The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research cordially invites you to its
23rd Anniversary Gala
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Congregation Shaar Hashomayim
450 Avenue Kensington, Westmount, Quebec, CanadaDISTINGUISHED KEYNOTE SPEAKER
MOSHE ARENS
Former Israeli Defense Minister and Ambassador to the U.S.
Also Featuring
Prof. Barry Rubin
Outstanding internationally-renowned Middle East analyst
Tax receipts will be issued for the maximum allowable amount
For additional information. or to register for the 23rd Anniversary Gala,
please call Yvonne at 514-486-5544 or contact us by e-mail at yvonne@isranet.com.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: ISRAEL YOUNG AT 63!
Baruch Cohen
In loving memory of beloved Malca z’l
“Love for Israel must be a fire burning in every Jewish heart”—Sharon Zalman (1796)
O! My people!
I would sing my heart
On this day of glory
Tears of endless generations
Of my people Israel
Have not ever extinguish
The flames of infinite love
The flames of eternal sacrifice!
Clouds of unbearable thunder
Of hate and destruction
Of endless tears!
O! My people Israel
O! My beloved Israel
You are embraced for ever
With my people’s love!
O! Israel
Forever!
As Israel celebrates its 63rd Independence Day, the Jewish state is today stronger than ever before!
No other State faces unremitting hatred and lethal threats as Israel does. Today’s struggle is for the right of Israel and her citizens to live in peace and dignity, secure against her relentless enemies: Hamas, Hezbollah and their patron Iran, and inflamed worldwide antisemitism.
For Israelis who have fought and continue to fight so valiantly just to stay alive, the notion of peace seems to be a dream of never ending!
From the ruins of Europe, from the ashes of the gas chambers, from the concentration camps, from Russia, Romania, Poland, Egypt, Morocco and dozens of other lands, the Jewish people created a most vibrant and successful land—Israel!—sustained by our ancient faith. Am Israel chai!
With painful sacrifice, and the loss of some of our finest and bravest sons and daughters, we are proudly celebrating our 63rd anniversary.
I want to remind the world that Israel is facing increasing waves of radical Islam and global antisemitism: an nuclear-bound Iran harbours global ambitions of a will to destroy the Jewish state. We Diaspora Jews must stand on the front lines of the oncoming storm, by lending our support and encouragement to our sisters and brothers in Israel. We must remember our ancient hope and belief that neizach Israel lo yishaker, the eternity of Israel will never falter!
(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ISRAEL!
David Harris
Jerusalem Post, May 9, 2011
This week, Israel celebrates its 63rd birthday. For most countries, that number would elicit a shrug of the shoulders. Not in Israel’s case. Considering Israel’s extraordinary history, each birthday is a cause for celebration—and admiration.
It’s quite a story—and it drives Israel’s foes bonkers. Try as they might, they haven’t managed to sap Israel’s will to survive, nor its capacity to thrive.
How can it be that this tiny nation, the size of New Jersey or Wales, could defend itself through thick and thin against determined, well-funded, and numerous adversaries?
How can it be that this small sliver of land, one percent the size of Saudi Arabia and bereft of any natural resources until recent offshore discoveries of natural gas, could catapult itself into the top tier of advanced nations?
And how can it be that the flag of democracy could be planted in Israel in 1948 and celebrated in this lone oasis to the present day, while surrounded by what the world today should better understand as a prevailing culture of despotism, emergency rule, torture, cronyism, and corruption?
No, Israel is not perfect. Of course not. And yes, Israel, like other democratic societies, remains very much a work in progress. There’s still much to be done in addressing relations between Jew and Jew, Jew and Arab, democracy and religion, and rich and poor. Moreover, the quest for a durable peace…raises difficult and divisive questions about how best to get there, and whether it’s even possible in the current regional environment.
These issues aren’t going away anytime soon. Nonetheless, Israel’s birthday provides an occasion to pause, take a deep breath, and marvel at what has been achieved.
An ancient people, born and rooted in this land, have built a modern, dynamic state.
The age-old cry of the Jewish people, “Next year in Jerusalem,” is now this year.
The psalmist’s remembrance of the tears of exile in Babylon has been replaced by the joy of the return home.
A language of old has been restored.
A dry, barren soil has become lush with the fruits of the earth.
A people decimated by the Nazi Final Solution experienced sovereign regeneration only three years after the Holocaust.
A nation confronted by a war of extinction on its very first day—and relentlessly thereafter with more wars, waves of terrorism, economic boycotts, blood-curdling incitement, assaults on its legitimacy, you name it—has never given up or given in.
Despite the ever-present threats, Israelis have embraced life to the fullest, not succumbing to a siege mentality, nor losing the yearning for enduring peace and normalcy. Israeli society has developed rapidly, enriched by wave after wave of new immigrants. In recent years, for example, thousands of African Christians and Muslims have risked life and limb, crossing inhospitable lands such as Egypt, to seek a new start in, yes, Israel.
It’s hard to visualize the real Israel if the only lens is the conflict-obsessed media. In actuality, Israel today is a high-octane, multicultural, and open society. First-time visitors are inevitably surprised. They often expect to be met with dark colors, a brooding mindset, and the shadow of war. Instead, they soon discover why Lonely Planet named Tel Aviv the third hippest city in 2011, and why the 2010 UN Human Development Report ranked Israel #15 among the world’s nations—ahead of the United Kingdom and Denmark and just behind France—in terms of education, health, and other indices of an advanced society.
They also might learn that Israelis have won more Nobel Prizes than all the countries surrounding them combined. Or that, incredibly for a nation of only seven million, Israeli high-tech companies—prominent in such fields as biotechnology, alternative energy, and communications—now rank second, after the U.S., in the number of listings on the NASDAQ stock exchange.…
And, above all, perhaps, visitors to Israel encounter a deeply-rooted and pervasive national spirit that is hard to put in words. Apropos, maybe if more of Israel’s adversaries would see it up close with open eyes rather than judge it blindly from a distance, they’d come to understand two things. First, Israel is a far cry from the place they’ve conjured up in their one-dimensional minds. Second, Israelis will not be defeated in their determination to defend their country.
There’s a story that G-d became so furious with the sorry state of the world that he announced a new flood would engulf the planet in two weeks. In response, the French president told the nation that, as the end was near, there’d be no more work and everyone was encouraged to enjoy la joie de vivre. The Italian prime minister announced that, with only 14 days left, all Italians should take full advantage of la dolce vita. Meanwhile, the Israeli prime minister informed the Israeli people: “We have exactly two weeks to learn how to live underwater.”
That just about says it all.
Through courage, inspiration, sacrifice, and innovation, and in defiance of all the odds, Israelis have built a remarkable country in their ancestral home. Again, the work is unfinished and the challenges are many. But in 63 short years, Israelis have proved the late Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion right when he said: “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.”
Happy 63rd birthday, Israel!
(David Harris is Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee.)
BOOMING AT 63
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, May 8, 2011
Celebrating the 63rd anniversary of Israel, one cannot help but be struck by the incongruity of conflating an ancient people, perhaps the world’s oldest still extant, with a birthday age befitting a baby boomer. Indeed, many of the dilemmas that face the Jewish people today have been around for centuries. And yet, while many aspects of “the Jewish question” have not been resolved, we have so much to be proud of and thankful for this Independence Day.
Zionism’s founders thought that the Jews’ “abnormal” status as weak and stateless was the cause of anti-Semitism. They had hoped that by normalizing the Jewish condition via the creation of a Jewish state, “like all the nations,” Jews could finally put an end to their status as a pariah people. Originally, Zionists competed with assimilationists and Bundists, Reformists and Socialists.
But the Nazi Holocaust and the rise of the totalitarian Soviet Union put an end to the bickering. Zionism emerged as the dominant and most dynamic Jewish movement to confront the challenges offered by modernity while taking advantage of its opportunities, including military technologies, to alleviate Jews’ tragic powerlessness. But although they were wildly successful at fulfilling their state-building goals, the Zionists did not—and have not—put an end to persistent anti-Semitism.
There are those who would argue that, if anything, Zionism has made the Jews’ predicament even more precarious.
Of the world’s three groupings that remained after the Holocaust—Israelis, American Jewry and Jews spread across the rest of the Diaspora—only the first group lives in daily range of rockets, mortar shells and missiles launched by rabid anti-Semites bent on destroying the Jewish state. Only Israelis are directly in danger of a nuclear Armageddon if Iran’s Islamic Republic manages to get its hands on the bomb. And while the sudden changes sweeping the region, currently optimistically described as the “Arab Spring,” might conceivably lead to the creation of stable democratic or semi-democratic regimes and the birth of a new Middle East, they could just as easily result in increased anti-Semitic extremism in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood and its various offshoots or some other reactionary Islamist dogma.
But such thinking overlooks the fact that, in Israel, the Jewish nation is also uniquely capable of defending itself and determining its own destiny.
The age-old prejudices of the anti-Semites remain largely the same. In the 18th and 19th centuries, individual Jews—even those, such as French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, who agreed to strip themselves of all vestiges of their heritage—found they could never integrate into European states as full citizens. Today, the hostility, hatred and bias of large parts of the international community have prevented Israel from being accepted by the nations of the world as an equal, no matter how accommodating Israel has indicated its readiness to be in negotiations with the Palestinian and no matter how fairly Israel fights its wars.
Israel’s very existence—the Jewish nation’s fundamental right to sovereignty in its historic homeland—continues to be constantly questioned. Inexplicably, similar claims are never made against states such as, say, Pakistan—which for years played host to Osama bin Laden while consuming vast amounts of American aid. Established a year before Israel was re-established, its legitimacy—historic and moral—is eminently more deserving of scrutiny.
And yet, notwithstanding the all too common rejection of Israel’s very right to exist, the misrepresentations of Israel’s daily narrative, and the numerous military threats Israel faces in this rapidly changing region, the Jewish state’s situation today is enviable compared to those long centuries of exile, wandering and powerlessness.
We have come a long, long way in ingathering the exiles. We are managing to reconcile the conflicting demands of a first world democracy and fealty to the religion that sustained us in exile. We enjoy a robust alliance of common values with the world’s single superpower.…
We have accomplished all this while fighting conventional and unconventional wars, absorbing a vast and diverse immigrant population and providing basic democratic rights to all citizens, regardless of race, creed or religion. Not too bad for a state the age of your average baby boomer.
AN INDEPENDENCE DAY GIFT FROM CANADA
Evelyn Gordon
Jerusalem Post, May 8, 2011
The people of Canada gave Israel a lovely Independence Day gift last week when they resoundingly re-elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
The vote, of course, had nothing to do with Israel: Harper’s Conservative Party won its first absolute parliamentary majority of his three terms in office mainly due to his economic stewardship, under which Canada suffered far less from the global economic crisis than most other Western countries. Nevertheless, it is good news for Israel, for two reasons.
The first is that Harper is currently one of Israel’s best friends worldwide. Under his leadership, Canada has repeatedly cast the sole vote against anti-Israel resolutions in the UN Human Rights Council—as in a 2009 vote condemning Israel’s operation in Gaza, or a 2007 vote placing Israel’s “human rights violations” permanently on the council’s agenda (European countries, by contrast, abstained on the former and supported the latter).
Harper made Canada the first country, preceding even Israel itself, to announce a boycott of the UN’s Durban II conference on racism in 2009 on the grounds that it was set to be an anti-Israel hate fest. And he has worked to end Canadian government funding for anti-Israel organizations: Last year, for instance, his government defunded several Canadian groups involved in anti-Israel activity; he also slashed Canada’s contribution to UNRWA, the UN organization founded to prevent the resettlement of Palestinian refugees so that the ongoing refugee crisis could continue to feed anti-Israel sentiment.
But perhaps even more important than Harper’s specific actions is the degree to which he has changed attitudes toward Israel within his country.
Before he took office, Canada’s policy on Israel was identical to Europe’s—meaning lots of lip service about being “a friend of Israel” while in practice opposing it in every international forum and lavishly funding its enemies. Shortly after the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, for instance, Canada voted for a UN Security Council resolution that condemned Israel for the violence, without a word of blame for the Palestinians.
Moreover, Canada has been a hotbed of anti-Israel boycott/divestment/sanctions activity. In 2006, for instance, the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) voted to boycott Israel until it accepts a Palestinian “right of return”—or in other words, agrees to commit suicide.
Thus one would, at least, have expected Harper’s pro-Israel stance to remain strictly confined to his own party. But in fact, while both main opposition parties continue to advocate markedly less pro-Israel policies than Harper does, change has begun seeping into their ranks as well.
This became glaringly evident last year, when the provincial legislature of Ontario—Canada’s largest province—voted unanimously to condemn Israel Apartheid Week because it “serves to incite hatred against Israel, a democratic state that respects the rule of law and human rights.…” The resolution, naturally, was introduced by a member of Harper’s Conservative Party. But the legislature was dominated at the time by the opposition Liberal Party, which had 71 seats compared to the Conservatives’ 24. Thus it could not have passed at all, much less unanimously, had pro-Israel sentiment not spread beyond Harper’s party.
Nor can the vote be dismissed as a matter of electoral necessity, as pro-Israel votes are for, say, New York politicians: Not only is Ontario’s Muslim population roughly double its Jewish population, but powerful vote-getting machines like the local CUPE chapter—Ontario’s largest labor union—were firmly in the anti-Israel camp.
And that is precisely the point: In the few short years since he entered the Prime Minister’s Office in 2006, Harper has managed to make being pro-Israel politically respectable in Canada—so respectable that politicians on both sides of the political fence are willing to take pro-Israel positions even when powerful interest groups oppose them. That message of respectability was underscored by Harper’s resounding victory this week. Just seven months ago, Canada’s chattering classes were up in arms over the “humiliating rejection” of the country’s bid for a UN Security Council seat, which was attributed in part to the fact that Harper’s pro-Israel policy cost him the support of Muslim countries. But that did not stop voters from re-electing him with an even bigger majority last week.
In world where anti-Israel positions are increasingly de rigueur for aspiring politicians, it is no mean feat to have succeeded in making pro-Israel positions both respectable and electable. So thank you, Stephen Harper. And best of luck to you and your country in your new term.
