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This was the pretext of Israel’s withdrawal. But it wasn’t the subtext. The subtext of the withdrawal – telegraphed to both Israelis and the international community – was that the withdrawal was cause the demise of Religious Zionism at the hands of the leftist progeny of Labor Zionists. That is, the operation wasn’t about peace with the Arabs. It was about cultural supremacy within Israel.
In the countdown to the withdrawal, the Palestinians did everything they could to make clear the move would not enhance the chances for peace. They triumphantly declared that then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to expel Gaza’s Jews was an admission that Israel had been defeated by the Palestinians. Hamas was ascendant and both Hamas and Fatah declared repeatedly that they would continue their terror war until all of Israel was destroyed. And as the pretext crumbled, the subtext became more prominent.
Haaretz editorialized six weeks before the expulsion of Gaza’s 8,000 Jews, “The disengagement of Israeli policy from its religious fuel is the real disengagement currently on the agenda. On the day after the disengagement, religious Zionism’s status will be different. The real question is not how many mortar shells will fall, or who will guard the Philadelphi route [connecting Gaza with Egypt], or whether the Palestinians will dance of the roofs of Ganei Tal. The real question is who sets the national agenda.”
Religious Zionist leaders were in a horrible bind. If they responded to the demands of their own people and fought fire with fire, they knew – given the Left’s control of the media – they would be demonized for years to come. And they knew that if the Left succeeded in destroying their reputation among rank and file Israelis, they would be powerless to defend Judea and Samaria.
So in the end, Religious Zionist leaders disappointed their followers, making do with mass protests in the countdown to the expulsions and then allowing the IDF to carry out the expulsions largely unchallenged. While they failed to save Gaza’s Jews from internal exile, they at least succeeded in preventing the demise of Religious Zionism as a political and social force in Israel.
Their success was acknowledged by Haaretz. In the weeks that followed the expulsions, Haaretz columnist Orit Shochat bemoaned the fact that the campaign against Religious Zionism had not succeeded. As she put it, “Soldiers who experienced the evacuation won’t travel to an ashram in India because they discovered that there is an ashram next door. The same Jewish religion that they hadn’t seen up close for a long time embraces them into its fold with a song and a tear for a common fate. They have now sat arm-in-arm at the synagogues in Gush Katif, they have now felt the holiness mixed in sweat, they have now moved rhythmically and sung songs. They have stood in line to kiss the Torah scrolls. They are now half-inside.”
Zionism’s revolutionary message to Jewry was that after 2,000 years of powerlessness, Jews would again become actors on the global stage. But Zionism has many movements and not all of them are equally revolutionary. The two most significant Zionist movements today are Labor Zionism and Religious Zionism.
The inherent weakness of Labor Zionism is that it was never aimed specifically at enabling Jews to be Jews. Rather, its purpose was to enable Jews to be socialists. Understanding that the anti-Semitic climate in Europe in the early 20th century rendered Jewish assimilation into a larger socialist sea impossible, Labor Zionists argued that by establishing a Jewish state Jews would be “normalized” and accepted as regular people and socialists by the nations of the world. That is, Labor Zionism’s message was assimilation on a national rather than on an individual one since conditions in Europe precluded individual assimilation.
Labor Zionists have been confounded by the endurance of anti-Semitism and its transformation of Israel, though anti-Zionism, into the International Jew. The world’s refusal to accept Israel as an equal has been shattering for them. It has caused Labor Zionists to abandon Zionism in the hopes that by doing so they will finally be accepted as equals by the nations of the world. At its core, Labor Zionism is outward seeking rather than inward looking.
In contrast, Religious Zionism is inward looking. It seeks to turn Jews into actors on the international stage as Jews. It also seeks to make Judaism responsive to the imperatives of an empowered people as it was responsive to the imperatives of Jews as a powerless people during the generations of exile. Because of its specific message to Jews as Jews, Religious Zionism is a pure revolutionary ideology.
Religious Zionists are a finger in the eye of the Labor Zionists for their stubborn devotion to Judaism and their relative indifference to whether Israel is accepted by the anti-Semites of the world. And Labor Zionists are not alone in their angry rejection of Religious Zionism’s message. They are joined by the non-Zionist religious establishment.
The non-Zionist religious establishment feels threatened by Religious Zionism’s attempts to reinvest Judaism with its nationalist mission for the Jewish nation. And, unfortunately, the non-Zionist religious establishment is joining forces with the Labor Zionist establishment to attack Religious Zionism.
In early May, a panel of three non-Zionist rabbinic judges on Jerusalem’s High Rabbinic Court published a ruling in a divorce case declaring all the thousands of conversions carried out under the auspices of Religious Zionist Rabbi Chaim Druckman, and the state’s Conversion Authority he headed, null and void. The court argued that Druckman did not investigate sufficiently whether the converts were committed to observing all the mitzvot. Piling on to the non-Zionist establishment’s act, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week removed Druckman from his position as head of the Conversion Authority.
Both Rabbi Avraham Sherman, who wrote the rabbinical high court’s decision, and Druckman’s fellow Religious Zionist rabbis agree that the dispute is an attack on Religious Zionism’s view of the role of religion in Israel rather than a strictly halachic disagreement. In his ruling, Sherman wrote of Druckman and his Religious Zionist colleagues in the Conversion Authority, “All these rabbis have one thing in common. They all see in conversion a sacred commandment as part of their national responsibility…. In other words, the conversion is not primarily the spiritual and religious need of the individual convert who wishes to join the Jewish people and accept upon himself all the commandments. Rather, conversion is a means of improving the spiritual situation of the entire Jewish nation living in Israel. It is a way of bringing Jews closer to their Judaism.”
The Religious Zionist movement is up in arms over the ruling, which its leaders are calling an act of aggression and halachic malfeasance. Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, who heads the hesder yeshiva in Petach Tikvah and is considered a leading rabbinic authority in Religious Zionist circles, called Sherman’s ruling “a desecration of God’s name” and said that if it is not overturned he would set up independent conversion courts outside the aegis of the Chief Rabbinate.
Between the Labor Zionists’ attempts to destroy Religious Zionism politically, and the non-Zionist rabbinic leadership’s attempts to demonize it religiously, Religious Zionism has been under tremendous pressure in recent years. One can only hope its leaders will have the wisdom to persevere. Israel and the Jewish people need Religious Zionism more than anyone will ever admit.
Originally published in The Jewish Press Utopian Peace Junkies
Arguments against an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights are so self-evident that they simply fly off your tongue. But that doesn't mean that it is unnecessary to make them. This is especially the case when supposedly serious people like former IDF chief of general staff Lt. Gen. (ret.) Dan Halutz - co-architect of the strategic disaster which was the Second Lebanon War - advocate withdrawal in exchange for "peace."
So here goes.
Since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Golan Heights has been Israel's quietest, most stable border. This is largely the case because the Syrians know that from the Golan Heights, the road to Damascus is wide open.
An Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights would destabilize the border by removing Israel's offensive deterrent capacity against Syria. Since nature abhors a vacuum, Israel's deterrent capacity would be transferred to the hands of Syrian dictator and Iranian proxy Bashar Assad and his henchmen.
Additionally, in the wake of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights on the heels of Iran's consolidation of its hold over Lebanon, Assad's regime will be triumphant. His decision to cast his country's lot with Iran will be perceived an act of brilliant statecraft.
While there is no certainty about how long it would take before Syria took advantage of the new situation to initiate aggression against Israel, it is clear that an Israeli withdrawal would raise tensions dramatically. And those tensions would find the remainder of Israeli territory more vulnerable to an Iranian-Syrian attack than ever before.
Today Syria already has the capacity to attack all of Israel with its Scud and Nodong ballistic missiles. But while these missiles can terrorize and kill Israeli civilians, their guidance systems are generally assessed as too primitive to enable them to be successfully deployed against tactical and strategic targets. Possession of the Golan Heights would enable Syria to use more conventional armaments to precisely target IDF positions, arms depots and attack formations throughout Northern Israel. So one of the consequences of Israel's handover of the Golan Heights would be a steep rise in the price in blood that a post-Golan Heights-withdrawal-Israel would be forced to pay to win any future military contest with Iranian proxies Hizbullah or Syria.
Indeed it would dwarf the heavy price that Israel paid for victory in 1967 and 1973.
And the cost of an Israeli relinquishment of the Golan would not be paid by Israel alone. With Syria in control of the Golan, Damascus and its allies in the Iranian axis would be even more willing to assert themselves in battlegrounds like Iraq. Their renewed will to fight would limit still further the possibility that the US could remove its forces from Iraq without risking the prospect of Iraq being forced into the Iranian axis.
Moreover, with Israel's strategic options massively curtailed as a result of its surrender of the Golan Heights, the Iranians would have far less cause to fear that Israel would launch a counter-attack in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel or a preemptive attack against Iranian nuclear installations.
IN HIS statement Saturday in support of Olmert's announced intention to give Assad the Golan Heights, Halutz said, "For real peace one must be willing to pay a real price." While this is no doubt a true statement, it is completely irrelevant. Everyone knows that Israel won't get a "real peace" from Assad.
Indeed it won't even get a pretend peace from Assad.
To understand why Israel can expect to receive absolutely nothing from Syria in exchange for the Golan Heights, one needs to look no further than Syria's last big peace treaty with a neighbor. In 1989, Syria agreed to withdraw all its troops from Lebanon under the Taif Accord that ended Lebanon's civil war. Needless to say, Syrian troops continued their illegal occupation Lebanon for the next 15 years and still today continue to block Lebanese independence by arming Hizbullah.
Or consider Israel's "successful" treaty with Egypt, under which Egypt received the entire Sinai Peninsula in exchange for signing a peace treaty with Israel. Due to Egypt's willingness to sign the deal, Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship has been hailed as a moderate and friendly regime by the US and Israel alike. And yet, short of going to war against Israel, since it signed its peace treaty, Egypt has done just about everything in its power to endanger Israel's security.
At the cabinet meeting Sunday, Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin warned the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government that Hamas has missiles with ranges long enough to hit Ashdod and Kiryat Gat. Diskin added that with the border between Gaza and Egypt breached, time is working in Hamas's favor. With every passing day of Israeli inaction, Hamas brings in more and more advanced weapons. Aside from Iran, which is the major source of Hamas's weapons, Egypt has done more than any other country to enable Hamas's missile war against southern Israel and its takeover of Gaza in general. As MK Yuval Steinitz has noted repeatedly over the past several years, those missiles didn't just magically appear at the Egyptian-Gaza border. Those Iranian weapons are transported in ships through Egyptian waters that dock at Egyptian ports.
The weapons are then offloaded onto trucks and travel overland across the country before reaching Gaza.
Egyptian security forces could intercept these weapons at any point along the way. But they pass through unmolested because Egypt wants Hamas to have those weapons to attack Israel and to keep the border destabilized.
And if this is what Israel gets from our supposedly moderate Egyptian friends, what can Israel expect to receive from our radical Syrian enemies?
Here it bears noting that Syria is still preventing the International Atomic Energy Agency from sending inspectors to check out the site of the North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria that Israel destroyed last September 6. And again, if this is how Syria treats the UN, how will it treat Israel after Israel relinquishes its ability to threaten the Syrian capital?
GIVEN ALL of these self-evident drawbacks of Olmert's proposal to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria, it is obvious that the plan is ridiculous.
Similarly, in light of the massive danger such a withdrawal would entail, withdrawal advocates like Halutz are exposed as complete fools.
But the fact that this is true does not diminish the chance that Israel may still give up the Golan Heights if those who advocate this policy remain in power and continue to enjoy public respectability. Reality has counted for little in Israel's political and strategic discourse in recent years.
The lunacy of transferring control over south Lebanon to Hizbullah in 2000 and of giving Gaza to Fatah and Hamas in 2005 was just as obvious as the lunacy of relinquishing the Golan Heights to Syria in 2008. Moreover, the lunacy of transferring control over Gaza and Judea and Samaria to the PLO was obvious to anyone with eyes to see in the 1990s. And yet, even though all the opponents of these strategic fiascos made these arguments until they were blue in the face, Israel still withdrew.
All along and still today, standing against these voices of sane reality were voices preaching utopian peace. Men and women like Yossi Beilin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Shulamit Aloni, Tzipi Livni, Yuli Tamir, Sheli Yachimovich, Amnon Shahak, Uri Saguy, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and their chorus of "peace" operatives in the media castigated all proponents of reality-based policymaking as nothing more than fear-mongering fanatics and enemies of peace almost indistinguishable from the likes of Hizbullah, Hamas and all the rest.
And of course the voices of reason were correct every time and never thanked for their wisdom. Indeed, they continue to this day to be condemned as fear-mongering fanatics.
And in spite of the fact that the utopian peace junkies have been wrong every single time, they are still the first to be put on television and the radio to advocate Israel's capitulation on every conceivable front. Even as the cemeteries fill up with the charred corpses of Israelis killed because of their utopian madness, they are still feted as experts and wise men and elder statesmen.
The one hopeful sign of change is found in the Israeli public's reaction to the current malformed public debate about Olmert's new plan to give Assad the Golan Heights. In the past every time a government launched negotiations or simply called for unilateral surrender of land opinion polls showed an immediate jump of some 20 percent in public support for the initiative.
Today's polls suggest that public support for a withdrawal from the Golan Heights has decreased since Olmert announced he is negotiating their surrender.
If during past negotiations and planned withdrawals, politicians enjoyed the support of 45 percent of Israelis for their moves, today Olmert has the support of only 22 percent of Israelis for his plan to give up the Golan Heights.
The fact that Israelis are reacting negatively to people like Olmert and Halutz and their advocated withdrawals for "peace," may simply be a consequence of the public's contempt for these men specifically. That is, it is possible that the public would be more supportive of capitulation to Syria if more popular leaders like former prime minister Ariel Sharon were advocating it.
But it is also possible that the public has finally had enough of these utopian gasbags and their capitulation agenda. One can only hope that this is the case. Because while Israel will not be destroyed if its leaders are stupid enough to relinquish the Golan Heights, without the Golan Heights, Israel's chances of survival in the long term will be vastly diminished. Anti-Zionism at 60
Israel's 60th Independence Day is an excuse for the international media to weigh in on the state of the Jewish state. Given the anti-Israel bias of most of the international media, not surprisingly, most of the reports reveal less about Israel's status at 60 than they reveal about how anti-Zionists perceive Israel at 60.
Two critiques - both cover stories of major magazines - stand out in this regard. In Canada, Maclean's magazine's May 5 cover pictures three Israeli soldiers struggling to raise the national flag. The headline reads, "Why Israel Can't Survive."
In the US, the cover of The Atlantic Magazine's May edition sports a Star of David painted in Palestinian colors of red, black and green ensconced in a PLO flag. The headline asks, rhetorically, "Is Israel finished?"
The authors of the two articles - Michael Petrou in Maclean's and Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic come to their subject from different angles. Petrou writes as an emotionally disengaged observer. Goldberg, who made aliya in the 1980s, writes as a disillusioned Zionist who abandoned Israel and moved back to America. Petrou writes of Israel's certain demise with amoral detachment. Goldberg's dispatch is a deeply emotional attempt to justify his decision to abandon Israel.
PETROU'S ARTICLE begins optimistically enough. He asserts that at 60, Israel can handle all the security threats that come its way, including Iran's nuclear weapons program and Hizbullah's missiles in Lebanon. Yet despite its military strength, Petrou says that Israel is nonetheless doomed for it has no way of contending with what he proclaims is the greatest threat: the Palestinian demographic time bomb.
By Petrou's estimation, "Within one or two decades, the number of Muslim and Christian Arabs will surpass the number of Israeli Jews (including Gaza, the West Bank and Israel itself). When that happens, if there is still no Palestinian state (and in the absence of large-scale ethnic cleansing), Israelis will be forced to choose between two futures. Their country will either be Jewish, but not democratic - in other words, a Jewish minority will control a land mostly inhabited by Palestinians - or Israel will be democratic, but not Jewish, because Arabs will form the majority in what will become a binational state." While well written, Petrou's piece is a journalistic embarrassment. For his central contention is a fabrication.
The Arab demographic time bomb is a fiction. It was created out of whole cloth in 1997. That year, the Palestinian Authority's Bureau of Statistics published data from a falsified census which claimed that there were 3.8 million Palestinians living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The PA projected population growth of some 4.7 percent per year - far higher than any other place on earth. At that growth rate, the PA claimed that by 2015, the Palestinian population in Judea, Samaria and Gaza would be some 5.8 million and that together with Arab Israelis, who number some 1.2 million, they would comprise the majority of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In January 2005 a group of Israeli and American researchers published an in-depth analysis of the PA data. They compared the census with birth and death records published by the PA's Health Ministry, and education records of children entering first grade published by the PA's Education Ministry. They compared immigration rates published by the PA with immigration records compiled by Israeli authorities at the international borders. They compared population statistics with voter rolls in the 1996 PA elections. Their findings were remarkable.
They discovered that the PA had counted as residents hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived abroad. It double counted Arab Jerusalemites. It assumed high immigration rates when in fact except for 1994, the PA has experienced net emigration every year. The PA inflated birthrates and deflated death rates. It ignored the tens of thousands of Palestinians who had immigrated to Israel.
ALL IN ALL the American-Israeli Demographic Research Group discovered that the PA's census data was exaggerated by some 50 percent. Its researchers discovered that there were only 2.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza, Judea and Samaria in 2004. They found that Israeli Jewish fertility rates are higher than Palestinian fertility rates in Judea and Samaria and the Jewish fertility rates are converging with Israeli Arab fertility rates. Fertility rates in Gaza are similarly declining steadily. So too, Israel's net Jewish immigration rates are positive and rising. Most striking, the researchers found that Israel's Jewish majority west of the Jordan River has remained remarkably steady since 1967. Today Jews make up a 3:2 majority over Arabs in Israel, Gaza and Judea and Samaria. Jews comprise 67 percent of the population of Israel and Judea and Samaria and nearly 80 percent of the population within sovereign Israel.
The AIDRG's initial and subsequent reports have received significant attention in Israel. Had he wished, Petrou could easily have accessed its work on the Internet. But that would have upset his conclusions.
Petrou's story reveals a consistent message of many anti-Zionists. That message is that no matter what Israel does, it remains essentially powerless, just as Jews were powerless for 18 centuries in exile. It is meant to demoralize Israel's supporters by telling them there is no point in trying to prevent the inevitable. And it is meant to console Israel's detractors. They needn't worry. Israel is on its way out.
WHILE GOLDBERG too, makes use of the PA's phony demographic data, his argument for Israel's demise is not about demography. It is an indictment of Jewish power. If Petrou's Jewish state is doomed because it is powerless just as Jews have always been, Goldberg's Jewish state is doomed because it has sinfully deviated from Jewish history by being powerful.
Goldberg set up his article as an indirect dialogue between far-leftist novelist David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed in the Second Lebanon War and Olmert - who Grossman blames for his son's death. Goldberg served as the moderator. Goldberg's decision to focus his analysis on Grossman was a revealing one. While Grossman enjoys a pride of place among the radical leftist elite, he is a marginal figure in Israeli society. Yet by Goldberg's telling, Grossman is a giant. As he tells it, Grossman's son's death in war, "became a national tragedy." Yet this is untrue.
Goldberg likes Grossman, because like Goldberg, Grossman doesn't feel comfortable with Jewish power. Goldberg notes approvingly that during the course of the Second Lebanon war, Grossman held a press conference with fellow radical leftist novelists A.B. Yehoshua and Amoz Oz demanding that Israel not launch a ground offensive in Lebanon. Goldberg ignores the fact that their call was widely ignored by the general public and to the extent that their press conference evoked a response, it was a negative one.
Goldberg recalled that after that press conference, Grossman told him, "Force [against Hizbullah] will fan the flames of hatred for Israel in the region and the entire world, and may even... create the situation that will bring upon us the next war and push the Middle East to an all-out regional war."
What is bizarre about Grossman's statement is that it was made while Israel was in the midst of a regional war. The war was fought by Hizbullah forces but it was directed by Iran, and Hizbullah was armed and equipped by Syria with Russian assistance. Today Grossman, who advocates negotiations with Iran's Palestinian proxy Hamas, is none the wiser and no less isolated from mainstream Israeli opinion. Yet Goldberg misleads his readers by claiming that Grossman's views are mainstream and influential.
Goldberg's assessment of Israel as destined to fail is predicated on two ideological opinions which imbue both his narrative and his analysis. First, he claims that Israel's decision to build communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines is the reason that the Arabs refuse to make peace with it. That is, it is Israel's fault that there is no peace. Arabs are not actors, they merely react to Israel. Second, and more fundamentally, Goldberg argues because Israel is powerful, it is necessarily immoral.
Far from a moral argument, Goldberg's second assertion renders his analysis a moral perversion. For him, there is no distinction between actors only between their relative military power. It is military strength, or the absence of military strength, that determines if a nation should be supported or delegitimized. In his mind, there is little difference between a powerful Israel and a powerful Germany. Both are destined to use power to advance evil. By the same token, since America is militarily powerful, its campaign in Iraq is evil and since al-Qaida in Iraq is militarily weak, it is a victim, and good, just like the Palestinians.
Goldberg's view is just as familiar as Petrou's. As Prof. Ruth Wisse from Harvard University wrote in her recently published book Jews and Power, throughout the years of Jewish powerlessness in 18 centuries of exile, many Jews confused their tragic and lamentable existential condition for a moral virtue. They reviled Zionism with its message of Jewish empowerment because they refused to recognize that power can be used to advance both good and evil, depending on the identity of those who wield it. For Goldberg, then, it is the very success of Zionism in empowering Jews that makes it unacceptable. In the end, the unifying factor in Petrou's and Goldberg's anti-Zionism is that both ignore Zionists. For Petrou, Zionists are irrelevant because they are doomed to fail whoever they are. For Goldberg, Zionists are no more than symbols. They cannot be moral because they are powerful.
Israel's success is a testament to the enduring ingenuity and strength of the Jewish people as moral actors. The longevity of anti-Zionism is a testament to the fact that no matter what Israel's accomplishments, there will always be those who fail to see them.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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