RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yesterday, May 15, Palestinians and their supporters, as they have done increasingly over recent years, marked the nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) –– the day 68 years ago that Israel came into existence upon the expiry of British rule under a League of Nations mandate.

That juxtaposition of Israel and nakba isn’t accidental. We’re meant to understand that Israel’s creation caused the displacement of hundreds of thousand of Palestinian Arabs.

But the truth is different. A British document from the scene in early 1948, declassified in 2013, tells the story: “the Arabs have suffered … overwhelming defeats … Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands.”

In other words, Jew and Arabs, including irregular foreign militias from neighboring states, were already at war and Arabs were fleeing even before Israel came into sovereign existence on May 15, 1948.

Neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responded to Israel’s declaration of independence with full-scale hostilities. In fact, the headline for the New York Times’ famous report on that day includes the words, ‘Tel Aviv Is Bombed, Egypt Orders Invasion.’ And, indeed, the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.

As Israel celebrates its 68th birthday today, even facing talk of a possible new border war, its people are among the happiest on Earth. A look at its founding document helps explain why – and helps show the power of a faith-infused cause, rightly understood.

Even as a confirmed admirer of Israel, I had never read “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” (linked above) until I saw it in a full-page ad in the May 12 Wall Street Journal. It was a revelation.

For those willing to see, it has long been obvious that Israel is a remarkable oasis of human rights in a region notably hostile both to those rights and to Israel itself. It guarantees voting rights not just for Jews but for Arabs, including Muslims, and it protects most of the rights to speech and religious practice that are so central to Western, especially American, republics.

What I didn’t know is that it was founded that way. I had imagined that in its violent beginnings – Arab neighbors attacked it immediately upon the Jewish state being formally constituted on May 15, 1948 – it probably had started as an only semi-free state, aspiring to full republican rights but too beleaguered at the time to guarantee them.

But the Declaration says otherwise. The document says the new nation, from day one, “will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” It appealed to Arab inhabitants by reassuring them of “full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” Finally, rather than declaring hostility towards its neighbors, it said “we extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness.”

Israel has lived up to those pledges. Its courts feature non-Jewish judges. (Surrounding nations, of course, would never consider allowing a Jew to sit in judgment of any matter under law or equity – or, usually, even to openly acknowledge his own Jewishness without fear of arrest.) Its streets teem with non-Jewish merchants. And yes, the non-Jewish holy places operate freely – or, rather, freely for their own adherents, even to the exclusion of Jews and Christians. CONTINUE AT SITE

Sure, people have the right to dress as they wish, within the bounds of decency, of course. And that’s why the vile misogyny of imprisoning women in head-to-foot draperies must be banned: it is a foul and indecent assault on everything our society should stand for.
I’m changing my mind, and that doesn’t happen too often. In an article in the March 2011 issue of Quadrant (“Struggling with the Burka”) I argued from a classical liberal tradition that the way people dress in purely public situations — where no professional interactions are required — is a matter for them and certainly not for the law. I brought in John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), no less, to bolster this position.

I was taken to task in the following May issue by Babette Francis from Toorak, Victoria. In her letter, among other astute observations, she wrote that I arrived at my conclusion “from the comfortable perspective of a male, one moreover who has never had to live as a citizen of an Islamic country.” My reaction at the time was to think that she had misunderstood my position. After all weren’t we on the same side?

The tenor of my article was hardly pro-Islam and, accordingly, I had concluded that the only option available to Western societies was “to limit the size of Muslim populations through selective immigration policies.” But now I don’t think we were quite on the same side at all. I believe that I was on the wrong side when it came to the burka.

Let me be clear, I now believe that the Islamic face veil – the niqab – should be outlawed in all public places, as it is in France. Moreover, I believe that the Islamic head covering – the hijab – should be banned for teachers and students in all schools in receipt of any government funding. Would I extend this ban to other religious symbols? No, I wouldn’t, unless, say, Catholics, Anglicans, Buddhists or Hindus developed supremacist tendencies and turned particularly nasty.

On this 68th anniversary of the independence of the modern Jewish nation-state, my thoughts naturally turn to the question of how long we will be able to keep that independence, purchased at such great cost.

It’s not an issue that occupies citizens of most other states to the same degree. Although the US has major problems in several areas, I don’t hear Americans talking about losing their independence. They settled that back in the 18th century.

For us, it is never settled, despite international law and despite our successful defense of our homeland. Most of the world does not think that the Jewish people should have an independent state, in many cases because they don’t agree that there is a Jewish people (on the other hand, a ‘Palestinian’ people makes sense to them, or at least they pretend it does).

There is more than one way a sovereign nation can lose its independence. It can be conquered in war, as happened to Carthage in the 2nd century BCE, its people killed, enslaved or dispersed, its wealth carried off and its land sown with salt. It can be invaded and then made into a colony or satellite, its people allowed to live but without self-determination, as happened to the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union after WWII. And it can allow its decisions to be influenced by a more powerful state or states, little by little giving up its independent volition to economic and political pressure, until it finds itself so dependent on its ‘patron’ that it has lost the ability to control its destiny.

Israel is threatened militarily today primarily by Iran and its proxies. It would be wrong to minimize the direct threat to our existence that they represent, and our government and the IDF do take it seriously and prepare for conflict.http://abuyehuda.com/2016/05/israels-dangerous-addiction/

But we are also at risk of a ‘soft conquest’ by another enemy, this one an alliance of supposedly friendly nations, led by one massively powerful country that is considered our greatest friend and supporter. And our leaders seem blind to this danger.

How does a soft conquest work? Here are some of the tactics:

Create economic dependence by damaging the target’s relationships with rival partners.
Create military dependence either directly by ‘protecting’ the target or indirectly by locking it in to you as a sole supplier of arms, ammunition or spare parts.
Strengthen its enemies and weaken the target’s own self-defense abilities so that it will have to depend upon you when threatened.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Switching off antibiotic resistance. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have found new RNA-control switches (“ribo-switches) for genes encoding antibiotic resistance and discovered that these switches are actually “turned on” by the antibiotics themselves. The switches could be turned off by future treatments.
http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/switching-antibiotic-resistance

Israeli doctors save “no chance” Cyprus baby. (TY Beverly) No newborn with a heart defect like that of Cypriot baby Vassilios had ever survived. But Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center was willing to treat him. After an anxious journey to Israel, Hadassah surgeons achieved the “impossible” and after 10 days Vassilios and his happy parents returned to Cyprus. http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/cyprus-newborn-saved.html

Hadassah saves Al Quds student with organ failure. (TY Beverly) Palestinian Arab student Sara al Katzroy collapsed whilst jogging. She was brought from Jericho hospital to Jerusalem where Hadassah doctors used a Molecular Adsorbent Recirculation System (MARS) to save her liver. Sara now wants to become a nurse.
http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/sara-katzroy.html

Doctors save Palestinian Arab boy who fell into boiling jam. (TY Barbara Sofer) One of Barbara Sofer’s 68 reasons to love Israel includes this amazing report of how doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center managed to save the life of Mohamed – a Palestinian Arab toddler who fell into a vat of boiling jam.
http://hadassahinternational.org/supermodel-naomi-campbell-visits-childrens-ward-at-hadassah/

Eye spy. Two people have regained their eyesight after receiving the corneas of the late former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who died March 17 after a long battle with cancer. Avraham Gian, 81, and an unnamed 70-year-old woman received the corneas at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/meir-dagans-corneas-give-sight-back-to-2-israelis/

Heart implant is a success. (TY Atid-EDI) UK medical journal The Lancet reported the first implants of the interatrial shunts from Israel’s V-Wave (see previous newsletters). In less than 1 hour, each of 10 Canadian patients suffering poor left ventricular function received new implants and were discharged home next morning.
http://vwavemedical.com/2016/03/28/first-human-results-v-waves-interatrial-shunt-published-lancet/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2816%2900585-7/abstract

The Biblical view of the relationship between man and nature is set out clearly in Genesis 1:28:

God blessed them [mankind] and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

The view of the Sierra Club is well described by this:

Humans have evolved as an interdependent part of nature. Humankind has a powerful place in the environment, which may range from steward to destroyer. We must share the Earth’s finite resources with other living things and respect all life-enabling processes. Thus, we must control human population numbers and seek a balance that serves all life forms.

In the Biblical view, mankind rules nature and exploits it. In the Sierra Club view “humankind” must blend in with all the other animals and not burden the natural order. The Sierra Club view represents a step backward from monotheism to nature worship. They cannot admit that they are practicing a religion, because if they did many of the laws passed in response to lobbying by the Sierra Club and similar organizations would be unconstitutional, according to the first amendment, as a “law respecting an establishment of religion…”

John Muir, the founder and first president of the Sierra Club, made clear the religious nature of the club in his protest against the damming of the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park: “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

In the preface to the book Dark Green Religion, the green religion is described as:

Dark green religion — religion that considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worthy of reverent care — has been spreading rapidly around the world.

Teaching While White (TWW) is becoming an occupational hazard these days. So is being a white student, for that matter. At the “Unofficial Scripps College Survival Guide,” students learn that “white peers and faculty — portray Claremont Consortium as a haven for liberal ideology and acceptance. It’s a rhetoric that has led many white students to believe that racism does not exist on campus.” Thus, “as white students, [they] must identify the ways that [they] are engaging in the perpetuation of white supremacy and work to unlearn [their] racism.”

Of course, “reverse racism does not exist because there are no institutions that were founded with the intention of discriminating against white people on the basis of their skin. Many white people claim to be victims of reverse racism when people of color associate negative characteristics with white people or have a general dislike for them as a group. This is not reverse racism because racism is privilege plus power and people of color do not have racial privilege. Moreover, distrust or anger at white people is a legitimate response to a repetitive history and current state of racist violence.”

And so Rachel, Anna, Emi, and Jasmine, authors of the above, state that “[t]he solution to white privilege is to ‘ask people of color to absolve [white people] of [their] guilt.'” But even that is “not an adequate response… [since] whites must be accountable and hold other white students accountable, too.”

I would like to ask the authors if I decide to be black tomorrow a la Rachel Dolezal, would I still be guilty of white supremacy? After all, an Indian-American student got into medical school by pretending to be black.

Under relevant international law, a true state must always possess the following specific qualifications: (1) a permanent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government; and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
While this contingent condition of prior demilitarization of a Palestinian state may at first sound reassuring, it represents little more than a impotent legal expectation.
For one thing, no new state is ever under any obligation to remain “demilitarized,” whatever else it may have actually agreed to during its particular pre-state incarnation.
“The legality of the presence of Israel’s communities the area (Judea and Samaria) stems from the historic, indigenous, and legal rights of the Jewish people to settle in the area, granted pursuant to valid and binding international legal instruments, recognized and accepted by the international community. These rights cannot be denied or placed in question.” — Ambassador Alan Baker, Israeli legal expert.

International law has one overarching debility. No matter how complex the issues, virtually everyone able to read feels competent to offer an authoritative legal opinion. While, for example, no sane person would ever explain or perform cardio-thoracic surgery without first undergoing rigorous medical training, nearly everyone feels competent to interpret complex meanings of the law.

This debility needs to be countered, at least on a case by case basis. In the enduring controversy over Palestinian statehood, there are significant rules to be considered. For a start, on November 29, 2012, the General Assembly voted to upgrade the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the status of a “Nonmember Observer State.”

Although it is widely believed by many self-defined “experts” that this elevation by United Nations has already represented a formal bestowal of legal personality, that belief is incorrect. Under law, at least, “Palestine” – whatever else one might happen to think of “fairness” – remains outside the community of sovereign states.

This juridical exclusion of “Palestine,” whether welcome or not, on selective political grounds, is evident “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The authoritative criteria of statehood that express this particular exclusion are long-standing and without ambiguity. Under relevant international law, a true state must always possess the following specific qualifications: (1) a permanent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government; and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Moreover, the formal existence of a state is always independent of recognition by other states. According to the 1934 Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (the Montevideo Convention):

“Even before recognition, the state has the right to defend its integrity and independence, to provide for its conservation and prosperity, and consequently to organize itself as it sees fit….”

It follows that even a Palestinian state that would fail to meet codified Montevideo expectations could simply declare otherwise, and then act accordingly, “to defend its integrity and independence….”

More than likely, any such “defending” would subsequently involve incessant war and terror against “Occupied Palestine,” also known as Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in 1964, three years before there supposedly were any “Israeli Occupied Territories.” What, then, exactly, was the PLO trying to “liberate?”

On Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, lessons for our world from theirs
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/202040/americans-the-almost-chosen-people

When we speak of culture in general, we typically think of fixed roots in the form of memory, custom, and habit. Yet the salient characteristic of the American character is restlessness, as Tocqueville observed. We are journeyers rather than settlers. We are risk-takers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. How then should we think about ourculture?

One approach is to steer clear of the problem and define America as a “propositional nation,” as John Courtney Murray contended. A proposition is something one assents to rationally. Culture, by contrast, is the context in which we perceive things, which we receive from our ancestors and pass down to our descendants. It is pre-rational, instinctive rather than intellectual, a manifestation of who we are rather than what we think. It is the way in which we cannot help but understand the world.

It is one thing to assert that a proposition is true and quite another thing to pledge one’s life, fortune, and sacred honor. The American Revolution is in some ways the strangest conflict in history: There is no other example of prosperous, property-owning people who were free to publish their thoughts and practice their religion taking up arms against the world’s most powerful empire. Four generations later, half a million Northerners died to end slavery.

If America is merely a propositional nation, moreover, then this proposition can be taught to any other nation, like a proof in logic. From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, our attempts to instruct the rest of the world in the American proposition have had baleful consequences, and it behooves us to consider the side of being American that cannot be learned but rather must be lived—what we call culture.

American culture is so singular that the general concept of culture we inherit from the Old World does not suffice to cover it. Critic Russell Kirk refers us to T.S. Eliot, who wrote:

[T]he term culture … includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.

These are the sorts of quaint things American tourists used to look for in England, that is, when England still had them. If we Americans had things like that, we would put them in a theme park. I do not mean to deprecate Eliot. His is the common-sense way to think about culture, and to deviate from it takes us into deep water. Nonetheless, Eliot’s definition does not well suit the American example.

For Martin Heidegger, our Being-in-the-World, or Dasein, always occupies a particular space in a particular temporality. “Heritage” for Heidegger refers back to something like an autochthonous peasant archetype. In his later years Heidegger withdrew to a cabin in the Black Forest to write dithyrambs to the German Heimatendangered by the encroachment of technology. Americans do not stay in any one place long enough to accrete the Bodenständigkeit, or rootedness, that Heidegger sought at the core of our Being. No wonder Heidegger hated America.

Recently Alexander Gauland, the deputy chair of the ultra-right Allianz für Deutschland, called Americans “a people thrown together by chance without an authentic culture.” It is true that we do not have a high culture to compare to Europe’s, for all the good that did them. We cannot claim a national poet with the stature of a Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe. Not until the 1920s did we discoverMoby-Dick when critics in search of an American classic rescued Melville’s work from 70 years of obscurity. We have Walt Whitman, the butt of innumerable parodies, and Hemingway, the subject of a famous imitation contest.

America nonetheless has a distinct national culture, with a national epic, a national poem, and a national place.

It is instructive to start in medias res, with the most original and influential work of American fiction, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, whence “all modern American literature comes,” as Hemingway said. Its flaws shed light on our problem as much as do its virtues. Twain devised the most arresting image in American literature: the runaway boy Huck and the escaped slave Jim, fragile and free on the great river. The evocative opening of the novel, though, eventually fades into a disappointing sequel to Tom Sawyer. “The book ends so lamely,” Harold Bloom rightly observes. Nonetheless, we forgive Mark Twain his sin of literary construction and love the work. Our critics, I think, misunderstand why. Lionel Trilling thinks Huck is a “servant of the river-god,” while Bloom cannot decide whether Huck is a “wholly secular being” or an “American Orphic.” This seems far-fetched. What fascinates us in Huckleberry Finn is not the plot but the image of the journey itself. Twain gives us the most poignant picture of a journey ever imagined by an American: the vulnerability of the two fugitives against the backdrop of the great current that bisects the American heartland.

“What kind of talk is this, ‘punishing Israel?’ Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we 14-year-olds who, if we misbehave, get our wrists slapped? Let me tell you whom this Cabinet comprises. It is composed of people whose lives were marked by resistance, fighting and suffering.”

These were the words of Prime Minister Menachem Begin delivered to the U.S. President Ronald Reagan in December 1981. Begin, one of the greatest leaders and fighters of our times, knew the meaning of true independence.

He knew that it was not about firecrackers, dancing in the streets or lighting flames. It was about standing up for yourself and submitting to no man. Declaring to the world, “this is where we stand.”

Israel’s independence was bought at a high price in Jewish blood, fighting first against the might of the British Empire and then against five powerful Arab armies which sought its destruction.

For 68 years Israelis have fought again and again to defend their independence against enemies who would subjugate their country. No other nation has struggled so long and so hard, surrounded by such unyielding hostility.

But in making their stand, Israelis have never had to stand alone. From the beginning, Jews from the U.K., the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Africa and around the world rallied to the fight for independence under the glorious banner of the Mahal. Among them were non-Jews, including a Christian soldier from my own regiment.

In the years since, and even today, the courage of their young successors, the “lone soldiers”’ of the diaspora, travelling thousands of miles from the safety of their homes to stand and fight here to preserve Israel’s independence, inspires awe and humility. As Begin said: “This is the land of their forefathers, and they have a right and a duty to support it.”