MOST ISRAELIS AND JEWS ARE UNDER NO ILLUSIONS
Isi Leibler
Jerusalem Post, May 2, 2012
If one reviews the events of the past year and monitors opinion polls, it becomes abundantly clear that despite the mantras chanted by the far Left insisting that most Israelis and Jews are opposed to the policies of the current Israeli government, the evidence on the ground suggests the contrary.
There is neither a groundswell of resentment against the foreign policy and security policies of the Israeli government nor are there indications suggesting that committed Diaspora Jews are becoming alienated from the Jewish state. In fact, it is undeniable that a far stronger consensus prevails among Israelis in relation to the government’s approach toward the Palestinians than at any time since the national schism was created in the wake of the adoption of the Oslo Accords.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has effectively charted a centrist course which is endorsed by most of the nation. This amounts to an end of further radical concessions to the Palestinians in the absence of genuine reciprocity and no additional unilateral territorial withdrawals that could lead to a repetition of Sharon’s Gaza disengagement, which merely emboldened the jihadists and provided them with additional staging grounds from which to launch rockets and intensify terrorism.
At the same time Netanyahu has repeatedly reiterated that in the event of a Palestinian leadership committing to peaceful coexistence, willing to compromise and recognize Israel’s security requirements, he would make every endeavor to achieve an accommodation which would provide the Palestinians with an independent state. Israelis recognize that this will necessitate a change in the current duplicitous Palestinian leadership which is more committed to terminating Jewish sovereignty than achieving statehood.
Despite the appalling Israeli electoral system with its multiple parties and the excessive leverage by small one-dimensional parties, setting aside the extreme Left and Right and radical Arab parties, there are no basic ideological differences on issues of foreign policy or security between the leading political parties. The histrionic media opposition from the far Left is neither reflected in voting patterns nor in opinion polls. The circulation and standing of its flagship newspaper, Haaretz, has plunged to an all-time low. The reality is that although the trendy “progressive” politicians and far-left academicians continue making headlines, in reality they have been effectively marginalized.
Nothing illustrates this more than the humiliating defeat in the Kadima primaries of former leader Tzipi Livni, which was unquestionably linked to her mindless and destructive opposition to every aspect of the government’s foreign policy and her vitriolic personal attacks on the prime minister. In contrast, her successor Shaul Mofaz is somewhat more circumspect in his criticism on foreign affairs and announced that he intends to primarily direct his efforts toward opposing the government on economic issues. Unlike Livni, he made it clear that after the next elections he would be open to joining a broader coalition.
The same applies to the Labor Party, which to some extent had been hijacked by extremists from the far Left. Today, leader Shelly Yacimovich is more selective than her predecessors in criticizing security policies, and while opposed to settlements has deliberately distanced the party from its former leaders who engaged in demonizing settlers.
One can point to similar trends among Diaspora Jewry. As was always the case, assimilated Jews are less likely to display strong emotional ties with Jewish affairs and are inclined to be more aloof from Israel. But the repeated assertions that committed Jews and especially younger people are distancing and even divorcing themselves from Israel have no basis in reality.
Yes, the generation which witnessed the Holocaust and the struggle for the creation of a Jewish state is being replaced by Jews who take Israel for granted. They cannot identify with the pre-state Jewish powerlessness and do not experience the fears for the security of Israel endured by their antecedents. But today’s committed Diaspora Jews have certainly not turned against of Israel.
When J Street appeared on the scene two years ago, the left-liberal media hailed it as the wave of the future, claiming that its “progressive,” “liberal” and “pro-peace” approach was far more representative of American Jews than the established leadership. Yet it made little headway and to this day continues to represent the hard-core far-left and only attracts naïve, even well-intentioned, fellow travelers. J Street’s boastful predictions about supplanting AIPAC turned out to be pathetic.…
Peter Beinart, hailed as the darling of the left-liberal establishment, whose frenzied attacks on Israel received extraordinary coverage in the media, also disappointed supporters of the anti-Israeli Left by obtaining only miniscule support from the Jewish community. Indeed his much heralded book was panned by virtually every Jewish reviewer and his call for a boycott of settlements was condemned by all, other than the extreme Left. Even J Street was obliged to distance itself from him in relation to this issue.
Indeed if one observes developments in the Diaspora and monitors Jewish public opinion polls, especially in the US, it is clear that there is a solid sense of loyalty for Israel among Jews who understand the realities on the ground. They display support for the current Israeli efforts to achieve security in a region in which it is the intransigent Palestinians who undermine prospects for peace and make a short-term realization of a two-state policy virtually impossible.
This was reaffirmed in the results of a recent poll conducted by supporters of President Barack Obama designed to understate the role of Israel as a factor determining how American Jews vote. But even this poll recognized that 73 percent of all Jews—not merely the committed ones—considered that Netanyahu, the bête noir of left-liberals, represented “true Jewish values.”
We should not fall prey to propaganda repeating false assertions that today Jews are less supportive of the Jewish state. The reality is the opposite and that the overwhelming majority of committed Jews continue to fervently support Israel. The only major change is that they are no longer deluded by visions of a non-existent Arab peace partner.
THE BATTLE OVER ‘MEIN KAMPF’
L. Gordon Crovitz
Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2012
Officials in the German state of Bavaria never wanted to publish “Mein Kampf,” the book written by Adolf Hitler that has been unavailable in Germany since the end of World War II. The Internet has now made them do it.
The government of Bavaria inherited the copyright to “Mein Kampf” in 1945, when the state took over the Nazi party publishing house Eher-Verlag as part of the de-Nazification program. Under German law, copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author, which in this case means in 2015.
The text is available on many websites, making it impractical to continue suppressing the book. Instead, Bavaria announced last week that it will issue an edition that includes scholarly critiques of Hitler’s bitter themes of anti-Semitism, German expansion into the territory of its neighbors, and his conceit of a 1,000-year Aryan empire.
The book, whose title translates as “My Battle” or “My Struggle,” is a series of harangues dictated by Hitler to Rudolf Hess while Hitler was in prison in the 1920s for trying to overthrow Germany’s parliamentary government. It sold 10 million copies as Hitler came to power, and every German couple married from 1936 got a copy as a wedding gift from the Nazi government.…
Bavaria has used its copyright to block publication. In the 1990s, the state got Amazon to stop shipping copies of the book into Germany and prevailed on the U.S. military to stop selling copies on American bases in Germany. As recently as 2010, Bavaria said it would use “all means at its disposal” to stop copies from being published and earlier this year enjoined a British publisher from printing a version in German.
The increased availability of the text online tipped the debate for Bavarian officials in favor of allowing the book, while adding the essays by scholars explaining the pernicious context for the book and the historical results. In announcing the change of mind, the finance minister of Bavaria said this should help with “demystification” of Hitler and would explain the “world-wide catastrophe” of Nazi philosophy and actions.…
Perhaps the best reason to give people access to “Mein Kampf” is the one Winston Churchill gave in his history, “The Second World War.” Churchill wrote that Hitler’s book was a critical source to understand Nazi policies—and that the Allies should have taken its message and popularity more seriously. Churchill wrote, “Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.”
Less understandable than Germany reluctantly permitting an annotated version of “Mein Kampf” is that versions of the unexpurgated book have been best sellers over the past few years, including in Palestinian areas and in Turkey. Local popularity of this book is a useful data point to identify worrisome cultures.…
The challenge, as German officials understand, is to ensure that greater transparency goes beyond the text itself to an understanding of the evil that the book helped to make possible.
SWEDEN’S ‘DAMN JEW’ PROBLEM
Paulina Neuding
Tablet, April 5, 2012
The store window had been smashed many times before. The shoe-repair shop is located in one of the rougher parts of Malmö, Sweden, and the Jewish owner, a native of the city, had gotten used to this sort of vandalism. But in the spring of 2004, a group of immigrants just under the age of 15—too young to be prosecuted by Swedish law—walked into the store yelling about “damn Jews.” The owner was hit in the face by one of the boys. Yasha, an 85-year-old customer…was struck in the back of his head. The doctor who received him at the emergency room concluded that he must have been hit with a blunt object. “I left Poland to get away from anti-Semitism,” he later told the police. “But at least there I never experienced any violence. That only happened to me here, in Sweden.”
The Jews of Malmö, a community of about 1,500 in a city of 300,000, are living through a new form of anti-Semitism. This kind does not stem from neo-Nazis or right-wing extremists—traditional perpetrators of European Jew-hatred—but has come to the city through immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East and is part of a larger, countrywide problem of failed integration. According to the 2011 census, one in 10 Malmö citizens comes from the Middle East and North Africa, and ethnic Swedes are no longer in the majority among 15-year-olds. In 2009, 60 hate crimes against Jews were reported in Malmö, ranging from hate speech to assault.… A dozen families have already left Malmö for Stockholm, Israel, or the United States because of anti-Semitism, according to community leaders.
If only this were the whole problem. But Malmö’s mayor of 17 years, Ilmar Reepalu, has “Tourettes syndrome with respect to Jews,” according to Kvällsposten, a Swedish newspaper.… When a journalist from the Malmö daily Skånska Dagbladet asked him in January 2010 about growing anti-Semitism in his city, he replied, “We accept neither anti-Semitism nor Zionism in Malmö.” His reaction to the fact that Jews are leaving his city because of anti-Semitism was to maintain that “there have been no attacks against Jews, and if Jews want to leave for Israel that is not a concern for Malmö.” In an interview with Danish television in March 2010, he described criticism about his statements regarding Jews and Zionism as an attack orchestrated by “the Israeli lobby.…”
During Israel’s 2008-2009 war against Hamas in Gaza, there was a sharp increase in anti-Semitic violence in Malmö—but the mayor didn’t seem concerned. On Dec. 27, 2008, as Israel Defense Forces launched Operation Cast Lead, the Jewish community of Malmö held a demonstration in the city’s main square to express sympathy for “all civilian victims” in Gaza and the Jewish state. They were soon confronted by a much larger counter-demonstration, consisting mainly of immigrants from the Middle East. The Jews were singing hine ma tov, but their song was overwhelmed by chants of “damn Jews” and “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler!” A glass bottle flew through the air and hit a Jewish girl in the back. When a homemade bomb was fired straight into the Jewish group, the police decided to evacuate them.…
When Reepalu was questioned about these events, he chose to criticize the Jews of his city for not taking a firm stand against the policies of the state of Israel: “Instead they choose to have a demonstration at the main square, which can send the wrong signals,” he said, while referring in passing to Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.…
At the end of 2010, Shimon Samuels and Rabbi Abraham Cooper from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles visited Malmö to judge the situation first-hand. They met in Stockholm with Reepalu and Sweden’s conservative Secretary of Justice Beatrice Ask. At these meetings Reepalu and Ask were informed that the Wiesenthal Center would issue a travel advisory for Jews visiting southern Sweden.… When the Wiesenthal Center repeated the travel advisory at the beginning of 2012, Reepalu called the decision bizarre: “I get the impression that the aim of the [Simon Wiesenthal] Center is to make people forget what is going on in the state of Israel—human rights abuse that all people should denounce.…”
Fredrik Sieradzski, 47, is a Jew from Malmö who got tired of waiting for the city’s politicians to take action against anti-Semitic threats and harassment. He recently initiated what he calls “kippah walks” through the streets of the city. Members of the community meet up after services on Saturdays and walk through town wearing visible Jewish symbols. He is critical of how the Swedish media portrays the situation for Malmö’s Jews. “They don’t write that the perpetrators are Muslims.…”
Last time around, his kippa walk gathered 20 people.… The walks have become a way of dealing with a fear of anti-Semitism that permeates all aspects of Jewish life in Malmö.…
(Paulina Neuding is a lawyer and editor-in-chief of the Swedish magazine Neo.
She is an editorial page contributor to the Stockholm daily Svenska Dagbladet.)
The following is excerpted from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's
speech marking National Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Ottawa, Ontario, 23 April 2012
…Survivors, honoured veterans, Canadian descendants of the Righteous Among the Nations, distinguished guests, fellow parliamentarians, ladies and gentlemen.
Six million. Six million innocent men, women, and children. We remember this number.
It reminds us of the sheer scale of the Holocaust, one aspect of its singular place in the history of crimes against humanity. Above all, we remember the individuals included in this number. We remember that each one has a name—precious, irreplaceable, deserving of honour.
And so we gather as a nation on this solemn day…[to] honour each and every one of the six million who were murdered in the Holocaust. We pay tribute to the courage and solidarity of the Jewish people in that time of gravest peril. We stand in awe of the Righteous. We give thanks for those who survived.…
Ladies and gentlemen, today we remember not only a fact of history.… We strengthen our resolve to defend the vulnerable, to challenge the aggressor and to confront evil. And we renew our vow: never again.
But to honour the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, it is not enough simply to remember. Truly remembering the Holocaust must also be an understanding and an undertaking. It is an understanding that the same threats exist today. It is an undertaking of a solemn responsibility to fight those threats.
We see it in the manifestos of organizations which deny the right of Israel as a Jewish state to exist. We see it most profoundly and clearly in the ravings of a ruthless leader who threatens to wipe Israel off the map, while violating his country’s international obligations and pursuing the development of nuclear weapons.
We see it in the slaughter of Jewish children and other innocents, just last month, by a man born and raised in a tolerant, Western country [France]. And we see it here at home, every year on some university campuses, in the unconscionable slur that is the so-called Israeli Apartheid Week.
Ladies and gentlemen, while the Holocaust stands alone, it does not stand isolated. It is but the most hellish chapter in the long and continuing history of anti-Semitism. We must face this history unflinching. Anti-Semitism is a sickness, a deadly moral sickness. Anti-Semitism kills the lives and security of its victims, the consciences of its perpetrators, the integrity of those who fail to speak out, of those who counsel a false peace, of those who seek refuge in moral equivalence.
As history and present controversies tell us all too well, anti-Semitism is a threat not only to the Jewish people. It is a threat to us all—a sickness that quickly morphs into a hatred and a desire to destroy anyone—anyone who is different than its perpetrator.
But most important of all, we remind ourselves, we remind ourselves in this moment, that we are neither hopeless nor helpless. This is the message of Yad Vashem, of the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, and of all those committed to Holocaust remembrance and education.…
