After reading Phil Weiss’ take on the AJC 2007 survey, whose findings about the I-P conflict disturbed me, I wanted to revisit the issue which I’ve already covered in this post.
Phil correctly notes no in depth questions about the Occupation like: do you view the settlements as an obstacle to peace? Should Israel relinquish most of the settlements if there was a chance for a genuine opportunity for peace?
But another absence from the survey glared at me as well. Phil correctly notes its obsession with anti-Semitism, which isn’t surprising since this currently mostly hackneyed phenomenon seems to be the single factor that props up the work of most mainstream Jewish organizations and gives them their raison d’etre. But if we’re going to talk about hatred of Jews shouldn’t we explore Jewish attitudes toward others? Why no questions about attitudes toward Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics or immigrants? All of these are very hot issues in political life in this country. The survey’s utter disinterest in them shows, I think, a fundamental unwillingness to look at ourselves and any role we might play in maintaining a destructive status quo either in the Middle East or in relation to our fellow citizens.
I just saw Charlie Wilson’s War tonight and it was one helluva romp. Directed by Mike Nichols and scripted by the inimitable Aaron Sorkin, it will remind you of Primary Colors, a Nichols film about another captivating American politician with prodigious appetites for vice and virtue. Tom Hanks’ performance is stellar, but Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s really is a sleeper and deserves an Oscar nomination. In fact, the film would be much less interesting if not for Hoffman’s gruff, funny, salt of the earth CIA spy. Even Julia Roberts, who I haven’t really enjoyed in a role in many years, does a decent job portraying a wealthy born-again Texas anti-Communist true believer.
One thing that I missed in the film was a sense of the irony of Wilson’s full-throated embrace of the mujahadeen struggle in Afghanistan. Except at the end, there was hardly a glimmer of recognition that all this would bite us in the ass. I also detested the glee with which Wilson and the CIA agent said: “Let’s go kill some Russians!” I guess the film is being true to the characters, but the notion is disgusting.
But one of the most telling lines in the film spoken, if I recall correctly, by Hoffman’s spook is “we always leave.” In other words, we invade countries to get what we want from them, but then we abandon them when we’ve achieved our interests or been defeated in the process. “We always leave,” of course will apply to Iraq, yet another country which will likely turn into the type of shambles Afghanistan became after the mujahadeen came to power, tearing the country apart in the process, and we exited.
Unfortunately, we are a country with a short attention span and easily bored when things don’t go our way.
On a related note, I listened to an excellent On the Media interview with Michael Hodges, author of AK-47: Story of the People’s Gun. He interviewed Mikhail Kalashnikov, who said he often wished he’d invented a lawnmower instead of a gun. The Russian weapons designer called his gun a “golem,” a being created to protect a people, but who runs amok and endangers the very people it was supposed to protect. This was especially telling to me because I wrote an essay here likening the IDF to the golem myth. And I suppose the mujahadeen were the U.S.’ golem. They did our bidding to rid Afghanistan of the Russians and then ran amok afterward. Now they rise up in the form of Al Qaeda against their former creator to overthrow him.
Haaretz reports on the value that the Israeli justice system places on the life of one of its Arab citizens:
A Tel Aviv Court on Sunday sentenced a border patrolman who shot and paralyzed a Kafr Qasem resident to six months of community service and a year of probation.
In 2003, Haim Castro shot Salah Amar from a distance of a half a meter, claiming that his life was in danger and he acted in self defense. The court dismissed this claim and ruled there was no threat to Castro’s life.
Since the shooting, Amar has been listed as 100% disabled.
Although 20 Israeli citizens have been killed by Israeli security forces since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000, Castro is the first person to be convicted for shooting an Israeli citizen.
What type of community service do you think Castro will get? I think he should be forced to wash Salah Amar’s bed pans for a year.
What makes this crime and sentence even more heinous is that this is the same Kfar Qassem in which Israeli soldiers shot and killed scores of residents during the 1948 War when their commander ordered them to kill anyone violating curfew (which the residents had no idea existed). Just last week, Shimon Peres apologized for the massacre.
There are a few right-wing commenters here who enjoy defending the Border Police. This one’s gonna be tough for them but I’m sure they’ll give it a shot, so to speak.
Well, glory be. Finally, Christian evangelical leaders who step forward with a pragmatic and realistic approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of the usual drivel from the John Hagees and Pat Robertsons of the evangelical world supporting a maximalist Israeli nationalist perspective. Thanks to Daoud Kuttab for pointing me to a terrific statement published last month in Christianity Today by 80 evangelical leaders. It reads in part:
In the context of our ongoing support for the security of Israel, we believe that unless the situation between Israel and Palestine improves quickly, the consequences will be devastating. Palestinians—especially the youth who have no economic opportunity—are increasingly sympathetic to radical solutions and terrorism. As a result, the threat to Israel’s security is now greater.
Likewise, the threat to America’s national security is greater. Because so many of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims see America through the prism of Israel-Palestine, the longer the current situation continues, the more likely it is that anti-American attitudes, policies, and terrorist activities will increase dramatically among Muslims worldwide.
…The Bible clearly teaches that God longs for justice and peace for all people. We believe that the principles about justice taught so powerfully by the Hebrew prophets apply to all nations, including the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. Therefore we are compelled to work for a fair, negotiated solution for both Israelis and Palestinians. We resolve to work diligently for a secure, enduring peace and a flourishing economy for the democratic State of Israel. We also resolve to work for a viable permanent, democratic Palestinian State with a flourishing economy that offers economic opportunity to all its people. We believe that the way forward is for the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate a fair, two-state solution.
…We call on all evangelicals, all Christians, and everyone of good will to join us to work and pray faithfully in the coming months for a just, lasting two-state solution in the Holy Land. We call on all involved governments to work diligently toward this goal. And we covenant to pray for the leaders of all the nations engaged in this effort, hoping for them the blessing of our Lord, who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
…We are empowered by the knowledge that until He comes again, He summons us to support the things that promote peace and justice for everyone in the Holy Land.
Given the high profile enjoyed by the Christian Zionist zealots thanks to their embrace by AIPAC, it is easy to forget that there are evangelicals who are clear-eyed in their analysis of the issues. We need to make common cause with them and to continually ask AIPAC why it chooses the lunatic fringe instead of leaders like the ones featured here.
Christopher Hitchens has the blood of this boy on his hands (Daily family)
I was truly shocked to read the following paragraph in today’s David Brooks column:
Several months ago, Christopher Hitchens was sent an article about a young soldier, Mark Jennings Daily, who had been killed in Iraq. Daily was improbably all-American — born on the Fourth of July, an honors graduate from U.C.L.A., strikingly handsome. He’d been a Democrat with reservations about the war. But, “somewhere along the way, he changed his mind,” the article said. “Writings by author and commentator Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him.”
My heart almost went through the floor when I read the last sentence. Christopher Hitchens’ “moral case for war deeply influenced him???” Ugh, what a waste. Hitchens has a moral conscience the size of a pea. His reasoning is spurious. Everything about his writing is hyperbolic and almost clown-like. He’s a WASP [note: reader Mark Klein advises me that Hitchens is Jewish!] version of Alan Dershowitz though with a much posher accent. And this poor boy gave his life under the influence of Christopher Hitchens’ moral world view?
How do you think a man of such moral vacuity would react to indirectly leading a man to his death?
“I don’t exaggerate by much when I say I froze,” Hitchens wrote about reading that sentence.
I should hope so. At the very least.
Brooks gives Hitchens the benefit of the doubt in the following passage:
His essay in the November issue of Vanity Fair is a meditation on his own role in Daily’s death, and a description of the family Daily left behind. Hitchens asks painful questions and steps on every opportunity to be maudlin, and yet for all its tightly controlled intellectualism, the essay packs a bigger emotional wallop than any other this year.
I don’t even have the heart to read what I’m certain will be a morally self-serving exercise. Everything about Hitchens makes me sick to my stomach. None more so than a story like this. Talk about someone with blood on their hands. I hope that Hitchens will ponder what Mark Daily might’ve done with his life had he spurned the former’s pipe dreams. What contribution could this boy have made to society? What family might he have created? And what contribution has Hitchens himself made and what part has he played in this tragedy?
It is certainly true that someone as intelligent as Daily clearly was was the agent of his own fate. He was guided by his own conscience and takes as much responsibility for his actions in life and death as Hitchens must. But had I written something that led a boy to fight and die in a conflict as muddled and hopeless as Iraq I don’t think I could face myself. I’m certain Hitchens will find a way to block out his own culpability.
Joshua Mitnick wrote an excellent piece on Yechiel Eckstein’s promotion to the Jewish Agency Executive and the rising power of his evangelical International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. As far as I’m concerned this is the “money quote:”
Rabbi Eckstein said the pro-Israeli enthusiasm of Christian Zionists fills a “void” among the American Jewish public, which surveys suggest is less and less connected to Israel.
Instead of examining the deeper reasons why younger Diaspora Jews have become alienated from Israel–which would force us to examine Israeli policy that prevents peace and the leadership’s support for that policy–Eckstein essentially gives up on the next Jewish generation and turns to evangelicals; as if they can take the place of Jews. To me, the notion that an evangelical Christian, given all the baggage that this religion carries in its historic relation to Jews, can substitute for Jewish engagement with Israel is absurd. Not only absurd, but dangerous. What happens when the inevitable break happens between the evangelicals and Jews as their perceived self-interest diverges (say, when Israel makes a peace agreement which the former disagree with)? What will Israel be left with? Diminished Jewish support and no Christian Zionist support.
One issue that Mitnick left out of his story was IFCJ support for Jewish settlements. While the group supports communities within the Green Line, it funnels tremendous amounts of aid to settlements thereby helping prop up this enterprise. It should also be noted, as Gershom Gorenberg points out, that private aid to the settler movement though significant, is dwarfed by government aid.
I have no problem with the idea that Israel should be a refuge for Jews in distress around the world. The Holocaust proved the validity of this. But I do have a problem with those who manipulate the idea of Israel as refuge in order to advance ideological, political or theological agendas–especially when they are the agenda of evangelical Christianity. So is Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein doing in placing a bounty of $10,000 on the head of every Iranian Jew who makes aliya.
Haaretz reports triumphally that 40 Iranian Jews recently touched down at Ben Gurion. Altogether 200 Iranians have come to Israel in 2007 (out of an estimated population of 25,000). When you consider that Israel threatened massive strikes against Iran this year to which the Iranian mullahs have responded with bellicose anti-Israel rhetoric, the fact that Eckstein could draw less than 1% of the population to Israel is truly pathetic. That’s probably why the Jewish Journal reports the program will be discontinued at year’s end.
It’s also important to examine the motive’s of Eckstein’s International Fellowship of Christians and Jews in financing the bounty. Evangelicals believe that Christ’s Second Coming can only happen after the Ingathering of the Exiles. In other words, every Jew must return to Israel after which there will be an Armageddon-like war between the forces of Good and Evil in which 2/3 of Jews will be killed.
Add this to the fact that Iranian Jews, while certainly not living under the freest conditions Jews live under in the world today, are under no imminent religious or physical threat. While Iranian Jews should be FREE to make aliya. There is no reason to treat them as if they are a Jewish vanishing species in need of immediate aid. That’s why this rhetoric from Eckstein is so propagandistic and irksome:
Rabbi Yehiel Eckstein, warned in a telephone interview from Chicago that the situation facing Iranian Jews is critical.
“Our feeling is that this is very similar to the situation of Jews in Germany in the 1930s,” Eckstein said. “All it needs is a U.S. or Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program for them to come down strong on the local Jewish population.”
This is right out of Bibi’s playbook: it’s 1938 and Iran is Nazi Germany. Who believes this shit? Apparently, the good rabbi doesn’t read his NIE Estimates or newspapers or he’d know there is no possibility of a U.S. strike against Iran and the possibility of an Israeli strike seems terribly remote as well.
But leave it to a Jewish Pied Piper to exploit willing Christian dupes to advance a quasi-Zionist, quasi-right wing agenda to bring Iran’s Jews to Israel to promote the Second Coming.
Susan Sarandon, Denise Rich & Isabella Rosselini at Leviev opening (Scott Wintrow/Getty Images)
I hope that title grabbed your attention. They shouldn’t have anything in common, right? The first a progressive, the second a troglodyte. Well, unfortunately they do. They both like diamonds. Nothing wrong with that you might say. Unless the diamonds come from African conflict zones and unless their proceeds are used to build West Bank settlements on confiscated Palestinian land. All of which is true.
Susan Sarandon has a taste for diamonds and the high life and so attended the glittering opening of Lev Leviev’s new Madison Avenue jewelry emporium. She was joined in the crowd by other celebrities like Isabella Rosselini, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Denise Rich (maybe she was there to arrange a “pardon” for Leviev as she did for her ex, Marc Rich). Problem was that to enter the store Sarandon had to cross a picket line established by Adala NY, a group of human rights adherents who oppose the Israeli Occupation. Despite the cause, Sarandon crossed. Not only that. Jewish Voice for Peace wrote a subsequent letter asking her to voice her opposition to Leviev’s pro-settlement activities. The response–silence. Well, not exactly. The NY Post’s Page Six quotes a representative saying that Sarandon has no “tie” to Leviev and thus nothing to renounce. Which is basically a casuistic non-answer.
Roman Abramovich & Lev Leviev, Tel Aviv (Nir Keidar/Getty Images)
Lev Leviev grew up in Tashkent as a member of the Bukharan community. He came to Israel as a teenager and eventually joined the Israeli diamond industry producing polished diamonds. He has become wealthy in his chosen profession by trafficking in Angolan diamonds. Walter Ruby, writing in Jewish Week, notes that Forbes lists him as the 210th richest person in the world worth $4.1 billion (Zev Chafets says that Leviev’s associates estimate his real worth as closer to $8 billion). He also funds the Chabad-dominated Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia.
Also disturbing is Leviev’s participation in the Land Redemption Fund, which purchases land under false pretenses from Palestinian owners in order to transfer them to settlement ownership. Leviev’s development company is also building several settlements including a $230 million project on land confiscated from the Palestinian village of Bilin, which is in the international news because of weekly protests there against the Apartheid Wall. Leviev and the LRF use Palestinian stooges to approach Palestinian farmers, many of whom can no longer farm their land anyway due either to the Wall or settler intimidation, offering to pay many times what the land is worth. As far as the farmers know the land is being purchased by a fellow Palestinian. Instead, the land reverts to LRF and then becomes land that Leviev can build settlements on, further increasing his empire after selling the homes to settlers.
The residents of Bilin and Jayyous recently wrote to Sarandon asking her to take up their cause against settlements encroaching on their land.
I should amend my post title by acknowledging that Lev Leviev is not a member of the Russian mob. He’s way beyond that. His money has bought him respectability that every shady character craves, even as he continues pillaging poor Palestinian farmers as he makes hundreds of millions of dollars and perverts the chances for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Recently, Leviev decided to expand his diamond and real estate business to New York, where he owns property worth well over $1 billion including the Plaza Hotel and New York Times building ($525 million). The store opening and accompanying protest was covered by The Forward and JTA, which indicates a rapidly changing political climate in the American Jewish community. Until recently, such a story would’ve been met with skepticism or derision by much of the Jewish community and press. It also indicates that Adalah NY had created dramatic protest imagery that would appeal to New York’s mass media.
As the photo above indicates, Leviev is linked with former Russian mobster and now oligarch, Roman Abramovich in the diamond business. Abramovich, in attempting to smooth his path into international business and social circles also purchased the Chelsea football club. Leviev, not to be outdone, also owns an Israeli football club. According to Haaretz, Leviev and Abramovich are among the two largest donors to Elad, whose goal is the “Judaize” East Jerusalem by buying up Arab property and transferring it to Jewish ownership. Elad refused to disclose its donor list publicly and is in danger of being dissolved by the government.
Surprisingly, the NY Post’s Page Six has kept the story alive with periodic updates–probably because the right-wing paper seeks to embarrass the progressive Sarandon. What is a shame is that with a short note to the public Sarandon could reaffirm her commitment to support ending the Occupation and tell the world she knew nothing about Leviev’s right-wing agenda and had no intention of shopping in his store again. Instead, she’s trying to fudge the issue.
As for Dershowitz, ever the entertaining clown, Dersh must’ve seen the brouhaha and decided he needed to get a slice of Sarandon’s PR. So he went down to the Leviev showroom and came out swinging his shopping bag as if it contained Norman Finkelstein’s head. All of which is quite interesting when you consider that during his Democracy Now debate with the latter he said that he opposed Israeli settlements. How quickly they forget. After watching Dershowitz’s pathetic primping performance in this video you realize that he’s nothing more than an ambulance chaser for political notoriety, a Jewish Ann Coulter.
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Christopher Hitchens has the blood of this boy on his hands (Daily family)
Iranian Jews answer Zionist clarion call thanks to $10K sweetener (AP/Ariel Schalit)
Susan Sarandon, Denise Rich & Isabella Rosselini at Leviev opening (Scott Wintrow/Getty Images)
Roman Abramovich & Lev Leviev, Tel Aviv (Nir Keidar/Getty Images)
