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Jewish Journal

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October 13, 2015

Third intifada? The Palestinian violence is Israel’s new normal

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Israelis have become accustomed to dismal news in the past few weeks – mornings and evenings punctuated by stabbings, car attacks and rock throwing.

The cycle of random violence has left dozens of Israelis and Palestinians dead, and many fearing the worst: The start of a third intifada, or armed Palestinian uprising, that could claim hundreds more lives.

But since the second intifada started in 2000, fears of a repeat have proved unfounded. Conditions in Israel and the Palestinian territories have changed since that time, and short bursts of low-level violence are the new normal.

“It’s a matter of days until this stops,” said Nitzan Nuriel, the former head of the prime minister’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau. “This has no goal. It will be forgotten. The reality is we have waves of terror. It doesn’t matter what the reason is.”

Israelis have been bracing for a third intifada ever since the second one ebbed to a close in 2005. Waves of terror have risen and fallen, along with concerns that the region is on the verge of another conflagration.

Most recently, a string of attacks in late 2014, including the murder of four rabbis in a synagogue, sparked talk of a third intifada. But those clashes died out after several weeks. Another rash of attacks came and went two years ago.

Now, after two weeks of near-daily attacks, some Israelis and Palestinians are already calling this string the third intifada. But during the past 15 years, Israel has created safeguards to keep Palestinian violence in check.

“Every night we have actions to detain people who are involved in terrorist activities,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Peter Lerner told JTA. “We have operational access at any given time to any place.”

After hitting a peak in 2002, attacks on Israelis waned the following year when Israel completed the first part of a security barrier near its pre-1967 border with the West Bank. Part fence and wall, the barrier has proved controversial. Its route cuts into the West Bank at points in what critics call an Israeli land grab. And the restrictions on Palestinian movement imposed by the barrier, as well as the fence around Gaza, have led some to call Gaza an open-air prison.

The separation barrier winding through the West Bank. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
Israel's security barrier winding through the West Bank has proven controversial since it first started being built in the early 2000s. Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90/JTA

Still, the barrier coincided with a sharp decrease in Israeli deaths from terrorism. Terrorists have infiltrated it repeatedly, but successful Palestinian terror attacks dropped 90 percent between 2002 and 2006. Militants attacking Israel from Gaza now shoot missiles over the barrier or dig tunnels under it.

The current wave of violence has mostly involved attacks in the shadow of the security barrier – either in the West Bank or in Jerusalem. Both are Palestinian population centers with easy access either to Jewish communities. A handful of stabbings have taken place in central Israel, perpetrated by Palestinians who were able to sneak across the barrier.

The unorganized, “lone wolf” attacks occurring across Israel have created an atmosphere of insecurity and tension, even as the attacks have been relatively small in scale. There’s a feeling, some say, that an attack could happen anywhere at any time.

“No one is in charge to say tomorrow we stop the attacks,” said Shimon Grossman, a medic with the ZAKA paramedical organization who is responding to the ongoing violence just as she did in the second intifada. “Whoever wants to be a shaheed [‘martyr’] takes a knife and stabs people.

“It’s very scary for people because they don’t know when the end will be, what will stop it. Last time people knew to stay away from buses. Now you don’t know who to be afraid of.”

Another significant obstacle to a third intifada has been the West Bank Palestinians themselves, who have worked with Israel for eight years to thwart terror attacks. In 2007, Hamas seized full control of the Gaza Strip, violently ousting the moderate Fatah party, which controls the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority.

Since that takeover, the P.A. and Israel have viewed Hamas as a shared enemy and coordinated on security operations aimed at discovering and arresting Hamas terror cells.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas of inciting the ongoing violence. But Abbas has maintained security coordination with Israel through the clashes and has a history of opposing violence. Nuriel said that while Abbas is not to blame for the attacks, he stands to benefit from them.

“He has an interest for the conflict to get headlines,” Nuriel said. “He wants to show there’s chaos here. He wants to show it’s in places that Israel controls.”

But a majority of Palestinians are fed up with Abbas and oppose his stance on nonviolence. Rather, Palestinian society as a whole appears to support violence against Israelis. A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey research last week found that 57 percent of Palestinians support a return to an armed intifada, an increase of 8 percent from earlier this year. Half believe the P.A. has a mandate to stop security coordination with Israel, and two-thirds want Abbas to resign.

“This is an explosion of a whole generation in the face of the occupation,” said Shawan Jabareen, director of Al-Haq, a Palestinian civil rights group. “No one can say when it will stop unless people get hope that things will change. But if they see there’s no hope, I don’t know which way it will take.”

Even if the attacks continue, according to former Israeli National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror, Israel will retain the upper hand. The best course of action, he wrote in a position paper this week, is to maintain current security operations and be cautious in using force.

“Now we no longer have to prove anything,” Amidror wrote in the paper for the Begin Sadat Center for Security Studies. “Israel is a strong, sovereign state, and as such it must use its force prudently, only when its results have proven benefits and only as a last resort.”

Third intifada? The Palestinian violence is Israel’s new normal Read More »

Could guns for German Jews have prevented the Holocaust?

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, Opinion /

In the mid-1930s, an English scholar wrote a book — with many learned citations — proving that Nazism was the wave of the future and made for a happier and healthier nation.

In reviewing the book, one critic noted that if the distinguished author had spent only one day actually living in Nazi Germany, he probably would change his mind.

That anecdote comes to mind while reading that Dr. Ben Carson, the noted neurosurgeon turned Republican presidential candidate, told CNN that Hitler could have been foiled if ordinary German citizens had been allowed to carry guns.

A corollary to that frequently repeated claim is that if only German Jews had carried pistols in their pockets, they could have foiled the Nazis and prevented the Holocaust.

Perhaps if the proponents of this theory could retroactively spend a few days in Germany, where I was born and lived until 1939, they would be disabused of this illusion.

First, German Jews, predominantly middle class, were among the most law-abiding members of a generally law-respecting civilian population and no way could they have been persuaded to arm themselves illegally.

Also remember that it took a single shooting by a Polish Jew of a minor German functionary at the German embassy in Paris to serve as the trigger for unleashing the 1938 Kristallnacht and the destruction of synagogues and Jewish stores throughout Germany.

Can you imagine how Hitler would have loved to have a few Jews kill a couple of storm troopers in Berlin as a rationale to wipe out the entire German-Jewish population, even before World War II and the Holocaust? That would have meant the death of an additional 100,000-plus German Jews, including my family, who managed to emigrate in 1938 and 1939.

The naiveté of the guns-for-everyone advocates, retroactively in Germany and now in the United States, is matched only by some middle-aged Jewish Angelenos, who have taken up pistol and rifle practice on weekends to foil any future fascist takeover of California and the United States.

I was particularly taken by an online invitation by one such group to join in a jolly “Bagels & Bullets” brunch.

For the record, may I note that I was an American combat infantryman in France and Germany during World War II and subsequently a squad leader in an anti-tank unit during Israel’s War of Independence.

So I believe I know something about rifles, machine guns and mortars, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear Dr. Carson’s analysis or follow the Walter Mitty fantasies of some members of our community.

Could guns for German Jews have prevented the Holocaust? Read More »

Ruth Messinger to step down as head of American Jewish World Service

Leave a Comment / Culture /

Ruth Messinger will step down as president of the American Jewish World Service, the international relief organization she has guided to prominence since taking its helm in 1998.

Messinger, who during her tenure has raised the group’s operating budget to over $60 million from $3 million, will be succeeded in July by Robert Bank, the executive vice president, AJWS said Tuesday.

Messinger, 74, will remain affiliated with the organization, which provides disaster relief and funds development projects around the world, as a “global ambassador” and work on interfaith efforts and outreach to rabbis, the Forward reported.

Bank, a former lawyer who worked for the New York City Law Department and Gay Men’s Health Crisis, has worked at AJWS since 2009.

AJWS has been closely associated with Messinger since she became president.

“What I believe is that we’ve built an organization,” she told the Forward. “The organization has a clear and critical mission. The board’s decision to select Robert as the next president and CEO is based on his demonstrated capacity for public speaking, for fundraising and for bringing, frankly, who he is.”

Messinger was the Democratic nominee for New York mayor in 1997. She lost to incumbent Rudy Giuliani.Messinger, who has guided the international relief organization to prominence since taking over in 1998, will be succeeded by current executive vice president Robert Bank.

 

Ruth Messinger to step down as head of American Jewish World Service Read More »

Kerry seeks to calm Palestinian-Israeli tensions, to travel there soon

Leave a Comment / United States /

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday he was working on calming violence between Palestinians and Israelis, and will travel to the region soon to try to move the situation “away from this precipice.”

“I will go there soon, at some point appropriately, and try to work to reengage and see if we can't move that away from this precipice,” Kerry told an audience at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Kerry seeks to calm Palestinian-Israeli tensions, to travel there soon Read More »

Amid GOP disarray, Jews in DC search memories and Rolodexes

Leave a Comment / United States /

“Do I know this person?” has been a common refrain in the Washington offices of national Jewish organizations since Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, resigned as House speaker last month and his chosen successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the majority leader, flamed out last week.

Every day sees a new Republican contender named in the media. Some, like Rep. Pete Roskam of Illinois, are well known to Jewish officials. Others, like Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, have community professionals flipping through their virtual Rolodoxes trying to pinpoint the last time they had a meaningful chat.

“The community has a history of building relationships, and we’ll reach out and build relationships where they do not exist, not just in D.C. but in field offices,” said Richard Foltin, the American Jewish Committee’s national and legislative affairs director. “To the extent that I have concerns, it’s having voices who oppose compromise and who are not comfortable with the notion that governing is about reaching accommodation both within the party and the other side.”

Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the director of American Friends of Lubavitch, said that his Chabad-affiliated group already had ties with a broad swath of the 247 GOP members, noting that Chabad had offices in 320 of 435 congressional districts.

“If it’s not one of the members we know, we’ll have someone we can connect to them,” he said before noting that Blackburn met recently with a Chabad rabbi from Tennessee.

Among the half dozen or so unconfirmed contenders for the post are Blackburn and Roskam, who led House opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, as well as Texas Rep. Bill Flores, who chairs the Republican Study Committee, the party’s more established conservative caucus. Declared candidates include Reps. Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Daniel Webster of Florida, members of the harder-line conservative wing of the Republican Party that prompted Boehner to step down.

Hovering above them all is Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the tax-law writing Ways and Means Committee. Ryan has indicated that he does not want the top spot, but is under pressure by the party establishment to step into the breach.

The GOP caucus is overwhelmingly pro-Israel — each of the prospective speakers put out a statement in March welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, an address that riled the White House and congressional Democrats.

But the Jewish community has closer ties to the establishment figures who have fallen out of favor among Republican conservatives. Boehner, who orchestrated the Netanyahu speech, has ties to Jewish federations in Ohio dating to his days in the 1980s as a municipal official in the Cincinnati area.

McCarthy and Ryan, together with former Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., were the self-described “Young Guns” who rode the wave of GOP disaffection in 2010 to win the House and assume party leadership positions. Cantor is Jewish and has longstanding ties to national Jewish groups. Ryan, the 2012 vice-presidential pick of Mitt Romney, grew close to Romney’s Jewish backers. And McCarthy is a favorite of the Republican Jewish Coalition — his speech to the group in April generated vice-presidential buzz.

In recent years, however, the Tea Party insurgents have been gunning for the Young Guns they had raised to leadership, saying they were doing too little to reverse President Barack Obama’s agenda, particularly his signature health care reforms. Cantor was ousted by an anti-immigration candidate in the primaries, losing his historic post as the first Jewish majority leader in the House of Representatives.

McCarthy succeeded him as leader and seemed eager to step into Boehner’s slot. But he withdrew last week upon realizing that he would not win the speakership on GOP votes alone and was loath to rely on Democratic votes.

Ryan does not appear ready to give up the chairmanship of his committee — one of the most powerful in the House — assuming the speakership would require that move.

One worry for pro-Israel groups is that newcomers, while broadly pro-Israel, may not yet get the nuances of the pro-Israel lobby’s agenda — for instance advancing funding not only for Israel’s defense, but for other nations as a means of maintaining U.S. influence abroad.

A staffer for a senior GOP House member said the turnover in the caucus presented a challenge for pro-Israel groups who seek to educate lawmakers.

“About half if not more of the GOP conference has changed in the last six years,” said the staffer, who asked not to be identified.

Cantor decried in a New York Times Op-Ed on Sept. 25 the unwillingness of the party’s hard-line wing, numbering 40 or 50 members, to accommodate Obama on any level.

“Somewhere along the road, a number of voices on the right began demanding that the Republican Congress not only block Mr. Obama’s agenda but enact a reversal of his policies,” Cantor wrote. “Strangely, according to these voices, the only reason that was not occurring had nothing to do with the fact that the president was unlikely to repeal his own laws, or that under the Constitution, absent the assent of the president or two-thirds of both houses of Congress, you cannot make law.”

In the short term, Boehner’s resignation helps keep government running. Freed from threats from the right to unseat him, he can use his lame duck period to pass spending laws, including a defense bill that boosts Israel’s anti-missile capability. Boehner originally said he would leave on Oct. 31, but has indicated he may stay until a credible array of candidates emerges.

The AJC’s Foltin named immigration reform, voting rights and energy security as issues the AJC and the broader community want addressed in the longer run.

“We have to be able to move forward on the basis of negotiation and compromise,” he said. “How will we deal with the big picture on these issues?”

Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., the sole Jewish Republican in Congress, said he was confident that whoever became speaker would protect pro-Israel funding.

“I would not anticipate any delay whatsoever with regards to any legislation that strengthens the relationship between the United States and Israel,” he said in an interview.

The Republican Jewish Coalition spokesman, Mark McNulty, said his group had ties into virtually every caucus member and was ready to educate anyone who got the slot.

“That’s why we’re here, we have the resources to educate people,” he said. “We have a lot of confidence in the resources our legislative team has developed over the years.”

Amid GOP disarray, Jews in DC search memories and Rolodexes Read More »

Bernie and me

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Opinion /

I spent a good portion of the winter of 1981 on the snowy porches of aging wooden homes in the blue-collar, Old North End of Burlington, Vt., watching Bernie Sanders promote his outsider candidacy for mayor against an entrenched Democratic Party incumbent.

Hunched up inside a wool coat, his voice raspy in the cold, the 40-year-old Sanders’ thick Brooklyn accent and machine-gun delivery was worlds apart from the terse yet lilting cadences of the city’s French and Irish-Catholic natives.

I was the newly minted City Hall reporter for the Burlington Free Press, as well as a newly minted Vermonter. Like Sanders, I also was an outsider — a Jewish Brooklynite transplanted to the Green Mountain State.

As my articles began reflecting what I perceived as Sanders’ rise in popularity, I came under sharp and personal attack. One day, as I sat in a downtown diner whose walls were lined with photos of Democrats such as Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter, its owner, a member of the city’s political inner circle, slid into my booth and pressed me against the window.

“He’s not from around here,” the owner said. “He’s from New York. He isn’t like us. He doesn’t know what we need. He can’t win here. Say, aren’t you from New York, too? Are you helping him?”

“I just want to eat breakfast,” I said, and nodded to the waitress hovering nearby, unwilling to take my order while the owner was there.

A few days later, toward the end of the campaign, a crudely drawn, mimeographed flyer made the rounds of downtown. It called itself the “Flea Press” and was festooned with grade-school level drawings. It “reported” on the fact that my parents and Sanders were friends who had gone to the same Brooklyn high school, and that I was therefore in the candidate’s pocket. It didn’t need a Jewish star or big-nosed caricature to communicate its anti-Semitic message: “New York” was — and still is, in some eyes — code for “Jew.”

The Flea Press was partially right. My parents did go to James Madison High School, as had Sanders. But they weren’t friends; my parents were more than a decade older than Sanders and didn’t know him from a hole in the ground.

The pairing of Bernie and me then was ironic in many ways. As has been well reported, Sanders has little love for the media. He sparred with the Free Press over the years and continues to berate the media for focusing on trivia and not his ideas.

Sanders never warmed to me personally, either. In the weeks after his election as mayor, I interviewed him several times in an effort to understand him and therefore explain him to the city of Burlington. He never played the Brooklyn card in seeking to win me over, and was stingy with the kind of personal details that I was seeking for a magazine feature.

[See Alan Abbey's 1981 Bernie Sanders profile here]

It would be “toh-tully” untrue (as Sanders would say in his Brooklyn growl) to claim that we were friends then or now. Yet today, as I think about his presidential campaign, I think that our coincidental similarities can help me offer an understanding of seminal and uniquely Jewish elements that shaped his character.

First was the impact of the Holocaust on his father’s family and his subsequent awareness of the danger of totalitarianism, especially that which grew out of a nominally democratic process. Second was post-war, Jewish New York, a milieu well known for turning out phenomenally successful and assimilated Jews and weaving them into the fabric of America. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg are just two of many other graduates of Madison from that environment.

Sanders has often spoken of his family’s financial straits, yet he made sure he attended university. The drive for a secular education is, of course, a hallmark of the mainstreaming of American Jews. That he first attended Brooklyn College but graduated from the University of Chicago speaks to the collapse of academic anti-Jewish quotas after World War II.

Finally, there is Sanders’ description of his time on an Israeli kibbutz. He spoke of it to me in 1981: “It was owned by the people. There were no bosses. Decisions were made democratically with women having an equal say. The residents worked hard because it was their place. It impressed me.” As a brief sidebar, I will say here that I didn’t fact-check the statement at the time, as I had no reason to question it. Yet there has been a nagging if unstated concern in recent stories in the Jewish media, as no one has yet been able to pinpoint the name and dates of Sanders’ kibbutz sojourn, and he hasn’t offered any help in answering the question.

On the larger question of his stance on Israel, Sanders has navigated a nuanced course that has satisfied neither its critics nor its supporters.

A year ago, right after Sanders flirted with the idea of a presidential candidacy on “Meet the Press,” the Washington Post cited a flimsy poll of 309 registered Iowa Democrats showing his standing at 5 percent to bluntly state, “If Sanders does run, of course, he won't win.”

The latest Iowa polls tell a different tale, yet the election is a long ways off. The usually perspicacious Nate Silver and his team at fivethirtyeight.com say that endorsements from politicos are historically among the best predictors of candidate success, and Sanders is lagging badly in that “primary.”

Sanders’ Jewish storyline hasn’t been told much in the mainstream media, yet some of the coarse stereotypes used against him in 1981 have already cropped up. As the campaign unfolds and questions of character and personality begin resonating with the American public, it will be interesting to see if his background, a narrative familiar to American Jews yet never exposed to the hothouse of a presidential race, will harm his political ambitions.

Alan D. Abbey is the director of media at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Bernie and me Read More »

The last Jews of Spain

Leave a Comment / Danielle Berrin, Opinion /

I was in Spain the day before Simchat Torah when my Israeli friend suggested we honor the holiday by walking through Sevilla’s Jewish quarter – La Juderia de Sevilla.

It was a terrible way to celebrate.

Sevilla’s Jewish quarter – or, rather, what once functioned as Sevilla’s Jewish quarter, before pogroms, massacres and expulsions – is bring-your-meds depressing.

A map outlining places of interest lists several sinagogas (synagogues), abruptly followed by the explanation, “actually,” this is now Iglesia [church] de Santa Maria la Blanca or Convento de Madre de Dios. On one side of the map is a quaint little reconstruction of an enclosed area that was once home to the second largest Jewish community in the Kingdom of Castilla. Today, all that remains are a few dinky pieces of the wall that delineated the quarter, and I probably don’t have to tell you what’s left of the Jewish cemetery.

The story of Spanish Jewry is now a story of remnants. It is the story of much of Jewish Europe, defined mostly by what is missing, by exclusions and absences.

Sevilla’s Jewish museum, if one could call it that, is but a room with few artifacts and some text on the walls. It is a poor testament to the rich history of Spanish Jewish life, a once-thriving medieval culture that produced some of Jewish history’s most honored philosophers and poets — Maimonides, Nachmanides, Yehuda Halevi and Solomon ibn Gabirol, among them. Oddly, more wall space is devoted to Susona Ben Suson, the reputedly beautiful daughter of a wealthy merchant and Jewish converso (convert) who fell in love with a Christian nobleman and then betrayed her father and her people.

The dirty little secret about the Spanish Inquisition is that even after Jews converted to Christianity to save themselves, they were subject to “estatutos de limpieza de sangre,” discrimination and reprisals resulting from their lack of pure Christian blood. When a group of Sevillan conversos hatched a plot to take back their city and halt these reprisals, the pretty Susona Ben Suson told her lover, who then dumped her and had everyone else killed. According to one legend, Susona died a recluse, having asked that her skull be nailed to the doorpost of her house in order to remind others of the consequences of betrayal. Another legend says the Inquisitioners burned her alive.

The story Spain tells about Sephardic Jewry can sometimes seem schizophrenic, oscillating from the glories of the Golden Age to the ignominious Inquisition. It carves Spanish Jewish history into distinct chapters, suggesting one period was good, and the other, bad. 

But Moisés Hassán-Amsélem, a Sevillan native of Moroccan and Algerian Jewish descent, tells another story. “Life for the Jews in Spain was never that great, as some historians would say,” Hassán-Amsélem told me during an interview.

The 48-year-old educator (and a non-practicing attorney) is Sevilla’s go-to tour guide for the Jewish quarter; he is a Jewish history autodidact and lives in an apartment of wall-to-wall books. He also lectures on Holocaust studies and anti-Semitism at the local public university, Pablo de Olavide. He scoffs at the notion that there ever was a Spanish Jewish “Golden Age” when Jews prospered and three religions co-existed in peace and harmony – “This is a myth,” he said.

Hassán-Amsélem became a tour guide because he wanted to introduce visitors to a different perspective than that of official Spain. In the 1990s, eight cities decided to work together to create a network of Jewish quarters – Red de Juderías de España – in order to encourage and promote tourism. “Jews became an attraction,” he said wryly. And it worked: Today, there are 24 cities in this network, and Hassán-Amsélem said he conducted more than 220 tours last year.

“But how many of these cities have something to show? Hassán-Amsélem asked. “Not many.”

Hassán-Amsélem is bothered by how the official record romanticizes the past. “You realize there’s not that much to see [in these quarters] because after 500 years, so much has been destroyed.” In Barcelona, for example, a Jewish cemetery was turned into a quarry – a cheap place to buy stone, which then became the building blocks of the city. “You can still see a façade with Hebrew letters carved into it,” Hassán-Amsélem said of one of Barcelona’s Jewish-tour stops.

Today, official statistics suggest that where once there was a Jewish community of 200,000, only 40,000 remain. But even that census, Hassán-Amsélem told me, is probably exaggerated: “I don’t see it,” he said, suggesting the actual population is probably somewhere between 18,000 and 20,000, with the biggest communities in Barcelona and Madrid.

After generations of living in exile in North Africa, Hassán-Amsélem’s parents decided to return to their ancestral home in Sevilla. In 1963, his father organized all the Jewish émigrés into the “Israelite Community of Sevilla,” which today claims between 100 and 120 families – the size of one very small synagogue in Los Angeles.

“I am not very optimistic,” Hassán-Amsélem said of the future of Spanish Jewry.  “The number of Jews in Spain is not growing. I don’t know for how long the communities will survive. Places like Sevilla? I am quite pessimistic. I don’t think there are enough Jews to be able to go forward.”

Spain’s recent repatriation efforts – an offer of citizenship to Jews whose ancestors might have been expelled – are a lovely gesture, but the requirements of new potential citizens are not demanding enough to tip the scales of Spain’s Jewish future. 

Spain is also, after all, a Catholic country. And the continuing weakening of its Jewish presence is akin to the general languishing of the Jewish presence throughout Europe.  “There is still a lot of prejudice,” Hassán-Amsélem said. “People are still very ignorant of what being a Jew means – a lot of people [still] think that Jews killed Jesus, and that the Jewish expulsion from Spain happened because Jews were controlling all the finances.”

So the Spanish-Jewish homeland was never totally glorious or golden. And now, when the Jews have their promised land, Israel, even there peace continues to evade them. In every iteration of Jewish history, bounty and blessing are punctuated by violence and loss: Loss of cities, quarters, whole communities, countless artifacts and millions of lives.

“Sometimes I feel myself like a dinosaur, like I should be in a museum from 500 years ago,” Hassán-Amsélem said. “I don’t know if there is any future, but there is a present. And I try to open the eyes of the people; it’s like ‘You see? I’m Jewish. I look like any other person. I have no horns.’”

But he also said that even his very best efforts as an educator are challenged by the situation in Israel.

“Nobody cares that every day a Jew is stabbed in Israel – that doesn’t count, that’s not part of the news. The problem will be when [days from] now, Israel will bomb spaces in Gaza and the whole world will say ‘Jews are all like the Nazis.’ And Spain is part of that, unfortunately.

“This is what Europe has become.”

The last Jews of Spain Read More »

Gulf states looking to buy Israel’s Iron Dome system for protection against Iran

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

Bahrain and several other Gulf states are in negotiations to buy the Israeli-developed Iron Dome defense system for protection from “a growing arsenal of Iranian missiles.”

Bahrain’s foreign minister, Khalid bin Mohammed, told Sky News that the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, are interested in purchasing the Israeli weapon for the entire council.

“The Israelis have their small Iron Dome. We’ll have a much bigger one in the GCC,” Mohammed said.

The Iron Dome system has intercepted approximately 85 percent of missiles fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip since it became operational in 2011, according to the Times of Israel. It was produced through American contractors and the Israeli arms firm Rafael.

Mohammed said that interest in the Iron Dome has increased as a result of the Iran nuclear deal, which will loosen sanctions on Iran. The Bahraini foreign minister said the agreement will allow Iran to “stockpile enough missiles to overwhelm any defense system we build in the Gulf.”

“Iran has been trying to undermine and topple government in our region for years,” he said.

A deal involving several Gulf states could potentially cost hundreds of billions of dollars, Sky News reported.

Gulf states looking to buy Israel’s Iron Dome system for protection against Iran Read More »

The New York Times’ ‘Big Lie’ about the Temple Mount

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

Last week, I opened The New York Times to Rick Gladstone’s article, “Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place,” happy that the newspaper of record would explain to its audience the historical context of this embattled piece of real estate.

As I read on, I was horrified.

“The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered, is whether the 37-acre site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was also the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone,” Gladstone reported.

The article received an avalanche of comment from scholars and lay readers, Jews and Christians, who well understood that beneath this article was an attempt to problematize the very existence of the Jewish temples on Mount Zion.

While it is true that the temple shrine has not been found, the entire platform of the Temple Mount was built by Herod and his successors and are part of the temple complex — visible to the eye and described in detail by the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and others. The attempt to throw doubt on this is obfuscating, taking advantage for political or religious benefit of the appropriate willingness of historians to question sources.

While this is quite disheartening, what is most disturbing about this article is that The New York Times gave voice to yet another Big Lie about Jews and Judaism. Joining claims of deicide and ritual murder, which are broadly believed in the Islamic world, Muslim commentators in recent years have purveyed the belief that there never was a Jewish temple on the Haram al-Sharif.

“They claim that 2,000 years ago they had a temple,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has written. “I challenge the claim that this is so.”

Palestinians have much to gain in claiming that there was no Jewish temple. If there was no temple on Mount Zion, then Jews have no claim on that hill, nor to the land of Zion and Jerusalem. Hence, no Zionism.

The Big Lie that there was never a Jewish temple is thus a cipher for discrediting and undercutting the entire Jewish claim to the Holy Land — the very claim that, in fact, makes this particular land holy.

What Palestinians stand to lose by purveying this untruth, however, is the trust of those, like me, who are willing to listen carefully to legitimate claims and to act on them. The claim that there was never a temple is offensive and in no way furthers Palestinian national aspirations.

The claim that there is no “Palestinian people” is similarly offensive to Palestinians. But while that claim has mostly disappeared among Jews and Israelis, the Big Lie that Jews are foreign to the Holy Land, and that the temple never existed, is alive and well.

What disturbs me most is that The New York Times totally missed this complicated history and unintentionally gave the Big Lie a voice on its pages, as if it is equal to actual historical fact.

The Times deserves credit for (somewhat) correcting the article online, but what about the millions who read only the paper version?

Steven Fine is the Pinkhos Churgin professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University and director of the university’s Center for Israel Studies and the Arch of Titus Project.

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Netanyahu: Israel will settle accounts with murderers

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to implement new measures to bring quiet to Israeli cities amid a wave of terror attacks.

“Israel will come to settle accounts with the murderers and those who want to kill, and anyone who helps them. Not only won’t they have any rights, but we will extract the full price from them,” Netanyahu said Tuesday afternoon during an address in Knesset marking the 14th anniversary of the assassination of government minister Rehavam Zeevi. He briefly left an emergency Security Cabinet meeting at which the measures were being discussed to speak to the Knesset.

Israeli media reported Tuesday evening that the government will send Israeli soldiers to support police forces in cities that have been hit with terror attacks.

During the day, three Israelis were killed and more than 20 injured in terror attacks in Jerusalem and the central Israeli city of Raanana. Two Palestinian assailants also were killed.

Netanyahu in his Knesset address called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to “Stop lying, stop inciting. A true leader must demonstrate responsibility.”

“Do not turn murderers into heroes,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu also addressed Arab citizens of Israel.

“Do not be misled by agitators who want to ignite the fire in the country. We live together. We believe in coexistence. It is very easy to unravel the threads that bind us to one another. Do not be tempted to do so,” he said.

He also called on Israeli citizens not to carry out revenge attacks.

“Israeli citizens must not raise a hand against innocent civilians on either side. Israel is a state of law,” Netanyahu said. “Those who take the law into his hands will pay the price.”

Meanwhile, some 20,000 demonstrators gathered Tuesday in the Arab-Israeli city of Sakhnin in northern Israel to show support for the Palestinians. Arab-Israeli lawmakers, including Ahmed Tibi and Jamal Zahalka, addressed the crowds.

On Tuesday evening, a Palestinian man from  Bethlehem was killed during clashes in the West Bank city with Israeli troops. The Palestinian Maan news agency reported that the man, whom it identified as Mutaz Ibrahim Zawahreh, 27, was hit with a live bullet in the chest.

Palestinian Gazans earlier in the day rioted at the border with Israel, with dozens breaking through the border fence in southern Gaza. They were turned back with tear gas and rubber bullets.

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