Palestinian Arabs: Teach Peace, not Hate

From Gatestone Institute, April 25, 2016, by Fred Maroun:

• The Arab states, many Europeans and the so-called "pro-Palestinian" movement have been using the same tactic since 1948 -- keep the Palestinians in poverty, victimhood, and dependence so that Israel can be blamed, with the hope that Israel would lose legitimacy and its Jewish residents would be thrown into the sea or they would pack up and leave.
• Values that bring peace (acceptance of differences, religious tolerance, and non-violent conflict resolution) are taught all over the liberal democratic world, including Israel, but somehow, when it comes to Arabs, all expectations of socialized behaviour are thrown out the window.
• Somehow, people expect to resolve a conflict without neutralizing the root cause of that conflict: programming people to hate.
• Teach Peace: This is the solution that Western politicians urgently need to talk about when they meet Palestinian officials. It should be at the start, at the middle, and at the end of every meeting and every speech, and all funding should be made contingent on it and strictly linked to it.

As an Arab, the situation of the Palestinians breaks my heart, as does the situation of Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and even those living in relative peace under dictatorships. But the Palestinian situation bothers me most because no realistic solution is ever seriously considered.

 

While Palestinian refugees are scattered over several countries and given few rights by their Arab hosts, and while they live in various states of dependence in Gaza and the West Bank, resolution of their status is delayed decade after decade, with occasional lip service paid to a negotiated two-state solution -- the magic solution that would supposedly cure everything!

 

Who should be blamed for this? Most of the world is quick to blame Israel. I do not blame Israel for one second. The Jews accepted the UN partition plan of 1947 which would have given the Palestinians a state more viable than what was given to the Jews, but the Arab states convinced the Palestinians that it was a bad deal, and the Palestinians have been rejecting all opportunities for a state ever since.

 

The Arab states, many Europeans and the so-called "pro-Palestinian" movement have been using the same tactic since 1948 – keep the Palestinians in poverty, victimhood, and dependence so that Israel can be blamed, with the hope that Israel would lose legitimacy and its Jewish residents would be thrown into the sea or they would pack up and leave. Obviously it has not worked and it never will, but it has created what seems a carefully-planned hate culture for the Palestinians. This hate culture started from traditional Arab anti-Semitism, was combined with European anti-Semitism and has evolved into the most notorious and possibly the worst culture of hate on earth today. Less than a week ago, in the official Friday sermon on official Palestinian Authority (PA) television -- not Hamas -- the PA preacher was praying for genocide:

"Allah, punish Your enemies, the enemies of religion, count their numbers and kill them to the last one, and bring them a black day. Allah, punish the wicked Jews, and those among the atheists who help them. Allah, we ask that You bestow upon us respect and honor by enabling us to repel them, and we ask You to save us from their evil."

All attempts by the U.S. to facilitate a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians have failed. Has any reasonable person really expected those attempts to succeed?

 

A society

• whose leaders campaign for a convicted terrorist to be given the Nobel Peace Prize,
• that teaches its children hatred and violence as part of its standard curriculum,
• that unabashedly teaches anti-Semitism through all means available,
• that puts suicide belts on children during political celebrations,
• that honors, glorifies and funds terrorists,
• that uses a hateful version of religion to poison the minds of its children,
• that engages in widespread jubilation when Jews are victims of terrorist attacks,

is not a healthy society that can develop peace of any kind.

A Palestinian girl recites a poem about Jews on official Palestinian Authority TV, May 29, 2015: "Oh Sons of Zion, oh most evil among creations. Oh barbaric monkeys..."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claims that he wants a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, yet he refused it when it was offered to him because he knows that he cannot sell any reasonable solution to his people. He knows that Palestinians have been taught for generations to believe that the only solution is the end of the Jewish state, and he and his predecessor Yasser Arafat hold a huge part of responsibility in that brainwashing.

Peace cannot be achieved as if by magic. Teach the Palestinians the values that bring peace (acceptance of differences, religious tolerance, and non-violent conflict resolution) rather than the lies that bring hate. Stop the anti-Israel incitement and maybe in a generation or two, the Palestinians will be ready for peace. These are the values taught all over the liberal democratic world, including Israel, but somehow, when it comes to Arabs, all expectations of socialized behavior are thrown out the window.

That peace requires -- first -- the end of the Palestinian culture of hate is obvious; yet this point is rarely made except by Israel and its supporters. Somehow, people expect to resolve a conflict without neutralizing the root cause of that conflict: teaching hate. Apparently, no one wants to face the reality that fighting hate is far harder than fighting warplanes, armored vehicles, missiles, or armies. But far more important.

When well-meaning but naïve (or disingenuous) people talk about how "both sides" in the conflict are at fault, I get nauseated. While it is technically true that both sides have faults, the imbalance is so great that the analogy is not only meaningless, but, more importantly, dangerous. It papers over the most fundamental issue in this conflict -- the need to resolve the huge moral failure on the Arab side, its anti-Semitic hatred.

Resolving the hatred would finally allow Palestinians to look after their own interests rather than be obsessed and distracted with damaging the interests of Israel. They would find that their interests are quite consistent with those of Israel, and that peace would bring them huge dividends. They would be able to see these facts because they would no longer be blinded by hate.

Teach Peace: This is the solution that Western politicians urgently need to talk about when they meet Palestinian officials. It should be at the start, at the middle, and at the end of every meeting and every speech, and all funding should be made contingent on it and strictly linked to it.

Until this approach is adopted, there is really no point in talking about a negotiated two-state solution.

The Muslim population in Israel is a foreign colonist population.

From Arutz Sheva, 11 April 2016, by Daniel Greenfield:

You can’t switch from being the indigenous population to being its conquerors whenever it suits your pseudo-historical narrative. You can’t claim to be the Philistines, the Jews and their Islamic conquerors at the same time.

At Israeli Apartheid Week, campus haters claim to be fighting “colonialism” by fighting Jews.

Columbia University’s Center for 'Palestine' Studies, dedicated to a country that doesn’t exist and which has produced nothing worth studying except terrorism, features diatribes such as 'Palestine' Re-Covered: Reading a Settler Colonial Landscape”. This word salad is a toxic stew of historical revisionism being used to justify the Muslim settler colonization of the indigenous Jewish population.

You can’t colonize 'Palestine' because you can't colonize colonizers. The indigenous Jewish population can resettle its own country, but it can’t colonize it.

Muslims invaded, conquered and settled Israel. They forced their language and laws on the population. That's the definition of colonialism. You can't colonize and then complain that you're being colonized when the natives take back the power that you stole from them.

There are Muslims in Israel for the same reason that there are Muslims in India. They are the remnants of a Muslim colonial regime that displaced and oppressed the indigenous non-Muslim population.

There are no serious historical arguments to be made against any of this.

The Muslim conquests and invasions are well-documented. The Muslim settlements fit every historical template of colonialism complete with importing a foreign population and social system that was imposed on the native population. Until they began losing wars to the indigenous Jewish population, the Muslim settlers were not ashamed of their colonial past, they gloried in it. Their historical legacy was based on seizing indigenous sites, appropriating them and renaming them after the new conquerors.

The only reason there’s a debate about the Temple Mount is because Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem and ordered a mosque built on a holy Jewish site. The only reason there’s a debate about East Jerusalem is because invading Muslim armies seized half the city in 1948, bombed synagogues and ethnically cleansed the Jewish population to achieve an artificial Muslim settler majority.

The only Muslim claim to Jerusalem or to any other part of Israel is based purely on the enterprise of colonial violence. There is no Muslim claim to Israel based on anything other than colonialism, invasion and settlement.

Israel is littered with Omar mosques, including one built in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, because Islam is a colonial entity whose mosques testify to their invasive origins by celebrating colonialism as their true religion. The faith of Islam is the sworn religion of the sword.

Islam is a religion of colonialism that spread through invasion, settlement and conquest. Its caliphs, from the original invaders, including Omar, to the current Caliph of ISIS, wielded and wield religious authority in the service of the Islamic colonial enterprise.

Allah is the patron deity of colonialism. Jihad is just colonialism in Arabic. Islamic theology is nothing but the manifest destiny of the Muslim conquest of the world, colonial settler enterprises dressed up in the filmy trappings of religion appropriated from the culture of conquered Jewish and Christian minorities. Muslim terrorism is a reactionary colonial response to the liberation movements of the indigenous Jewish population.
Even “Allahu Akbar” did not originate as a religious sentiment. It does not mean “God is Great”, as it is often mistranslated. It was Mohammed’s taunt to the Jews he was ethnically cleansing. His purge of a minority group proved that “Allah was Greater”. Islamic colonialism is used to demonstrate the existence of Allah. And the best way to worship Allah is through the colonialism of the Jihad.

Islam would not have existed without colonialism. It still can’t exist without it. That is why the violence continues. The only way to end the violence is for Muslims to reject their theology of colonialism.

But instead of taking ownership of their real history, the Muslim settler population evades its guilt through propaganda by claiming to be the victims of colonialism by the indigenous Jewish population. This twisted historical revisionism is backed by bizarre nonsense such as claiming that Jesus was a Palestinian or that the Arabs are descended from the Philistines. The Muslim settlers insist on continuing to celebrate colonialism while claiming to be an indigenous population that was always living in Israel.

You can have one or the other. You can have your mosques celebrating the conquest and suppression of the indigenous population or your claims of being the indigenous population. But you can’t switch from being the indigenous population to being its conquerors whenever it suits your pseudo-historical narrative. You can’t claim to be the Philistines, the Jews and their Islamic conquerors at the same time.

From its Roman origins, 'Palestine' has always been a colonial fantasy of remaking Israel by erasing its original Jewish identity. The Arab mercenaries who were deployed by the Romans in that original colonial enterprise continued it by becoming self-employed conquerors for their own colonial empire. The name 'Palestine' remains a linguistic settlement for reimagining a country without a people and a past as a blank slate on which the colonial identity of the invaders can be written anew. That is still the role that the 'Palestine' myth and mythology serves.

Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh complains about “linguistic colonialism”. When Muslims rename the Spring of Elisha, a Jewish biblical figure, Ein as-Sultan in honor of an Islamic colonial ruler, that’s linguistic colonialism. When Jews restore the original indigenous names that Jewish sites held before Muslim colonialism, that’s not colonization. It’s the exact opposite. It’s decolonization.

Promoting mythical claims of a 'Palestinian state' isn’t decolonization, it’s colonization. Or recolonization. Advocates for 'Palestine' are not fighting colonialism, but promoting it. They are advocating for a discredited Muslim settler fantasy and against the indigenous Jewish population of Israel.

Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh complains about “geographic amnesia” among “Palestinians”. There’s no geographic amnesia because you can’t remember what never existed. There’s only paramnesia because there was never a country named ''Palestine''.

''Palestine'' has no history. It has no people. It has no borders. It has never been anything except a colonial invention. It is a name used by a variety of foreign settlers operating on behalf of colonial empires.

You can’t colonize ''Palestine''. How can you colonize a colonial myth? You can only decolonize it.

Every Jewish home built on land formerly under the control of the Caliphs is decolonization and decaliphization.

When Jews ascend the Temple Mount, they are also engaging in decolonization and decaliphization.

When the liberation forces of the Jewish indigenous population shoot a Jihadist colonist fighting to impose yet another Islamic State on Israel, that too is decolonization and decaliphization.

Resistance to Islamic terrorism is resistance to colonialism. And Jews have the longest history of resisting the Islamic State under its various Caliphs throughout history. Israel is still resisting the colonialist Jihadist plans for the restorations of the Caliphate.

Zionism is a machine that kills Islamic colonialism.

The existence of Israel not only means the decolonization of Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh’s imaginary colonial fantasies of “'Palestine'”, but inspires resistance in peoples struggling against Islamic colonialism throughout the region, from the Copts to the Berbers to secular intellectuals fighting for freedom.

Islamic colonialism has always been defeated, whether at the Gates of Vienna or in the Sinai Desert. Its colonial fantasies are false and will be defeated as many times as it takes, whether in the form of 'Palestine' or ISIS.

The worst thing for Israel's hopes for peace is the peace movement

From Arutz Sheva, 22 April 2016, by Mordechai Kedar:

...the terror attacks we from which we suffer today and yesterday, a week ago, a month, a year and a decade and century ago, are all part of the same war, the same struggle, the same Jihad waged against us by our neighbors for over a century. Sometimes it is a full scale war with tanks, noise, flames, planes and ships and sometimes it is a war on a slow burner known as "terror" with explosions, stabbings and shots. Each of these is Jihad in Arabic, each is aimed at Jews just for being Jewish.

...this war began way before the establishment of the Jewish state declared in 1948. The riots and massacres of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39 et al, were not due to a Jewish state or what our enemies call the "occupation" of 1948, and certainly not because of the 1967 "occupation". The bloody and cruel massacre of the Jews of Hevron in 1929 was carried out against Jews who were not part of the Zionist movement, quite the contrary. The Palestine Liberation Movement (Fatah) was founded, may I remind you, in 1959 and The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, years before the 1967 "occupation" that was a  result of Israel winning the Six Day War.

... the shouts we heard, mainly in the 1948 War of Independence, were "Itbach al Yahud" – "Butcher the Jews" – and not the "Israelis" or the "Zionists," because their problem is with the Jews who refuse to be dependent on the mercy of Islam, refuse to live as dhimmi, protected ones, the way Islam mandates for Jews and Christians. In the Arab world, children still sing (in Arabic): "Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs." The dog, in Islamic tradition, is an unclean animal. Sharia law stipulates that if a Muslim is praying and a dog, pig, woman, Jew or Christian walks in front of him, his prayers are worthless and he must begin the entire ritual once again.

...Israel's enemies' most popular chant is (in Arabic) – "Kyber, Khyber O Jews, Mohammed's army will yet return." Khyber is an oasis in the Arabian Peninsula that was populated by Jews until Mohammed slaughtered them in 626 C.E. The chant commemorates that event and threatens a repeat performance.  The Jews, according to the Koran (Sura 5, verse 82) are the most hostile enemies of the Moslems. Verse 60 states that Allah's curse and fury upon them turned them into monkeys and pigs. Since when do monkeys and pigs have the right to a state? Since when are they entitled to sovereignty?

...peace with Egypt was achieved only after Sadat realized that despite Arab efforts to destroy Israel in the 1948 War of Independence, the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the 1967 Six Day War, 1970 War of Attrition, and even the 1973 Yom Kippur War that took Israel by surprise, the Jewish state managed to push back all the Arab armies and bring the war to their territory. That is why Sadat understood that Israel is not conquerable and that there is no choice other than making peace, even if this peace is temporary and based on the precedent of the 628 C.E. Hudabiya Peace in which Mohammed gave a 10 year hiatus to the infidels of Mecca, but broke it at the end of two years when they fell asleep on the watch.

Yassir Arafat did not sign the Oslo Accords because he believed in peace, but because, calling it the "Hudabiya peace," he saw the agreements as a Trojan horse that would hoodwink the Jews. The only objective of the Oslo Accords was to create a Palestinian entity with an army and weapons that would be used to destroy Israel when the time was ripe. He repeated this constantly, but our decision makers explained that he is only saying it for domestic consumption, and when suicide bombers set themselves off in our streets, the victims were called "victims of peace." Since when does peace require victims? And when will the rifles we allowed them to obtain be turned on us?

... all of Israel's efforts to please the Hamas Gazans failed, and Hamas went on from being a terrorist organization to becoming a terrorist state. Deathly rockets, attack tunnels, suicide bombers -  all are considered legitimate in the eyes of Gaza's Jihadist government, so to hell with the lives of the men, women and children living there, and to hell with their welfare, health  and assets. The Gazans are pawns in the hands of Hamas, the Jihad and the Salafists, all of whom appointed themselves the liaison between the residents of Gaza and Paradise, having already given them a taste of hell on earth.
 ... the concrete and iron that [we gave] the Jihadists in Gaza in order to rebuild their destroyed homes, were used to build tunnels of death both to Gazans and Israelis. Instead of building hospitals, schools and infrastructure, the Jihadists built an infrastructure of death, suffering and disaster.

... Analysts... said ...that when Hamas has to bear the responsibility for food, electricity and welfare in Gaza, its leaders will become more moderate, realistic and pragmatic.

We were wrong:  Hamas, despite leaving the opposition in order to rule, has not ceased its Jihad against Israel and has not removed Israel from the top of its list of priorities, nor has it changed in the slightest its wholly negative view of the "Zionist entity."

I hate to ruin the "two states for two peoples" party, but I must, because what is happening in Gaza today is exactly what will happen to the second Palestinian state ...in Judea and Samaria. Hamas will be the winner of elections for the legislature, as they were in Gaza in January 2006, and will win the presidential elections as well. If they don't they will take over all of Judea and Samaria in a violent putsch, just as they did in Gaza in 2007. ...

And to anyone with a short memory, let me refresh it: In July 2014, Hamas managed to shut Ben Gurion Airport for a day by launching rockets from Gaza. If and when they gain control of Judea and Samaria, they will be able to shut Ben Gurion down with a slingshot, and will be able to overlook all the runways from the Beit Arye heights. Anyone who does not believe me should get into his car and drive to the top of the hills to the east of Ben Gurion Airport, located in "conquered, occupied territory" (conquered from whom, precisely?).

Due to Israel's wind conditions, most of the planes that land in Ben Gurion approach from the east, cruising right over those very same hills. Will Hamastan allow planes headed for Israel to circle and approach landing from above its territory? Just what price will Israel have to pay after an RPG or machine gun shoots down one El Al plane, G-d forbid? Will we offer them Jerusalem so as to calm them down?

And if we are already talking about Jerusalem, what will you do when the State of Hamas presents you with an ultimatum: Jerusalem or war? The Temple Mount or we shut down Ben Gurion Airport? And when the world supports their demand for Jerusalem, letting Israel pay the price of calming  down radical Islam, what will you say? And when the snipers go back to shooting at passersby on Jerusalem streets from the walls of the Old City as their Jordanian brothers did until 1967, where will you hide? Behind concrete walls? A security fence? Or will you simply move Israel's capital city to Tel Aviv?

... the worst thing that ever happened to Israel's hopes for peace was the rise of the peace movements, those calling for Israel to establish a terror state in Judea and Samaria and give up East Jerusalem for it. In the Middle East, he who expresses a desire for peace, talks about his yearning for peace and offers his land and country as bribery in exchange for a paper which has the word "peace" on it, is looked upon as someone who lost a war and is begging for his life.

The peace movements turned Israel's image into that of a weak and soft defeatist country, the exact opposite of the kind of country that achieves peace in the Middle East. In the violent and radical region where Israel is trying to survive, anyone considered weak gets kicked, you know exactly where, and is sent to hell in the best case, or butchered and beheaded as a matter of course.

In the Middle East, peace means that your enemies leave you alone because you are too strong, threatening and dangerous to start up with. In the Middle East only the unvanquished obtain peace.

Anyone who does not accept these facts, who is not ready for "blood, sweat and tears," he who impatiently demands "Peace Now" does not belong in the Middle East. Here, we have room only for the brave, the strong, the steadfast and those who believe in the justice of their cause. Anyone who lacks those traits can find a suitable home somewhere else, where life is peaceful, quiet, prosperous and blooming. May we suggest Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Boston or San Bernardino….

For the Jews of Ethiopia: Next Year in Jerusalem!

From Times of Israel, 23 April 2016, by Melanie Lidman:

Participants at vast, jubilant Passover service in Gondar pray the Israeli government’s latest decision really does mean ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’

Members of the Falash Mura Jewish Ethiopian community wait for prayer service before attending the Passover seder meal, in the synagogue in Gondar, Ethiopia, April 22, 2016

GONDAR, Ethiopia — It was the Bnei Akiva kids who started the dancing, of course, at the end of the Passover seder when we say “L’Shanah Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim” – Next Year in Jerusalem. These children, who have been waiting for years to make aliyah to Israel, sang the words with passion, dancing in wild circles, jumping with their hands on each other’s backs and hoisting the smaller kids onto their shoulders. One enterprising five-year-old stage-dived off the bima (platform) into the crowd of dancers and was raised aloft.

The words “Next Year in Jerusalem” are bittersweet for Gondar’s Jewish community. They capture moments of hope, but also decades of longing, countless frustrations, bureaucratic hurdles, the pain of family separation, and thousands of years of tradition. The Passover seder, which retells the story of the exodus from Egypt to Israel, from slavery to freedom, brings their struggle to become Israelis into sharp focus.

Some of the members of Gondar’s 6,000-strong Jewish community have been waiting for upwards of 25 years to move to Israel, stuck in limbo as they watch the political wrangling in Israel from afar.

About 135,000 Jews of Ethiopian descent are living in Israel. Tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel during Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1992. Since that time, 50,000 additional Ethiopian Jews have made aliyah to Israel, at a rate of about 200 per month.

 

A member of the Falash Mura Jewish Ethiopian community carries her baby on her back before attending the Passover prayer service, in the synagogue in Gonder, Ethiopia. April 22, 2016.

(Miriam Alster/FLASH90)

 

But there are still approximately 9,000 Jews left in Ethiopia, according to the community. The Jews still left in Ethiopia are called “Falash Mura,” descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity generations ago, often under duress.
 

In November, Jews in Ethiopia celebrated the government’s decision to approve the aliyah of 9,000 Ethiopian Jews. The approval faltered three months later when the Prime Minister’s Office refused to implement the program because the $1 billion needed to fund the absorption was not part of the budget. Funding was found and the aliyah was again approved on April 7.

The aliyah of the “last” 9,000 Jews is expected to begin in June and continue for approximately five years.
 

So the Passover seder on Friday for approximately 3,000 people in Gondar had a celebratory air, because many in the community believe that maybe this time, finally, they will be celebrating future Passover seders in Israel.

 

But there are still approximately 9,000 Jews left in Ethiopia, according to the community. The Jews still left in Ethiopia are called “Falash Mura,” descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity generations ago, often under duress.
 

In November, Jews in Ethiopia celebrated the government’s decision to approve the aliyah of 9,000 Ethiopian Jews. The approval faltered three months later when the Prime Minister’s Office refused to implement the program because the $1 billion needed to fund the absorption was not part of the budget. Funding was found and the aliyah was again approved on April 7.
 

The aliyah of the “last” 9,000 Jews is expected to begin in June and continue for approximately five years.
 

So the Passover seder on Friday for approximately 3,000 people in Gondar had a celebratory air, because many in the community believe that maybe this time, finally, they will be celebrating future Passover seders in Israel.

 

“You are not alone, people all over the world are thinking of you as they say the same words tonight,” said Rabbi Menachem Waldman at the start of the seder. Waldman, a Haifa rabbi who has acted as the rabbi of the Jewish community in Ethiopia for the past 35 years, now works for the Jewish Agency. He mentioned the names of MKs who visit or support the community, including Likud MKs David Amsalem and Avraham Neguise, who refused to vote with the coalition for two months until the Knesset approved the plan to bring the 9,000 to Israel.
 

Waldman reminded the community that the Jewish Agency was again sponsoring the seder meal for the first time since the it announced the “end” of Ethiopian aliyah in August 2013. And he told them that thousands of Jews around the world, in Israel and in America, were advocating for the resumption of aliyah, the reunification of families stretched between Ethiopia and Israel.
 

A seder for 3,000 is chaotic, loud, boisterous, exciting. It required two weeks of preparation to hand-bake 50,000 matzahs over the fire. Thursday was spent sweeping the dirt-floor synagogue from top to bottom, and Friday was for food preparation: boiling 2,000 eggs and 400kg of potatoes, crushing the peanut-date-banana mixture for haroset by hand with two large wooden mallets.

 

By early Friday afternoon, as the sun turned golden and the Ethiopian and Israeli flags fluttered in the breeze, the frantic preparations were at last completed.
 

People began arriving two hours in advance, women dressed in beautiful white shrouds and the children scrubbed clean and excited. Dozens of synagogue leaders worked all day on Friday to make “seder goody bags” for every participant, with a boiled potato, egg, piece of lettuce, and matzah. Perhaps the biggest miracle was that the bags were passed out more than three hours before the seder began, and almost no one, not even the smallest children, opened the bag for a pre-seder snack.

Around 50 children sang the Four Questions at the top of their lungs as the rest of the community clapped along

The evening began with Kabbalat Shabbat (welcoming the Sabbath) services, since Passover began on Friday evening. As the crowd began to sing the traditional local Friday night song “Sambuse, Sambuse,” the women broke out in ululations and the crowd went crazy, dancing and throwing their arms in the air.

It took community leaders a while to get everyone seated so Waldman could begin the seder.

As he ran through an abbreviated text — this is the bread of affliction, this is the bitter herb, this is the first cup of wine — people held the items aloft, a sea of boiled eggs raised throughout the synagogue. Around 50 children sang the Four Questions at the top of their lungs as the rest of the community clapped along.

The sweet homemade wine, made of 40kg of raisins fermented in two large trash barrels for a week, was the biggest hit of the seder, with children clambering to get a cup.

When the night ended with a singing of Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, the mournful melody was transformed

A seder for 3,000 doesn’t leave much room for deep discussions or reflections on the themes of Passover. But perhaps it’s less about the words, and more about the reality of yearning for Israel, and hoping that this is the year their own exoduses will come to an end.
 

When the night ended with a singing of Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, the mournful melody was transformed. It was a rousing chant shouted with resolution and strength. It was a promise, not a plea. And when they sang it, I couldn’t help but tear up.
 

Because I live in Israel, I know that it is not the perfect place of their dreams, or of anyone’s dreams. “Don’t you know how difficult it will be for you when you arrive?” part of me wanted to tell them. “Don’t you know that Israeli society can sometimes feature a bottled-up but commonplace racism that may try to erase your culture, change your name, deny you educational opportunities just because of the color of you skin? Don’t you know about the racism, violence, and senseless terrorism that Israel faces from its enemies?”
 

And yet. No matter how difficult Israel can be, there are also moments of beauty that take your breath away. “I will miss Ethiopia, but even more, my soul now misses the Holy Land,” one of the cantors in Ethiopia told me as he oversaw the preparation of matzah. And I understood.
 

At some point on Friday, almost every Jew in the world turned their thoughts towards a single place, Jerusalem, as they retold the story of the exodus from Egypt.
 

For the Jews of Ethiopia, these words are not a traditional story. They are a reality, a hope, a plea, a promise. This year we are slaves, next year let us be free. Now we are in our Egypt, but we have hope: Next Year in Jerusalem!

Why Are American Jews and Israel Drifting Apart?

From Mosaic, 11 April 2016, by Elliott Abrams:

The conventional wisdom says the problem is Israel. It’s wrong.


A Jewish anti-Israel demonstrator in New York City in 2014.
Andy Katz/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images.

Everyone knows that American Jews and Israel are drifting apart...

...Israel, it is said, has become increasingly nationalistic and right-wing; “the occupation” violates liberal values; and the American Jewish “establishment,” with its old familiar defense organizations and their old familiar apologetics, has lost touch with young American Jews who are put off by outdated Zionist slogans and hoary appeals for communal solidarity. In brief, [it is claimed that] the fundamental problem resides in the nature of the Israeli polity and the policies of the Israeli government, which together account for the growing misfit between Israelis and their American Jewish cousins.

This...is wrong...

I. Goodbye Consensus, Hello Disillusionment
A British Jew who has lived in the United States for half his life, Dov Waxman in Trouble in the Tribe congratulates himself on having gained special insight into the American Jewish community and its psyche... “My own politics surely come through at times,” he writes disarmingly—and about that he is entirely correct. Those politics will be familiar to anyone who has read (and believed) the writings of Peter Beinart.

The narrative goes like this: the “pro-Israel consensus that once united American Jews is eroding,” and “American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity.” In fact, while “Israel used to bring American Jews together,” it is now “driving them apart.”

...however, Trouble in the Tribe is mostly about today’s version of the story, when the “widespread sense of disillusionment” with the Jewish state is fuelled... As groups like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace have arisen to press their critique of the Jewish state in the court of public opinion, the community is “being torn apart” by division...

...in Waxman’s view, ...the “distancing” from Israel that has been widely attested in surveys is in fact a hopeful sign, and may not even constitute distancing at all. Yes, some young, liberal American Jews, confronted with an Israel “becoming increasingly illiberal and increasingly isolated in the international community,” will “turn away from Israel in despair, or even disgust.” But many others will, like Waxman himself, move instead to “critical engagement.” These American Jews actually care very deeply about Israel, and wish only to save it from itself.

Israeli leaders, writes Waxman, should therefore expect “growing pressure from the American Jewish community to change Israel’s policies, especially toward Palestinians in the occupied territories.” As the project to save Israel from itself gathers steam, “it is hard to believe that any Israeli government, including the present one, [will be] completely immune to criticism, and that an increase in this criticism, by American Jews and others, will not eventually encourage, if not compel, Israeli policymakers to alter Israel’s present course.” In the end, it may be possible to persuade or compel these recalcitrant leaders, “foremost among them Prime Minister Netanyahu,” to “recommit Israel to the goal of establishing a Palestinian state as quickly as possible.”

II. Cosmopolitan Jews and Tribal Jews
As will already be evident, Trouble in the Tribe contains more in the way of ideology than careful engagement with empirical analysis. Do American Jews really have “greater knowledge” about Israel today than did their parents or grandparents?

Why would that be, and where did they acquire their balanced and penetrating insights—by reading the New York Times? Is Israel really “increasingly illiberal”?

Do American Jews truly think Israel is “increasingly isolated” in the world when they can read every week about its improved relations and growing trade with India and China, its growing security relations with the Arab states of the Middle East—not to mention its steadily high popularity among the majority of the American people?

Above all, is there any evidence whatsoever that, except as an empty slogan, “opposing, and even lobbying against, the policies of Israeli governments . . . has now become for many American Jews a way of supporting Israel” (emphasis added)?

Waxman makes that claim repeatedly—but then repetition seems to be a key strategy in a book that restates its main theses several times in each chapter, making a poor substitute for demonstration.

Michael Barnett’s The Star and the Stripes ... focuses on the friction between two different perspectives within the community: on the one hand, the brand of “cosmopolitanism” and/or “prophetic Judaism” embraced by the non-Orthodox majority and, on the other hand, the more traditional and “tribal” approach that historically has placed the emphasis on protecting endangered Jews and securing and enhancing Jewish welfare.

This is by now an old story. With emancipation and the achievement of civil rights in Europe, Barnett writes, the old parochialism came up against both assimilationist and nationalist tendencies in the wider society. In the United States, the Reform movement reinterpreted the traditional idea of Jewish “chosenness” to be consistent with American pluralism. Jews were “chosen” not to dwell alone and apart but rather to be “working for the betterment of humanity.”

Zionism, from this perspective, long lay under a cloud of suspicion among American Jews, not only because it might raise dangerous charges of “dual loyalty” but also because, in focusing exclusively on the plight and future safety of Jews alone, it contradicted the ethos of liberal universalism.

... In [Barnett’s] terms ...these concerns about exclusively Jewish problems and threats to Jewish communities abroad did not override, or sit comfortably with, the liberal and universalist impulses that remained powerful among American Jews. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) and other leading organizations had created a synthesis that was meant to substitute for Jewish parochialism. In this conception, the particular interests of  Jews would be best protected not by tribalism, i.e., by focusing exclusively on fighting anti-Semitism and rescuing endangered Jews, but by creating a more just society, in which all forms of bigotry would be countered and destroyed, and by forging a world order built on peace, justice, and law.

Thus, the AJC, in an internal memo quoted by Barnett, resolved “as a matter of enlightened self-interest, to interest ourselves in situations involving other minorities, even though Jews are not primarily affected.” During the 1960s, Barnett writes, the AJC’s American Jewish Year Book “often gave more prominence to the civil-rights movement than to Israel.”

This cosmopolitan outlook was itself consonant with the “prophetic Judaism” that had long been the hallmark of the Reform movement; today, it is increasingly the religion of all non-Orthodox American Jews. Tikkun olam, “repairing the world” through action for “social justice,” is regarded by many American Jews as more important than actually observing Jewish rituals or supporting Israel. It is also necessarily in tension, sometimes more and sometimes less, with the need and the desire to protect Jews who are in danger.

When Israel or some other community of Jews seems at risk—as during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, for example, or when the Soviet regime was sending “refuseniks” to Siberia for the crime of seeking to learn Hebrew and move to Israel—the tribal instinct may appear to dominate, at least for a time. Still, that impulse is itself often framed in terms of universal themes like the concern for international human rights, the right to emigrate, the right to freedom of religion, and so forth.

Today, Barnett writes, when fewer Jews seem to be in physical danger, certainly in this country, and with Israel regarded as a major Middle Eastern power, many American Jews see no need whatsoever for the tribal approach. After all, “in 1914, 76 percent of all Jews lived in illiberal lands . . . [but] now a minuscule 3.5 percent live in authoritarian countries [while] 96.5 percent live in liberal democracies.”

No wonder, then, that the “prophetic” or “cosmopolitan” outlook has prevailed, or that to some extent (again, Barnett is cautious about the “accepted wisdom”) American Jews are “losing their love for Israel.”

He puts it this way: “there are forces at home and in the world that are leading American Jews to return to a political theology of prophetic Judaism, and an Israel that is increasingly acting like an ethnonational state is not the best outlet for such cosmopolitan longings.”

III. The Shrinking of the American Jewish Community
To sum up: both Dov Waxman in Trouble in the Tribe and Michael Barnett in The Star and the Stripes agree that criticism of Israel by American Jews is increasing, though they identify different reasons for the increase.

For Waxman, the problem is mostly the rightward move of Israeli politics. For Barnett, the problem is the differing realities of Israeli and American Jews...

At the very end of his book, Barnett wonders what sorts of threat to Jewish security it would take before the American Jewish perception of reality would change. Here’s his list of potential threats:

• “a Europe that abandoned its Jews to the new anti-Semitism,
• an Israel that became surrounded by radical Islamic forces that were actively attempting to destroy it, or
• an Israel that made the Arabs second-class citizens or attempted to cleanse the territories of non-Jews.”

Even setting aside the discordant and seemingly gratuitous final item, this list would surely strike many Israelis, and even many Diaspora Jews, as odd if not positively bizarre in its speculative forecasting of what are already present-day realities.

A world presenting fewer and fewer physical threats to Jews?

• To Israel’s north in Syria sits Islamic State (IS), a brutal and murderous Islamist terrorist group of growing global vitality.
• To the east, Jordan is now burdened by roughly 1.3 million Syrian refugees, the eventual economic and political impact of whose presence cannot be measured.
• And somewhat farther east sits Iran, busily building its ballistic-missile program in service of the clear path to a nuclear bomb allowed by last November’s six-power agreement, while also mobilizing Hizballah and its own Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) troops just miles from Israel in Syria.
• To the south lies Sinai, riddled now with IS and other terrorist groups that despite efforts by the regime in Cairo are growing in size.
• Each week, and almost each day, brings another Palestinian terrorist attack, in a series that has reached over 200 stabbings, over 80 shootings, over 40 vehicular attacks, with dozens killed and hundreds wounded.
• And has not Europe, where in city after city Jews are warned not to walk in the street displaying any sign of their religion, “abandoned its Jews to the new anti-Semitism”?

Barnett postulates that any such development might change the perceptions of American Jews.

That has decidedly not been the case: neither the rise of IS, nor the new “stabbing intifada” that Israelis now face, nor the dire threat of anti-Semitism in the heart of liberal and democratic Europe—nor, for that matter, the swelling tide of anti-Semitism on American university campuses, to which so many American Jewish parents entrust their own children—none of this has appeared to have much if any impact on the way most American Jews see and judge Israel in particular or the Jewish situation in general.

What if the reason for the distancing from Israel resides not in Israeli conduct but instead almost entirely in the changing nature of the American Jewish community itself?

 

...the real problem with the analyses of both Waxman and Barnett is their focus on external phenomena—mainly Israel and Israeli government policy—as the source of the developments under inspection. Neither sufficiently considers the alternative: that the explanation for the criticism or distancing resides not in Israeli conduct, which is actually a minor factor, but instead almost entirely in the changing nature of the American Jewish community itself.

Consider this question: how does the relationship between Israel and the Australian, Canadian, or British Jewish community differ from that of Israel and the American Jewish community?

If one seeks an answer that can be quantified, note that, even taking into account the effect of the Birthright program—which to date has sent 400,000 young American Jews on trips to Israel—it is still the case that only about 40 percent of American Jews have bothered to visit [Israel] at all. Without Birthright, that proportion would shrink to a third.

By contrast, approximately 70 percent of Canadian Jews have made the trip at least once, as have 80 percent of Australian Jews and an estimated 95 percent of British Jews. Beyond the Anglosphere, 70 percent of French Jews have visited Israel, as have 70 percent of Mexican Jews and more than half of Argentinian Jews.

In many ways the British, Australian, and Canadian Jewish communities, though much smaller than that of the United States, are internally stronger than the American Jewish community, and more Zionist as well. They also tend to cast their votes for the political party that supports Israel, having switched allegiance in recent decades to help elect Australia’s Liberal party as well as leaders like Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Stephen Harper in Canada.

By comparison, very little political mobility is visible in the United States, where in 2012 an estimated 70 percent of American Jews voted to re-elect President Barack Obama despite the tensions between his Democratic administration and Israel, just as 76 percent had voted against re-electing a Republican president, George W. Bush, in 2004 despite the excellent relations between Washington and Jerusalem at the time.

Why do American Jews appear to care less about Israel and feel less solidarity with it than do Jews living elsewhere in the Anglosphere? It is sometimes argued that, because both political parties in the United States express strong support for Israel, voting patterns measure nothing. That is hard to square with the fact that the state of actual relations between the two countries, which rises and falls considerably, hardly affects the voting pattern at all.

A partial exception to these electoral habits is to be found in the Orthodox community. And here we begin to approach what may be the more persuasive explanation for the growing distance between American Jews and Israel and/or the growing criticism of the Jewish state. Just who are the American Jews? Surprisingly enough, Waxman’s book, despite its strong ideological slant, supplies the answer.
Listing the various ways one can analyze attitudes toward or levels of support for Israel in the American Jewish community, Waxman begins with the “denominational divide”—that is, Orthodox versus non-Orthodox—before discussing the “ideological and partisan divide.” As he correctly writes, religiously conservative Jews “tend to be more emotionally attached to Israel” than religiously liberal Jews. When it comes to politics, moreover, the “partisan” division makes sense: “Simply put, while Democrats have gradually become more critical of Israel, Republicans have become much more supportive.”

Waxman then turns to the “generational divide,” stating that “young American Jews are far more critical of [Israel] than their parents or grandparents. . . . Even more strikingly, young Jews are also more critical of U.S. government support for Israel,” and “young, non-Orthodox American Jews are less suspicious of the Palestinians.” Putting things together, we get this: many “well-educated, liberal, young American Jews . . . have flocked to join groups on college campuses like J Street U, Open Hillel, and, further to the left, Jewish Voice for Peace,” the last of which is a radical anti-Zionist, pro-BDS faction.

And then, really putting things together, we get to the crux of the matter:

Perhaps the biggest reason why young American Jews tend to be more dovish and more critical of Israel is because they are much more likely than older Jews to be the offspring of intermarried couples. Intermarriage undoubtedly has an impact upon the political attitudes and opinions of the children of such unions. Young American Jews whose parents are intermarried are not only more liberal than other Jews, but also significantly less attached to Israel. As such, it is hardly surprising that this rapidly growing subgroup within the American Jewish population has very different views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than other American Jews.

This should not be surprising. As Lawrence Hoffman, a scholar at Hebrew Union College and himself a prominent Reform rabbi has written: “[T]he disappearance of the sort of ethnic solidarity that prior generations enjoyed as a matter of course . . . [and] our high intermarriage rate . . . means that Jews of the next generation will increasingly be people with no childhood Jewish memories and no obvious reason to maintain Jewish friends, associations, and causes at the expense of non-Jewish ones.”

Among those “causes” will be Israel. Why should that be? Surely the points made by Hoffman suggest the answer, and the massive 2013 Pew survey of the American Jewish community confirms it. One big part of that answer, perhaps the biggest, is the intermarriage rate, now higher than 50 percent of all American Jews who have married since the year 2000—nearly six in ten, according to Pew. (Intermarriage rates among Orthodox Jews are negligible, estimated by Pew at 2 percent.) Moreover, within the group of Pew respondents who are themselves the married children of intermarriage, the intermarrying figure of nearly six-in-ten rises to over eight-in-ten.

Thus, Pew found that persons of “Jewish background”—mainly, those with only one Jewish parent—express significantly lower levels of support for Israel than do “Jews by religion.” Of the former, fully 41 percent report being “not too” or “not at all” emotionally attached to Israel, and only 13 percent have ever traveled there.

Similar findings relate to the sense of Jewish peoplehood. According to the Pew study, only 20 percent of Jews with a non-Jewish spouse say they are raising their children exclusively as Jews. When asked if they have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people, only 59 percent say yes—as against 92 percent of those married to Jews—and only 49 percent say they feel a special responsibility to care for Jews in need—as against 80 percent of those married to Jews.

 

Intermarriage is of course not the only way to distinguish levels of communal solidarity; religion itself is another. Half of those who identify themselves as Jews by religion say that “caring about Israel” is “essential” to what it means to them to be Jewish, while only 23 percent of those identifying themselves as non-practitioners believe that to be so in their case.

And age is another factor: Jews sixty-five and older are far more likely to say caring about Israel is essential than those who are under thirty. ...Waxman thinks it is because the young are offended by “the occupation” and the policies of a Likud government, and Barnett does not differ very much from that conclusion.

A deeper analysis suggests that we are dealing here with a far broader phenomenon, and one in which sheer indifference may count as much as or more than critical disagreement with Israeli policies or an active desire to disembarrass oneself of association with an “ethnonational state.”

The erosion of ethnic solidarity among American Jews is in part a product, no doubt, of the unique openness of American society, the weakness of anti-Semitism, and the assimilation of Jews here—a much more rapid and more thorough process than has been the case elsewhere in Diaspora history. Just as Irish, Italian, and Polish Americans have lost most of their distinctive ethnic characteristics and are now more simply American Catholics, in the U.S. the sense of Jewish peoplehood as the core of “Jewishness” has largely been replaced by Judaism as a religion—if one that most American Jews do not actively practice.

And that is a problem: to cite Hoffman again, “the [mere] ethnicity of people without profound purpose is doomed.” In his judgment, and in the absence of an automatic identification with Israel, that profound purpose can be supplied only by “regularized ritual affirmations of the transcendent religious purpose justifying and demanding” religious commitments: in other words, precisely the sort of religious observance that the vast majority of American Jews avoid or eschew.

Indeed, as we have seen, not only does a growing portion of the American Jewish community not practice the religion at all, but a majority marry non-Jews, and so do an even larger majority of the children of intermarried couples. Every official and fundraiser for Jewish philanthropies or the communal federations knows this, and knows the effect it has wrought on the communal ties that historically led to concern about the fate of other Jews, including in the land of Israel.

IV. The Problem Is Here
What is to be done? Reversing the major demographic trends in the American Jewish population, for example by increasing endogamous marriage, does not seem to be in the cards.

Where the Jewish state is concerned, should Israel and its American supporters

• rely more heavily on the Orthodox, whose sense of community and of closeness to Israel is intact?
• Turn outward and work more closely with evangelical Christians?
• Reach out to growing population groups like Hispanics and Asians?
• Seek to strengthen hasbarah programs whose goal is to increase support for Israel among the American public in general?

Each of these suggestions has its value, and its limitations.

But the beginning of wisdom is surely to understand that the problem is here, in the United States. The American Jewish community is more distant from Israel than in past generations because it is changing, is in significant ways growing weaker, and is less inclined and indeed less able to feel and express solidarity with other Jews here and abroad.

The government of Israel and the Jewish Agency are right to be thinking about how the Jewish state can help, over the coming generations, to strengthen the community, for Israel’s sake and for ours. What should be dismissed are the unhelpful efforts to politicize these developments and transform them into weapons against Israel’s government.

Are we really to believe that someone

• who chooses not to engage with any part of the organized Jewish community,
• who does not belong to a synagogue and considers himself (in the Pew study’s terminology) a “Jew of no religion,”
• who has never visited Israel,
• who has married a non-Jew who did not convert and whose children are not being raised as Jews,

feels less attached to Israel than his parents or grandparents because of settlements or “the occupation”? Or that such a person would become a strong supporter of and frequent visitor to Israel if only the Labor or Meretz party were to win an election?

Are we really to believe that someone who considers himself a “Jew of no religion” would become a strong supporter of Israel if only the Labor party were to win an election?

 

Defending Israel and Israeli policies can be a task undertaken with gusto and commitment by American Jews. So can defending Israel while seeking to change or moderate certain policies or realities (like settlement policy, or the treatment of non-Orthodox Judaism); such is the practice in Israel itself of the Conservative and Reform movements, neither of which, despite the discriminatory treatment they receive there, has been led (in Waxman’s words) to “turn away from Israel in despair, or even disgust.” All too often, however, the default position of American Jews has been to see the defense of the Jewish state as a terrible burden that the ungrateful Israelis have placed on us and obstinately refused to lift.

I encountered one such Jew last fall at the annual session of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum, a conference attended by Israeli and American officials and former officials together with charitable donors, policy analysts, and journalists, the great majority of whom are Jews. During my own panel session, one audience member rose to speak with anguish about his daughter’s ordeal at her college. There was so much criticism of Israel, he lamented; the critics were harsh, and tough, and smart; the defenders had a very rough time; it was all so unpleasant. Surely, he adjured us, Israel needs to be aware of this and to change the policies that are imposing this painful experience on young American Jews.

Here was an echo of Waxman’s advice to increase the pressure on Israeli policymakers in a manner that will “eventually encourage, if not compel [them] to alter Israel’s present course.”

Our unhappy parent did not pause to ask why and wherefore the college had chosen to play host to so bitter and hostile an atmosphere, or to wonder about the possible complicity of deans or professors in the affair and the relevant responsibilities of administrators. Nor did he question whether perhaps he had failed as a parent to help choose the right campus for his daughter, or reflect on his child’s or her fellow Jewish students’ lack of preparedness for these increasingly frequent scenes, or inquire as to why anti-Israel voices were so much better armed. Nor, finally, did he appear to think twice about the appropriateness of judging policies meant to protect literally embattled Israelis by the standard of how they might disturb the comfort of politically or socially embattled American students.

Perhaps the Israeli and American Jewish communities will drift farther apart, and perhaps the level of criticism will rise. Work should be done, by all means, to prevent or minimize such trends. But the problems with which we are dealing won’t be solved by casting blame on Israelis or their politics.

The problems begin at home [in the USA], and so do the solutions.

Is Israel forming an alliance with Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

From Al-Monitor, April 13, 2016, by Ben Caspit:

Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud (L) welcomes Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at Riyadh International Airport, Nov. 10, 2015. 

(photo by FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images)

 

 

Egypt's April 9 announcement of the transfer of two islands, Tiran and Sanafir, to Saudi Arabian sovereignty came as a complete surprise to many in the Middle East.

 

The only country that was not surprised was Israel. A top-level official in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor on April 12 that Israel had been privy to the secret negotiations.

 

Israel had given its approval to the process and did not ask to reopen the peace agreement with Egypt, even though the agreement dictates that any territorial change or transfer of Egyptian sovereignty of lands that Israel gave back to other hands constitutes a violation of the treaty.

 

Talks between Saudi Arabia and Egypt on the transfer of these islands have been going on for years, with Israel firmly opposing the move. The fact that the transfer has now earned Israeli support reflects the depth of the shared interests between the three sides: Cairo, Riyadh and Jerusalem — although the Egyptians and Saudis prefer the label “Tel Aviv.”

 

This is a real geostrategic and diplomatic drama. Former Shin Bet chief Knesset member Avi Dichter of the Likud Party said on April 12 in an interview with the Israeli Kol Yisrael radio station that this step is one of the most important, dramatic diplomatic occurrences that have taken place between two Arab countries in the Middle East. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, in a small pre-Passover celebratory toast with military reporters, updated and confirmed that Israel had, indeed, agreed to the course of action and had even received a written document, signed by all sides.

 

The document confirmed Israel’s continued freedom of navigation in the Strait of Tiran, in which the two strategic islands are situated; the Strait of Tiran led to the important Israeli port city of Eilat.

 

In addition, Ya’alon noted that the Americans had been partnered to the negotiations and are also signatories on the agreement. Thus, Ya’alon said, Israel had received all the requisite guarantees.

According to a senior security official, who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, Ya’alon emphasized to his associates that security cooperation between Israel and Egypt had reached an all-time high. The security systems of the two countries share the same interests. Egyptians, for instance, help Israel contain and cordon off Hamas in Gaza.

 

The recent move — the transfer of the two islands to Saudi Arabia — reveals part of the dialogue that has been developing between Israel and its Sunni neighbors. A highly placed Israeli security official, who spoke to Al-Monitor anonymously, added some details: Israel's relationships in the region are deep and important. The moderate Arab countries have not forgotten the Ottoman period, and are very worried about the growing strength and enlargement of the two non-Arab empires of the past: Iran and Turkey. On this background, many regional players realize that Israel is not the problem, but the solution. Israel's dialogue with the large, important Sunni countries remains mainly under the radar, but it deepens all the time and it bears fruit.

 

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's action has aroused sharp public criticism in Egypt. The president’s opponents argue that under the Egyptian Constitution he has no authority to give up Egyptian territory, but Sisi rightly warded off this criticism: These islands originally belonged to Saudi Arabia, which transferred them to Egypt in 1950 as part of the effort to strangle Israel from the south, and prevent the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from taking control of them. Israel embarked on two wars (the Sinai War in 1956 and the Six Day War in 1967) for navigation rights in the Red Sea. It took over these islands twice, but then returned them to Egypt both times. Now events have come full circle, and the Egyptians are returning the islands to their original owner, Saudi Arabia. This is a goodwill gesture from Sisi to King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, after the Saudis committed themselves to the economic solvency of the Egyptian regime for the next five years. The Saudis are making massive investments in Egypt and providing financial support to save the Egyptian economy from collapse.

 

There is another aspect to the Egyptian transfer of the islands to Saudi Arabia: In the past, several proposals were raised regarding regional land swaps, with the goal of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The framework is, in principle, simple: Egypt would enlarge Gaza southward and allow the Gaza Strip’s Palestinians more open space and breathing room. In exchange for this territory, Egypt would receive from Israel a narrow strip the length of the borderline between the two countries, the Israeli Negev desert region from Egyptian Sinai. The Palestinians, in contrast, would transfer the West Bank settlement blocs to Israel. Jordan could also join such an initiative; it could contribute territories of its own and receive others in exchange. To date, this approach was categorically disqualified by the Egyptians in the Hosni Mubarak era. Now that it seems that territorial transfer has become a viable possibility under the new conditions of the Middle East, the idea of Israeli-Egyptian territorial swaps are also reopened; in the past, these land swap possibilities fired the imaginations of many in the region. In his day, former head of Israel's National Security Council Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland led a regional initiative on the subject. But he was stymied by Egypt.

 

Still, not everything is coming up roses. There are no simple equations in the Middle East, and this holds true in this case. In Israel there are those who are concerned about the growing Saudi Arabian influence in Egypt. This is reflected in the founding of Saudi-inspired Islamic madrassas (religious Islamic schools), and Saudi-type Sunni radicalization in Egypt. But these pessimists are the minority. “It is important for Sisi to strengthen and survive, he is the key to the stability of the entire region,” said a diplomatic source in Jerusalem who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity.

 

In light of America distancing itself from the region and the cold shoulder that Egypt has received from Washington in recent years, Saudi assistance and Israeli support to Egypt are viewed as critical to Sisi’s continued grip on the regime.

 

And to complicate the situation even more, we can add the reconciliation attempts between Israel and Turkey; these have continued for many long months in marathon negotiations between the sides.

 

A highly placed Israeli official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that the Egyptians don’t want to see the Turks in the Gaza Strip, and are strongly opposed to a rapprochement between Jerusalem and Ankara. This is the reason, according to the source, that the reconciliation agreement has not yet been completed, and that there are gaps between the sides. In the current state of affairs, it is possible that the Turks and Israelis will accept the fact that they can’t come to a full agreement, and will settle for a partial rapprochement: an exchange of ambassadors, limited warming of relations and nothing more. Israel is sitting on the thorns of a dilemma: between its desire to normalize relations with Turkey, which could also facilitate the signing of an agreement to supply natural gas from Israel to Turkey, following discoveries in recent years of natural gas reserve off the Israeli coast; and its desire to promote the emerging Israeli-Sunni understandings that are becoming a strategic cornerstone in Israel’s national security.

Israel is less isolated than the U.S.

 From The Washington Post, by Jennifer Rubin, April 14:

One of the oddities of President Obama’s approach to the Middle East is that its hostility to Israel and its lack of support for Sunni allies have left the United States less influential and less respected with everyone in the region (including Iran) while Israel has become closer to its Arab neighbors. A recent event highlights this phenomenon.
 

Troops from Egypt arrive for a multinational military exercise in Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia, in February.
(Saudi Press Agency via European Pressphoto Agency)

The Times of Israel explains:

The islands of Tiran and Sanafir are two tiny specks of land located at the entrance of the Gulf of Aqaba. . . . And yet, the islands continue to make headlines. In the last 70 years, they have changed hands nearly half a dozen times. This week, Tiran and Sanafir — which historically belong to Saudi Arabia but since 1950 were ruled by Egypt and twice captured by Israel — were in the news again as Cairo agreed to hand them back to Riyadh in exchange for the creation of a $16-billion investment fund.

This is a bigger deal than one might imagine.

“It is very significant. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is agreeing, according to press reports, to abide by the Egypt-Israel peace treaty,” Elliott Abrams, former deputy national security adviser, tells me. “When that treaty was signed in 1979, the Saudis denounced it and broke relations with Egypt. Now they are formally accepting it, and that means they acknowledge and will respect Israel’s rights to use the Gulf of Aqaba and pass through what are formally Saudi waters.”

Abrams continues:

“Moreover, all three parties–Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia–are acting like neighbors, agreeing (though there are still no open and direct Saudi-Israeli diplomatic contacts) on not only the islands and the Gulf but also a bridge to be built across the Gulf between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.” He sums up: “It is a remarkable demonstration of how the attitude of Arab states toward Israel is changing.”

Indeed, the island transfer is not an isolated event, Al-Monitor reports:

The recent move — the transfer of the two islands to Saudi Arabia — reveals part of the dialogue that has been developing between Israel and its Sunni neighbors.

A highly placed Israeli security official, who spoke to Al-Monitor anonymously, added some details:

Israel’s relationships in the region are deep and important. The moderate Arab countries have not forgotten the Ottoman period, and are very worried about the growing strength and enlargement of the two non-Arab empires of the past: Iran and Turkey.

On this background, many regional players realize that Israel is not the problem, but the solution. Israel’s dialogue with the large, important Sunni countries remains mainly under the radar, but it deepens all the time and it bears fruit.

More Reasons for the American Jewish Distancing from Israel

From Mosaic, 14 April 2016, by Martin Kramer:

There are more Israeli Jews than ever, so they need American Jews less. And they don’t all look European, so American Jews might have trouble seeing them as “my people.”
 

Moroccan Jewish men at the tomb of Rabbi Israel Abuhaṣeira, known as the Baba Sali, during the annual pilgrimage to his grave in the southern Israeli town of Netivot, on January 14, 2016. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images.

 

Elliott Abrams has put his finger on the main cause of American Jewish “distancing” from Israel, and the answer is discouraging. He picks up on this passage from one of the two books he surveys, Dov Waxman’s Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel:

Perhaps the biggest reason why young American Jews tend to be more dovish and more critical of Israel is because they are much more likely than older Jews to be the offspring of intermarried couples. . . . Young American Jews whose parents are intermarried are not only more liberal than other Jews, but also significantly less attached to Israel.

Abrams rightly calls this the “crux of the matter,” and the evidence he musters from surveys is unequivocal. With a 50-to-60 percent rate of intermarriage, Jewish communal solidarity in America is steadily eroding, with regard both to religious practice and to engagement with Israel. The children of intermarriage are less in touch with everything Jewish; their “sheer indifference” to Israel, in Abrams’ phrase, has nothing to do with the “occupation.”

But let me introduce two additional demographic explanations for the “distancing,” even among American Jews who do remain affiliated and committed.

Assimilation
When the state of Israel was established in 1948, there were six million American Jews and 700,000 Israelis: a proportion of nine to one. Israelis were those feisty little cousins, and while American Jews admired their grit, they didn’t let Israelis forget who had the numbers (and the money). When American Jewish leaders talked, Israeli leaders listened—and when the two parties disagreed, the burden of proof fell on the Israelis.

What a difference 70 years have made!

Over that time, the number of American Jews has hardly budged, due to low fertility and intermarriage. In Israel, by contrast, the number of Jews has increased almost tenfold through immigration and high fertility.

The result is that today, the ratio of American to Israeli Jews is one-to-one—about six million in each country. In another twenty years, there will be well over eight million Jews in Israel, and probably fewer than six million in America. And these Israelis are economically prosperous and militarily powerful in ways no one could have foretold in 1948.

American Jews are rightly proud of the important role they played in Israel’s transformation, and Israelis are grateful for it. But as Abrams admits, American Jewry “is in significant ways growing weaker.” Demographic stagnation and geographic dispersion aren’t just taking their toll within the community; they are eroding Jewish political clout more broadly.

So it is hardly surprising that, from the prime minister down, Israelis entrusted with the exercise of sovereign power are less attentive to what American Jews think Israel should do. Israeli Jews have worked out a successful survival strategy, and while it’s not perfect, the numbers don’t lie. The American Jewish survival strategy is struggling. As Abrams concludes, the day won’t be long in coming when the Jewish state will have to assume the direct burden of sustaining Jewish communal identity in America, “for Israel’s sake and for ours.”

Old patterns in relationships die hard. It’s not easy for many American Jews to recognize the stupendous shift in the balance, and when they don’t, this is often expressed in disappointment, disillusionment, and even dissociation from Israel. These are the discontents of gradual decline. Israelis should empathize with the deeper dilemma of American Jewry, but it should surprise no one that they discount some of its symptoms, and certainly don’t intend to change their own national priorities in a futile attempt to alleviate them.

There is another demographic reason for “distancing.”

Jewish Demography
In 1948, American and Israeli Jews were landslayt. They or their parents had come out of the same cities, towns, and shtetls of Europe. American Jews looked at Israeli Jews like family, and often they were: almost everyone in Israel had some (allegedly rich) uncle or cousin in America. True, other Jews began to arrive in the 1950s, as refugees from Arab and Muslim lands. But they were mostly out of sight in immigrant refugee camps and development towns. As for the political leaders, most were born in Russia or Poland—from David Ben-Gurion through Golda Meir, Menachem Begin through Yitzḥak Shamir. Levi Eshkol could hardly refrain from slipping into Yiddish in cabinet meetings. They all hailed from what Irving Howe called “the world of our fathers.”

All that has changed.

Today, over half of all Israeli Jews identify themselves as being of Sephardi or Mizraḥi descent; less than half, of European or American descent. (Were it not for the immigration from the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the Ashkenazi share would be closer to a third.) Israelis today just don’t look as much like family to American Jews, 90 percent of whom are of Ashkenazi descent.

Because Israeli Jews are drawn from a wider spectrum of cultures, everything else about them is more diverse. Jewish religious practice, despite the formal monopoly of Orthodox, is more varied in Israel than in the United States. Nor are the historical legacies that inform politics limited to the Holocaust, so central to American Jewish identity. The forced Jewish flight from Arab and Muslim lands is just as relevant, and explains much of the present skew of Israeli politics with regard to the Palestinian Arabs.

On top of this, about 70 percent of Israeli Jews are Israeli-born. Israel is no longer primarily a nation of immigrants. The hybrid Hebrew-language culture nourished by native-born Jewish Israelis isn’t easy to pin down in a sentence, but it’s a lot edgier than the dominant culture of the blue-state suburbs where most of American Jewry resides.

One reason is that those suburbs are more peaceful and stable than any environment in the history of humankind since Adam. Israel, in contrast, sits on the crust of the world’s most active geopolitical fault line. It isn’t that American Jews are from Venus and Israeli Jews are from Mars. It’s that they reside on opposite ends of planet Earth, one nearing perpetual peace, the other leaning toward perpetual war.

So an American Jew, disembarked at Ben-Gurion airport for the first time, might have to stretch his or her imagination quite a bit to see Israelis as “my people” and Israel as “my homeland.” For some significant number of American Jews, indeed, this is precisely what makes contemporary Israel so exhilarating. If there is any meaning to ahavat Yisrael, love of the Jewish people, it is solidarity not with Jews who look and think like you, but precisely with those who don’t.

But other American Jews, seeing shifts in Israel that suggest to them the neighborhood may be changing, begin, as it were, to move out. Israel has become too this or too that, things seem more black than white, the people there sound too uncouth.

The next thing you know, “progressive” American Jews are moving their Jewish identity elsewhere—to some place where they never have to rub elbows with people whose “Jewish values” differ from their own.

It’s not tragic: Israel will make good the loss elsewhere, through its own spectacular growth and the forging of new friendships. But it’s sad that there are Jews in America, however few or many, who do not stand in pure wonder that they live in a time when there exists a Jewish sovereign state. They would like a different one.

They must have millennia to spare.