RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his essay “Why Many American Jews are Becoming Indifferent or Even Hostile to Israel,” Daniel Gordis lists, as key sources of tension, four major differences between the American and the Israeli political projects. His analysis strikes me as largely accurate, yet I think he misses something important by treating the differences as longstanding and perhaps even inherent. In fact, most are of recent vintage, and there is nothing inevitable or intractable about them. They are the product, first, of dramatic changes in the tenets of political liberalism, and second, of a collective decision by many American Jews to follow the new liberalism wherever it leads—even when it contradicts longstanding axioms of both American politics and traditional Judaism.https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2017/05/how-a-changing-american-liberalism-is-pulling-american-jews-away-from-israel/

Take, for instance, the issue of universalism versus particularism. It’s true, as Gordis notes, that unlike Israel, America was not founded to serve a particular ethnic group. Nevertheless, throughout most of its history, America has viewed itself and functioned as a nation-state. Thus, despite promoting supranational projects like the European Union, which entail forfeitures of sovereignty, America has shunned any such project for itself, preferring jealously to preserve its own sovereignty. This preference traces straight back to the founders’ distrust of “entangling alliances.” Even today, there is bipartisan agreement that America’s first responsibility is to itself, whether or not the “international community” agrees; that’s why even a thoroughly liberal president like Barack Obama didn’t hesitate to launch strikes against anti-American terrorists worldwide without waiting for UN approval—something few European countries would deem thinkable.

Of course, the agreement isn’t wall-to-wall. In recent decades a vocal subset of American liberals, mostly housed in the left wing of the Democratic party, has come to believe that—in the words of Walter Hallstein, first president of the European Commission—”the system of sovereign nation-states has failed.” As perhaps inevitable corollaries of this belief, they argue that national decisions require “global legitimacy,” and that one’s fellow citizens have no more claim on one’s allegiance than do citizens of other countries.

Princeton University, my alma mater, exemplifies this evolution. When I graduated in 1987, the university’s motto was “Princeton in the nation’s service,” which nobody considered problematic. A decade later, the idea that a university should dedicate itself to serving its own country in particular had become unacceptable in advanced liberal circles. And so, in 1996, the motto was changed to “Princeton in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.” Two decades later, even this was deemed too particularistic; last year, the university’s trustees recommended a new version: “Princeton in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.”

The change is hardly trivial. Americans who view their country as a nation-state, even if not the state of a particular ethnic group, have no trouble understanding why, when Israeli and Palestinian interests clash, Israel puts its own interests first: why it is reluctant to cede more territory to Palestinians when every previous such cession has massively increased terror, or ready to fight wars to stop rocket fire on its civilian population. Only for liberals who believe that countries have no right to prioritize their own citizens over other human beings are such decisions unacceptable.

Yet, even today, this latter view, however dogmatically held in elite circles and by American Jews, is a minority one in America at large. That’s precisely why polls consistently show that most Americans still strongly support Israel.

The same goesfor a second difference highlighted by Gordis: namely, the place of religion in the public square. A few decades ago, few Americans thought twice about crèche scenes in public venues at Christmastime or public-school choirs singing Christmas carols. Nor has the legal situation changed since then. In a series of rulings in the 1980s and 1990s, the Supreme Court largely upheld the constitutionality of public displays of crèches and other religious symbols, only occasionally nixing them due to very specific circumstances. As recently as 2014, it also upheld a decision by a town in upstate New York to have volunteer chaplains open local board meetings with a sectarian prayer. To this day, politicians from across the political spectrum, including the last three Democratic presidents, continue to speak openly about their own faith.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said Tuesday that the US embassy should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, upholding a campaign promise of US President Donald Trump, and that the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem is part of Israeli territory.

Her remarks came amid an ongoing diplomatic spat between the US and Israel over whether the Western Wall is part of Israel or the West Bank — as one US consular staffer suggested — as well as speculation on whether Trump will fulfill his campaign promise to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem, even as the president has since distanced himself from the move.

Trump is due in Israel and the West Bank on May 22-23, stopping first in Saudi Arabia. He will also visit Brussels and the Vatican after leaving the Mideast.

In excerpts from an interview with CBN News released on Tuesday, Haley said: “Obviously I believe that the capital should be Jerusalem and the embassy should be moved to Jerusalem because if you look at all their government is in Jerusalem. So much of what goes on is in Jerusalem and I think we have to see that for what it is.”

Regarding the Western Wall, Haley said: “I don’t know what the policy of the administration is, but I believe the Western Wall is part of Israel and I think that that is how we’ve always seen it and that’s how we should pursue it… We’ve always thought the Western Wall was part of Israel.”

Haley’s full interview is set to air on Wednesday.

The issue of Israeli sovereignty over the Wall came to a head this week when Israeli officials asked US officials organizing Trump’s visit to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could accompany him on his visit to the Western Wall. But the US declined, with one official telling the Israelis that the site is “not your territory.”

Israel angrily demanded an explanation from the White House, casting a cloud over the highly anticipated visit by the new president. The White House quickly distanced itself from the comments, saying they were unauthorized and did not reflect the president’s view.

Israel captured and annexed East Jerusalem, including the Old City and its holy sites, in the 1967 Six Day War and considers all of Jerusalem to be the undivided eternal capital of Israel, a stance not recognized by the international community, including the US.

Earlier Tuesday, Trump’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer affirmed that the Western Wall is indeed “clearly in Jerusalem,” hours after another official, national security adviser H.R. McMaster declined to answer a direct question as to whether the US government considers the Western Wall to be within Israeli territory. McMaster said that question “sounds like a policy decision.”

In November of last year, members of the University of North Carolina’s Hillel, J Street U and Heels for Israel voted on an “official” pro-Israel position document. The document, though it was meant to set out a “united declaration of principles”, is almost impossible to find online.

And with good reason. It was as pro-Israel as Kentucky Fried Chicken is pro-chicken.

Hillel, J Street U and Heels for Israel don’t represent any kind of pro-Israel position.

J Street is an anti-Israel hate group. Brooke Davies, the president of J-Street UNC-CH, has a social media feed brimming with support for other anti-Israel groups, including T’ruah and B’Tselem, and hatred for the Jewish State and her supporters. Davies even spitefully accused comedian Elon Gold of being a “hasbara mouthpiece”.

Hillel’s “Senior Jewish Educator”, Jenny Solomon is active in T’ruah. Her husband, Eric Solomon, is on T’ruah’s board. The North Carolina Hillel hired Jenny Solomon in June of last year. Next month, the anti-Israel couple led a T’ruah trip linked to BDS.

And Heels for Israel? It describes itself as “Working to collaborate with organizations like UNC Hillel and JStreetU”. J Street U defines itself as fighting against the “Occupation” by Jews of their own homeland.

If you collaborate with a group fighting Israel and Jews, what does that make you?

The unified policy insisted on confining Israel behind the ’48 Auschwitz borders, it demanded a PLO capital in East Jerusalem and condemned Jews living in “Settlements” in ’67 Israel. Its glossary described BDS in terms both negative and positive. And linked to a site supportive of BDS. It blasted Jews living in areas claimed by the PLO and Hamas as “a threat to the viability of the two-state solution.”

The signatories included the J Street leadership, the two Heels for Israel Campus co-liaisons, and Hillel’s leadership, Noa Havivi, Hillel co-president, Shira Chandler, the other co-president and Daniel Barondes, the Hillel Israel Chair.

Last Tuesday, coinciding with Israel’s 69th Independence Day, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) passed a resolution entitled ‘Occupied Palestine.’ The resolution denies Israel any sovereign claim to its own capital city, Jerusalem, and falsely describes Israel as the city’s “occupying power” and speaks of the “cultural heritage of Palestine and the distinctive character of East Jerusalem.”

Clearly, the intention of the UNESCO resolution is to achieve internationally the direct repudiation of Israel’s Jewish history and sovereignty in favor of Arab claims.

Lying behind this Arab diplomatic offensive is an Arab street and Muslim world, neither of which have reconciled themselves to Israel’s existence nor even the peoplehood of the Jews and thus the Jewish immemorial association and claim to Jerusalem.

However, this clamor and fixation on Jerusalem, quite recent in Muslim history, has led many to conclude that Jerusalem is holy to Islam and central to Palestinian Arab consciousness. This is, however, a propaganda fiction.

Though possessing important Muslim shrines, such as the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosques, Jerusalem holds no great significance for Islam, as history shows.

Jerusalem rates not a single mention in the Quran, nor is it the direction in which Muslims turn to pray. References in the Quran and hadith to the ‘farthest mosque,’ in allusion to which the Al Aqsa Mosque is named, and which has sometimes been invoked to connect Islam to Jerusalem since its earliest days, clearly doesn’t refer to a mosque which didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

Indeed, the site of the biblical temples is called Temple Mount, not the Mosque Mount and –– in contrast to innumerable Palestinian Authority statements today –– was acknowledged as such for decades by Jerusalem’s Muslims.

Nearly a quarter-century has passed since Yitzḥak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn. The agreement signed on September 13, 1993 established the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the official representative body of the Palestinian people and permitted its chairman, Yasir Arafat, to return to the West Bank after his extended isolation in Tunisia. Committing Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a final-status agreement, the so-called Oslo Accords opened the era of the peace process. https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/05/the-flaws-of-oslo-are-the-same-as-the-flaws-of-oslo/

It is worth recalling the buoyant atmosphere that characterized not only that particular moment on the South Lawn but, more generally, the period in world history in which it occurred. Most dramatically, the cold war with the Soviet Union had ended in a triumph for the United States and its form of liberal democracy. If this was not quite the “end of history,” as a major public-policy essay had conjectured, the fall of the mighty Soviet empire raised similarly exuberant expectations for other arenas of conflict. Why, after all, couldn’t Israelis and Palestinians make peace?

To some, all the elements were in place. The Palestinians, it was averred, were willing to come to the table, and Israel was open, forward-looking, and “hopeful.” Its Labor-party leadership—not only the war hero Rabin but also Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak—had set aside any remaining illusions of permanent occupation. Having marginalized the “territorial maximalists,” Israelis were prepared to make the painful compromises for peace—a dynamic that President Bill Clinton, a friend of Israel, could help push along.

As even ardent supporters of the ensuing peace process will admit, things did not—to put it mildly—go according to plan, and the final-status agreement never came about. Today, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s (quite possibly fleeting) enthusiasm for the project, even the beginning of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority seems highly unlikely. The optimism that greeted the apparent breakthrough of 1993, however understandable in light of the cultural atmosphere of the time, in retrospect seems downright delusional. Yet many Westerners, Jewish and gentile alike, still look back at the Oslo years as a kind of golden age, one that shines only the brighter in contrast to the allegedly dark present.

Was Oslo a golden age? Those inclined to that belief now have the gift of a cleverly constructed drama that supports, and flatters, their view. Written by the New York playwright J.T. Rogers, Oslo tells the backstory of the Norwegian-brokered talks between informal envoys of the Israeli foreign ministry and the PLO over a ten-month period in 1992-93. Nearly three hours long, the play is heavy on dialogue and mostly lacking in the bells and whistles of many major New York productions. Nevertheless, by any non-Hamiltonstandard the play has been a hit, having moved from its debut last year at a small off-Broadway venue to the much bigger Lincoln Center Theater. On the evening I saw it, the crowd, more Upper West Side than Upper Midwest, gave the performers a rapturous standing ovation.

One might attribute this fervor at least in part to our own, highly fractious times, in which political, not to say partisan, drama is ripe for a comeback. But Oslo, which has been nominated for a 2017 Tony Award, is also an effective piece of indoctrination, mirroring, to a subtle but powerful degree, the dominant political mentality that helped produce the disastrous Oslo Accords themselves.

Aside fromthe iconic Rabin-Arafat handshake, the whole story of the Oslo negotiations is not especially well known, and Rogers deserves credit for telling it with relative fidelity. The events are seen from the perspective of a Norwegian deputy foreign minister named Jan Egeland and his wife and fellow bureaucrat, Mona Juul. Thanks to a shared zeal, whose motive is never examined, the two navigate all manner of obstacles in order to bring Israelis and Palestinians together in secret negotiations at a country house south of Oslo, where the play is largely set.

Indeed, the play quite artfully stresses the single most astonishing fact about the Oslo talks: not only were they secret, but, on the Israeli side, they were at first completely unauthorized. At the time, Israelis were forbidden by law from having direct contact with PLO officials. It was Yossi Beilin, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, who unilaterally decided that flouting the law was justified by the end he sought. In December 1992, Beilin asked Yair Hirschfeld, a University of Haifa economist, to meet in London with the PLO’s finance minister, Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Ala. In January and early February, at further meetings in Norway, Hirschfeld and another economist, Ron Pundak, began drafting with the PLO team a document offering an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian administration in the West Bank, and direct negotiations regarding a final-status accord.

Donald Trump is set for his first overseas trip as the U.S. president, with stops in Saudi ‎Arabia, Israel, Italy and Belgium.‎ The trip will include meetings with Pope Francis in Rome, NATO leaders in Brussels, ‎and G7 members in Sicily in addition to Saudi, Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

The Saudi visit, which kicks off the trip, is expected to result in the announcement ‎of a large arms sale package, as well as demonstrate that the American posture in ‎the region is no longer based on balancing Iran and Saudi Arabia, former President Barack Obama’s inexplicable strategy which has done nothing but to encourage Iran to be an even more ‎provocative and aggressive actor. So too, early and frequent American efforts at ‎the United Nations by Ambassador Nikki Haley to stop the constant Israel bashing, and the Trump-Netanyahu meeting, which offered a warm American embrace of ‎Israel, seemed a part of an effort to restore close ties between the two traditional ‎allies and put an end to the distancing of America from Israel, a strategy carried ‎out throughout Obama’s two terms.‎

While the Trump administration has worked to put U.S. relations with Israel on a ‎more traditional path, there is renewed hope among the career Middle East peace ‎processing contingent, and the vast majority of foreign policy journalists who do ‎such a poor job covering the region, that perhaps Trump will be serious ‎about dealmaking, and is at work setting balls in motion to get another peace ‎process between Israelis and Palestinians going. The new hopes stem from ‎the warm welcome that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas received ‎on his recent official visit to the White House, and other signals that the president ‎and his team seem to have been sending to Israel. ‎

Many are putting weight on the fact that long-time Trump friend Ronald ‎Lauder has been encouraging the White House to launch a new peace process initiative, ‎arguing that Abbas is a moderate and open to a deal and that the time is right ‎given the new American team in place. (Presumably, the timing and people were ‎wrong on all prior occasions.) Attached to this theory is the notion that Abbas ‎could sell a deal to Palestinians, including those affiliated with or supportive of ‎Hamas, a bitter enemy of the PA and currently in control of Gaza. Selling a deal would mean that Israel and the ‎Palestinians could reach a deal, and there is no evidence today of overlapping sets ‎of minimally acceptable positions between the two parties, just as there never has ‎been. Most who have studied Palestinian politics believe that Abbas, who has long ‎overstayed his elected term, is hardly strong enough to ‎conclude a process that would require moderation or abandonment of core ‎Palestinian positions, such as the so-called “right of return” for millions of descendants of ‎refugees.‎

When Trump administration officials have met with Israeli leaders, both at the ‎White House and in Israel, the issue of settlement construction, the obsession of ‎the Obama White House, has come up. Trump chose not to get into a ‎public fight with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue on his first visit to ‎meet with the president, but nonetheless made clear that expansion of settlements ‎beyond their current boundaries would be viewed as problematic. ‎

Last Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah boasted in a televised address (he rarely makes live appearances) that the next war with Israel would be waged in Israeli territory. Nasrallah said that Israel was “scared and worried… and knows that [war] could be inside the occupied Palestinian territories.” Nasrallah’s tough rhetoric is somewhat peculiar as it comes from a man who’s been living underground for the past 11 years and rarely resides at any given location for any lengthy period of time for fear of being at the receiving end of Israel’s long arm.

Nasrallah’s speech was meant to mark the one year anniversary of the liquidation of Hezbollah’s chief of special operations Mustafa Badreddine, who was killed in Syria under mysterious circumstances. Badreddine replaced Imad Mughniyeh in that capacity. Mughniyeh himself was killed in 2008 in Damascus in a hit widely believed to have been executed by Mossad and CIA operatives in a joint operation.

Nasrallah’s bombast is eerily reminiscent of Arab rhetoric just prior to the June 1967 Six-Day War, which ended badly for the Arabs. Calls for an Arab invasion and Israel’s destruction reached fever pitch in the days preceding the war, with Arab leaders vying for top spot in the shrill contest.

On May 22, 1967 Radio Cairo announced that, “the Arab people is firmly resolved to wipe Israel off the map.” On May 31, President Abdel Rahman Aref of Iraq announced, “our goal is clear – to wipe Israel off the map. We shall, God willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa.” Not to be outdone, PLO chairman, Ahmed Shukairy, boasted on June 1, that, “we shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.” Government leaders of other Arab countries, including those of Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, joined in on the hate fest.

Israel’s answer to its enemy’s venom was delivered on June 5, 1967 at 7:45 a.m. At precisely that time, Israel unleashed its version of Shock and Awe, and in just under 3 hours, destroyed the bulk of the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Some 452 Arab aircraft – MiG-21s, MiG-19s, MiG-17s, Hawker Hunters and various medium and heavy bombers were instantly transformed into expensive heaps of scrap metal.