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Jewish Journal

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February 17, 2000

Scholarly Pursuit

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

Holocaust revisionist David Irving has no right to call himself a historian, according to a leading scholar of Nazi Germany.

Richard Evans, a professor of modern history at Britain’s prestigious Cambridge University, made the remark last week while testifying in the trial here where Irving is suing American historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, for libel on the basis of Lipstadt’s 1994 book “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.”

Irving, who denies that Jews were systematically exterminated in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, is claiming that Lipstadt ruined his reputation and career by labeling him a Holocaust denier — and asserting that he twisted historical data to suit his own bias.

Irving’s confrontation with Evans was just one that he had with other scholars last week who are testifying in the trial.

After producing a 740-page critique of Irving’s historical method, Evans said he had been unprepared for the “sheer depth of duplicity” he had found in Irving’s treatment of Holocaust-related historical sources.

In his report, Evans asserted that Irving had relied on his audience lacking the time or the expertise to study his sources in order to discover the “distortions and manipulations.”

Irving, who is representing himself, charged that Evans’ “sweeping and rather brutal” attack on his career was based on personal animosity: “I think you dislike what I write and stand for and what you perceive my views to be,” he said.

But Evans denied this was true and said he had sought to be as objective as possible when examining Irving’s work.

Evans said he had little prior knowledge of the work, although he had thought of Irving as a sound historian. But he said he was “shocked” at what he found when he closely examined Irving’s writings and speeches.

The court proceedings reinforced the view he had expressed in his report that Irving had fallen so far short of accepted standards of scholarship that “he doesn’t deserve to be called a historian at all.”

But Irving declared that he was always “scrupulously fair,” and the “total opposite of being unscrupulous and manipulative and deceptive, as you say in your report.”

Evans agreed that Irving had a very wide knowledge of the source material for the Third Reich and that he had discovered many new documents: “The problem for me,” he said, “is what you do with them when you interpret them and write them up.”

Irving’s writings and speeches, said Evans, contained statements that he regarded as anti-Semitic — to the extent that he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust.

Irving’s belief that he was the target of “a worldwide Jewish conspiracy,” Evans continued, was “a fantastic belief which has no grounds in fact.”

Irving also had a bruising encounter last week with Professor Christopher Browning, of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., who also appeared as a witness for Lipstadt.

Asked by Irving to comment on a Nazi plan to settle Jews on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, Browning, author of four books and more than 35 academic papers on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, said it was a “bizarre fantasy.”

Browning added that the result of such a population transfer would have been disastrous as “a large percentage of the people would have perished.”

“I think,” countered Irving, “that the Jews are a very sturdy people.”

Earlier, military historian Sir John Keegan, compelled by subpoena to testify for Irving, said he found Irving’s ideas to be “perverse,” while his claim that Hitler did not know about the fate of the Jews until late 1943 “was so extraordinary it would defy reason.”

Sir John, who was knighted for his contribution to military history, agreed that he had in the past recommended students of World War II to read Irving’s book “Hitler’s War,” but he told the court he had also advised them to read Chester Wilmot’s “Struggle for Europe.”

“Together,” he said, “they gave Hitler’s side and the Allies’ side.”

His recommendation to students did not mean he endorsed the opinions in Irving’s book, he said.

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Moving On Up, Reluctantly

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

For the last two years, I’ve dreamed of a simple thing: I’ve just wanted to be able to say, “I’m in the other room.”

After a lengthy stay in a grim studio apartment, I can finally say that. I’ve moved to a one-bedroom place in a far better neighborhood, complete with a garden courtyard, a garage, a roomy living room and the sense that, like the Jeffersons, I’m “moving on up.” Which is why it’s confusing that I feel so down.

Gone are the roaches, the fax machine at the foot of my bed, the tangle of electrical cords going into one pathetic, fire hazard-creating outlet. Gone are my fellow tenants, the Asian transsexual, the toothless building manager, the out-of-work actor who daily stuffed the outgoing mail box with manila envelopes containing his outdated picture and resume. Gone is the ice cream truck that seemed to pierce every moment of silence with “La Cucaracha.” Gone is the ghetto I had come to think of as home.

You would think this change would thrill me. My new place isn’t a palace, poised on the edge of Koreatown in an area I optimistically refer to as Hancock Park adjacent, but it’s the nicest place I’ve ever lived. Still, each day I wake up in my new digs feeling lost and out of place. It’s like eating an ice cream sundae but not tasting the hot fudge.

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A Weekend in San Francisco

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

Generation J is Lisa Schiffman’s shorthand for American Jews born after World War II who feel connected to their Jewishness in some way they can’t explain and, at the same time, feel ambivalent about that connection.

“We were a generation of Jews who’d grown up with television, with Barbie, with rhinoplasty as a way of life,” she writes. “Assimilation wasn’t something we strove for; it was the condition into which we were born.”

Her book, “Generation J” (Harper San Francisco) is a personal memoir, a travelogue of her adventures exploring Judaism. She gives voice to the yearnings of many Jews, and also speaks to those who don’t yet know they are yearning.

In an interview, Schiffman, 35, explains that the book was inspired when she hit her 30s, a time when she expected she would have “had things figured out.” She didn’t feel comfortable with the Jewish part of herself. “It was like carrying around an old piece of baggage. I couldn’t see going forward without reconciling.” She began to keep a diary, seeking out “Jewish experiences” and writing about them: The diary grew into this book. And she grows from a reluctant participant to an authentic seeker, from apathy to engagement with the tradition, in her own untraditional way.

Schiffman writes well, often with humor and irony. She says that she doesn’t mean to be disrespectful, rather, that she uses irony as a device to get people to laugh, to keep them involved in the story. “Humor is an essential character trait of being Jewish,” she says.

The book opens at a conference on Jewish identity in Berkeley, Calif. where Schiffman and others are asked to fill in the blank, “I am a Jew, and to me that means_____” in the words of their grandparents, parents and themselves.

She finds her own Jewish identity “impossible to map” — and realizes she is not alone.

Unlike others who’ve discovered longings to understand Judaism, Schiffman, who grew up in Levittown, L.I., doesn’t enroll in a yeshiva, doesn’t begin attending synagogue regularly; instead she forges her own path, attending Jewish workshops in northern California where she lives, and using her training as an anthropologist to interview people who are themselves engaged in Judaism — rabbis, teachers, writers, the mikveh ladies who have their own wisdom.

Schiffman is totally honest about her own ignorance of Judaism, wondering at a service she attends about whether the candles are for the living or the dead. She explains that she learned from writer Anne Lamott “not to be ashamed of what you don’t know. You have to go to the core.” When she stumbles upon the klezmer music of Andy Statman for the first time, she thinks that he must “know something about the life of the sacred,” so she calls him, and he tells her that “music is a way of experiencing God’s goodness and having an experience of God.” He talks to her about living according to halacha, about mitzvot, repairing the world. Although she respects his wisdom, she “couldn’t follow his lead.”

To figure out what keeping kosher means, she questions many Jews about why they feel comfortable eating shrimp but not pork. She wonders whether keeping kosher is a mystical path, “a way to nurture the essence of God.” With a bowl of ice cream she notes is labeled kosher, she tackles Leviticus, reprinting most of chapter XI in her chapter “Kosher — Me?”, running her “favorite compulsions” in bold face. She then devises her own experiment: eating non-kosher every day for a week — pork fried rice, chicken and prosciutto in cream sauce, pastrami and cheese sandwiches. Later she muses that if she kept kosher, “it would be about finding holiness in the small, mundane places. It would be about being aware.”

The author, who is married to a non-Jew, also writes about her quest to find a rabbi to perform their marriage, and is disappointed by the negative reactions she encounters. “We were a hybrid couple, like hundreds of thousands of interfaith couples. We were an expression of love. We were an expression of Judaism. We had to be, because I’m Jewish. We, and others like us, were part of a Judaism that no one had yet named.”

About intermarriage, she says that she’d like to see the Jewish community recast its questions, “from ‘how long before intermarriage dilutes Jewish culture’ to, ‘given that it’s happening, whether there’s some way it can benefit the culture and religion.'”

She imagines the future, and suggests the “One Tribe Card.” Through an annual contribution to the Jewish community, one would gain access to membership in all the synagogues in the area, Jewish museums, library, film festivals, courses at any Jewish institution. “The lines of demarcation between Jews might begin to melt.”

Now a Jew “by choice as much as by birth,” she continues to nurture her Jewish identity. She’s beginning to study Hebrew. And she now thinks about God — she says she couldn’t even use the word two years ago. “I don’t have anything like a cohesive practice; it’s still evolving.

How would she now answer the question posed at the Berkeley conference?

“I am a Jew and to me this means I’m interested in continuing to evolve my Jewish identity.”

A Weekend in San Francisco Read More »

High-Tech Harassment

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Science & Technology /

A string of recent sabotage attacks on Web sites could mean a business boom in Israel, where some of the world’s most successful Internet security companies are located.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched an investigation into a series of attacks on several leading Web sites, including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, CNN.com and eBay, the Internet auction house. Some of the sites were forced to temporarily shut down because of the sabotage.

The worldwide attention to the issue of Internet security may mean more business for Israeli companies like Check Point Software, a world leader in Internet security. The company — founded by a group of ex-army technology experts — is now trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange at a valuation of more than $11 billion. A Check Point spokesman said none of the sites attacked last week were using the company’s products.

Israel’s expertise is a direct product of its army’s historic focus on cutting-edge technology. Over the years, as the army adopted new computer and networking technology, securing those networks from outside intrusion was a top priority.

When the Internet started to expand, some veterans of intelligence and communications units transformed their knowledge into civilian applications and companies. Today, Israeli Internet security companies sell more than $500 million a year in network security products around the world, and Israeli security experts also play key roles in overseas companies.

Israel Mazin, former chief executive of Memco, an Israeli security company that now belongs to Computer Associates, the world’s biggest business software group, said the hacker barrage could make consumers less willing to buy products on-line.

“All of these sites will now have to be more aware of security and find a way to explain to buyers that it is safe to do business,” he said.

However, he added, security companies in Israel and abroad could actually benefit from the attacks, which may boost awareness of the need for comprehensive security systems and spark more corporate investments in foolproof security products.

Shimon Gruper, vice president of Internet technology at Aladdin Knowledge Systems, a Tel Aviv-based, NASDAQ-listed security company, said the method used to disable the Web sites was an “extremely primitive” technique.

It involved bombarding the Web sites with massive requests to view Web pages. This caused an overload on Web servers in the same way a telephone system would crash when hit with massive amounts of calls for the same number or area codes.

There are many theories as to how the sabotage was pulled off — whether it came from one troublemaker who hacked into other computers, which in turn sent the massive requests to the targeted site or whether it was coordinated with other hackers.

Gruper said that although the method was primitive, the coordinated nature of the attack is worrisome.

“That is the biggest threat,” he said. “This appears to be the biggest coordinated attack ever.”

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A Day at the Races

Leave a Comment / Old Stories /

From the first question, the interview sank like a rock.

“Jews in horse racing. What kind of story is that?” the famous- person’s voice bellowed over the phone. “You’re 20 years too late!”

“There was Maxwell Glick and Sam Rubin and Hirsh Jacobs and Eugene Kline. A guy like Maxwell Glick made $8 million in one race!”

The famous-person paused momentarily, speaking to someone over his shoulder; by the time he returned, what was left of his good manners had flown out the window.

“But why am I educating you?” he barked into the phone.

I squirmed in my chair, my ears burning red. The famous person had posed a very good question, indeed.

It was true, I didn’t know a lot about horse racing (although, I did grow up downwind of Churchill Downs), but I knew enough to know that Jews liked horses. Up until the 1950s, East Coast horse racing was dominated by Jews, along with small time gangsters, who found intellectual and financial rewards at the races. Kline, Jacobs and Rubin — East Coast Jews — had all been big-time thoroughbred owners, and winners, at one time.

But on the West Coast, when it came down to the track, old wealth ruled.

“What you’ve got to understand is that Santa Anita was the quintessential WASP bastion,” says Nathaniel Friedman, an attorney and horse racing enthusiast, who has been going to the track for over 40 years. According to Friedman, during the ’30s, under Charles B. Strub, founder of Santa Anita, Jews were not exactly welcomed at the Turf Club.

“Common sense said you invited in people who could afford it… So, in 1937, a man named Mervyn LeRoy [ a Hollywood director] and Louis B. Mayer incorporated Hollywood Park.” Thus, Hollywood Park was created, Friedman says, in part as a place where Jews could go and have a Turf Club of their own.

“There were no bones about it: Jews had plenty of money, they were willing to spend it and they loved horses,” Friedman says.

Today, at Santa Anita, you’ll find the most diverse crowd anywhere in Southern California. Under new ownership, the Club House has had a facelift, welcoming in a whole new generation of horse fanatics. And today, Jews have a bigger presence than ever in the sport of horse racing.

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Jewish Films Tapped for Oscars

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Old Stories /

A film on the 1972 Olympic Games massacre of Israeli athletes has received an Oscar nomination for best documentary, while a Welsh film about the romance between a Jewish boy and a Welsh girl is in the running for best foreign film.

The documentary “One Day in September” recreates the bloody 24 hours at the Munich Olympics, when Arab terrorists took 11 members of the Israeli team hostage. Two of the Israelis were killed outright and the remaining nine died in a bungled rescue attempt at the Munich airport.

Included in the 90-minute film is extensive testimony by the only survivor among the eight terrorists.

The driving force behind the film is Swiss-based producer Arthur Cohn, who has won an unprecedented five Oscars, including one for “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.”

The Welsh film “Solomon and Gaenor” is a takeoff on “Romeo and Juliet,” in which Solomon conceals his Jewish identity until forced to reveal the truth. The film’s dialogue is in Welsh, English and Yiddish.

The Oscars will be presented on March 26.

The Israeli Olympic Team at their arrival in Munich in August 1972.

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Ernestine Bradley’s Message

Leave a Comment / Lifecycles, Old Stories, Womans Voice /

Ernestine Schlant Bradley, short brown hair, dressed in a lively pink/purple-checked wool jacked with beige slacks, was sipping hot water with six lemon wedges at the Los Angeles Regal Biltmore Hotel coffee shop last weekend, nursing laryngitis. The wife of former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, Democratic candidate for president, is facing what might be called the flip side of the “Madeleine Albright syndrome”: America’s lingering obsession with the Holocaust manifested by exposing the lives of its public personalities. If Albright, 63, was the hidden Jew, Schlant, 64, is now the revealed German.

She set aside nearly an hour just three weeks before the California primary to address the bitter prospect that there may be a whisper campaign against her. Tabloid reporters and investigators are apparently looking into the question: Had her father, a pilot in Hitler’s Luftwaffe, been a Nazi?

Schlant, whose many Jewish friends include the philosopher/writer Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, told me that she and Bradley had discussed the so-called German question before announcing his candidacy. But she clearly counted on the passage of time, and the decades of her own impressive work in German-Jewish reconciliation, to quickly put it all to rest.

Yet as the campaign has proceeded, the issue has not died. Even in articles that praise her own scholarly and personal talents, like Andrew Sullivan’s column in last week’s New York Times Magazine, there is the annoying tendency of journalists to repeat that her father was not a Nazi Party member only when it is followed by the delimiting “according to Schlant.”

“It’s part of the political atmosphere,” she says, sadly.

So she came to address the issue. The short answer, she said bluntly, is no. She had asked her father directly whether he had been a Nazi, and he told her no. She had relentlessly questioned her mother.

“I wish that they had been part of the resistance,” she said softly.

Schlant was 10 when the war ended. As a child she delivered tea to wounded German soldiers. She came to the U.S. as a Pan Am flight attendant, then earned a Ph.D. in post-war West German literature at Emory University. She became a citizen in 1963. Her books, including “The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust,” indict the writers of her generation for denying the slaughter and destruction of the Jews. She teaches German and comparative literature at Montclair State College in New Jersey.

“The Holocaust has been used as a word without much content,” she said. “When German writers use the word ‘Holocaust’ they don’t have to think about children and women. We have yet to come to terms with mourning, the sorrow, the pain of them having destroyed a culture and a tradition.” Nevertheless, she suggested that Germans are eons ahead of Austrians, who still bear their sense of victimization, and a shadowy isolation, which might help explain Vienna’s current flirtation with neo-Nazism through Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party.

An intellectual, every bit the equal of her Rhodes-scholar husband, Schlant and I spent some time discussing the word “complicit” which she felt too vaguely indicting of her father’s generation: “You lived with the reality,” she said. “Even if you were passive, you could have passive activity and active passivity.” Schlant clearly meant that others should not judge her parents as merely accepting Hitler even if they went along.

Schlant’s interests are not solely with Germans. Today, she is learning that American Jews still have their post-war homework to do. On a recent campaign stop at a New York yeshiva, she was surprised to find that Jewish students did not know German history very well.

“I have visited yeshivas before, but it wasn’t until I heard the question that I realized that the students didn’t understand the difference between the German army and the Nazi party,” she said. “This needs to be dispelled, this needs to be addressed.” The persistent equation of Germans with Nazis, even among the youngest Jews, makes it impossible for any of us to move on.

The distinctions between “complicit” and “implicated,” between Germans and Nazis, between Jewish victims and prejudiced youngsters will become more important as the shadow of the Holocaust continues to recede. Schlant’s appearances are thus historically important regardless of the primary campaign’s results.

“Even if Bill doesn’t get elected,” she told me, “there is an opportunity for us. Not for forgiveness, since the Jewish survivors say that forgiveness is impossible. Not for reconciliation, since that is impossible. Not for atonement. None of that is possible.

“But I can possibly build bridges between the two sides.”

Marlene Adler Marks, senior columnist of The Jewish Journal, is author of “A Woman’s Voice: Reflections on Love, Death, Faith, Food & Family Life.”

Her website is www.marleneadlermarks.com.

Her e-mail address is wmnsvoice@aol.com. Her book, “A Woman’s Voice” is available through Amazon.com.

Ernestine Bradley’s Message Read More »

New Sculptures Debuted

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories /

Sculptures by two prominent local artists are now on permanent display.

“Benediction”(above) by Charna Rickey stands at Temple B’nai Emet in Montebello. The bronze sculpture was dedicated by Rickey and her brothers, Bernard and Howard Barsky, to the memory of their parents, Sonia and John Barsky, who were among the Temple’s founders.

A new marble sculpture (right) at the University of Judaism represents Ruth and Naomi mourning the death of Boaz. It is the work of 86-year-old sculptor Ben Bronson, who created it at a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy. — Tom Tugend

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Holocaust Voices on CD

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories /

School children ask Siegfried (Siggy) Halbreich, “Do you have nightmares?” He answers, “Nightmares, dreams, I never do, because I live with it, day and night.”

The testimony of the 90-year-old Los Angeles resident, who survived five years in six concentration camps, is among those of 180 men and women interviewed in the United States, Canada and England and heard in a unique, four-hour oral history, “Voices of the Shoah: Remembrance of the Holocaust.”

In a five-year project, the poignant stories of the survivors, from their early childhoods to old age, have been collected in a four-volume box set, available in both CD and audio cassette.

Rhino Records, which describes the sets as the first-ever audio documentary of the Holocaust, will release them on March 14, with narration by actor Elliott Gould. All proceeds are to be donated to The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, which participated in the project.

The audio sets are complemented by a 100-page hardbound book, with complete transcripts of the spoken testimonies, historic photos, explanatory essays, an excellent timeline of events, maps, charts and a glossary.

In addition, there are suggested questions and activities for parents and teachers, and a list of additional teaching resources and Web sites.

John R. Fishel, president of The Jewish Federation, said he became involved in the project as facilitator, after he realized, following visits to Holocaust museums, that there were no audio histories available to the public.

Richard Foos, president of Los Angeles-based Rhino Records, had a similar reaction and asked filmmaker David Notowitz to produce “Voices of the Shoah.”

(The Rhino production has no connection to Steven Spielberg’s widely publicized Shoah Foundation, which has videotaped the stories of some 50,000 survivors.)

Volume one features survivors’ remembrances of life in Europe before World War II, the rise in anti-Semitism as Hitler gained power, and the Jewish experience in ghettos and concentration camps. Volume two includes survivors’ memories of liberation, life after the war, adjustment to freedom, and emigration to Israel or the West.

Volume three deals with Jewish-American and Japanese-American soldiers who witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps and tells the story of a rabbi who went to Europe to help survivors. Volume four includes the personal account of a woman who survived in a small Polish village by hiding her Jewish identity, and the attitudes of a second-generation survivor in dealing with the Holocaust legacy.

Besides Halbreich, other featured Angelenos include John Rauch, Sonia Meyers and Cesia Kingston.

The complete box set will be available as of March 14 at record stores and other retail outlets, at a suggested retail list price of $69.98/CD and $54.98/cassette, or directly from the Rhino Web site: www.rhino.com.

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Early Withdrawal?

Leave a Comment / Israel, Old Stories, Worldwide /

Israel’s leaders are losing whatever faith they may have had in Hafez Assad. They are no longer convinced that the Syrian president has made a strategic choice for peace.

As a result, more than half Ehud Barak’s cabinet is pressing for an early, unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops from Southern Lebanon — and the prime minister does not write off that option. The skeptics include some of the most dedicated of peaceniks.

Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of the 1993 Oslo breakthrough with the Palestinians, despaired this week: “I don’t understand why the Syrians missed the boat with Rabin, Peres and Netanyahu. I don’t understand why they sent Foreign Minister Shara to shake hands with Barak. And I don’t understand why they stopped the negotiations. They have here a government that is ready to pay the price for peace. I hope they’re not going to miss the boat again.”

Another Oslo veteran, Uri Savir, urged: “We have to stop courting the Syrians.” Savir, now a Center Party legislator, headed the Wye Plantation negotiations with Syria under the 1992-1996 Labor administration.

Although he is not yet ready to give up, Barak is beginning to share their doubts. The Syrian negotiations are doubly critical for the prime minister because Damascus holds the key to stability in Lebanon. And the Lebanese cannot sign a deal without Syria’s blessing.

Barak promised his voters to “bring the boys home” by July, one year after he took office. He is standing by that timetable. He would still prefer to pull back in agreement with Syria. But he made it clear this week that he would not keep Israeli soldiers across the border indefinitely as Syrian bargaining chips.

“If it turns out, in the coming weeks,” he conceded, “that there is no one to make an agreement with, we will stop the Lebanese tragedy in the best possible way by July.” Other ministers are suggesting that the decision to leave might be taken as early as March or April. The general staff is already drawing up plans for defending Israel’s front-line communities from south of the border.

An escalating casualty toll — at least seven Israeli soldiers have died in the past three weeks — is sapping the will to fight of the conscripts and the stoicism of their families. If they are going to withdraw by July, they don’t see why they should risk death for the sanctity of a timetable.

Aryeh Itah, a reserve colonel whose son was killed by a Hezbollah missile last Friday, made an impassioned television appeal to Barak: “Take the boys out of Lebanon. Please do it quickly so that my son, Tzahi, will be the last sacrifice.”

Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg told worried mothers of soldiers serving in Lebanon: “We are sitting ducks there. We should pull out as soon as possible. If it is right to pull out in July, why is it not right do so now?”

Most Israeli commentators acknowledge that Israel is losing the war of attrition with the Hezbollah guerrillas. But what would be celebrated in the Arab world as a humiliating retreat goes against the grain for Barak, who was elected to deliver both peace and security. He still aspires to end the Israeli-Arab conflict once and for all. And his strongest card with Israeli voters is his record as the Jewish state’s most decorated war hero.

“There would be far fewer casualties, in the long run, if Lebanon were evacuated as part of a comprehensive peace agreement with Syria,” he argued. “If we want to reach an agreement, we cannot pull out under pressure. We are fighting in Lebanon so as to exhaust the chances of a settlement. A nation also needs to know how to communicate its steadfastness in times of pain.”

But even if the Clinton administration manages to cajole Israel and Syria back to the negotiating table, Barak’s chances of selling a peace treaty, which would have to include returning the Golan Heights to Damascus, are being eroded by Assad’s belligerence. Barak has pledged to submit any agreement to a referendum.

A late January poll by Tel-Aviv University’s Steinmetz Center for Peace Research found 51 percent of Israelis saying they would vote against if a referendum were held today. Only 25 percent said they would vote in favor. The rest were waiting to see the color of Assad’s money.

Israelis at all levels are convinced that Syria is fostering the Hezbollah offensive. Syria, warned Deputy Defense Minster Ephraim Sneh, could not talk and shoot simultaneously. “The whole logistics of Hezbollah comes through Syria,” he explained, “the supply of arms, the supply of everything. Also nothing can be done in Lebanon without Syrian approval.”

At the same time, Israelis have been dismayed by an editorial in the official Syrian newspaper, Tishreen, which contended that the Holocaust was a Zionist myth and that Israel had done much worse things to the Palestinians. “Frankly, the Syrians can go and stuff themselves. I’ve had it with them,” columnist Hirsh Goodman wrote in the Jerusalem Report magazine.

“The Syrians,” complained Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University political scientist, “are doing nothing to facilitate the political support system necessary for Barak to give back the Golan. Israelis will not give up the heights for an antagonistic peace. Syria cannot maintain the posture of an enemy and negotiate with Israel.”

Early Withdrawal? Read More »