LET POLLARD GO!
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, April 11, 2012
On June 13, US President Barack Obama, campaigning for reelection, plans to honor President Shimon Peres by bestowing upon him the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom. Whatever Obama’s motives, this could constitute a source of pride for much-maligned Israel.
But it could turn into a hollow gesture should Peres be feted while Jonathan Pollard is still denied freedom. Obama holds the key to Pollard’s cell. It behooves Peres to persuade Obama to use it. Peres, thus far, has been true to his promise and did formally ask for Pollard’s release.
Pollard is in his 27th year of imprisonment for passing American intelligence (about inimical third countries—Iraq, Libya, the then-PLO headquarters in Tunis) to a friendly country (Israel). He should have been freed long ago and not only because his health is now failing.… Lighter punishment was meted to assorted US spies for greater offenses, including those involving tangible security risks to America.
Although Pollard’s life-term is unprecedented for transferring classified material to an ally, no US administration in nearly three decades countenanced pardoning him. This, despite the fact that in 1991 Pollard publicly apologized and expressed further remorse in a 1996 open letter to then-president Bill Clinton. In 1998, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu admitted that Pollard spied for Israel and sought to free him as part of the Wye River deal. Clinton reneged on the agreement.
As things stand, it appears that the current administration is toying with the emotions of the entire Israeli collective. It issued an ambiguous statement which news agencies impetuously misrepresented as a rejection of Peres’s request. Peres held his own and released a communiqué saying he has not received Obama’s response and still awaits it.… The ball is still in play.
And it is quite a unique play. The medal, which was to have been a symbolic pat on Israel’s back with multiple political perks for both sides, has been turned into a catalyst for reinforcing another dynamic—the clamor for Pollard’s long overdue liberation. Because of the medal, two presidents are now forced into an apparent stand-off. Pollard, though physically in his North Carolina maximum security prison, has somehow come between Obama and Peres like the veritable pink elephant in the room—a huge moral predicament that everyone is acutely aware of, but would have preferred to avoid.
If Obama tries to go ahead with Peres’s ceremony while concomitantly keeping Pollard behind bars, he would be seen as giving the lie to his own declared motives for honoring Peres. If Peres is honored while Pollard keeps languishing, his image too would suffer a blow which Obama certainly does not intend to deliver. What may have started as a public relations stunt that could have afforded beleaguered Israel rare contentment, might be exposed as another instance of disingenuous posturing on the American side and outright humiliation for the Israeli.…
Nobody can credibly persevere in the sham that Pollard threatens American national security interests. Indeed the pendulum has swung hard and many former higher-ups (like ex-secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz) now support Pollard’s release. We cannot escape the impression that the only reason Pollard is still denied his freedom is because he is Jewish.…
TAKING THE POLITICS OUT OF HOLOCAUST HISTORY
Rafael Medoff
Jerusalem Post, April 1, 2012
A prominent Jewish historian who claims that criticism of president Franklin Roosevelt is all the handiwork of disgruntled Likudniks is being challenged by, of all people, a longtime supporter of Israel’s left-wing Meretz party.
The spectacle of a peacenik blogger taking on one of the best known academic figures in the Jewish community has a kind of David vs Goliath feel to it which makes it inherently interesting. But more than that, the clash between Ralph Seliger and Prof. Deborah Lipstadt sheds important light on the broader problem of the politicization of the Holocaust.
Seliger, 62, has been a lifelong activist on the American Zionist Left. For many years, he was editor of Israel Horizons, the US publication of Meretz, the Israeli party led by Shulamit Aloni and Yossi Sarid. Nowadays he blogs for Michael Lerner’s Tikkun magazine, among other venues. On March 6, Seliger went to hear Prof. Lipstadt speak at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El. He was more than a little surprised by what he heard.
Seliger, writing on his Tikkun blog, reports that Lipstadt accused some critics of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust of being “too harsh.” Lipstadt said, according to Seliger, “that it’s not by accident that the critics of FDR and the American Jewish establishment during the Nazi era emerged after Menachem Begin’s Likud broke the Laborite monopoly on power in Israel, with its electoral victories in 1977 and in the 1980s.” In other words, criticism of FDR is something akin to a vast right-wing Jewish conspiracy.
There’s just one little problem with Lipstadt’s theory. Actually, not so little.
“The first such book” blasting FDR’s response to the Holocaust, Seliger points out, “was written by Arthur D. Morse in 1967.” Morse’s While Six Million Died was published 10 years before Begin was elected prime minister. And that’s not all. Seliger continues: “I also don’t see how an ideological backlash to Labor’s decades in power would explain the biting examination by the non-Jewish American historian David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews.”
In other words, since Prof. Wyman is the author of the definitive history of Roosevelt’s indifference to the Holocaust, and Wyman is not even Jewish, much less a Likudnik, where does that leave Lipstadt’s theory?… Seliger could have cited many additional examples that leave Lipstadt’s thesis in tatters. After all, the entire first wave of scholarship critical of FDR long preceded Begin’s rise in 1977. Prof. Wyman’s first book on the subject, Paper Walls, was published in 1968.…
Next came Henry Feingold, in 1970, with The Politics of Rescue. He concluded that “European Jewry was ground to dust between the twin millstones of a murderous Nazi intent and a callous Allied indifference.” Prof. Feingold was for many years chairman of the Labor Zionists of America, so he doesn’t fit Lipstadt’s it’s-all-a-Likud-plot theory very well. In fact, one might say that his Laborite credentials turn her theory on its head.
There was plenty of criticism of FDR in the years following Begin’s election. But it came from the Left as often as it came from the Right. For example, Martin Gilbert, who has described himself as “a supporter of the [Israeli] Labor Party,” wrote in his 1981 book Auschwitz and the Allies that the Roosevelt and Churchill administrations were guilty of “failures of imagination, of response, of intelligence, of piecing together and evaluating what was known, of co-ordination, of initiative, and even at times of sympathy.”
Arthur Hertzberg, the historian, Jewish leader, and outspoken critic of Begin, wrote in 1984 that the Roosevelt administration and the other Allies “were well and currently informed about the tragic fate of the Jews, certainly by 1942, and did little to mitigate it.”
The Israeli Holocaust education group Lapid, which is far from the Likud on the political spectrum, staged a mock trial in 1990, in which the Allies were found by the presiding judge to have abdicated both their “legal obligation” and their “moral obligation” to bomb the death camps. The judge was Labor MK Shimon Sheetrit.
The list goes on and on, with plenty of examples from both sides of the political spectrum. Which is why Prof. Lipstadt’s attempt to politicize the debate over FDR’s Holocaust record is so regrettable. Indeed, it could be argued that America’s response to the Holocaust is one of the few genuine consensus issues in the Jewish community today. So thank you, Ralph Seliger, for trying to take the politics out of Holocaust history, and for reminding us that sometimes, even famous professors make mistakes.
(Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.)
A MATTER OF OPINION
Anav Silverman
Jerusalem Post, April 3, 2012
When Sigmar Gabriel wrote that Hebron was “an apartheid regime for which there is no justification” on his Facebook page (March 14), the chairman of Germany’s main opposition party sparked an outcry that reverberated beyond his virtual wall. Gabriel, the leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party and a likely challenger to Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2013, was not the first European politician to associate Israel with apartheid—nor will he be the last.
While the comment may have been particularly surprising coming from a high ranking German politician, the truth is that Gabriel simply echoed an oft repeated statement made in international discourse about Israel—one that has rarely been questioned in the past. In 2008, the former president of the UN General Assembly Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann likened Israel’s policies to “an apartheid of an earlier era.” In 2002, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu accused Israel of apartheid policies towards Palestinians.
Other notable officials who have joined in the Israel apartheid chorus include former UN special rapporteur John Dugard, former US President Jimmy Carter, Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, University of Chicago political science professor John Mearshimer, prominent Israeli media commentators and South African activists including antiapartheid veteran Reverend Allan Boesak who in November 2011 stated that Israeli apartheid is “more terrifying” than South Africa’s.
The above mentioned figures’ conclusions are inevitable considering their reliance on sources and organizations that present Hebron in an extremely skewed light.
One of the most active is the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), the group that guided Gabriel during his visit to Hebron recently. Established in 1994, TIPH representatives, who hail from Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, Turkey and Denmark, patrol Hebron and provide situation analysis with the aim of ensuring that residents are upholding human rights law while providing “a feeling of security to the Palestinians of Hebron.”
TIPH, whose members enjoy diplomatic immunity and wear special “observer” badges during their Hebron patrols, has given numerous tours to ambassadors, government officials, ministers and diplomats from across Europe. Israeli Foreign Ministry officials in the past accused TIPH personnel of compiling false reports against IDF soldiers and Jewish settlers, while ignoring violent acts by Palestinians, thereby “vilifying Israel.”
What is most unfortunate about these tours is that they do not provide an all-encompassing perspective of Hebron, rather one that distorts its history and promotes a propaganda campaign that leads to the demonization of Israel. The tours do not highlight the fact that the Jewish presence in Hebron dates to biblical times, from King David’s monarchy, and continued for centuries after, throughout the Babylonian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Mameluke and Ottoman periods.…
Nor is it made clear that Hebron today is divided into two areas—H1 and H2—following the Hebron Accords in 1997, which were signed by Israel, the US and the PA. The accords offered international recognition of the existence of the city’s Jewish community and its entitlement to security and development. The accords ceded some 80 percent of the area to the PA and left Israel responsible for 20%.…
The only area in Hebron that Jews are permitted to live in is H2, the smaller and poorer area of the city, which makes up 20% of the municipal territory. [In practice], however, Jewish residents have access to only 3% of the city which entails one street along which several Jewish neighborhoods are located. The 600 Jewish people who live among 30,000 Arabs [120,00 live in area H1] are not permitted to travel into H1.
Furthermore, although Israel’s security measures in Hebron have been questioned, they are crucial for the protection of Jewish residents living in the city and for residents across the country. Stabbing attacks against Jewish worshippers in the vicinity of the Cave of the Patriarchs have been attempted numerous times since 2010. And one of the most dangerous Hamas terrorist groups during the second intifada was the Jihad Soccer Club, considered the best soccer team in Hebron, whose players and coach carried out a wave of suicide attacks against Israelis, the most recent of which in 2008 killed a woman and wounded 11 others in Dimona.
In reality, the best way to gain an objective view of Hebron is to tour the city independently, just as Stefanie Galla, a German lawyer from Cologne did in December 2011. Galla travelled to Hebron and visited the city without a tour guide.…
“The Hebron I have experienced is another,” wrote Galla, who described the Jewish quarter in Hebron as “seeming to be a very small area, sheltered by high walls and barbed wire.” According to Galla’s perspective, Hebron to her was a “ghetto,” with “Jews included.”
Unfortunately, Gabriel’s sensational comment…continues to perpetuate a misconstrued reality that is accepted as true by many—except for the few like Galla who dare to think without being told how.
GREAT AUTHOR OR BIG JERK?
George Jonas
National Post, April 11, 2012
Last week, Germany’s respected Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper published the poetic ruminations of a former member of the Waffen-SS, Hitler’s elite fighting force. The 84-year-old author called his poem something that “needed to be said.”
“Tomorrow could be too late,” he wrote. The Jewish state “could wipe out the people of Iran” using a “first strike.” As for his country, Germany, by selling another Dolphin-class submarine to Israel, it could become “accomplice to a crime.”
Excuse me, Nurse, who is this guy? Is he taking his pills? Here’s a hint: He can’t be some right-wing knuckle-dragger. It’s 2012, not 1932. Anyone who wants his poem about Jews plotting the annihilation of Iran’s population published in a mainstream Munich newspaper had better have impeccable left-wing credentials and a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Next, novelist Gunter Grass (congratulations, you guessed) poses a rhetorical question: What took him so long? Why not years ago? Why was he saying only now, “in his old age, using his last ink,” that Israel’s atomic power was “endangering the fragile peace of the world?” Good question, Herr Grass. Why?
Well, first, because of Nazi Germany’s “matchless” crimes against the Jews (please note that Grass, unlike his protégés in Tehran, is no Holocaust-denier) and second, his fear of being accused of anti-Semitism. Nobel laureate Gunter Grass an anti-Semite? Perish the thought! But then what actually has changed? Does Grass no longer consider Nazi crimes to have been matchless? Or is he no longer afraid of being accused of anti-Semitism?
What made him lose his fear? Could the winds of political fashion have shifted? Has anti-Semitism stopped being a career-breaker or even a social handicap, especially when disguised as anti-Zionism? Is it because Grass, who has always been attuned to nuances, senses that it’s becoming prudent to flaunt what would have been imprudent to admit only a few years ago? Is it because the great author is a jerk?…
Can jerks or fools paint magnificent landscapes or write remarkable books? They certainly can; it isn’t even rare. And if there’s something even easier than for jerks or fools to create great art occasionally, it’s for great artists to be occasional jerks or fools.
Stop right there, someone might say. Fool, yes; jerk, maybe, but great? Insofar as people know of Grass outside Germany, they know of him only as the author of a book about the Nazi era, published 53 years ago. A phenomenon rather than a novel, it made a stir in the 1960s, but couldn’t be described as having had a lasting impact on the culture.
I suggest it did, though. True, the 84-year-old icon made his mark as a political activist for left-wing causes, rather than a writer, after his 1959 debut; as a type of Lenin’s “useful idiot,” a sucker for sinistral doctrines and dictators. It’s also true that winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, as Grass did in 1999, isn’t like winning it for chemistry. The literary Nobel Prize has the same modest nexus with literature as the Nobel Peace Prize has with peace.…
Grass used to have a certain moral authority in Germany (if this isn’t a contradiction in terms), but elsewhere most people wouldn’t have known whether to mow him or smoke him. Even in Germany, his authority was shaken to the core in 2006, when he belatedly revealed having been a member of the Waffen-SS.
It wasn’t being conscripted into an SS Panzer division at 17 that hurt Grass; it was not admitting it until his seventies. Many Germans remembered that in the 1980s, it was Grass who took it upon himself to castigate U.S. president Ronald Reagan for saying a few conciliatory words over Germany’s war dead in a cemetery that included some Waffen-SS graves.
A bit thick, yes. Jews would call it chutzpa.
What has changed in 80 years? The players, mainly; the plot, very little. In 1932 it was Hitler laying the groundwork for the Holocaust. As the curtain rises in Munich in 2012, it’s a remorseful participant in the Nazi Holocaust, former SS-Schütze Grass, who at the risk of being mistaken for an anti-Semite uses his last ink to assist the Holocaust-deniers of Tehran to develop, without Israeli interruption, the nuclear technology needed for an Islamist Holocaust. Full circle. This is where we came in.
THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM
Victor Davis Hanson
Defining Ideas, March 28, 2012
Not long ago, the Economist ran an unsigned editorial called the “Auschwitz Complex.” The unnamed author blamed serial Middle East tensions on both Israel’s unwarranted sense of victimhood, accrued from the Holocaust, and its unwillingness “to give up its empire.” As far as Israel’s paranoid obsessions with the specter of a nuclear Iran, the author dismissed any real threat by announcing that “Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis,” and that “Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran.”
It is hard to fathom how a democracy of seven million people by any stretch of the imagination is an “empire.” Israel, after all, fought three existential wars over its 1947 borders, when the issue at hand was not manifest destiny, but the efforts of its many enemies to exterminate or deport its population. I would not otherwise know how to characterize the Arab promise of more than a half-century of “pushing the Jews into Mediterranean.…” [Also], The Economist’s choice of “appealing” is an odd modifying adjective of the noun “enemy,” particularly for Iran, which has both promised to wipe out Israel and is desperately attempting to find the nuclear means to reify that boast.
The Economist article is fairly representative of European anger at Israel, a country that is despised by most of the nations that make up the UN roster.… What then are the sources for widespread hatred of Israel? Such venom cannot be explained just by political differences with its Arab and Islamic neighbors. After all, take any major issue of contention—occupied land, refugees, a divided Jerusalem, cross border incursions—and then ask why the world focuses disproportionately on Israel when similar such disputes are commonplace throughout the globe.
Does the world much care about the principle of occupation? Not really. Consider land that has been “occupied” in the fashion of the West Bank since World War II. Russia won’t give up the southern Kurile Islands it took from Japan. Tibet ceased to exist as a sovereign country—well before the 1967 Middle East War—when it was absorbed by Communist China. Turkish forces since their 1974 invasion have occupied large swaths of Cyprus.… The 112-mile green line that runs through downtown Nicosia to divide Cyprus makes Jerusalem look united in comparison. Over 500,000 Jews have been ethnically-cleansed from Arab capitals since 1947, in waves of pogroms that come every few decades. Why are they not considered refugees the way the Palestinians are?
The point is not that the world community should not focus on Israel’s disputes with its neighbors, but that it singles Israel out for its purported transgressions in a fashion that it does not for nearly identical disagreements elsewhere. Over 75 percent of recent United Nations resolutions target Israel, which has been cited for human rights violations far more than the Sudan, Congo, or Rwanda, where millions have perished in little-noticed genocides. Why is the international community so anti-Israel?
A new sort of fashionable and socially acceptable anti-Semitism looms large. For much of the past two millennia in the West, hatred of the Jews was a crude prejudice, rich with state-sanctioned religious, economic, and social biases. By the same token, dissidents, leftists, and anti-establishmentarians once took up the cause of decrying anti-Semitism, an Enlightenment theme until well after World War II.
No more—with the establishment of Israel, anti-Semitism metamorphosized in two unforeseen ways. First, it became a near obsession of the modern Left, which associated the creation of the Jewish state with a sort of Western hegemonic impulse. That Israel was democratic and protected human rights in a way unlike its autocratic neighbors mattered nothing. To the international Left, [especially after the 1967 war], Israel was a religious, imperialistic, and surrogate West in the Middle East.…
There was a second facet of the new anti-Semitism. The establishment of the state of Israel itself also served as a respectable cloak for anti-Semitism. One now spoke not of disliking Jews, but only of despising the Jewish state and seeing Palestinians as if they were victims analogous to minority groups within the West. From Oxford dons to award-wining novelists, it became socially acceptable to decry the creation of Israel in a way it was not to say that the Jews were again causing trouble.…
Oil, of course, played an even larger role. By the 1960s, the West was heavily dependent on Persian Gulf and North African oil and gas, and by the 1990s, was in a rivalry with emerging economies in India and China to ensure steady Middle East supplies. After the deleterious oil cutoff of 1973, the Arab world proved not just that it was willing to use oil as an anti-Israel weapon, but also that it could do so quite effectively.
On the flip side, since the 1960s, trillions of petrodollars have flowed into the Islamic Middle East, not just ensuring that Israel’s enemies now were armed, ascendant, and flanked by powerful Western friends, but through contributions, donations, and endowments also deeply embedded within Western thought and society itself. Universities suddenly sought endowed Middle East professorships and legions of full tuition-paying Middle East undergraduates. Had Israel the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, then “occupied” Palestine might have resonated at the UN about as much as Ossetia, Kashmir, or the Western Sahara does today. Size matters as well. Israel is tiny; its enemies, legion. For many in the world, demography is everything: would an opinion-maker or journalist rather side with seven million Israelis or 400 million of their enemies in the largely Islamic Middle East?…
The terrorism of the last thirty years loomed large as well. If in the 1970s, Western governments feared that their Olympic games, their jet airliners, their embassies, and their sports teams might be attacked by secular left-wing Palestinian terrorists, by the late 1990s they were even more afraid that radical Islamist suicide bombers and terrorists would strike not just abroad, but inside Europe and North America itself. After 9/11, to draw a cartoon in Denmark mocking a Jewish rabbi would earn either praise or indifference; but to caricature Mohammed or the Koran ensured threats of assassination in the heart of postmodern, humanitarian Europe.…
Finally, Israel…[seems] as a sort of cachet or membership card into the right circles. Filmmakers do not usually shoot sympathetic documentaries about Israel—not if they want grants from foundations and social acceptance from their peers and overseers. Visiting journalists and authors might hotel in Israel, but their professional work on the West Bank will be praised and supported to the degree that it is pro-Palestinian and shunned should it be either balanced or pro-Israeli.
Will the image of Israel ever be reversed? Only if the above criteria are altered—a damning indictment that popular antipathy has little to do with the reality of Israel’s predicament.
(Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
He was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Bush in 2007.)
