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Jewish Journal

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March 14, 2013

This week in power: Obama plans, Egypt movie ban, Brooks column, SXSW

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A roundup of the most talked about political and global stories in the Jewish world this week:

Obama's coming
“What should Barack Obama, who is to visit Israel next Wednesday for the first time in his presidency, do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” ” target=”_blank”>wrote Herb Keinon in The Jerusalem Post. Stay tuned next week.

Movie delayed
A documentary about Egypt’s Jews that was scheduled to screen this week in the country was suspended after security officials “delayed the renewal of its authorization,” ” target=”_blank”>said the film's producer in a post on the film's Facebook page. “I announce the delay of the screening of Jews of Egypt until a solution is found for this inexplicable problem, inherited from long years in the parlours of the Egyptian state securities and which aim to terrorise thought and repress creativity.” He is also threatening to take legal action for financial losses incurred due to the delay.

Brooks column
New York Times' columnist David Brooks took a trek to an Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn and lived to tell the tale in ” target=”_blank”>said Jane Eisner in The Jewish Daily Forward, but it's only half the story. Other bloggers were even more aghast over the overlooking of key facts. “The people who shop at Pomegranate voted with their tuition dollars and sent their daughters to Brooklyn schools that emphatically and purposely do NOT prepare their students for careers as US attorneys. If Brooks was attempting to be a journalist rather than a publicist he might have discovered this,” ” target=”_blank”> looking for a religious experience while staying there. Chabad couldn't really sit out such a festivity, could it? “#openShabbat is like any of the umpteen other events put on throughout the week, except for one rule: no technology,” ” target=”_blank”>joked Tablet's Adam Chandler about the event. Some savvy Jewish entrepreneurs ” target=”_blank”>wrote Steve Lipman in The Jewish Week. “Their Haggadah, they say, is meant for people like them: committed to Jewish life but not committed to strict Jewish observance. Based on several years of research, it evolved from notes Bronfman used at the seders he led for friends and family.” For the more historically-minded, this Haggadah could be just the right fit.

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Abbas wants peace talks with Israel this year

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Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Thursday he hoped peace talks with Israel would restart this year although the chances of a resumption seemed slim.

Abbas made his comments during a meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said Russia would do all it could to promote peace in the region.

“We … hope that substantive peace talks will start this year, although the hopes are probably not very high,” Abbas said through an interpreter at talks at a state residence outside Moscow.

“We hope that in the end we will reach a political solution based on the two-state principle,” he said.

Peace talks broke down in 2010 over Palestinian objections to Israel expanding settlements on land the Palestinians want for a state. Israel has called for a resumption of the talks without preconditions.

Russia, a member of the Quartet of Middle East peace mediators along with the United States, the United Nations and the European Union, has criticized the Israeli settlement expansion.

Putin has tried to balance relations with Arabs including the Palestinians, dating back to the Soviet era, with improved ties to Israel during his 13 years in power.

Reporting by Alexei Anishchuk; Writing by Steve Gutterman, Editing by Timothy Heritage

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‘Rivals’? Certainly. A ‘Team’? That’s Yet to be Determined: Notes on a New Israeli Government

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1.

The “team of rivals” cliché is becoming common as writers around the world struggle to explain the new Israeli government, a coalition made of five parts: Likud (Netanyahu), Israel Beiteinu (Liberman), Yesh Atid (Lapid), Habait Hayehudi (Bennet), and Hatnua (Livni). The fact that these are all rivals is obvious, but can they be a “team”? I very much doubt that. Israel's new coalition is problematic, and its chances for long-term survival seem slim. A new election cycle in two or two and a half years would not be a surprise.

 

2.

Why problematic? Because the people running this coalition have many conflicting interests. Netanyahu knows that his partners want to replace him. He has an interest in belittling them while they are his coalition members. They will resist such attempts and are going to try and undermine Netanyahu while he is nominally their boss. This is not a recipe for a healthy work environment.

 

3.

Netanyahu didn't get the coalition he wanted. He had to break with the Haredis, and had to accept Lapid and Bennet playing a much larger role than he'd ideally give them. He will also have to deal with an unhappy party in which people will soon be talking about the “next leader”, surely making Netanyahu even more paranoid than he already is.

Don't envy the Prime Minister- he still has one of the toughest jobs on earth. He has to deal with all of the following: his most trusted advisers are leaving one by one; his party is grumbling; he got a Defense Minister that he didn't exactly want; he doesn't have a Foreign Minister he can trust; his coalition members are plotting against him; they have also dictated an agenda he did not choose; and if this agenda makes this government a success they will get most of the credit; his old partners are angry with him for abandoning them.

 

4.

Liberman is on trial. If acquitted, he will also come back wanting to be a Prime Minister. If he is found guilty and cannot be a minister, he has little interest in keeping this government alive (especially if the verdict says that he can't be a minister in the current Knesset).

 

5.

Lapid should be happy with the outcome of coalition negotiations, except for two little things: He is Finance Minister in tough economic times. Traditionally, that is a job that makes a politician less popular, not more so (as Netanyahu, a very good Finance Minister, could tell Lapid). He also – by dictating terms to Netanyahu – owns the agenda of the new government. If the government doesn't deliver, it is his government that doesn't deliver (unless he can put the blame on Netanyahu – which he'd surely try to do).

 

6.  

Bennet handled the coalition talks masterfully. He was humiliated by Netanyahu at first, but soon made lemonade out of this lemon-like reception. The problem for him is different from that of Lapid: if there's any movement on the peace front, he'll have to make some tough choices and will have to deal with a party that can be unruly. In fact, one of Netanyahu's best options for unraveling the annoying alliance (annoying for him, that is) between Lapid and Bennet is to make friends with Mahmud Abbas.

 

7.

Livni wanted to be Netanyahu's second in command, but now she's not the third but rather the fifth wheel of this coalition. Netanyahu still needs her though, for one of two options: if he can get rid of Lapid and get the Haredis back Livni will be his centrist cover; if he wants to get rid of Bennet, he'd do it by advancing a peace process – and Livni is his tool for that too.

 

8.

A paragraph on the Lapid-Bennet alliance- the most surprising, revolutionary and positive result of the last elections. If these two camps of Tel Avivian bourgeois and settler ideologues can come together to make this country a better place, a lot can happen. As I've written many times in recent weeks, the division of Israel into a right-wing camp and a left-wing camp is outdated (see some discussion of “blocs” in the fifth part of my exchange with pollster Prof. Camil Fuchs). Lapid and Bennet make it seem even more outdated, almost irrelevant. By adopting a domestic agenda, and by demonstrating that two camps that still differ somewhat on the “Palestinian question” can cooperate on many other issues, these two leaders have created an Israeli agenda that the majority of voters seem to like. Of course, there's a possible problem with such an agenda: the 'region' might not want to cooperate with it and might force the Israeli government to focus on other issues.

 

9.

Wild cards:

  1. Does Netanyahu want a fourth term as Prime Minister? If, for some reason, Netanyahu makes a decision to focus on this term and not worry about his chances for the next election (having realized that he might not want to run again), this changes many of the previously-presented calculations of all partners.

  2. Iran. Does anyone know what Lapid and Bennet have in mind regarding Iran? I've made some calls and the answer is no. If there's a war with Iran, if there's an attack on Iran, if Iran manages to acquire nuclear weapons, if the US decides to act against Iran – all bets are off.

  3. Other skirmishes or wars – in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Gaza – can turn any agenda upside down, and with it the projection for this government.

  4. Will a new alternative to Netanyahu emerge? Olmert? Ashkenazi? This can make things even more complicated.

‘Rivals’? Certainly. A ‘Team’? That’s Yet to be Determined: Notes on a New Israeli Government Read More »

Netanyahu clinches coalition deals

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clinched deals for a coalition government on Thursday reflecting a shift to the center in Israel and a domestic agenda that has shunted peacemaking with Palestinians to the sidelines.

In control of 68 of parliament's 120 seats, the right-wing leader's new administration is expected to take office next week, just days before a visit by U.S. President Barack Obama, his first to Israel since entering the White House.

“There is a government,” said Noga Katz, a spokeswoman for Netanyahu's Likud party, citing agreements with the centrist Yesh Atid and far-right Jewish Home parties as well as with a smaller faction led by former foreign minister Tzipi Livni.

Netanyahu's long-time partners, ultra-Orthodox parties effectively blackballed by Yesh Atid and Jewish Home over social benefits and military draft exemptions for religious Jews, will not be in the new coalition born of a January 22 parliamentary election.

The exclusion of the religious parties represents a dramatic political change for an increasingly inward-looking Israel after the surprisingly strong ballot box showings by Yesh Atid, led by former TV news anchor Yair Lapid, and Jewish Home, headed by high-tech millionaire Naftali Bennett.

Although Lapid, has advocated a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians stalled since 2010, his party's second-place finish was a reflection of a renewed public focus on bread-and-butter issues such as the high cost of living.

“We came into politics specifically to influence health and welfare policies…the time has come to start working,” Yesh Atid lawmaker Adi Kol said on Israel's Channel 10 television.

Public expectations are high that the new government could affect real change in what many Israelis see as state coddling of the ultra-Orthodox, whose welfare benefits and exemption from the military provide little incentive or opportunity to learn skills and contribute to the economy.

Netanyahu will turn his attention again to the Palestinian issue and Iran's nuclear drive in his talks with Obama, with whom he has had a testy relationship. But U.S. officials have said Obama is not coming with any peace plan and expectations of any swift movement on the Israeli-Palestinian track are low.

“We hope that this Israeli government will choose peace and negotiations and not settlements and dictation,” Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said.

DEADLINE

Lapid and Bennett each said they expected to sign coalition deals with Netanyahu later in the day. Livni made her pact with the prime minister several weeks ago.

The agreements on Thursday were sealed before a March 16 deadline for Netanyahu to announce a new government. Yesh Atid said Lapid would become finance minister. Israeli media reported Bennett would get the trade and industry cabinet post.

Lapid, 49, gained wide backing among young, secular voters who helped fuel massive street protests in 2011 against high food and housing prices.

He and Bennett, 40, took kingmakers' roles in the coalition bargaining by forming a negotiating alliance that frustrated Netanyahu's efforts to retain his largely loyal ultra-Orthodox partners for his third term in office.

Bennett, who Israeli media said would get the industry and trade portfolio, rejects any future Palestinian state and has strong support among Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

But he has pledged not to be an obstacle to peace talks, saying that in any case, he does not believe they will achieve anything. Neither Bennett nor Lapid have spoken out in detail on how they would deal with the Iranian issue.

Palestinians have demanded Israel suspend construction in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas captured in the 1967 Middle East war and which they seek, along with the Gaza Strip, for a future state.

Netanyahu has called on the Palestinians to return to the talks without preconditions. 

Additional reporting by Dan Williams; Editing by Angus MacSwan

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U.N. curbs Golan patrols after peacekeepers seized, diplomats say

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U.N. peacekeepers monitoring the ceasefire line between Syria and the Israel's Golan Heights have scaled back patrols after rebels detained 21 Filipino observers for three days last week, diplomats said on Thursday.

The seizure of the unarmed observers highlighted the vulnerability of the 1,000-strong U.N. Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), whose mission began in 1974, to the growing violence in Syria.

It also heightened concern in Israel that Islamist rebels, separated from Israeli troops only by a toothless U.N. force, may be emboldened to end years of quiet maintained by President Bashar al-Assad and his father before him on the Golan front.

“They have reduced their patrols for now, halted patrols in areas like the place where the Filipinos were taken hostage,” one diplomat in the region said.

A U.N. official in Damascus declined to comment, but two Israeli officials confirmed that UNDOF had reduced operations.

The capture of the 21 peacekeepers was the latest challenge for the United Nations force, comprised of troops from the Philippines, India, Croatia and Austria.

Japan said it was withdrawing soldiers from UNDOF three months ago in response to the violence in Syria. Croatia said last month it would also pull out its troops as a precaution after reports, which it denied, that Croatian arms had been shipped to Syrian rebels.

Two weeks ago the United Nations said an UNDOF staff member had gone missing. It did not identify him but one rebel source identified him as a Canadian legal adviser and said he had been captured by another rebel force and held for ransom.

VIOLENCE MAY FORCE CHANGES

The diplomat said the new restrictions on UNDOF affected mainly the southern part of its “area of separation”, between Syrian and Israeli forces, a narrow strip of land running 45 miles from Mount Hermon on the Lebanese border to the Yarmouk River frontier with Jordan.

“But it does affect all areas where there are potential security issues,” she said, adding that the whole UNDOF operation may need to be “reframed and reworked”.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a December report to the Security Council that fighting between Syrian armed forces and rebels inside the area of separation has “the potential to ignite a larger conflict between Israel and the Syrian Arab Republic, with grave consequences”.

Israel warned 10 days ago that it could not be expected to stand idle as Syria's civil war, in which 70,000 people have been killed, spilled over into the Golan Heights.

The 21 Filipino peacekeepers were released on Saturday by Syrian rebels who had seized them and held them for three days in the southern village of Jamla.

The rebels from the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade initially accused the peacekeepers of collaborating with Assad's forces during heavy fighting last week and of failing to carry out their mandate to keep heavy arms away from the frontier region.

At first they demanded the Syrian army cease shelling in the area and pull back from Jamla village as a condition for releasing the peacekeepers, but later described them as guests and escorted them to freedom in Jordan.

Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Mariam Karouny in Beirut; Editing by Alistair Lyon

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Danish, Swedish Jews hold first joint Limmud conference

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About 160 Swedes and Danes attended the first inter-Scandinavian Limmud Jewish learning event.

The March 11 event was held at an adult education center in Lund, a Swedish city situated 23 miles north of Copenhagen.

“Last year we held the first Lund Limmud and this is the first time that the event has gone international,” said the event’s co-organizer, Rabbi Rebecca Lillian.

“Many Swedes can understand Danish and visa versa, but to completely eliminate the language barrier each time bloc included at least one session in Danish or English,” said Lillian, an American Reconstructionist rabbi who immigrated to Malmo from Chicago two years ago.

The event was promoted on social media in Swedish, Danish and English. The 2014 Oresunds Limmud will be held at a bigger venue, Lillian said.

She added the majority of participants were Swedish but a few dozen Danes also came, including former Danish chief rabbi Bent Melchior. In his address, he encouraged Jewish communities to embrace families with only one Jewish spouse.

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Doug Christie, attorney who defended Holocaust deniers, dies

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Doug Christie, the Canadian lawyer who defended a slew of Holocaust deniers, white supremacists and an accused Nazi war criminal has died.

Christie died in Victoria, British Columbia on March 11 from liver cancer. He was 66.

While many mourn him as a staunch defender of free speech, Christie was a lightning rod for the Jewish community's anger and suspicion. His client list included German Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel; Wolfgang Droege, head of the neo-Nazi Heritage Front; anti-Semitic teachers Paul Fromm, Malcolm Ross and James Keegstra; white supremacists Doug Collins, John Ross Taylor and Terry Tremain; and alleged Nazi war criminal Imre Finta.

Many believed Christie shared the views of the extremists and anti-Semites he represented, a perception that dogged him into death, the National Post reported.

“Even to this day, the jury remains out in my mind as to whether or not he was a fellow traveler with them or simply a defense counsel,” said Bernie Farber, the former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who encountered Christie many times in court. “My gut tells me he was kind of a fellow traveler, but he was an ardent and passionate defender of their right to free speech.”

Farber recently wrote to Christie to wish him a full recovery.

In a letter to the Post, Farber elaborated: “I always believed that Doug Christie made common cause with his racist clients. The level of complicity to me was always a mystery. His courtroom attacks on Holocaust survivors were reprehensible. And from time to time his zealous defense of his client-bigots led him to utter statements that were in effect anti-Semitic.”

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First Miss Israel of Ethiopian descent to dine with Obama

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Yityish Aynaw, the first Miss Israel of Ethiopian descent, has been invited to meet President Obama at a dinner hosted by President Shimon Peres.

Aynaw, 21, who was crowned two weeks ago, reportedly was invited at the behest of Obama's advance team, which is currently in Israel putting the finishing touches on plans for next week's visit.

In interviews with the Israeli media on Wednesday, Aynaw called Obama an inspiration and a role model.

“For me, he is a role model who broke down barriers, a source of inspiration that proves that every person really can reach any height, regardless of their religion, race or gender,” she told the Israeli daily Yediot Acharonot.

She told the Jerusalem Post that she thought she was invited to the dinner because she is “the first black Miss Israel to be chosen and [Obama] is the first black American president. These go together.”

Aynaw, who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia with her grandparents at the age of 12, said in an interview Wednesday with Israel's Channel 2 that when she meets Obama she will tell him he has been a role model and that he should free Jonathan Pollard.

She told the interviewer that as head of her high school student council she worked on many projects calling for the release of Pollard, who is serving a life sentence in the United States for spying for Israel. “If I have the opportunity, why not?” she said.

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Thessaloniki Jews to mark 70th anniversary of Nazi deportations

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The Jewish community of Thessaloniki in northern Greece will hold a series of events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the first deportations of the city’s Jews to Auschwitz.

On March 15, 1943, the Nazis sent the first convoy of some 4,000 Jews from Thessaloniki to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. By August, 49,000 out of the city’s pre-war population of 55,000 Jews had been deported. Fewer than 2,000 survived.

The events will include a march on March 16 from the city’s Liberty Square to the Old Railway Station where a memorial ceremony will be held. That will be followed by the main commemoration ceremony on March 17 at Thessaloniki’s Monastiriotes Synagogue, where Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is expected to speak.

The Jewish community will also inaugurate a photographic exhibit about the deportations and hold a concert at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, which was constructed on the site of a destroyed Jewish cemetery.

The Jewish community of Thessaloniki was one of the most important centers of Sephardic Jewry for 450 years following the expulsion from Spain. Known as the Flower of the Balkans, it was the center of Ladino culture in the region.

Following the deportations, Jewish property was looted, synagogues were destroyed, priceless Ladino libraries were shipped to Germany and Jewish cemetery headstones were used as construction materials.

Also March 17, the World Jewish Congress will hold a special meeting in Thessaloniki, headed by Ronald Lauder, as part of the commemorations. The gathering is part of the organization's efforts to support vulnerable Jewish communities, the World Jewish Congress said in a statement

Today, about 1,000 Jews live in the city and they are “adversely affected by the country’s deep economic problems and by the rise of the extremist Golden Dawn, a movement whose leaders openly deny the Holocaust,” according to the World Jewish Congress.

Thessaloniki Jews to mark 70th anniversary of Nazi deportations Read More »