May It Be a Year of Knowing What To Ask For -Rabbi Barry Gelman
Shanah Tova to all!
May It Be a Year of Knowing What To Ask For -Rabbi Barry Gelman Read More »
September 7, 2010
The peace talks—and their obstacles
Peace in a year? Try getting past Sept. 26. Or is it 30?
Direct talks between Palestinians and Israelis have barely begun and already the sides are facing their first major hurdle—the end of Israel’s partial moratorium on settlement building.
Several issues might beset the sides as they aim to meet the yearlong deadline suggested by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and endorsed (with considerable enthusiasm) by President Obama and (with less enthusiasm) by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The hard questions—the status of Palestinian refugees and the sharing of Jerusalem—promise to vex the negotiators, as they have for years. Even before that point, however, a number of issues already are creating anxieties among negotiators in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Washington.
That moratorium:
Netanyahu placed a partial moratorium on settlement building to entice Abbas to the negotiating table. It lapses Sept. 26—although not effectively until Sept. 30 because of the Sukkot holiday—and Netanyahu has said he will not renew it. Abbas says he will not be able to continue talks without it.
U.S. officials are pressing the sides to come up with a way out before the next meeting of the leaders, on Sept. 14 in Egypt. Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, has spoken of “incentivizing” the Palestinians with other gestures.
Oren did not elaborate, but Netanyahu has made a point of talking up economic incentives for the Palestinians, including increased commerce by reducing regulations and pulling away roadblocks.
Another way out would be for both sides to avoid questions about the deadline as it approaches and for the moratorium to continue, unofficially, without comment from either the Israelis or Palestinians. Most Israelis living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders—the area known as the Green Line—wouldn’t notice whether or not building was continuing in settlements, but the impact would be immediately noticeable to Palestinians.
Supporters of the settlement movement, however, say the current restrictions create burdens for the 300,000 Israeli Jews living in the West Bank. The settler community has vowed to protest unless settlement building returns to 2008 levels.
That deadline:
Netanyahu wants an agreement within a year, and before that an interim agreement outlining the parameters of a final status deal. He has made clear, however, in private conversations with U.S. officials that the agreement will be on paper until the Israeli leader is sure that he can secure his country’s borders—in other words, Israelis are saying nothing goes into effect for five, perhaps 10 years.
The Israeli expectation is that Abbas will be able to sell the Palestinian public a peace deal based on clearly detailed outlines of what they will get down the line—sort of like showing Junior the catalogue photo of the BB rifle he’ll get for his 15th birthday when he’s 10.
Abbas wants more tangible results, and his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has suggested that a state could be in place by 2011. Fayyad later qualified this to say that he was referring to the infrastructure of a state, much the way that the Zionist movement had the instruments of statehood ready to go for years before Israel’s founding in 1948.
Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are seeking a patina of inevitability to fend off a challenge to their legitimacy by the Hamas terrorist group, which routed them from the Gaza Strip in 2007 and poses a challenge to them in the West Bank. What remains to be seen is whether state institutions—short of statehood—grants them that inevitability.
That border:
Netanyahu wants a demilitarized Palestinian state, which the Palestinians effectively conceded in the 1990s. But like his predecessors, he also wants a long-term, if not permanent, presence in the Jordan Valley, along the border with Jordan, to contain the threat from the east that for generations has exercised Israelis.
The Palestinians (and the Jordanians) counter, what threat from the east? The prospect of having to secure Israel’s longest border once may have been a concern, in terms of its drain on Israel’s military, but there is a peace treaty with Jordan and the United States has neutralized Iraq. And for the Palestinians, the point of the peace is to rid themselves of any continued notion of Israeli military occupation.
Iraq may be neutralized for now, the Israelis counter, but the region is inherently unstable and Iran is sinking its claims into Iraq.
That territory:
So within a year there is peace with the Palestinian Authority and mutual recognition, an end to all claims.
Well, except for Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas, which does not recognize Israel or any prospects for peace—and barely recognizes Abbas.
What does peace mean without the territory Israel referred to between 1949 and 1967 as a “dagger aimed at Tel Aviv” and the acquiescence of its 1.3 million Palestinians?
Just pretend and hope, Oren says.
“We are negotiating, we, the United States and the Palestinians are all three of us negotiating—throw the Egyptians and the Jordanians in there for good measure, too—as if the West Bank and Gaza are together when in fact we know they’re not,” the envoy said recently. “The assumption is, if we cut a deal with the PA, and someday the people of Gaza throw off the Hamas yoke, they’ll join the peace arrangement.”
That word:
Netanyahu has made clear he wants the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and in this he has the Obama administration’s backing. The Israeli prime minister did not invent this formulation—Tzipi Livni introduced it in 2006 when she was foreign minister.
The rationale was that the PLO’s absolute recognition of Israel—extracted in excruciating negotiations by Netanyahu during his previous prime ministership, in 1998—added up to not much. In the 2000 Camp David talks, the Palestinians insisted on a Palestinian right of return, which Israel believed added up to a peaceful plan for removing the Jewish state. The Palestinians also denied any Jewish claim to Jerusalem.
That was followed by the bloodshed of the second intifada, and for Israelis the failure to accept the Jews as a natural presence in the region became inextricably linked to the trauma of those years. The algebra was simple: Failure to recognize the Jewish claim equals anti-Jewish incitement equals violence.
Netanyahu has said that demilitarization and recognition of the Jewish claim are the keys to reaching a true peace deal.
The Palestinian Authority rejects this analysis. Its reasons for avoiding the Jewish claim is the responsibility that the Palestinian leadership feels for the 20 percent of Israelis who are Arab—it does not want to cut them out of their rights, although Netanyahu has said they will always be upheld.
There is also the sense among Palestinians that they have ceded enough by settling for “only” the West Bank and Gaza, 22 percent of British Mandate Palestine.
Nonetheless, there have been signs in recent months of movement here: In a meeting with U.S. Jewish leaders in June, Abbas recognized the ancient Jewish history in the area.
When Palestinian Diaspora intellectuals challenged this as capitulation last month, the PA mission in Washington pushed back not by parsing Abbas’ statement, but by repeating it and saying that it did not undermine the Palestinian claim.
The peace talks—and their obstacles Read More »
Jewish groups step up efforts to combat anti-Muslim bigotry
Jewish groups have stepped up efforts to combat anti-Muslim bigotry, with several national initiatives announced this week and supporting statements coming in from a range of Jewish voices.
In Washington, officials from several Jewish organizations took part Tuesday in an emergency summit of Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders that denounced anti-Muslim bigotry and called for a united effort by believers of all faiths to reach out to Muslim Americans.
Also Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League announced the creation of an Interfaith Coalition on Mosques, which will monitor and respond to instances of anti-Muslim bias surrounding attempts to build new mosques in the United States.
Meanwhile, six rabbis and scholars representing the Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox streams have launched an online campaign urging rabbis to devote part of their sermons this Shabbat to educating their congregations about Islam and include a reading from the Koran as part of a national outreach initiative.
The efforts come in response to what organizers describe as a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment resulting from the impending ninth anniversary of 9/11 and the controversy surrounding efforts to build a Muslim community center and mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan. Jewish bloggers and pundits, mostly on the right, have become more vocal in opposing the center and calling for greater scrutiny of American mosques.
Among the Jewish leaders at the emergency summit was Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
“As Jews, we could be nowhere else today,” said Saperstein, whose organization co-sponsored Tuesday’s interfaith summit with the Islamic Society of North America.
“We have been the quintessential victims of religious persecution … and we know what happens when people are silent,” he said, explaining why clergy and believers of all faiths need to be more forceful in speaking out against anti-Muslim bigotry. “We have to speak more directly to the anti-Muslim bigotry in America today.”
Leaders of the mainstream Protestant, evangelical Christian, Baptist and Catholic churches, Muslim organizations and several Jewish streams issued a joint statement Tuesday after their summit “to denounce categorically the derision, misinformation and outright bigotry being directed against America’s Muslim community.”
In addition to the Religious Action Center, representatives from the Reconstructionist and Conservative movements, the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella organization of more than 125 Jewish community relations councils and 14 national agencies, including the four major Jewish streams, also attended the summit.
The National Council of Jewish Women released a statement Tuesday denouncing Islamaphobia, decrying anti-Muslim bigotry and noting that “extremists who use Islam as a justification for their heinous acts of terrorism should not be allowed to dictate the character of the entire religion.”
The group of interfaith leaders met later in the day with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to coordinate parallel efforts with the government to combat anti-Islam sentiment.
The joint statement calls upon clergy of all faiths to denounce anti-Muslim bigotry and hate violence from their pulpits, and asserts that “leaders of local congregations have a special responsibility to teach with accuracy, fairness and respect about other faith traditions.”
In a similar vein, Jewish interfaith leaders in an online letter called upon pulpit rabbis to use part of their sermons on Saturday to address the need for understanding Islam and perhaps to read from the Koran. Professors and deans of the rabbinical seminaries of the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements, as well as the independent Hebrew College, signed the letter.
“The proposal for the ‘mosque at Ground Zero’ that turns out not to be a mosque and not at Ground Zero has brought to light this simple fact: We Americans need to know a whole lot more about Muslims and their religion,” said Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, director of multifaith studies and initiatives at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a main organizer of the appeal.
Organizers say a number of rabbis from various streams have indicated they will take part.
The ADL’s initiative underscores the shifting tide within the organized Jewish community.
Several weeks ago the organization generated national headlines when its national director, Abraham Foxman, came out against placing the Islamic center so close to Ground Zero. Foxman said the sensitivities of families who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks should be respected.
Its new coalition is focused on helping Muslim communities that face bigotry when they attempt to build local mosques.
Foxman told JTA that within two weeks, the Interfaith Coalition on Mosques will begin its work collecting details of incidents in which mosques are being challenged, determining whether bigotry is involved and, if so, whether public or legal responses are warranted. Mosques that are opposed due to zoning problems will be outside its purview.
The coalition’s charter members, the ADL said, will include a diverse collection of religious scholars and leaders, including representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Catholic Church.
Despite creating the coalition, the ADL has not changed its position on the Islamic center near Ground Zero, Foxman told JTA.
“Our position is very clear: They have a legal right, but the location is not sensitive to the victims,” he said, noting that not everyone in the coalition agrees with the ADL position.
One Jewish observer who questions the need for special outreach to Muslims is Steve Emerson, who directs the Investigative Project on Terrorism that tracks radical Islamist groups.
Noting that the most recent FBI list of hate crimes includes many more attacks against Jews than against Muslims, he suggests that talk of anti-Muslim hatred plays into the hands of anti-American radicals.
“Given this significant disparity in real world hate crime incidents, is there truly a ‘surge of Islamaphobia’ occurring, or is it more perception generated in and by certain media in cahoots with the Islamists?” he asked.
Foxman said that defending the rights of Muslims to build mosques “does not obviate” the need to continue to monitor mosques and churches for instances in which they preach hatred.
“We have to do that as well,” he said.
Jewish groups step up efforts to combat anti-Muslim bigotry Read More »
D.C. interfaith summit denounces anti-Muslim bigotry
An interfaith summit of Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders denounced anti-Muslim bigotry.
In a statement released by the group, which represented the majority of the country’s Jews, Muslims and Christians, participants announced that they came together Tuesday in Washington, D.C., “to denounce categorically the derision, misinformation and outright bigotry being directed against America’s Muslim community.”
The emergency summit was called by the Islamic Society of North America and co-organized by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Representatives from the Reconstructionist movement, the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding founded by Rabbi Marc Schneier and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella organization of more than 125 Jewish community relations councils and 14 national agencies, also were in attendance.
Summit participants included the national leadership of the mainstream Protestant, evangelical Christian, Baptist and Catholic churches, as well as Muslim and Jewish leaders.
Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center is among several in the group scheduled to meet with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday to coordinate Muslim outreach efforts with the Obama administration.
The group called upon religious clergy to join efforts to denounce anti-Muslim bigotry and hate violence, saying “leaders of local congregations have a special responsibility to teach with accuracy, fairness and respect about other faith traditions.”
Also Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League announced the formation of the Interfaith Coalition on Mosques to monitor and respond to anti-Muslim bigotry related to efforts to build mosques across the United States. The coalition is expected to begin functioning in about two weeks, according to ADL national director Abraham Foxman.
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Peace won’t be easy, Netanyahu tells Diaspora Jewry
Making peace with the Palestinians “will not be easy,” Israel’s prime minister said in a Rosh Hashanah message to Diaspora Jewry.
“I believe that we should make every effort to reach an historic compromise for peace over the coming year,” Benjamin Netanyahu said in a holiday message to Jewish communities around the world that was released Monday. “I guarantee one thing: This will not be easy. But as Israel’s prime minister, it is my responsibility to make every effort to forge a lasting peace with our neighbors.
“Lasting peace must be anchored in security, and it must be anchored in the recognition of the Jewish state’s permanence in this region, not merely as a fact, but as something that our neighbors accept by right,” he said.
Netanyahu pointed out that last year was the safest in Israel in two decades and reiterated that Israel has weathered the global financial crisis better than nearly any other industrial country.
“In the next year, Israel will face many challenges,” the Israeli leader said. “I have no doubt that in meeting those challenges, Jewish communities around the world will stand by Israel’s side—I think we’ve seen that every step of the way up to now. We’ll see that every step of the way going forward.”
In a message released Monday to the Israeli public, Netanyahu stressed that any agreement “will be based on two criteria: security and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.”
The message to the Israeli public, in Hebrew, was released on YouTube.
Peace won’t be easy, Netanyahu tells Diaspora Jewry Read More »
Burning the Quran: insane, not illicit
This is the United States, where flag burning is protected by the First Amendment. Of course an individual can raise their voice by burning the Quran, an act of utmost offense toward Muslims. (Remember when Orthodox Jews in Israel torched a pile of New Testaments?) But it’s insane—remember the reaction when an inaccurate report spread of a Quran being flushed down the toilet—and intellectually weak.
There are a lot more persuasive ways to criticize strains of Islam on 9/11.
And call Frank James at NPR cynical, but he raises a good point about what really might be at issue here for Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center, the 100-member Florida church that has said it will mark the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks with a Quran burnathon.
Last year, Marc Grizzard, the pastor of a 14-member church in Canton, N.C. announced that on Halloween 2009 his flock would burn a pile of books they considered evil.
That included every version of the Bible that wasn’t the King James Version since only the KJV was “God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people” Grizzard said.
(skip)
Just as has happened with the Florida church that promises to burn the Quran, Grizzard was warned by local officials that his church could be slapped with a huge fine, in his case as high as $25,000, because book burning would violate local ordinances.
So Grizzard and his people reconsidered; they had a non-book burning party, instead shredding the Bibles and other books that drew their ire if not their fire.
The few media who showed up had to take their word for it since it all happened inside the little church. Grizzard proclaimed the event a great success. And it was. A church with a membership of 14 got world-wide publicity.
A keen insight. Read the rest here.
(Hat tip: Master Jay)
Burning the Quran: insane, not illicit Read More »
Palestinian arrested in Florida for trying to buy weapons
A Palestinian man was arrested in South Florida for allegedly trying to buy stolen weapons.
Abdalaziz Aziz Hamayel is accused of attempting to purchase 300 stolen weapons, South Florida’s WSVN television reported. He said the weapons were headed to “his people,” according to the criminal complaint.
Hamayel, who reportedly is from a village in the West Bank, was arrested in Miami after exiting a plane that originated in Jordan. He has a family friend from his village living in that city, according to the complaint.
The complaint says that Hamayel specifically requested M-16 rifles, 9 mm handguns, and Uzi submachine guns, silencers and grenades, as well as remote detonation devices.
Palestinian arrested in Florida for trying to buy weapons Read More »
Obama, Biden to consult with Jews before Rosh Hashanah
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will consult with Jewish leaders on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.
Obama will speak with rabbis in a conference call Tuesday in what appears set to become an annual tradition. Last year, Obama reached out to rabbis to solicit support for his health care reform package.
There is no word on what this year’s topic will be, but one focus is likely to be soliciting U.S. Jewish support for Israeli concessions likely to arise out of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations renewed last week.
Biden will meet Jewish leaders at his residence Tuesday evening for a pre-holiday reception.
Obama released a statement Tuesday afternoon marking the holiday.
“Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the spiritual calendar and the birth of the world,” he said. “It serves as a reminder of the special relationship between God and his children, now and always. And it calls us to look within ourselves—to repent for our sins; recommit ourselves to prayer; and remember the blessings that come from helping those in need.”
Obama used the occasion to appeal for support for the negotiations.
“At a time when Israelis and Palestinians have returned to direct dialogue, it is up to us to encourage and support those who are willing to move beyond their differences and work towards security and peace in the Holy Land,” he said. “Progress will not come easy, it will not come quick.”
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Activists heckle actors during performance
Three activists, including an Israeli lawmaker, heckled actors during a performance at a theater in Tel Aviv.
Monday night’s disruption was a protest of the more than 50 Israeli theater professionals who signed a petition in late August saying that they will not perform in the new Ariel cultural center in the West Bank when it opens in November. The activists included Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union Party.
Both the playwright and the director of Monday night’s show at the Cameri Theater signed the petition.
Lead actor Oded Teomi, one of the Cameri’s veteran performers, did not sign the letter and tried to tell this to the hecklers.
“Because of your behavior, maybe we should consider whether there is anything to perform to in Ariel,” he then told the protesters, Haaretz reported.
The Ariel cultural center, which cost more than $10 million, was built with public funds. Several major Israeli theaters are scheduled to stage productions there this year.
At least 150 Israeli academics and authors, and another 150 American and British television and film professionals, also threw their support behind the boycott.
Ariel is one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
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