RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the many things the west fails to grasp about the State of Israel is how important it is to the security of the west, as well as the role that the Jews of that land have played in helping defend western lives since before Israel was reborn.http://www.melaniephillips.com/wests-vital-strategic-asset/

Col Richard Kemp, Britain’s former commander in Afghanistan, has written a greatpiece about this that should be essential reading. Here’s a flavour:

“For many years Western nations have depended heavily on Israeli intelligence, and the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State have even further increased the West’s reliance on Israeli intelligence… Of a far more sensitive and of course highly classified nature, Israel makes a major contribution to Western nuclear defences. On the homeland security front few Europeans are aware that Israeli technology safeguards such iconic symbols as Buckingham Palace, Heathrow Airport, the Eiffel Tower, and the Vatican.

But as we who have worked in the intelligence world know, action is premised on more than capability. Israel is not a vital strategic asset because of capability alone. Intent is equally important.

Why did the farmers and scouts of Hanita take such risks and make such sacrifices for the British in 1940? Neither they nor their fellow Jews who sustained and fought for the Eighth Army were under any obligation to do so. But nevertheless in the 1940s the Jews of Palestine contributed much more to the Allied war effort than all of the Arab nations combined who between them had over 50 times the resources of the Jews.

… Why do European countries exploit Israel’s capabilities with one hand and stab her in the back with the other? One word sums it up: appeasement. Every European country has a large and growing Muslim population and an increasing fear of Islamic terrorism. Political leaders believe that a harsh approach toward Israel will give electoral advantage in respect of their Muslim populations and also discourage Islamic terrorists from attacking at home.

A much longer-standing target of their appeasement is the Arab world itself and concern about the negative impact that their dealings with Israel will have on their relations with other countries in the Middle East.

But the balance has been shifting and European diplomacy has struggled to keep up.For many years Israel has had close strategic relations with two of its main Arab neighbours. And today in the face of a growing fear of Iran and the rise of radical jihadism, other Arab countries are increasingly, if cautiously and quietly, looking toward Israel for protection and assistance.

The Arab world will not suddenly fall in love with the Jewish State, but the sands are shifting and in their own security interests, Western states also now need to re-evaluate their relationships with Israel and appreciate what is the balance of cost and benefit to them.

… A modern day Balfour Declaration could be recognition of the strategic value of the Jewish state in today’s global struggle in the form of full membership of a reformed NATO, which would benefit all of our strategic interests and serve also to undermine international efforts to isolate Israel.”

Bravo.

In a not-so-earth-shattering move, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has appointed a Palestinian-American, Joyce Ajlouny, as its new Secretary General. Ajlouny is a native of Ramallah and formerly the head of the Quaker school there, a “passionate” advocate for Palestinians and for “evenhandedness.”

Ajlouny may be the perfect candidate to run the AFSC, the leading American Quaker organization, which over the years has cultivated its image as peaceful and supremely benign. Few suspect, much less know, that one of their central missions these days is promoting the BDS movement that opposes Israel’s existence.

How did a century-old religiously based pacifist organization transform itself into one of the leading engines for the Palestinian cause? Part of the answer lies in the AFSC’s evolution, which has gone from trying to save Jews to vilifying them. Its Quaker theology has similarly gone from emphasis on the “Inner Light” that guides individual conscience to something like old-fashioned Christian supersessionism, where Jews deserve to be hated. The result is that the organization is now effectively captive to progressive Israel-hatred.

Founded during World War I to provide alternative forms of “service” to pacifist Quakers, the AFSC quickly became one of the foremost refugee relief organizations of the early 20th century, with operations around the world. A favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, the AFSC was also active within the US during the Depression, teaching skills across Appalachia and the South.

With the rise of Nazism, AFSC became involved with what would be the greatest refugee crisis in history. But the experience also demonstrated the organization’s approach to religious diplomacy and relief efforts, where naïve idealism alternated with practicality. Shortly after Kristallnacht in November 1938, AFSC leaders traveled to Germany to personally investigate the suffering of the Jews and pled their case with Reichsführer-SS Reinhard Heydrich to bring relief aid. They were unsuccessful.

But the AFSC’s post-war record in refugee relief was so exceptional that along with a British Quaker group, it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. By the late 1940s, the AFSC had a distinctive place in American and international society, a well-established Christian NGO with global reach. But it was also a universalist organization that went against the grain to unpopular causes. Its humanitarian ethic and pacifist ideology were radical both in the American and Protestant contexts. These tensions would ultimately undo the AFSC.

The shift began when the AFSC was invited by the United Nations to run Palestinian refugee relief in Gaza in late 1948. Quakers had been in the Holy Land for over a century, running schools and hospitals for local Christians. But the refugee program was a turning point. Relief workers had never encountered refugees who did not want to be taught new skills or to be resettled elsewhere, only to be maintained at someone else’s expense until Israel disappeared.

So traumatic was this for the AFSC that after 18 months it refused to be part of any future Palestinian refugee program, citing among other things the “moral degeneration” of the refugees brought on by becoming welfare recipients. This view was prescient—almost seventy years later, the Palestinians remain the world’s largest recipients of international welfare through UNRWA and the UN system.

In 2017, Israel is the only advanced economy and Western democracy endowed with a relatively high fertility rate, which facilitates further economic growth with no reliance on migrant labor. Moreover, Israel’s thriving demography provides for bolstered national
security (larger classes of recruits) and a more confident foreign policy.

In contrast to conventional demographic wisdom, Israel is not facing a potential Arab demographic time bomb. In fact, the Jewish State benefits from a robust Jewish demographic tailwind.

At the outset of 2017, for the first time – and in defiance of projections made by Israel’s demographic establishment since the early 1940s – Israel’s Jewish fertility rate (3.16 births per woman) exceeds Israel’s Arab rate of fertility (3.11). Actually, in 2017, Israel’s fertility rate is higher than most Arab countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia – 2.1 births per woman, Kuwait – 2.4, Syria – 2.5, Morocco – 2.1, etc.).

The Westernization of the Arab fertility rate has also been in effect in Judea and Samaria: from 5 births per Arab woman in 2000 to about 3 in 2016; from a median age of 17 in 2000 to 21 in 2017.

The substantial, systematic Westernization of Arab fertility – from 9.5 births per woman in 1960 to 3.11 in 2016 – has been a derivative of the accelerated integration of Israeli Arabs into modernity, in general, and the enhanced status of Israel’s Arab women, in particular.

For example – as it is among the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, whose fertility rate is similar – almost all Israeli Arab girls complete high school, and are increasingly enrolling in colleges and universities, improving their status within their own communities. This process has expanded their use of contraceptives, delaying wedding-age and reproduction, which used to start at the age of 15-16, to the age of 20 year old and older.

Israel is tritely known as the start up nation, the incubator for ideas and products that change our lives – usually for the better – in an increasingly high-tech world. Your ever-smaller cell phone, that GPS app that saves you 7 minutes on your commute to work, that suddenly non-invasive medical procedure and those persimmons that magically never seem to go bad, those were all created in Israel, and tested on Israelis, before getting the OK to go global.http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/226791/what-happens-in-jerusalem-does-not-stay-in-jerusalem/

So too, alas, with the modern scourge of undiscriminating Jihadi mass murders, occasionally referred to as terrorism by Western media. Like the most famous of technology companies, Jihadi terror tragically also uses Israel as its R&D center, and the Israeli populace, it pains me to write, as its guinea pigs.

After doing so with suicide bombings in the 90s, Palestinian Jihadists (whether of the admittedly religious Hamas variety, or of the “secular” Al Aqsa Martyrs brigades of the PLO) invented, tested and made ever more lethal truck terrorism, stabbing rampages and mass shootings through Israeli “experiments,” that is, through attacks on Israeli moms, dads, sons, daughters and grandparents. Palestinians saw that those indiscriminate and savage murders of Israeli innocents going about their day not only didn’t backfire politically or trigger any meaningful Western outrage, they instead earned Palestinians an endless stream of gushing profiles in liberal media outlets, a global pulpit, wall to wall political support, and the permanent benefit of any moral doubt with Western intelligentsia. There are many psychological reasons why this is so, why so many who might be expected to know better instead respond to plain evil with moral acrobatics, overwrought compassion and Orwellian understanding. Regardless, it is no coincidence that the mass-killing tactics developed in Ramallah, tested in Jerusalem and rewarded in Norway are becoming ubiquitous in London, Nice and, now, New York City.

A report on Channel 10—a known stronghold of Bibi-animosity—claims that:

“senior law enforcement officials have concluded there is sufficient evidence to file an indictment against [Prime Minister Netanyahu] on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust…. The report quoted an unofficial police opinion according to which the evidence that has accumulated against Netanyahu is robust…. The State Attorney’s Office, Channel 10 reported, was also coming to the opinion that there are grounds to file an indictment on bribery, but was not as sure as the police.”

Most of the latest purported information—once again leaked by the police, guardians of virtue in the Bibi-hunt who have leaked ruthlessly and systematically throughout this affair—concerns Case 1000, in which Netanyahu is alleged to have done favors for his longtime friend, businessman and movie mogul Arnon Milchan, in return for gifts of cigars and champagne.

In other words, the suspicions center on bribery—Netanyahu illicitly receiving stuff from Milchan as a quid pro quo.

And what is Netanyahu alleged to have done for Milchan in return for the “bribe”?

The charge that keeps reappearing is that Netanyahu asked then-secretary of state John Kerry to help get Milchan a ten-year visa so that Milchan could stay in the U.S. to do what he does there.

If it’s true, it’s not exactly spine-chilling. Let’s say you have a friend in the States who badly wants a long-term visa, and you have an ongoing connection with the secretary of state, with whom you converse for hours at a time. What would you do?

In normal times—one might even say in a normal country—this is not the stuff of which “corruption scandals” are made. If Netanyahu indeed asked for Kerry’s help with Milchan’s visa, it was absolutely routine behavior of a kind that very few people involved in public life have not engaged in.

Even stranger in this case is that the ostensible “bribe” did not consist of money—usually the stuff of which bribes are made—but of nonmonetary gifts. Netanyahu appears to acknowledge receiving these gifts of cigars and champagne from Milchan for years, saying that—again—this was within the normal, noncriminal bounds of human behavior, a friend giving presents to a friend.

What, then, constituted the bribe? If the Netanyahu-Milchan friendship goes back years—and that is not in dispute—it’s hard to imagine Netanyahu, in return for Milchan asking for help with the visa, needing some certain quantity of cigar boxes, or some certain set of champagne crates, as “the bribe.”

The best musical of the year has made it to Broadway. After a successful but far too short off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater, “The Band’s Visit” has moved uptown with all of its wondrous charm and warmth intact. Directed with supreme finesse by David Cromer and performed by the best cast imaginable, this small-scale show is fine enough to fill you with fresh hope for a genre that has lately been running on fumes. In an era of slick, sterile, big-budget, no-but-I-saw-the-movie commodity musicals whose sole purpose is to siphon cash from tourists with ruthless efficiency, “The Band’s Visit” shows that the great American art form (give or take jazz) is still full of life when practiced by artists who trust the taste and intelligence of their audiences.

The Band’s Visit

Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St.
$67-$157, 212-239-6200/800-432-7250
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Adapted for the stage by Itamar Moses and David Yazbek from Eran Kolirin’s 2007 Israeli film, “The Band’s Visit” is the story of a fictional occurrence that was, as one of the characters readily admits, “not very important.” The eight members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, it seems, have traveled to Israel from Egypt in order to perform at an Arab cultural center in the city of Petah Tikva. Such, at any rate, is their intention, but they’re sidetracked en route by a mispronounced consonant: Since there is no “p” sound in Arabic, most English-speaking Egyptians automatically replace that consonant with “b.” Slightly fractured English being the lingua franca of the modern-day Middle East, the musicians inadvertently find themselves in Bet Hatikva, a hopelessly provincial desert village whose cultural attractions consist of two restaurants, a roller rink, and a concrete “park” devoid of grass or trees.

In less knowing hands, this mishap might easily have been played for farce and nothing more. But while “The Band’s Visit” gets plenty of well-deserved laughs in its opening scenes, Messrs. Moses and Yazbek are hunting bigger game. We soon discover that the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra and the bored residents of Bet Hatikva who spend their days “waiting for something to happen” all have something in common: They long for their little lives to be enlarged by love.

Some of the rest you can guess for yourself, but part of what makes “The Band’s Visit” so special is that it steers clear of the obvious. This is especially true when it comes to Tewfiq ( Tony Shalhoub ), the band’s conductor, and Dina ( Katrina Lenk ), the divorced café owner who offers to feed him and his men and put them up for the night. He’s rigidly proper, she’s tart-tongued and cynical, yet they’re both frustrated romantics under the skin. That’s the obvious part, and it is typical of “The Band’s Visit” that it leads to a denouement that will take you completely by surprise. CONTINUE AT SITE

For the first few minutes of our meeting, Zubin Mehta is on his cellphone with an old friend (who, it turns out, is a grandson of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan). The friend, like Mr. Mehta, is an Indian Zoroastrian—or Parsi—and the two are making plans for dinner after the maestro and his Israel Philharmonic Orchestra finish their performance that night at Carnegie Hall. They speak in Gujarati, the adoptive language of the Parsis, who fled persecution in newly Islamized Persia in the ninth century and took shelter in western India.

After he’s sorted out dinner, Mr. Mehta turns to me, mildly irritated. “New York is surprising. The restaurants all close at 10:30 p.m.,” he says. The night before, he had wanted an 11 p.m. table at a favorite spot, “but they said, ‘We cannot serve you that late, we are unionized.’ ” Tonight he is going to an Indian restaurant of repute that is happy to accommodate a late-dining celebrity. “It’s good food,” he tells me, adding in a very Indian touch: “Give them our name if you go. Then they’ll pay more attention.”

Mr. Mehta is the musical director of the Israel Philharmonic, an orchestra he has worked with and loved for more than 50 years, and with which he is touring the U.S., possibly for the last time. At 81, he’s still a maestro with more raw oomph than anyone else waving a baton. He’s also exactly as old as his orchestra, which was founded in 1936 by Bronislaw Huberman, a Polish violinist who made it his mission to find dignified work in Palestine for Jewish musicians forced from their jobs by the Nazis.

For a foreign, non-Jewish man, Mr. Mehta’s association with Israel is remarkable for its longevity and passion. Yet its beginnings were refreshingly humdrum. “It started by chance,” Mr. Mehta says. “A great conductor, Eugene Ormandy, fell ill and couldn’t do a series of concerts with the Israel Philharmonic in 1961. I was a jobless conductor in Vienna, with my two children, and they called me to cover as substitute. They sent me two tickets, for my wife and myself.”

He recalls the contract as grueling—about 15 concerts in a short span—but there was “an immediate good feeling between me and the orchestra. We hit it off, musically and spiritually. And I felt very at home in Israel, because it’s somewhat like our place, somewhat like India.” I press him to elaborate. “Their temperament is very much like India,” he says. “They all talk at the same time. They’re very opinionated, very argumentative, very hospitable.”

Mr. Mehta doesn’t say so, but when he signed on full-time in 1969, he quickly became a sort of popular hero, an outsider who had embraced Israel in a time of national hardship and international ostracism. He became friendly with Israeli founder and former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Another friend was Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek: “He was Viennese, and I’m half-Viennese because of my musical culture—I speak the Viennese dialect—so we became very close,” Mr. Mehta says. As for Ben-Gurion, he “didn’t love music so much, but he was a scholar of oriental religions. He told me things about Zoroastrianism that I didn’t even know. You know, we modern Parsis, we don’t know too much. We even pray in a language we don’t understand”—a reference to Avestan, the ancient Iranian language now used only in Zoroastrian scriptures.

Besides being impressed with Ben-Gurion’s erudition, Mr. Mehta was struck by “how very depressed he was” that India’s government had condemned Israel for the Six Day War in 1967. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had visited Cairo in solidarity with Israel’s enemies just four months after hostilities ceased. Mr. Mehta says Ben-Gurion “said to me, ‘We Israelis—and I particularly—worship Mahatma Gandhi. He managed to get rid of the British without spilling blood and we, in our small little country, had to kill and shoot them.’ ” Ben-Gurion couldn’t understand how the Mahatma’s country had become hostile to Israel. “And to this day, I don’t know either,” Mr. Mehta says. “What did India have to do with the Six Day War? Israel didn’t start it!”

Mr. Mehta still has Indian citizenship and is delighted that India and Israel now enjoy close relations, having established full diplomatic ties in 1992. I ask how it felt to be in the vanguard of this rapprochement. “Well,” he says, “I was in a way a substitute ambassador. In 1994, I took the Israel Philharmonic to Bombay and Delhi, and they played free of charge. Itzhak Perlman, the great violinist, didn’t take a fee. So I couldn’t be happier.”

Has Israel changed over the many years Mr. Mehta has known it? The maestro grows somber, and—in a faithful reflection of the way so many Israelis are themselves—quite critical. “Oh yes, I’m afraid,” he says, “and not for the better. This obsession with building settlements in land that really doesn’t belong to them—that’s where the argument is.” It’s a “great tragedy,” he adds, “that Sharon isn’t there anymore.” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was incapacitated by a stroke in 2006 and died eight years later. “He used to be very militant, and then completely changed. He would not have subsidized these settlements to the extent that is currently happening.” CONTINUE AT SITE