But isn’t there shame that we do deserve? What about learning to live with shame that is almost unbearable? Isn’t it precisely by becoming harrowingly aware of our faults and misdeeds that we become better people? Why no books about living with shame, rather than just getting beyond it?

It’s not only in the world of books that shame is taboo, where the only goal is to avoid it. We do the same in Israeli society, deftly moving the spotlight from our misdeeds to someone else’s alleged fault. Perhaps successfully, perhaps not, we try to convince ourselves that we bear no responsibility. What’s certain, though, is that this pattern allows us to avoid the introspection that might actually make us better people and, ultimately, a better country.

BY NOW, most of us have forgotten Eden Abergil, the former IDF soldier who posted on her Facebook page photographs of herself posing in front of bound and blindfolded Palestinians. What she did is revolting on a myriad of levels. For me, though, what was most astounding was her absolute unwillingness to consider the possibility that she had done anything wrong.

Did Abergil not care that she was humiliating those Palestinians (for they must have known that they were being photographed)? Did she not care that she was affecting how they would think of Jews? Did she not realize what the momentary (and sick) satisfaction she would get from this display of – of what? – might do to the image of her country as those photos flashed across the world, or the light it would cast on her (former) fellow soldiers, most of whom do their best to protect their country with incomparable decency?

At first, she feigned naïveté. “I still don’t understand what’s wrong,” she said to Army Radio, because the “pictures were taken in goodwill; there was no statement in them.”

But then, worst of all, she tried to shift the blame. She aimed her sights at the very army she’d betrayed, because she’d been informed that she’d be stripped of her rank. “The army let me down,” she said, expressing anger, not shame. “I’m sorry that I served in such [an] army.”

On that count, she’s right. It’s a shame that someone like her served in our army.

But Abergil is only sorry that she served in the army. She has no regret that she humiliated her prisoners, brought shame on the army or was raised without her parents teaching her that the best thing to do when you’re clearly wrong is to acknowledge that – and to grow from it. No, she’s part of the “healing the shame we don’t deserve” society, in which everyone except us is at fault.

At least the officer who is accused of having stolen laptops from one of the Turkish flotilla ships had the decency to cover his face at his first hearing. Is it possible that he’s now ashamed? One can only hope.

BUT THIS is not just an army matter. What about Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, whose recent book, Torat Hamelech, argues that non-Jews may be killed indiscriminately in war, and who asserts, in Chapter Five, that “even babies who [are innocent] – there is good reason to consider killing them because of the future danger that will be created if they are raised by evil-doers like their parents.”

So the police investigate Shapira for incitement, but instead of acknowledging that something is clearly amiss with religious education in parts of Israeli society, wide swathes of the rabbinate close ranks, arguing that rabbis must have freedom of expression. If the police can indict for this, religious freedom will be endangered, they insist. Magically, it’s now religious freedom that’s the issue, not the fact that some of the country’s religious “leadership” is condoning murder.

Whether or not this ought to be a police matter is a good question. But, so too, is the question of what is the ideal collective response to a book like Shapira’s. Is society well served when legalities afford us escape from confronting our painful failings? How is it that a country that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust can produce “religious” leaders who sanction the wholesale murder of babies? Most Israelis don’t see this as a reflection on our collective society.

What’s happening to us that we’re producing Abergils and Shapiras (and others) in ever increasing numbers? Do we not recognize the danger of our unwillingness to confront the shameful parts of who we’ve become? Of course we’re at war, and yes, we do have very real enemies. But when our battles blind us to the danger of being unwilling to admit that some dimensions of this society are simply shameful, haven’t we lost something sacred? With Israel so unfairly delegitimized at every turn, it is only natural that we will instinctively seek to defend the country we love. Sadly, there are too few Jews willing do to that today.

But that instinct must have limits. When the world applies double standards or is hypercritical in its treatment of the Jewish state, patriotism demands that we fight back. But when things go wrong, when there’s incontrovertible evidence that something is seriously amiss with Israel’s moral education (or at least parts of it), genuine patriotism demands that we acknowledge that, too.

For the danger of constant self-justification is very real. If we continue this pattern of avoiding shame and shifting blame, even if we are successful in saving this country, we may wake up one day and realize that what we saved wasn’t worth having in the first place.

“What is this?” he asked.

“It’s a Jewish cemetery in Argentina,” I told him. “See the Hebrew lettering on the tombstones?”

“But why are the tombstones shattered?” “People broke them,” I explained.

“But why would anyone do that?” “Because they hate Jews, I guess,” I told him.

“Why?” And a moment later, “But these Jews were dead,” he said to me. “They hate dead Jews, too?” Now things had gotten surreal. Was an Israeli Arab really asking me why anyone might hate Jews? Khaled wasn’t kidding. He seemed utterly perplexed, and continued studying the photograph.

I didn’t really know where to begin. I told him that in some places in Europe, people still destroy Jewish cemeteries. He was astounded. For a moment, I considered telling him what the Jordanians had done to Jewish cemeteries between 1948 and 1967, but for whatever reason, I decided not to. Maybe I just wanted to relish, even for a few moments, the hopeful moment of an Arab man who couldn’t understand why anyone would hate the Jews. It was the sort of moment that gives you some hope, even if but a faint flicker.

But flickers fade, especially in this region. A few days later, my wife and I were in Tel Aviv for an outstanding program on “The Law of Return: Just or Discriminatory?” sponsored by the Metzilah Center, founded by Prof. Ruth Gavison, one of the country’s most eminent jurists and a Zionist thinker of great profundity. Dr. Raif Zreik, of Tel Aviv University, whom I’d never heard before, was the first speaker.

Zreik, it was immediately obvious, is an intellectual to be reckoned with. Educated at Hebrew University, Columbia and Harvard, he is extraordinarily articulate, speaks a mellifluous Hebrew and doesn’t pull punches. Nor did he waste any time.

Zreik began by explaining why he knew he wouldn’t change our minds. The difference between an intellectual and an ideologue, he said, is that an intellectual can surprise himself. Intellectuals are sufficiently open-minded and rational that they occasionally find themselves adopting positions different from what they’d originally thought. An ideologue can never do that, he said.

But we immigrants, Zreik asserted, “don’t have the luxury of being intellectuals…. You are all small-minded intellectuals, not because you’re not smart, but because your bodies won’t let you be honest. If you were, you might have to admit you have no right to be here.”

From there, Zreik launched into what he called a macro-view of the Zionist story. The Palestinians were in Palestine, he said, and Jews in Europe. The Jews in Europe ran into deep trouble, but there was then a mismatch between the place of the problem (Europe) and the place of the solution (Palestine).

Everything that’s followed, he insisted, is the result of that original mismatch.

What was astounding was everything that Zreik did not mention. That the Jews also had a connection to this place and had been exiled from it. That before Israel was created, Jews had nowhere to go. That the world understood that and ultimately, with Balfour, Peel and the partition plan, collectively decided that the Jews should have a state, and that it should be here. That, ironically, it was Zionism’s success that ignited Palestinian nationalism. No, none of that would fit into his theory, so it went unmentioned. Zreik, brilliant though he clearly is, had become the very ideologue he’d just defined.

Ultimately, Zreik was a high-brow version of Helen Thomas. “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine” – Thomas’ words, but Zreik’s position, too. And with the world almost everywhere turning on the Jews once again, saying “get the hell out Palestine” is tantamount to saying “rest in pieces.” Zreik may not intend that, but that’s where his theory must inexorably lead.

HOW DO we get more Khaleds, I wondered. Decent people, understandably not always happy with their lot as Israeli Arabs, but people who just want to live together, not to turn the clock back to a place it can never go.

I found myself missing Khaled’s bewilderment at the hatred. Of course, most people don’t use the word “hate.” They speak in terms of Palestine belonging only to the Palestinians, or the immorality of the Law of Return. Or the intolerability of the embargo. But ultimately, their positions boil down to this – you, unlike everyone else, do not need, or deserve, a home. Leave. And rest in pieces.

Which brings us to this week. There are Jews who wonder if the Ninth of Av still makes sense. After all, no one is slaughtering us. Israel is thriving. And Jerusalem is rebuilt. Why all the mourning? For me, moments like an evening with Dr. Zreik, articulate and brilliant though he is, make the case for this period of mourning. It’s not just about the past, but also about the future, about what could still happen, and what may already be beginning. “The Lord has summoned against Jacob enemies all about him,” says Lamentations (1:17). “Jerusalem has become among them a thing unclean.”

The Khaleds of the world are too few and far between. Today, for the most part, we’re surrounded by a world that has tired of us, once again. It has tired of its guilt, and has tired of the state that it re-created when that sense of responsibility was at its peak. Gone is the era when the world understood, even if momentarily, that we, no less than anyone else, deserve a place to be. We had it, briefly, but it’s gone.

Which is why, I suppose, we still conclude the reading of Lamentations not with its last verse, but by repeating the penultimate sentence: “Take us back, O Lord… renew our days as of old.”

(Photograph by Zion Ozeri, www.zionozeri.com)

There’s more, of course, including their treatment of Sephardim (even haredi Sephardim), the often despicable attitude to women in their communities, their tendency toward violence (when irked, they attack city workers, police officers and even the haredi rabbi who urged the Sephardi parents to go to the Supreme Court) and, most obvious, their unwillingness to share the burden of defending this country.

This cancer threatens to destroy everything we have built. Yes, that’s a harsh metaphor, but it’s apt. As Dan Ben-David of the Taub Center has shown, despite its current economic stability, the State of Israel is simply economically unsustainable if matters continue this way. Barring a dramatic shift in policy, the country will collapse under the weight of these haredi “cells” that drain the energy from the best of the body. There’s nothing inherently evil about a cancer cell; we dread it only because it kills the organism we desperately wish to preserve. Haredim have every right to live as they wish, but that does not mean that we must allow them to destroy the country that we have built at such great cost over the past century.

THE HAND-WRINGING of the past week suggests that most Israelis believe that there’s little we can do. I disagree. With apologies to Jonathan Swift, I offer the following modest proposal for our collective consideration.

Those who argue that the two-state solution will not work are right. We need not a two-state solution, but a five-state solution.

1. Hamastan will be created on the territory now known as the Gaza Strip, and will be ruled by the same people who already run it. Like Iran and North Korea, Hamastan will survive through sheer force and the use of terror, until its citizens rebel. Its borders are already internationally recognized. It already has a flag, and international sympathy in abundance.

Yes, it’s short on many other commodities, so one presumes that even as Israel continues to blockade it (for it will remain sworn on Israel’s destruction), it will have to continue to let in massive humanitarian aid, either by sea or by land. But perhaps Egypt will open its borders and let goods flow in from the south. After all, it’s not as if Hamastan will be sworn on Egypt’s destruction. In Hamastan, in short, nothing but the name changes.

2. Fatahland, on the other hand, will rise from what is today the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria. It, too, thankfully already has a flag. It could become a democracy, though probably a limping one at best, considering the Palestinians’ record of creating transparent, democratic institutions. True, we might be pleasantly surprised, and its democracy might flourish. Equally possible, though, is that absent Israel’s efforts at propping up the scaffolding of its democratically inclined leaders, Fatahland could slip into dictatorship. The jury is out, but whether Fatahland is democratic or just another version of the brutal regime of Hamastan would really not be Israel’s problem.

Fortunately, even if Fatahland begins as a despotic regime, however, that could eventually change. For as Americans like John Adams and his compatriots knew, as millions of former Soviet citizens learned and Zionists before May 1948 understood well, you can earn freedom when you want it badly enough and are willing to risk – and sometimes to die – for it. Perhaps Fatahlandians will really crave freedom enough to be willing to die for it. They’ve proven that there are those of them willing to die to kill us; now we’d see if they’re willing to die to make themselves free.

3. Palestine will be the country of today’s Israeli Arabs. Increasingly, Israeli Arabs are wholly unambiguous about the fact that they reject the notion of Israel as a Jewish state. Adalah is only one of the Israel-Arab advocacy groups that have openly called for ending the Jewish character of the State of Israel. And the citizens of Umm el-Fahm, Israeli Arab citizens who rioted after the recent flotilla incident, continuously make it clear that they want a different type of government. It’s time to give them one. Though its borders would have to be negotiated, Palestine would be based in the “Triangle” section of the Galilee where such sentiment is strongest. And we’d have to figure out how to handle the other pockets of such sentiment, which are not geographically contiguous with the Triangle.

Palestine would probably be democratic. It would simply be liberated from the oppressive Jewish regime that it can’t bear, and would be free to chart its own course. And amazingly, Israel might have a neighboring Arab state with which it’s never been at war.

Alas, Palestine does not have a flag. The PA’s flag will be taken by Fatahland. And Israel’s flag, based as it is on the image of a tallit, would be thoroughly unacceptable. Designing a flag will thus be one of the first challenges to which the leaders of the new state will have to turn their attention.

4. Haredia will be the ultra-Orthodox state. Based primarily in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Mea She’arim, Geula and Sanhedria, along with Bnei Brak and perhaps a few other localities, Haredia would be the country that last week’s 100,000 plus protesters clearly desire. It would have a Supreme Council of Rabbinic Elders, not the vile secular Supreme Court that so offends them. They would be free to do whatever they wished with their schools, and with their Sephardim. They could impose a halachicly based system of law as other countries have done with Shari’a. They could virtually guarantee the exclusion of all the nefarious influences they so deeply object to in contemporary Israel. They could impose whatever standards for conversion they wished, without causing a rift with the rest of the Jewish world, which would actually have more in common with Turkey than it will with Haredia.

Today’s haredim already have a political party called Degel Hatorah, the flag of Torah. Surely, they’ll have some ideas for a flag.

How Haredia will defend itself against attacks from elements emanating from Hamastan and Fatahland is, admittedly, not entirely clear. Defense, after all, takes some serious commitment, a willingness to risk and lots of training. There is a real possibility, unfortunately, that Haredia will be utterly unable to defend itself, and Haredians (some will just call them Haredim, probably) will find themselves the most abandoned and vulnerable group in the Middle East. What will the world say about that? Will there be the same outpouring of concern that there is now for the Palestinians of Gaza? We’ll learn a lot about the world from watching how many other countries come to the verbal and physical defense of Haredia facing its Arab neighbors all alone.

5. Israel will be the region’s Jewish and democratic state. It doesn’t have recognized borders, but at least it does have a flag. It will be mostly Jewish, though some Israeli Arabs will decide to remain Israelis instead of becoming Palestinians, and they should be welcomed. The same with Haredim – a few might be willing to recognize the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and might decide to live in a Zionist entity. If they want to go to the army and are willing to live off their own salaries and not off government subsidies, then they, too, should be welcomed.

ISRAEL WILL be a broad tent. It will include religious and secular, right wing and left wing, free marketers and those more inclined to socialism. It will be home to Im Tirtzu, a right-of-center student organization seeking to restore Zionism to Israeli campuses that countenances no criticism of Israel whatsoever, and Breaking the Silence, former IDF soldiers – and other peaceniks who’ve now glommed on to them – who travel across the world telling anyone who’ll listen about the excesses of Israeli power. It will be home to Avigdor Lieberman and Naomi Chazan.

Eventually, of course, it’s likely that both Palestine and Haredia will discover that running a country is a pretty complicated business. You need hospitals, and police. You need a functioning court system. You need people who can run the power company and the phones, people who can fly airplanes and people who can represent you in the international community. And, they’ll discover, all that money that Reform and Conservative Jews helped steer toward Israel actually did make life much better.

So the time may come that they’ll crawl back to us, on their hands and knees, begging us to annex them back. Imagine that. Israel annexes territory, but because the territory actually asked to be annexed. What a breath of fresh air.

Wait, though – not so quick. Maybe we’ll take them, maybe we won’t. Because by then, hopefully, we’ll have had a serious national conversation about what our country is committed to. We won’t be embarrassed by the idea of a Jewish democratic state, and we’ll have discussed what preserving it will entail. So we’ll tell them who we are. They can join the enterprise called Zionism, or at least live with it and respect it, or they can stay independent.

But we ought not to be cavalier about this scenario – it is profoundly sad for Israel, too. Most Israelis take great pride in the country’s commitment to diversity, even if it is far from perfectly implemented. Its commitment to heterogeneity, and to freedom, is both one of its great strengths and one of its great weaknesses. Breaking up the region into these disparate countries addresses the weakness, but also robs Israel of potential strength. It’s an eventuality Israel should want to avoid.

What makes Israel different from these other imagined countries is that it does not wish to purge from its ranks those who are different. But it is slowly being given no choice. The challenge to its leaders now – were they only able to extricate themselves from their inability to make any decisions about anything at all – is to take sufficient steps to show these populations that in an ideal world, we want to live with them. But even more than that, we want to survive. Therefore, if surviving means living without them, so be it.

The real onus is on those groups who refuse to accept the notion of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state to show Israelis how we survive with them, and to demonstrate that their continued participation in our nation will not lead to its ultimate demise.

And now for something completely different — an article on the political significance of the Bible’s Tower of Babel story.  You can read it online here or download a PDF here.

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Comments and reactions, as always, below …

A Botched Raid, a Vital Embargo

By DANIEL GORDIS

June 3, 2010

Jerusalem

IN the last few days, Jerusalem has been blanketed by an unusual combination of humiliation and steely determination. How is it, people here wondered aloud, that the same country that tripled its size in three lightning days in June 1967 and then pulled off the rescue at Entebbe nine years later now seems to botch everything?

We lost the 2006 war in Lebanon, believing — incorrectly — that our venerated air force could win the war from the skies. The strikes on Gaza in December 2008 were a military success, but we have utterly failed to convince the world that it was a defensive effort precipitated by eight years of Hamas’s firing Qassam rockets at us, killing and maiming and destroying any semblance of a normal life for Israelis living near the border. And then came Monday’s attack on the flotilla trying to break through the naval blockade of Gaza.

Yet, despite widespread criticism at the way the raid was conducted, few here doubted that stopping the flotilla was the right thing to do. Life in Gaza is unquestionably oppressive; no one in his right mind would choose to live there. But there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza; if anyone goes without food, shelter or medicine, that is by the choice of the Hamas government, which puts garnering international sympathy above taking care of its citizens. Israel has readily agreed to send into Gaza all the food and humanitarian supplies on the boats after they had been inspected for weapons.

Thus this flotilla was no “peace operation.” It was intended to break the blockade or to increase international pressure to end it. Its leaders, with the connivance of the Turkish government, set a trap, and Israel blundered smack into it.

But that does not make the blockade wrong. Hamas is a terrorist organization that completed its takeover of Gaza through brute force. It executes its political enemies at will. It is one of the world’s most misogynist regimes, allowing the murder of women for the slightest infraction of family honor.

Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from Israeli territory and has held him for four years without giving the Red Cross any access to him, in violation of the most basic international standards of conduct. And, of course, Hamas openly insists that it will countenance no long-term peace with Israel; the resistance will not end, it says, until Israel is destroyed.

Like every other country, Israel has as its foremost obligation the protection of its citizens. Given that, why should it have allowed the flotilla to enter without inspecting its goods? If the United States were to impose a blockade on Iran (which seems unlikely), and another country dispatched a string of ships in a similar operation, is there any chance the United States Navy would let them through without inspection?

Israel will, of course, endure tremendous international condemnation for this week’s events. Sadly, though, we Israelis are becoming somewhat inured to such criticism. And we know that we dare not capitulate now.

It is no accident that Turkey sent the flotilla at this time. It is clearly cozying up to Iran these days, even teaming with Brazil to offer Tehran a deal on atomic fuel that would allow the mullahs to maintain their effort to build a nuclear arsenal. Ankara’s warmongering talk this week was not intended for global consumption; it was meant to show Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Turkey is playing a new role in the Middle East.

Iran finances Hezbollah and Hamas and does everything it can to weaken and marginalize Israel, inching toward its vision of a world without a Jewish state. The West has known of Iran’s nuclear intentions for well over a decade, but has effectively done nothing. Israelis understand that we — and we alone — will have to ensure our security and our survival.

The recent avalanche of international condemnation is very painful for Israelis, who remember the years in which we were seen as a beacon of democracy and sophistication in a repressive part of the world. Those days are gone, of course, because of the world’s impatience with the “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza.

Our problem is that though most Israelis want peace with two states — one Jewish and one Palestinian, living side by side — we cannot find anyone to make a deal with us. A decade ago, President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak, tried, but Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, walked away. Now the supposedly moderate Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, refuses to negotiate, as of course does Hamas.

Israelis are resigned to the fact that reason will not shake the world’s blatant double standard. Our blockade of Gaza is “criminal”; yet nobody mentions that Egypt has had a blockade of Gaza in place since 2007, and has never hesitated to use lethal force against those trying to break it. Israel’s attempt to enforce a blockade becomes an international crisis, while most of the world shrugs when North Korea sinks a South Korean ship. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared his willingness to sit with Fatah leaders any time, anywhere, but they insist on mere “proximity talks,” which they will probably now scuttle, using the flotilla as an excuse.

Israel’s geographic vulnerability means that we do not have the luxury of caving in to the world’s condemnation. We will have to gird ourselves for the long, dangerous and lonely road ahead, buoyed by hope that what ultimately prevails will be not what is momentarily popular, but rather what is just.

[Credit:  Both Text and Image from New York Times]

Hey Danny….yet again a misguided Israeli political and military mission with regard to Gaza that American Jewry will be asked to stand by and support. All over the news Israel will be referred to as “the Jewish State” as worldwide condemnation will pour in. As a Jew I will be on the defensive despite the fact that I have no vote and no say in whatever the politicians in Israel decide. Again, you will no doubt ask for solidarity by Jewish folk worldwide and we will answer for Israeli decision-making. I love Israel as my religious base, but the policies do not reflect my peace loving values. I support Israel with bonds and donations and visits, but the thriving American Jewish experience is independent of it.

OK, there’s a lot there, and most of it I won’t respond to now.  But this is one of those moments when I don’t think we have the luxury of writing a column over days, printing it out and editing it, sleeping on it and editing it again.  Too much is happening, and people are too hurting and too confused for something not to be said.

To be sure, there’s much more that we don’t know than we do.  We’ll learn a lot in the days and weeks to come.  But we do know that this was a tragic day and an excruciatingly painful one in Israel.  At the fruit market, and at the dry cleaners, I asked people working there how they were, and all I got was a sigh.  And then, “Yom kasheh.  A tough day.  They’re going to eat us alive.”

They will, indeed, eat us alive.  It’s taken a full day for the Israeli government to say anything coherent at all, riots are breaking out in Israeli Arab towns, Israelis in Istanbul have been warned by the Foreign Ministry not to leave their hotel rooms, and the international community is raining down condemnation.

But I jump to conclusions very different than those of my high school friend, and I responded to him in language very close to this:

David – we couldn’t disagree more strongly.  Israel’s actions were “misguided”?   Let’s take that first. Were there tragic outcomes? Obviously. But “misguided”? Gaza is under the malicious and cynical rule of a terror organization sworn on Israel’s destruction, that is holding an Israeli soldier captive in contravention of all international treaties, and that oppresses its own population while even Palestinian witnesses there acknowledge that there is no food shortage. Given Hamas’ military objectives, Israel would be crazy not to check what’s going in.  But Israel had already pledged to pass on any humanitarian goods after they were inspected, and told the boats the same thing.  So, no, I don’t think that the idea of stopping the boats was misguided.

What we know is that on five of the ships, the commandos (among them friends of our kids, by the way) boarded the boats, and there was no resistance and no fighting.

On one boat, however, the first soldiers to land on the boat were attacked with metal rods and knives. There’s video of it.  It’s playing all over Israeli and all over the internet.  In some cases, soldiers’ weapons were stolen and used against them. One was stabbed, apparently in the abdomen.  Another was tossed from a desk and trampled when he landed. There were a handful of commandos there, and 600 “peace activists.” On Israeli news tonight, the soldiers on helicopters taking them to the hospital were interviewed.  They descended the ropes, they said, planning to talk the “activists” into going to Ashdod.  Their weapons were not in their hands, but strapped to their backs.  “We went into war,” one in his 30’s said bitterly tonight, “and all we had were toys.”  They were beaten, trampled, shot (yes, there were bullet injuries) but only after forty minutes of combat did they resort to live five.  They were going to get lynched if they didn’t fight back, they said.

Was I there?  No.  Do I know what really happened?  No.  But do I trust these kids and their officers?  Yes, I do.

As for “peace activists,” David, how much do you know about the IHH? It’s a terror support group, supported by Turkey (among others) and it was ent to provoke. If they just wanted the goods to get to Gaza, they could have agreed to transfer them to an Israeli ship, or to unload them in Ashdod, as the Navy personnel asked them to.  But they didn’t want that. They just wanted to break the blockade. Why?  For food?  Even a few Palestinian journalists with some guts are reporting that there’s no humanitarian food crisis in Gaza.  No, it wasn’t about food.  They want the blockade broken so that after that, non-humanitarian items (read weapons) could brought in. Why should Israel allow that?  So that they can be better armed the next time we have to send our kids into Gaza?

As for “being on the defensive,” you “will be on the defensive” only because you totally don’t get it. For if you did get it, you wouldn’t feel that way.  There’s only one country anywhere on the planet about which there’s a conversation about whether it has a right to exist. Do you ever think about why that is? What, the fate of the Palestinians is worse than that of aborigines in Australia?  Or people in the Congo, or Rwanda?  Why all the attention on Israel?  Do you really not get it?  You think that New Zealand just coincidentally decided this week to make kosher slaughtering illegal?  You think it’s really about humanitarian commitments?  Come on.

No, David, you really don’t have to defend Israel.  No one’s asking you to.  We know that it’s too late to expect many Americans like you to assume we’re right before you assume we’re wrong.  As we look out at Jews across the world, we’re just assessing who gets Jewish history, and who’s so thoroughly intellectually assimilated that they’re actually embarrassed that that Jews don’t have to continue to be victims. I’m horrified by what happened on the ship, and I’ll be shocked if after all is in, we find that Israel made no mistakes.  (This was pretty clearly an intelligence failure, at the very minimum, sending those soldiers into something for which they had not at all been prepared or armed.)  But if that had been my kid on the ship, and he’d gone in to prevent the blockade from being broken, but had no intention of fighting, and had then been attacked, I’d want him to defend himself.  No matter what.  I’d want him to come home whole, because that’s part of the new Jewish reality that this country is supposed to make possible.

The loss of life is tragic. So are the injuries to soldiers, including serious head wounds.  But most tragic of all is that the world is so willing to be blinded to what’s really going on here.

At the end of this excruciating day in Israel, at least given what I know at this moment, I’m saddened but not apologetic.  I’m not surprised by most of the world’s reactions.  But I haven’t lost sight of who provoked this, and why they did that.  But you’re a very smart guy.  Why have you?

In October 1994, several days after kidnapped IDF soldier Nachshon Wachsman was killed in a failed attempt to save him from his terrorist captors, I was scheduled to teach my weekly graduate seminar at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. But given the horror of what had just transpired, I couldn’t even imagine simply teaching as planned. I no longer recall what had been scheduled for that day. But what I do remember is that I decided to scrap the usual fare and that I taught a text in memory of Wachsman.

As the seminar drew to a close, it was obviously quiet in the room. But just as the students were preparing to disperse, one looked at me and asked, “What does any of this have to do with us?”

More than 15 years later, I can still picture that moment, frozen in time. I remember exactly where she was sitting. I recall the looks of discomfort on the faces of some of the other students, but the nods of agreement with her question from others. And I remember that I had no idea what to say.

And I remember feeling unbearably lonely and wholly out of place. Lonely because it was clear that she was not the only one wondering why in the world we were thinking about Nachshon Wachsman, when my own heart was breaking, and out of place because I had no idea how to engage those students in a conversation about why he mattered to me. I didn’t know where to begin.

What I didn’t know then, of course, was that a question that seemed to me an aberration would soon become the norm.

BUT IT has. Among young American Jews today, the public discourse has been captured by the intellectual and emotional heirs of that graduate student. Today’s is a generation of young American intellectuals and communal leaders without the instinctive bond to Israel that my generation possesses, even when Israel infuriates or embarrasses us. This is a generation of people like the talented writer Jay Michaelson, who wrote in The Forward, “I no longer want to feel entangled by [Israelis’] decisions and implicated in their consequences… count me out.”

Even in the moments of our greatest frustration with Israel, the people that I grew up with could never utter the words “count me out.”

Michaelson is but part of a massive wave. Prof. Jack Wertheimer, in presenting some preliminary findings from his newest study of American Jews (the specific figures are still being processed), noted a few weeks ago that most young American Jewish leaders (yes, leaders) “do not see Israel as central to Jewish identity and peoplehood.”

The evidence is virtually limitless. We’re witness to a tectonic shift in American Jewish life, but many people would rather ignore it than face the serious work that lies ahead. Thus, when I pointed out (“If this is our future,” Jerusalem Post, May 7) that following Brandeis University’s invitation to Ambassador Michael Oren to be its commencement speaker, the public discourse was captured by those opposed to his invitation, some people responded by pointing out the (obvious) fact that many Brandeis students (and probably the majority) supported the invitation. A petition in favor, signed by 5,000 people, was also reported. And a small number of articles in the Brandeis paper, opined one faculty person in a response to the Post, ought not be taken out of context. “Imagine someone telling you it’s pouring rain outside and you stick your head out the window and see there are just a couple of clouds in the sky,” he wrote.

But what we’re facing would be “just a couple of clouds in the sky” if the story that mattered was about Brandeis, which it obviously is not. Everyone knows that Jewish life on campus doesn’t get better than Jewish life at Brandeis. So why pretend that Brandeis is the issue? What is significant is that even at Brandeis, one of the crown jewels of American Jewish academe, as of the publication of my previous column, there had been four pieces in the student newspaper about the Oren invitation. The Justice’s official editorial and the head of the campus J Street chapter weighed in opposed. So, too, did a member of the computer science faculty. And a student representative to the Board of Trustees aimed to defend the invite by suggesting that Oren was being asked to campus not as a representative of the State of Israel, but as an academic.

WHY DOES any of this matter? Because in not one of these pieces did any of the four writers have a single positive thing to say about Israel. That, not Brandeis, is the story.

So instead of circling our wagons, seeking to convince ourselves that it’s not really raining and that there are only a few clouds in the sky, I propose that we ask ourselves a few basic questions: (1) Do we believe that the future of the Jewish people depends on what happens to Israel? (2) Do we believe that Israel can survive without strong and consistent support from the American Jewish community? (3) Given today’s younger generation, does a serious problem loom? (4) If we are facing a challenge, how did it arise? (5) And perhaps most importantly, what should be done?

To me it seems patently obvious that the secure, confident and creative Diaspora community that many American Jews now take for granted is directly dependent on a vital and flourishing State of Israel. Today’s young American Jewish leaders can neither recall nor imagine the days in which Jews hesitated to march on Capitol Hill, or the days in which one could not get a job on Wall Street wearing a kippa. That confidence is the product of Israel, and of the formative experiences that many American Jewish leaders have had in the Jewish state. The image of the Jew, no longer one of victim, but of utter confidence, was born in June 1967. In Israel.

Though many will disagree, it seems equally clear to me that were the State of Israel to be vanquished, the vibrant American Jewish life that we now too easily take for granted would wither away within a generation. And if that were to happen, the two great centers of world Jewry – Israel and America – would each essentially be gone.

And I believe that Israel’s military might, cultural flourishing, strength of spirit and more, important though they all are, are not sufficient to sustain the country. America’s support – financial, military and in the increasingly hostile court of international public opinion – is critical. Yet that support would be much endangered without an American Jewish leadership that instinctively feels deeply connected to Israel, that doesn’t ask, “What does any of this have to do with us?”

Today, we have that leadership. But the future is not as secure as many would like to believe. Nor is that future very far away.

SO HOW did this come to be? To be sure, Israel is partly at fault. It is notoriously horrendous at telling its own story, and has allowed those sworn on its destruction to capture world opinion. Nor has Israel been blameless in the interminable conflict with the Palestinians, of course. Israel alienates American Jewry with an anti-intellectual and often intolerant religious establishment. And the government still refuses to see the gradual distancing of young American Jews as a serious existential challenge, which it could become, if it isn’t one already.

But the responsibility for this widening fissure in world Jewish life cannot be attributed solely to Israel. Too many young American Jews have not been taught what they need to know to evaluate the conflict fairly. They know that they are opposed to the occupation, but they are much less clear on how the occupation began or what Israel has done in the past 43 years to seek to end it. Largely illiterate in Jewish texts or language, they are increasingly unaware of the cultural renaissance that Israel has made possible for Jews the world over.

Yet the problem is actually far more complex. At its core, the issue isn’t really Israel, or even American Jewish education. The real issue is the larger world in which today’s younger American (and Israeli) Jews live. Responding to Wertheimer’s study and the concerns it raised, Noam Pianko, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Washington, denied that there is a problem. As Gary Rosenblatt of the Jewish Week recently wrote, Pianko insisted that “boundaries don’t match the moment” of 21st-century America. His America, Pianko says, is “‘post-ethnic,’ symbolized by President Barack Obama, who he said represents racial fusion rather than division.”

Obama did not create this worldview; this Weltanschauung elected him. But Obama is perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for this orientation, insisting, as he did in Cairo, that we ought not be “defined by our differences.”

Even if we set aside the obvious fact that it is precisely by pointing to differences that we define most things, Obama reflects the worldview that is shaping both young Americans and increasingly, young Israelis: Difference is not an ideal, but an unfortunate reality, best transcended whenever possible.

In such a world, it is no surprise that a successful young nation-state, which breathes new life into an ancient language, which fosters Jewish ingathering from across the globe and which enables a cultural regeneration unlike anything humanity has ever witnessed – a state which, in other words, celebrates difference – would be uncomfortable for many, and reviled by some.

All of which makes the challenge even greater. Because engendering the instinctive passion for Israel that many of us feel, and miss, requires swimming against the current of an intellectual culture now pervasive in America and much of the Western world. But Jewish history in general and Zionism in particular are proofs that the trends of Western civilization can be withstood, and even altered at times. The question facing us now is whether we plan to capitulate, or whether we’re willing to lace up our boots and enter the battle.

This will be no simple battle. But as Joshua said to the angel (Joshua 5:13), you are either with us or against us. Left versus Right, or Orthodox versus Reform are now secondary issues. What matters now is whether or not each individual, organization, movement, etc. sees defense of Israel’s absolute right to exist as a Jewish state as its foremost responsibility. Let all our differences abide. But let both leftists and hard-liners understand that today, they are not opponents, but rather partners, assuming that both are committed to Israel’s survival and to making the case for that survival day in and day out. The rest we can deal with down the road. For the moment, especially when any substantive chance for a peace deal seems remote, changing the Jewish conversation about Israel, and then the international conversation, is what matters most.

That will not be easy, but first we have to decide that that’s what we want to do. So let’s begin with honesty. We delude ourselves if we pretend that there are but a few clouds in the sky. The Jewish people will survive, and thrive, not by pretending that everything will magically work out, but rather by acknowledging the challenges that lie ahead, and by then bonding together and resolving to meet them head-on.

Tragically, of course, there’s nothing hypothetical about the scenario. Brandeis University recently decided to award honorary degrees to Michael Oren, Dennis Ross and Paul Simon, among others, at its May 23 commencement, and Ambassador Oren, an extraordinary orator among his many other qualities, was invited to deliver the commencement address.

But the days in which Jewish students on an American campus would have been thrilled to have the Israeli ambassador honored by their school are apparently long since gone. Brandeis’s student newspaper, The Justice (how’s that for irony?), deplored the choice, writing that “Mr. Oren is a divisive and inappropriate choice for keynote speaker at commencement, and we disapprove of the university’s decision to grant someone of his polarity on this campus that honor.”

The ambassador is a polarizing figure? Why is that? Because, the editorial continues, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a hotly contested political issue, one that inspires students with serious positions on the topic to fervently defend and promote their views.”

This is where we are today. For many young American Jews, the only association they have with Israel is the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel is the country that oppresses Palestinians, and nothing more.

No longer is Israel the country that managed to forge a future for the Jewish people when it was left in tatters after the Holocaust. Israel is not, in their minds, the country that gave refuge to hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from North Africa when they had nowhere else to go, granting them all citizenship, in a policy dramatically different from the cynical decisions of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan to turn their Palestinian refugees into pawns in what they (correctly) assumed would be a lengthy battle with Israel.

Israel is not proof that one can create an impressively functioning democracy even when an enormous portion of its citizens hail from countries in which they had no experience with democratic institutions. Israel is not the country in which, despite all its imperfections, Beduin women train to become physicians, and Arab citizens are routinely awarded PhDs from the country’s top universities. Israel is not the country in which the classic and long-neglected language of the Jews has been revived, and which produces world class literature and authors routinely nominated for Nobel Prizes.

Nor is Israel the place where Jewish cultural creativity is exploding with newfound energy, as the search for new conceptions of what Jewishness might mean in the 21st century are explored with unparalleled intensity, particularly among some of the country’s most thoughtful young people. No longer is Israel understood to be the very country that created the sense of security and belonging that American Jews – and these very students – now take completely for granted.

No, Israel is none of those things. For many young American Jews, it is only the country of roadblocks and genocide, of a relentless war waged against the Palestinians for no apparent reason. For everyone knows that Palestinians are anxious to recognize Israel and to live side-by-side with a Jewish democracy. That, of course, is why Hamas still openly declares its commitment to Israel’s annihilation, and that is why Hizbullah has, according to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, accumulated “more missiles than most governments in the world.”

None of this is to suggest that Israel is blameless in the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, or that the present government has a plan for ending it. Those are entirely different matters. The point is that even if these students hold Israel partially (or even largely) accountable for the intractable conflict with the Palestinians, even if one believes that it should have conducted Operation Cast Lead differently, or even if one disapproves of its policies in the West Bank, for example, it is a devastatingly sad day for world Jewry when those issues are the only ones that one associates with Israel, when mere mention of the Jewish state evokes not the least bit of pride from students graduating from a prestigious institution long associated with the very best of American Jewish life.

WHAT WOULD have happened had Brandeis invited President Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address? Obama is, after all, not exactly a non-divisive figure. He is president of a country at war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, places in which (a small number of) American troops have committed their share of atrocities, a country in which civil rights issues are still far from resolved, in which the bounty of America is still far beyond the reach of millions of its citizens.

One suspects that the students would have been thrilled to hear Obama, despite the fact that many do not agree with his policies. They would have been honored to host him despite the fact that some must be disappointed that he has not lived up to his campaign promise to call the Turkish treatment of the Armenians a “genocide,” despite the fact that he is intent on pursuing the war in Afghanistan, to which many of the students must certainly be opposed. They would have been delighted by Obama’s presence because even if they disagree with some of his views or some of America’s actions, they understand that the US is more than Obama, and more than this war or that policy. And they are, quite rightly, enormously proud of what America stands for and what it has accomplished.

But that kind of instinctive pride in the Jewish state is, sadly, a vestige of days gone by, even for many American Jews.

Reading some of the reactions to Oren’s invitation, one is struck by an astounding simplicity, and frankly, an utter lack of courage to stand firm against the tidal wave of unbridled hostility toward Israel.

Jeremy Sherer, president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter, wrote to The Justice, “I am… bothered [by the invitation to Oren] because I disagree with his politics.” That’s what education is now producing – people who want to hear only those with whom they agree? “I’m not exactly thrilled,” Sherer wrote, “that a representative of the current right-wing Israeli government will be delivering the keynote address at my commencement.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of course, is now busy fending off members of his coalition who are far to the right of him, like Moshe Feiglin and Avigdor Lieberman, and whether or not one takes him at his word, he is the first head of the Likud to endorse a two-state solution, no small matter for those who know the history of the Likud. But Sherer makes no mention of that complicating data, for it doesn’t fit his overarching conception of the intrinsic evil of Israel’s “right-wing” government (of which the Labor Party is also – inconveniently for Sherer – a member).

The president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter, who writes that he’s of “Israeli heritage” (whatever that means), did not see fit to say a single positive word about Israel. Not one. One wonders what the “pro-Israel” part of J-Street’s “pro-Israel, pro-Peace” tag line means to Sherer.

Ironically, though, some of the attempts to defend the invitation to Oren were no less distressing. A student representative to the Board of Trustees writes in a disappointingly anemic piece to the The Justice that Oren “is being invited for his academic achievements, not his political ones,” and then launches into a recitation of Oren’s many academic accomplishments.

Here, too, however, not a single positive word about Israel, or of the honor that having not only a world-class historian, but also its representative to the US, might be for the university. That sort of pride appears nowhere in The Justice’s editorial, the J-Street representative’s piece or the op-ed defending the invitation. For too many American Jewish undergraduates, it’s simply no longer part of their vocabulary.

Imagine that Sherer had written something like this: “I disagree passionately with Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinians, and welcome President Obama’s new pressure on Israel to bring the conflict to a close. But as a Jew who understands that despite my disagreement with Israel’s policies, the Jewish state is key to the Jewish revival of which my entire generation is a beneficiary, I honor Ambassador Oren for his service to a country of which I am deeply proud in many ways, and I look forward to welcoming him to campus.”

Or if the pro-Oren op-ed had said, “There is a radical disconnect between our generation and today’s Israeli government. Many members of my generation believe that Mr. Netanyahu and his government either do not know how to speak to us, or are uninterested in doing so. Ambassador Oren’s appearance on campus is a perfect opportunity for the Israeli government to address us and our concerns; I urge our campus to listen carefully to what may well be a watershed address at this critical period in Israel’s history and in the relationship between Israel and the future leadership of American Jewry.”

Imagine. But nothing of that sort got said.

Indeed, the seeming refusal of any of the student articles to say even one positive thing about the Jewish state was all the more galling given other events that took place across the globe on the very same week that the Oren controversy was unfolding. At the University of Manchester, pro-Palestinian protesters tried to attack Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK, some holding Palestinian flags up to the windows of her car and others climbing on the hood and trying to smash the windshield. In Berlin, a Danish street art duo known as “Surrend” blanketed several neighborhoods with maps of the Middle East in which the State of Israel had been removed, with the term “Final Solution” at the top. The Scottish Labor Federation reaffirmed its support for a boycott of Israel, and the student government at the University of California, Berkeley fell just one single vote short in a bid to override a veto against a divestment bill; a similar bill was also debated at UC San Diego.

None of the writers to The Justice felt that they had to distance themselves from those views, even as they critiqued or supported the invitation to Ambassador Oren.

The student-thugs at UC Irvine, who disrupted Oren’s speech on campus in February, have won. They have set the standard for how one treats any mention of Israel on any campus. Israel is nothing but a legitimate whipping post even at institutions of higher learning, and sane discussion of its rights and wrongs need not be defended, even in communities ostensibly committed to civil and intelligent discourse.

Tragically, even these students at Brandeis, one of the great institutions of American Jewish life, had nothing terribly different to say to the world. Theirs are only more tepid versions of the delegitimization now spreading across the international community like wildfire.

One shudders to imagine a future in which they might be our leaders. ]]> http://danielgordis.org/2010/05/07/if-this-is-our-future/feed/ 92 http://danielgordis.org/2010/03/26/obama-intifada/ http://danielgordis.org/2010/03/26/obama-intifada/#comments Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:03:39 +0000 Daniel Gordis http://danielgordis.org/?p=1582 As I was departing the United States following a brief visit last week, the news being broadcast in the airport was preoccupied with Prime Minister Binyamin’s Netanyahu’s recent and apparently inadvertent snub of Vice President Joe Biden. Some 11 hours later, when I’d landed in Tel Aviv and was listening to the radio in the taxi on the way to Jerusalem, the news was of rioting in Jerusalem, the numbers of police officers injured, and the number of protesters detained during Hamas’s “Day of Rage.” On the American news, Hillary Clinton was calling for more than an apology, demanding “concrete steps” towards peace on Israel’s part. And in Israel, the fluent-Hebrew-speaking Arab protester interviewed on the radio was calling for armed resistance to Israel’s “assault on Jerusalem,” insisting that the time for a third intifada had now arrived.

The radical difference between the broadcasts is an apt metaphor for the wholly different ways in which the current crisis in Israeli-American relations is perceived on the two sides of the ocean. The Americans are quite right to be incensed at the way Biden was treated. Whether Netanyahu was sandbagged by Interior Minister Eli Yishai, or whether this was simply another example of Israeli bureaucratic incompetence is not yet entirely clear. But it should never have happened.

Having said that, however, it is also clear that in the context of a generally positive relationship, Israel’s insult to Biden would have been unfortunate, but it would have blown over almost immediately. The snub has had such massive repercussions because the relationship between the American and Israeli administrations is frayed, and wholly devoid of trust. The important question is why that is the case.

WHILE ISRAEL has obviously made some serious gaffes since Obama entered office, the real cause for this nadir in Washington-Jerusalem relations is the fact that Barack Obama seems to have little comprehension of the region on which he seeks to impose peace. The president’s ignorance of the world in which he is operating is apparent on at least three levels. He seems unaware of how profoundly troubled Israelis are by his indiscriminate use of the word “settlement,” he appears to have little comprehension of the history of Palestinian recalcitrance, and he has apparently learned little from decades of American involvement in the Middle East peace process.

First, there is the issue of the word “settlements.” To the Israeli ear, anyone who would use the same noun for both a small city with tens of thousands of inhabitants and for a tiny hilltop outpost consisting of a trailer and a portable generator simply does not understand the terrain. Gilo, to Israelis, is not a settlement. It is a huge neighborhood of Jerusalem, a part of the capital city. When Obama called Gilo a settlement after Israel announced new housing units there in November, Israelis drew the conclusion that the president of the United States is wholly out of his element.

Similarly, Obama’s demands for an absolute freeze on settlement construction strike Israelis as either foolish or unfair. Why, they ask, did all construction have to cease? Israelis who had planned to add a bedroom to their home for recently married children, who had already poured a foundation and ripped out the back wall of their home, were now told that nothing could proceed. When the president, who does not seem to know a city from an outpost, insists that houses remain open to the elements during the cold Israeli winter because of his desire to appease the very Palestinians who have never been serious about peace efforts, he does not win friends.

Nor, Israelis have noted, did Obama demand any similarly concrete concessions from the Palestinians or their puppet-president. That, too, has served Obama poorly in this country. And despite all this, Israelis believe the world has forgotten, Netanyahu acceded to Obama’s demands for a freeze, at no small political cost.

Thus, when the Americans decided to make the undeniably ill-timed announcement of the Ramat Shlomo housing plans into a cause célèbre, Israelis were hard-pressed to feel contrite about anything beyond the personal hurt caused to Biden. Ramat Shlomo is an enormous neighborhood that is already home to some 20,000 people, and which is situated between the even larger neighborhoods of Ramot and Sanhedria. Ramat Shlomo is Jerusalem, period. Building there may be wise or unwise for a whole array of reasons, but for the Americans to seize on this as a “settlement construction” issue only further confirmed Israeli suspicions that Obama couldn’t locate the neighborhood on a map.

THE SECOND major element that Obama appears not to understand is that the Palestinians’ current refusal to conduct face-to-face negotiations has a long history; their recalcitrance has nothing at all to do with the settlements. The settlements, like the refugee problem (on which Israel will never compromise), and the division of Jerusalem (where some accommodation will almost certainly be forced on Israel), will be addressed when the Israelis and Palestinians sit down for face-to-face negotiations.

But Abbas has agreed only to mediated talks because he is unwilling to countenance the concessions that direct talks might ultimately require of him. The Palestinians have balked at every attempt to sign a substantive agreement with Israel. There remains virtually no Israeli political Left, not because of the Israeli Right, but because Yasser Arafat unleashed the Second Intifada when Ehud Barak called his bluff and offered him just about everything he could have expected, proving beyond any doubt that the Palestinian leadership had no interest in “land for peace.”

For the Obama administration to suggest that the Palestinians cannot negotiate now because of settlement construction strikes Israelis as either hopelessly naïve, or worse, fundamentally hostile to the Jewish state.

And finally, despite his appreciable intellectual capacities, Barack Obama seems to have no appreciation of what America can and cannot do in the Middle East. He believes so deeply in the power of his own rhetoric that he imagines that he can evoke the passions of Grant Park on Election Day, or the Washington Mall on Inauguration Day, in a Muslim world that has disdain for the very democratic values that brought him to power. This is hubris at its most dangerous. Obama’s Cairo speech was rhetorically brilliant, but the president has been snubbed. Iran has yet to grasp Obama’s outstretched hand, and instead, proceeds apace in its quest for a nuclear weapon. The Palestinians have not budged. Yet Obama continues to believe that his eloquence will win the day.

Does Obama really not understand that this conflict has a long and consistent history? The Arabs rejected the UN Partition Plan in 1947, and refused a treaty at the end of Israel’s War of Independence in 1949. After their defeat in June 1967, they gathered in Khartoum and declared “no peace, no recognition and no negotiations.” Arafat said “no” at Camp David in 2000, and Abbas continues in that tradition. Why the American administration cannot or will not acknowledge that is one of the great wonders of this most recent train wreck.

WITH HIS laser focus on the settlements, Obama is ignoring the fact that Abbas wouldn’t negotiate even if not a single settlement existed. In so doing, Obama has not only not moved the process forward, but he has afforded Abbas a refuge from responsibility, and he has given those who would like to ignite a third intifada an empty but symbolically powerful excuse for doing just that. A third intifada remains unlikely at present (though, it’s worth noting, the IAF attacked Gaza targets this week and the IDF killed a Palestinian teenager during a scuffle – precisely the sort of innocuous events that could one day be seen as the first events of the third intifada), but should it happen, it will be, first and foremost, the product of Washington’s naïveté.

Obama would be well-served to recognize that the history of this region is clear. Peace emerges when the two primary sides do the work themselves, with the United States entering late in the process to iron out stubborn details. Sadat went to Jerusalem without American urging, and though Jimmy Carter ultimately brought the two sides together to conclude the deal, the bulk of the work had been done by Sadat and Begin long before Carter entered the picture. The Nobel Committee, which once exercised much more subtle judgment, essentially acknowledged that fact by having Sadat and Begin split the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, without including Carter.

The same was true with Rabin and Hussein, who worked on the Israeli-Jordanian peace deal. Clinton orchestrated the ceremony; but the principals had done most of the work without him.

And history suggests that only Israeli right-wingers can forge a deal. Israelis do not trust the Left to be security-conscious, and a left-wing government always has a right-wing flank blocking it. Obama may bristle at Netanyahu’s hawkish rhetoric, but the more Obama weakens this prime minister, the less likely a deal will become. The US cannot wish democracy on Iraq, or peace on the Middle East. There will be a settlement of this conflict when the Palestinians are ready, not when Barack Obama decides to impose one.

SO, WHERE do we go from here? To begin to pull out of the present nose-dive, each of the parties will need to shift gears.

The Palestinians have to decide if they will take risks for peace, and if they can elect a president who is more than a figurehead. Last week’s “Day of Rage,” it should be noted, was called by Hamas – yet it unfolded not in Hamas’ Gaza, but in Fatah’s Jerusalem. Fatah needs a genuine leader, perhaps someone like Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who is now saying that the Palestinians should first build the trappings of statehood, and only then declare independence down the road. It is no surprise that Shimon Peres recently compared Fayyad to David Ben-Gurion, the creator of the modern State of Israel.

The Israelis need to learn to play in the major leagues. When the American vice president visits, you need to have your act together. If Israeli leaders continue to act as if they run a banana republic, they will deservedly be so treated. But much more significantly, Netanyahu needs to apprise Israelis of his vision. Does he favor a two-state solution? What are his plans for Jerusalem? For the settlements? Let him tell us, and then we can decide. If we approve, he’ll stay in office. And if we don’t, he’ll be gone. But we deserve to know what our prime minister has in mind.

In some respects, though, Barack Obama has the hardest job, at least in the short term. When he took office, there was no love lost between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and Gaza was still smoldering from the recently concluded Operation Cast Lead. But there was reasonable quiet on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, and a renewed Intifada was nowhere on our radar screen. Obama’s blunderings have now restored the region’s previous tinderbox qualities.

The president needs to back down from his relentless and fruitless focus on settlements, and concentrate more on what he doesn’t yet know than on the power of his rhetoric. Should another intifada erupt, it will have had its seeds in a Washington more interested in the magic of its words than in the painful lessons of a century of history.

It was only a matter of time until settlement construction – the issue that the Obama administration has chosen to situate at the very core of its Mideastpolicy, as if settlements have anything at all to do with decades of Palestinian recalcitrance – reared its proverbial head once again. But now that the issue is back, it’s time for some honesty on both sides of the political divide: The wisdom or folly of settlement construction is substantially less obvious than most observers are willing to acknowledge.Barack Obama, Joseph Biden and Hillary Clinton are all justifiably incensed by the embarrassment caused to Biden by the sheer buffoonery of Israel’s elected officials. But their ire says nothing about the substance of the issue, which is once again being addressed with a stridency born of the fact that everyone believes that there is absolutely no merit to the position of the other.

LIVING IN Jerusalem, you don’t have to be prime minister to have periodic bouts of settlement whiplash. Life in the Jewish capital is sometimes comprised of conversations so surprising that you wonder whether to believe your ears. In the hopes of injecting even a drop of bilateral humility into the discourse, I share two conversations that took place not long ago – before most people had heard of Ramat Shlomo, but after it was already clear that settlements were a cause célèbre once again.

I was sitting at one of those ubiquitous cafés on Rehov Emek Refaim, chatting with a lay leader from New York. Biblical claims to the land no longer matter, he was telling me. Nor do picayune legalistic arguments about why this family or that has the right to inhabit this building or that. All of that, he insisted, is now irrelevant.

“You’re losing us,” he explained. “Lots of deeply committed American Jews have just had it with Israel. They want to care, but they can’t. Ninety percent of America’s Jews are Reform and Conservative Jews, but the Jewish state spits on them, and then expects us to pretend that it’s rain. You never elect a prime minister with the guts to stand up to those thugs called chief rabbis. You really expect us to be loyal third-class citizens?”

And he took a deep breath. “But then, you make us not only angry, but ashamed. Doesn’t anyone here give any consideration at all to how Israel’s policies play in our community? How are we supposed to defend policies that push the Palestinians off of more land and out of more neighborhoods, when the world’s decided that that’s simply abhorrent? And have you got a strategy? Do you want a two-state solution? Because if you do, you’d better start leaving them some land on which to create one. And if you don’t want a two-state solution, what do you plan to do with those millions of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank? Kick them out? Make them non-citizens forever, and then prove that Jimmy Carter was right about the apartheid accusation all along? Are you still going to expect us to watch your backs then? Really, do you guys ever actually think?”

I pushed back, but only a bit, and very gently, because I wanted him to know that I had, indeed, heard him. I disagreed with many of his factual claims, but his angst was genuine, and he was far too articulate to be easily ignored.

But it was soon time to go, for I had to pick up our car from its annual service. A short while later, I found myself in the waiting room, the car not quite ready though I’d been assured it would be. Sharing the space with me was a blond gentleman in a tweed suit and a tie, speaking English with a thick European accent. We had time to kill, so I figured I might as well talk to him. He was from Scandinavia, it turned out, but was now working for the European Union in “Palestine.”

Oy. This, I could tell, was just going to be one of those days. From the frying pan into the fire. I asked him about his counterparts in the Palestinian government. Some good people, he said, but a lot of corruption. They have a long way to go before they’re ready for statehood, he added.

That surprised me. So I pushed. “So, are we eventually going to have peace here?”

“Well,” he said, “‘eventually’ is a long time. But probably not in my lifetime, or yours.”

“So,” I asked, figuring that little could be worse than that conversation at the café, “what should Israel do in the meantime?”

“Just what you are already doing,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, that you keep building your country, and keep building the settlements.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Build the settlements?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why’s that?”

“Look,” he said. “Some day, they’re going to be ready for serious talks. They’re going to make a huge concession, and recognize your right to exist. But they’re going to expect a similarly grand concession from you. Your concession can’t be recognizing their right to a state, because you’ve already done that. And you can’t compromise on the return of refugees, because then you have no Jewish state. So you need something massive that you can give up on – and that’s going to be the settlements. You’ll have to evacuate and destroy most of them in the end, but if you do that now, then what will you offer at the table? The settlements are your key to making peace eventually.”

AT THAT moment, we were both told that our cars were ready. We shook hands, and went our respective ways. I should have asked for his card, I thought as I was driving home, because I should have introduced him to my American Jewish philanthropist friend. And my American Jewish friend should really speak not to me, but with the people who actually shape Israeli policy.

Which got me wondering: Could those people begin to hear each other? Can we? Not now, probably. But eventually? Perhaps. The problem, though, is that eventually can be a really long time.