HARPER MUST STAND BY ISRAEL IN WARTIME
Editorial
National Post, March 2, 2012
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be in Ottawa today. No doubt, he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will discuss a wide range of topics. But the most important, by far, will be Iran. Mr. Netanyahu is seeking to build support for a muscular response to Iran’s drive for weaponized uranium, and he wants to ensure Canada is firmly on board.
Just a few years ago, it would have seemed odd for an Israeli leader to give much thought to what anyone in Ottawa thinks about the Middle East.… But Canadian foreign policy has been very different under Mr. Harper. At the United Nations and elsewhere, Canada has established itself as Israel’s staunchest (if not its most powerful) ally.…
Where a strike against Iran is concerned, however, Canada would have little to contribute militarily—except perhaps for naval assets that could help secure mine-clearing efforts in the Persian Gulf, and other ancillary operations that arise in the fallout to an initial aerial attack. The actual campaign against Iran’s nuclear assets, if it comes to that, will be conducted with American and/or Israeli warplanes. Yet Canada still has an important role to play. And Mr. Harper should indicate to Mr. Netanyahu that we are on board to do our part if war becomes necessary to stop Iranian nuclear-weapon development.…
What can Canada do? First, it can join with other oil-producing nations in pledging to help make up any production shortfall that might result if Iran makes good on its threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and disrupt Gulf shipping. Canada has nowhere near the excess production capacity of Saudi Arabia. But oil markets respond in large measure to psychological factors. And the larger the international consortium of oil producers on record as willing to expand production, the more muted will be the sense of market panic once the moment of truth arrives.…
Secondly, Canada should declare openly and forcefully that Israel and the United States—and, indeed, all Western nations that have been targeted by Iranian threats and terrorism—have a moral right to pre-emptively attack Iran’s nuclear assets.… [Iran’s] rulers have loudly and repeatedly called for the end of Israel’s existence, and declared themselves in a state of existential conflict with the United States. There is little doubt but that they would brandish, if not use, a nuclear weapon in prosecuting their hatred of the “great Satan” and “little Satan.” Neither Barack Obama nor Mr. Netanyahu is obligated to sit by passively and wait for that moment to arrive.
There are many, many practical reasons for both Israel and the United States to wait before attacking Iran. Sanctions are biting hard on the Iranian economy, and there are signs of internal dissent within the regime. The coming legislative elections in that country may become a flash point for the opposition movement.… Then there is the military aspect: No one is quite sure how many sorties would be required to destroy all of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities, nor how long it would take the Iranians to build them back up.
Yet even as all this is weighed, it cannot be disputed that Western powers, led by the United States and Israel, have the moral right to take action if they believe it is prudent. We urge Mr. Harper to communicate this message publicly to Mr. Netanyahu when the two leaders meet today.
BEGIN’S LEGACY
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, February 27, 2012
On the 20th anniversary of Menachem Begin’s death [Begin passed away on March 9, 1992, corresponding to this past Monday in the Hebrew calendar], many are revisiting the former prime minister’s important legacy.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of Begin’s political leadership was his unique ability to bridge the gap between ideological purity and political realism, an important component of his ultimate political success. It was in large part due to Begin’s pragmatism and moderation that violence was avoided immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel.
On June 6, 1948, the Hagana, under orders from David Ben-Gurion, fired upon and sank the Altalena, an arms ship belonging to the Irgun, the Revisionist Movement’s military arm headed by Begin. If not for Begin’s responsible leadership, the situation could easily have spiraled out of control and led to more bloodshed. Begin, essentially bowing to Ben-Gurion’s will and preferring compromise and moderation over stubborn pride, vowed there would be no civil war among Jews.
Throughout his long years in the opposition, Begin resolved to keep Herut, the party he formed with the establishment of the state, in the political mainstream. To do so, he worked toward, and eventually succeeded in, moderating and incorporating some of the ideological purists of the Revisionist Movement and the Lehi (Freedom Fighters for Israel), or Stern Group, into Herut.
In 1965, Begin orchestrated an alignment with the centrist Liberal party to form Gahal (Herut-Liberal Bloc), which garnered 26 mandates in that year’s election. It was the entry of Gahal into the Labor-led national-unity government just before the outbreak of the Six Day War that permanently freed Begin from his political isolation.
But while Begin exercised political sagacity, he continued to hold to strong ideological principles, such as the belief in keeping the whole Land of Israel, particular Judea and Samaria. In August 1970, he quit the government headed by Golda Meir to protest initial acceptance of the Rogers Plan, which included a ceasefire agreement with Egypt along the Suez Canal and would have brought the Soviet Union into peace negotiations on the side of the Arabs. Begin said he opposed the government’s formal acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which is based on “peace for withdrawal,” including in Judea and Samaria.
After the devastating Yom Kippur War, with the Labor Party’s hegemony increasingly called into question, Begin joined forces with Ariel Sharon to mastermind the birth of the Likud out of Gahal and several smaller factions. His political savvy was vindicated in 1977 with the Likud’s electoral upset, overturning Labor’s decades-long monopoly on power.
Immediately upon entering office, Begin sent out signals to his Arab neighbors that he was prepared to enter into a peace agreement. Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, apparently sensed that Begin was a strong ruler capable of making peace, and answered his overtures. Misnamed the Sadat initiative, the resulting 1979 Peace Treaty was in reality a product of Begin’s push for peace.
Perhaps Begin’s unique ability to bridge the gap between ideological purity and political realism can be attributed to his liberal ideological roots. Like his mentor, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Begin believed strongly in maintaining a robust liberal democracy that protected free speech and the human rights of both Jews and non-Jews. As far back as 1956, Begin demanded that the Knesset “not legislate any law that limits freedom of expression, orally or in writing.”
He strongly opposed Emergency Defense Regulations dating back to the British Mandate, which severely restricted Arab Israelis’ basic freedoms in the decades after the War of Independence. He also pushed for a strong and independent Supreme Court—though he never supported judicial activism. And he was instrumental in facilitating the appointment of the nation’s first Arab Supreme Court Justice. Begin’s readiness to champion the rights of minorities was probably bolstered by his experiences as a Jew living in Poland between the two world wars and later as a Zionist activist in Palestine under British rule.
Begin’s unique combination of political pragmatism and moderation are an important legacy. We can only hope that our contemporary politicians learn from his example.
ONE MAN’S HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW: THINKING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Francis Fukuyama
NY Times, February 3, 2012
Thinking The Twentieth Century
By Tony Judt With Timothy Snyder
414 Pp. The Penguin Press.Tony Judt was known to many people as the public intellectual who aroused a firestorm of criticism for an article he wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2003, calling for Israel to become a binational state and to lose its specifically Jewish character. That essay, as well as biting critiques of the Iraq war and the Israel lobby, earned him considerable enmity in some quarters, mitigated perhaps by the subsequent news that he had developed Lou Gehrig’s disease, to which he succumbed in August 2010.
This public persona is unfortunate because it obscures a much more interesting figure. As a historian of 20th-century Europe, Judt both chronicled and himself represented the huge ideological transformations that occurred between the beginning and end of that century. This life has now been documented in the quasi-autobiographical “Thinking the Twentieth Century.” Conceived after Judt’s illness had already been diagnosed, the book consists of transcriptions of his conversations with Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian who is the distinguished author of a number of well-regarded books on Eastern and Central Europe. Snyder, highly erudite and opinionated himself, is not your typical journalistic interviewer; the book is more a dialogue than an autobiography.
Judt’s story is in many ways very familiar: His forebears were Eastern European Jews who ended up in Britain, where they assimilated into English life. He was not brought up in a religious home—his father was a Marxist—but consciousness of the Holocaust was central to his identity; he was named after a cousin who died at Auschwitz. He attended Cambridge and began a career as a Marxist historian in the mold of his idols Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, writing initially on obscure topics like French socialism in Provence. Intellectually, he was as French as he was English, participating in the événements of 1968 and spending a year at the École Normale Supérieure, where he befriended Marxist luminaries like the historians Annie Kriegel and Boris Souvarine.
Whatever Judt’s initial ideological commitments, he later concerned himself with a stark and important question: “how so many smart people could have told themselves such stories with all the terrible consequences that ensued.” The story was that of Communism, which perpetrated “the intellectual sin of the century: passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it,…concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information.” Looking back at the history of left-wing figures from the 1930s like the French socialist Léon Blum, he saw their central failing as the lack of “any appreciation of the possibility of evil as a constraining, much less a dominating, element in public affairs.” This was to become the theme of his 1992 book “Past Imperfect,” which chronicled French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre who publicly supported Stalinism while remaining willfully blind to its horrors.
Judt’s journey from Marxism to “East European liberal” came in several stages. He read the revisionist Marxist writings of the Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski, became friends with the Polish sociologist Jan Gross, and met in the 1980s with dissidents on the other side of the Iron Curtain, whose fates he realized he had previously ignored. He threw himself into this newfound interest with abandon, learning Czech and making himself an expert on contemporary Eastern European thought. His knowledge of the two halves of Europe was reflected in the sweeping narrative of his 2005 book “Postwar.”
Judt’s unhappiness with the contemporary left extended to the practitioners of cultural studies in the 1970s. This group, he argues, simply replaced Marx’s proletariat with “women; or students, or peasants, or blacks, or—eventually—gays, or indeed whichever group had sound reason to be dissatisfied with the present disposition of power and authority.” Identity politics made it impossible to create a master narrative of social development and sidetracked progressives into particularistic dead-ends.
The prolonged discussion of public intellectuals toward the end of the book shows off Judt’s least pleasant side. He argues that it is an intellectual’s duty to “speak truth to power” no matter what, and there is no doubt of his willingness to endure withering castigation for his own views. In return, he skewers many people—Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Michael Mandelbaum, Judith Miller, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, myself included—for being ignorant at best and willing dupes of power at worst, never conceding that his opponents could be honestly wrong or that his own views might deserve more introspection.
All of these characteristics come out in the above-mentioned critique of Israel. He argues that Israelis and their American supporters have used the Holocaust as a “Get Out of Jail Free card for a rogue state,” but seems to think that his own Jewishness and the fact that he lived in Israel at one point give him the authority to be as morally obtuse in return. Judt seems intent on transferring the lessons learned in Eastern Europe, where genuine liberalism mostly replaced ethnic nationalism, to a part of the world where such liberalism just won’t work. His proposal for a binational state was put forward with the self-certainty of an intellectual who has never had to deal with the realities of practicality and power. But he remained little inclined to give ground to critics he believed could be motivated only by bad intentions.
Perhaps as compensation for his embrace of Eastern European anti-Communism, Judt makes it clear that he wants his legacy to be on the left. It was “unjust as well as unfortunate” that social democracy collapsed along with Communism in the age of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He spends a great deal of time attacking Friedrich Hayek and defending John Maynard Keynes. “Thinking the Twentieth Century” concludes with a recapitulation of the defense of the welfare state made in his 2010 book “Ill Fares the Land,” as well as a prolonged castigation of the Bush administration for the Iraq war and rising inequality.
In the end, what is striking about this book is the great difference between the 20th-century world it describes and the present. Totalitarianism has disappeared, except in a few small countries like Cuba and North Korea; a risen Asia represents as much a cultural as an ideological challenge; religion has made a political comeback everywhere. The undergraduate students I teach were all born after the fall of the Berlin Wall; for them, the huge ideological battles among Communism, fascism and liberalism are neither meaningful nor interesting. They are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes. Documenting this 20th century, then, is an important achievement of a scholar and intellectual whose premature passing we should all regret.
(Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford’s
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.)
HOW WE CAPTURED ADOLF EICHMANN
Carl Hoffman
Jerusalem Magazine, February 23, 2012
In its broad outlines, the story of Adolf Eichmann, his capture in Argentina by Israeli secret agents, and his trial in Jerusalem are well known.
Eichmann was appointed head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs division at the start of World War II and was later placed in charge of organizing the “final solution” throughout Europe. At the end of the war—and at the conclusion of the Holocaust—Eichmann was arrested by the US Army. He soon escaped his captors, however, and eventually made his way to Argentina, where he lived under the assumed name of Ricardo Klement.
Information regarding his whereabouts began to reach Israel in the late 1950s, spurring both the Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) to track Eichmann down. On May 11, 1960, Eichmann was abducted near his home in Buenos Aires by a team of Israeli agents, smuggled out of Argentina and flown to Israel. Eichmann was placed on trial in Jerusalem in April 1961, convicted in December 1961, and hanged on May 31, 1962. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea, beyond Israel’s territorial waters.
Now, 50 years later, a multimedia exhibition at Beit Hatfutsot-Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv is providing visitors with many of the exact details of how the operation to capture Eichmann was carried out, and by whom. The exhibition, called “Operation Finale: The Story of the Capture of Eichmann,” is a joint effort of Beit Hatfutsot and the Mossad.
Offering an insider’s look at how the operation was planned and conducted, “Operation Finale” presents more than 100 documents, records, photographs and videos, as well as pieces of equipment used during the laborious process of Eichmann’s identification, capture and abduction to Israel.
At the entrance to the exhibition stands a wall of honor, listing the names of 67 people who participated in the operation. While some of the names—like those of Isser Harel and Rafi Eitan—are familiar, most are not. Perhaps not surprisingly, the words “Mossad” and “Shabak” (Shin Bet) appear under many of the names, while “El Al,” surprisingly enough, appears under several others. Above the list of names is an inscription that states, “The State of Israel and the Jewish people say thanks to the secret agents and all of those who participated in the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann, enemy of the Jews, each using his unique skills to ensure the operation’s success thousands of miles from home. We offer our praise and a place of honor.”
It is at this wall that we meet the exhibition curator on the show’s opening night, a Mossad employee who introduces himself simply as “Avner A.” Asked what this exhibition teaches us about Eichmann’s capture that we do not already know, Avner replies, “This is the first official story, the real one, with many small details.” A bit more expansively, exhibition historian Neomi Izhar says later, “This exhibition is unique, because it is the first time that the Mossad has unveiled, or partially unveiled, any of its documents or tools connected with any of the operations of the Mossad. The media have unveiled and exposed things, but this is the first time that the Mossad has done so.…”
One item in particular that Izhar cites is what she refers to as Eichmann’s “ear file.” She explains, “These are the photos by which Eichmann was positively identified before the operation, photos of his ear. Like fingerprints, the configuration of the outer ear is unique to each person. Photos taken of the man suspected to be Eichmann in Argentina were compared with photos from Eichmann’s SS file and from those supplied by one of his former mistresses. Careful comparison revealed 10 points of similarity, and no points of difference.”
Among other items on display are memos passed between the Shin Bet and Mossad regarding Eichmann’s whereabouts; the Leica camera used by the abduction team to take surveillance photographs; photographs of the house on Garibaldi Street; the abduction team’s forged car licenses; the lathe they used to duplicate keys; the document Eichmann signed stating that he was willing to stand trial in Israel; a model of the airplane used to abduct Eichmann to Israel and the identification card of an El Al flight crew member used by team leader Isser Harel; a forged Israeli passport and El Al flight crew identity card prepared for Eichmann in the name of “Zeev Zichroni”; and even the needle used by Dr. Yonah Elian to sedate Eichmann on the way from the safe house to the airport in Buenos Aires.
There are other materials on display as well, but perhaps the most famous is the now iconic glass booth in which Eichmann sat during his trial in Jerusalem. This, along with an original entrance permit to the trial and several paintings by team member Zvi Malkin—the man who actually ambushed Eichmann, grabbing him with his own hands—round out the exhibition.…
So who is the audience for “Operation Finale,” this exhibition consisting largely of what its curator characterizes as “small details”? Says historian Izhar, “Eichmann’s trial was a major event in Israeli society. We have not been the same ever since. The Eichmann trial revealed the Holocaust as it had not been revealed before.… It was the Eichmann trial that exposed all of the horrors. Were it not for the Eichmann trial, these would not have been exposed to the Israelis, to the Jewish people, and to the whole world. With this I answer your question.… Everyone is the audience.…”
Also on hand for the opening of the show is abduction team member Rafi Eitan, now 85. He says that the exhibition is not only about Eichmann’s capture, but more broadly about how the Jewish people rose from the ashes of the Holocaust and created a strong new country, capable of protecting its citizens. We ask him whether he thinks there might be new Eichmanns in the world today.
“You mean [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad,” he says, more a statement than a question. “Well, maybe,” he answers. Asked if he thinks we have the strength and resourcefulness to deal with new Eichmanns, Eitan responds, “Well, we are very strong today, and I feel that if the State of Israel had existed before the Second World War, there would have been no Holocaust. That is my reply.”
