining its Jewish status. He concludes, “In the Middle East, be careful what you wish for,” that “in the Middle East” signifying his deep appreciation for the complexities of a, well, complex region.

Could Brinkley really not know that UNRWA currently counts 4.7 million Palestinians as “refugees,” a number nearly equal to Israel’s Jewish population? Or was he so in love with his neat concluding thought that he massaged the details to fit the message?

If only it did not matter. Unfortunately, as the season of peace talks is upon us, Israel’s leaders might find themselves having to counter similarly daft prognostications from people with real political power who also have all the right credentials.

 

As a non-political organization, we at the David Project usually refrain from endorsing any policy position except for the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Now that I've said my disclaimer, let's discuss the issues here. In a recent article by Peter Beinart titled Obama's Foreign Policy Has Failed,  Beinart discusses his own disillusionment with Obama's inability to show "fresh strategic thinking" via foreign policy. Beinart is primarily upset with Obama's policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Afghanistan in which he accuses Obama of continuing Bush's policies on both. What's really troubling is Beinart actually thinks that Hamas would accept a two-state solution. But besides that absurd thinking, from Beinart's previous article on the Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, it is clear that he fancies himself as someone on 'progressive' side of the debate on issues regarding Israel and Judaism. Without making too many broad generalizations, part of what would indentify someone into this category would be the desire to challenge the existing status quo of the US-Israeli relationship a la J Street. What's interesting about this article and the reason why I am blogging about it, is the problem people like Beinart have with Obama's foreign policy. On one hand, you have the right who are highly critical of Obama's policy on Israel and now the left is voicing their criticisms as well. This can either mean two things, Obama has got the correct policy (usually happens when you piss the right and the left off) or he's totally wrong (something both sides can agree on). Either way, Obama has a tough road ahead of him if he wishes to create peace in the region.

Unless you've been in a cave for the past week or so, its pretty well known that direct peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians have commenced. As usual, there has been no shortage of articles full of 'expert' analysis on the talks. One of the major issues that has been discussed ad nauseam going in to negotiations has been the settlements issue. In fact, the New York Times has a whole section dedicated to debating the topic! With all the attention paid to the settlers(yes I do realize that I am also discussing the settlers), you'd think settlements is the main obstacle to peace. But of course it isn't (or I wouldn't be trying to write this witty blog post). As pointed out in an article by Amb. Oren, Israel has signed peace treaties in the past with Jordan and Egypt and has negotiated with the Palestinians for two decades despite the existence of the settlements.

With all that said, what I believe really is a major obstacle to peace, which has hardly been mentioned at all, is the Palestinian right of return. Let's give some background here. As a result of the 1948 War of Independence, over 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were forced to flee their homes within modern day Israel. Today these Palestinians and their decedents, through a special arrangement with the UN, number into the millions. As you may or may not know, many of these refugees live in squalid and inhumane conditions in various neighboring Arab countries where they are denied their basic rights. Without getting into a debate surrounding the circumstances of their departure, it is clear that what took place in 1948 has been (in past negotiations) and will be (in the present negotiations) one of the major obstacles to peace mainly because it threatens the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If all these refugees came back, then Israel would lose its Jewish majority, case closed. If you listened carefully to President Abbas's (who is a refugee himself, hailing from Safed) speech last night at the White House, he mentioned "correcting the historical injustice caused by the 'war' of 1948". Without sounding too cruel, it is clear the Palestinians or at least Abbas, has not completed the grieving process. So that really brings us back to the central question here, are the Palestinians able to make peace? or better yet, will these talks be sucessful? I would argue that by continuing to fixate and lament over 1948, it is impossible to build towards a better future. On top of that, let's say that they do resolve the right of return issue and agree that Israel does not have to take them back in. How can you absorb close to 4 million Palestinian refugees, many of whom are poor, uneducated, and lacking skills, into the West Bank or Gaza?? Hmmm...

Here they come walking down the road to peace....

What is it with you people? The page with the Ovadia Yosef video has no less than five animated ads that are flashing and moving and generally bugging the hell out of me. Enough already! Now I don't want to visit any of those sites or use any of those products! Are you secretly part of the boycott movement? Go compare the English version of Haaretz with the Hebrew Haaretz. Which of those makes you want to put your fist through the screen first? (and I'm not talking content here) Look, I don't mind little ads here and there (I just ignore them) but seriously, all the flashing is going to give me a seizure. Then you'll hear from my lawyers.

The 89 year old head of the Shas party, Iraqi born Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, gave a sermon the other day in which he said

Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this world... God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians

Personally I find this distasteful and intemperate and have no problem condemning the statement. Benjamin Netanyahu's office quickly stated "These words do not reflect the approach of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, nor the position of the government of Israel.”

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, however, was incensed and in his perpetually self-righteous way deemed the statement “a clear call for genocide" and demanded the Israeli government halt “racist incitement” against Palestinians.

A call for genocide? Hardly, merely a theological curse. Incitement? Yes, a low level example, and as such it should be condemned. And at the same time, I call on the Palestinian Authority to halt "racist incitement" against Israelis and Jews. The merest glance at what passes for civilized discourse in Palestinian media makes it amply clear that racism and antisemitism are absolute staples. Jews as subhumans? Check. Jews as pigs and monkeys? Check. Jews as evil? Check. Jews as disease? Check. (And thanks to Palestine Media Watch here for their handy categories). We need not both to talk about Hamas' attitudes toward Jews.

It is not even close. Israeli media bends over backwards to be 'fair' to Palestinians and their narratives, and anything smacking of racism or religious disrespect is roundly condemned by the pitiless Israeli establishment. Erekat's hysteria, partially endorsed by the U.S. State Department (“We regret and condemn the inflammatory statements by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. We note the Israeli statement that the Rabbi's comments do not reflect the views of the Prime Minister") is one of many examples where a rare example of Israeli misbehavior instantly trumps a well-documented pattern of Palestinian malfeasance and dishonesty.

Why is this so? The ever trenchant Barry Rubin suggests that Western consumers like the U.S. State Department are willingly suckered by quasi-concilatory statements made in Englsh and choose to ignore what is said in Arabic for local consumption thanks to a combination of fear and hope - fear of Islamists, fear of deviating from p/c conformity, and hope that someone else will be the victim. Add to this elite intellectual loathing for one's own society and a racist disdain for those who are fearful of what is actually being said for local consumption, and we have an explanation that applies in a number of situations.

Erekat's crocodile tears would be more persuasive if the PA actually did something about its own relentless incitement. Until they do, we should take note of Erekat's cynical use of an old man's outburst and move on.

UPDATE: So what did Rabbi Yosef actually say? The Elder of Ziyon has this transcription from from a reader who links to the video:

אבו-מאזן וכל הרשעים האלה, שיאבדו מן העולם. יכה בהם הקדוש ברוך הוא מכת דבר, בהם ובפלסטינים האלה, רשעים צוררי ישראל

Abu Mazen and all those villains, may they perish. May the Almighty strike them with the plague, them and those Palestinians, evil enemies of Israel.

Technically, it appears that Rabbi Yosef is inciting God to smite a subset of Palestinians. This is hardly earthly incitement, since he is not calling for humans to do anything one way or another. We may disapprove of the sentiment but honestly, this is nothing like a call for "genocide." Anyone claiming otherwise is the real inciter.

It is (or should be) a truism of media and academic culture that what deserves the least attention often gets the most of it. In “Good to Great,” the obsessively researched management book, Jim Collins aimed to find companies who had demonstrated consistently superior performance relative to their peers for at least 15 years. He came up with a list of 11 companies, every one of which – companies like Walgreens and Kimberly-Clark, a paper company - was decidedly un-sexy. Even more telling, they were all led by extraordinarily effective leaders who had received far less media attention than their less successful peers.

So, too, of course with much of the Jewish world, a significant segment of which has been obsessed in the last decade with identifying and understanding younger Jews. From the American side this obsession grew out of Jewish population studies conducted in 1990 and 2000-2001 , which revealed for many Jewish leaders what they should have known long before: that many young American Jews were alienated from Jewish life, which meant they were increasingly marrying non-Jews, which meant the Jewish population was stagnating or even shrinking. Of late Israelis have become no less concerned in this regard, as they see their country’s international standing sinking ever lower and point the finger, at least in part, on young American Jews less committed to Israel’s security.

This led to the commissioning of many studies on young American Jews as the established community sought to understand what had gone wrong. A revealing interview about this work with Steven Cohen, a professor at Hebrew Union College in New York who has written many of the most important studies of this kind, was published recently by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

These Jews, Cohen says, are “alienated,” don’t feel comfortable around “upper-middle-class, in-married, middle-aged, family people,” and dislike distinctions being drawn between the Jewish and the non-Jewish. Israel is, at best, a place to support if it meets standards of “tolerance,”“human rights,” and “women’s rights” that it is supposedly lacking in. For these Jews, to even define oneself as “pro-Israel” is to buy into the “sometimes immoral policies of the Israeli government.” (Then again, any label is supposedly anathema for this set.) Jay Michaelson, a bellwether of this kind of thinking, recently went so far as to propose that support for Israel is in direct conflict with American Jewish identity.

The crucial question, though, is who exactly Steven Cohen is talking about. In his interview with the JCPA, several times Cohen obliquely noted that his comments were limited to the “non-Orthodox.” He was more explicit in this regard in a 2006 study he wrote on intermarriage, limiting his work and conclusions only to non-Orthodox Jews. So one important thing we know about these Jews is that they are not Orthodox.

The other important thing about the young Jews Cohen focuses on is that they hail from a strong web of Jewish connections. They are fluent in traditional religious practice and familiar with Gemara and other mainstays of Jewish tradition. Despite their aversion to supporting Israel, many have nevertheless spent significant time there and know Hebrew. And they all have lots of friends with similar backgrounds. (None of these traits are odd for people with an Orthodox background. And pushed as far to the “left” as it will reasonably go, the Orthodox label comfortably contains within it many people as conversant in the secular world as the religious.)

The last important thing about them, which again can easily be seen in Cohen’s casual references in the JCPA interview to the havruta movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s and “social justice,” is that they define themselves as a protest against the mainstream, which is both bereft of meaning and corrupt.

So in effect we are looking at a cohort of American Jews under 40 who define themselves against the Jewish mainstream and do not call themselves Orthodox (no labels, remember) yet have the experiences and knowledge of their peers who do. An unusual and small group that Cohen considers an “elite.” And they can be forgiven to a certain extent for thinking of themselves in similar terms, as they have been showered with fellowships, awards, and other euphemisms for money by a Jewish establishment desperate for their attention.

Left entirely unasked is whether or not any of it is worth it. Even the most successful of their generously supported endeavors, places like Yeshivat Hadar, cater almost entirely to the small group of people like themselves who are well-versed in Jewish life but yet cannot bring themselves to rub shoulders with all those annoying middle-aged people and their children. Or commit themselves to substantive support for Israel, the largest collection of Jews in the world and the first independent Jewish polity in 2,000 years (located in the same place as the polities that preceded it, with even the same capital city) that finds itself under increasing assault from an international campaign determined to cast it as fundamentally illegitimate.

If this is an elite, it is a strange one. It shares little in common with the Jews it will supposedly lead who, in any case, it refuses to take responsibility for leading. It explicitly defines itself in opposition to the center of the Jewish community (which nevertheless goes on shoveling it money). And it sees avoidance of the most frightening and important issues affecting the Jewish people as a matter of high principle.

When the story, in some distant future, of our Jewish current is written, one thing we can be near certain of is that these types of leaders will not feature largely within it. For now, it is long past time to look elsewhere for the kind of leadership American Jews need.

One day when I was zooming around the Egyptian desert in Google Earth looking for the El-Alamein battlefields, I happened on a strange gridded area approximate 15.25 kilometers on a side  at

29°18'7.57"N   28°57'38.88"E

then I found another 20 kilometers to the north at

29°29'34.35"N  E 28°59'43.11"E

and now there's another one at

29°37'37.23"N   29°43'30.27"E

They look kind of like this

These sites are more than 200 kilometers to the southwest of Cairo in a region best described as 'parched desert.' No fences, no craters indicative of a bombing range, no structures suggesting a test facility. There is an abandoned airfield about 30 kilometers to the northwest  at

29°38'18.26"N  28°43'33.85"E

which is about a kilometer from what appears to be an industrial facility which reminds me vaguely of Quantum of Solace or, ugh, Sahara.

Overall these grids are eerily reminiscent of California City but I doubt that a visionary like Nat Mendelsohn was at work here.

Thoughts?

Much of the news coverage and analysis of the upcoming direct peace talks has focused on the elephant in the room - the question of what happens on September 26, when the settlement freeze ends.

Sam Freedman, in partnership with Avi Chai, is offering young Jews between 22-35 the opportunity to participate in a free writer’s seminar in New York over the next year.

Sam writes a regular feature on religion for The New York Times and is a professor at Columbia University’s journalism school. He is also an important voice in the contemporary American Jewish world, having several years ago authored an influential book on our internal divisions.

I was a participant in the seminar last year, and was impressed by our exposure to a bevy of interesting guest speakers, especially those I had never before heard of, like Gadi Taub, an extraordinary young Israeli thinker and writer. Avi Chai also kept us well-fed, put us up in a room overlooking Park Avenue that has to be one of Manhattan’s best for a seminar, and delivered a steady stream of books to our mailboxes, most of which were new to me and all of which occupy proud spaces on my bookshelf. My fellow participants were also smart and engaged, as well as an interesting cross-section of contemporary Jewish life.

But the best thing about the seminar is Sam. A thoughtful and tough teacher, he is also a thorough reader who gave my writing and thoughts more time than they perhaps deserve. It’s the kind of education you usually can only get for tens of thousands of dollars and if you are able to dedicate yourself to it full-time. Here you can do it in five sessions amenable to someone with a day job.

The deadline for applications is September 5. Go apply.

Claire Berlinski lives in Turkey where people don't always say what they really mean, or mean what they say. The policy implications are huge.

Carl in Jerusalem links to both parts of the BBC investigation of the 'aid flotilla' incident. Shockingly even-handed!

Why does higher education cost so much? One word - administrators.

ps-here's the transcript of the BBC documentary (thanks Matt)