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ISRANET DAILY BRIEFING ARCHIVE Volume VIII, No. 1,834 • Wednesday, April 30, 2008
WEDNESDAY’S “NEWS IN REVIEW” ROUND-UP WEEKLY QUOTES “Recently, I read two reports on the state of affairs in the Arab World. Both were written by Arab researchers, one for an international organization and one for an official Arab body, and both described the lack of access to information, technology, education, culture, and so on, in this part of the world. Nowhere in these reports was Israel mentioned, nor the United States, nor Canada nor France. I realized that these reports blamed the Arab world for its own troubles. This is extremely important. Why? Because when I speak to groups which openly blame Israel, the U.S. and other “rich” countries in a show of solidarity with the Palestinian-Muslim “victims”, I ask them: How many Muslim deaths occur at the hands of Israel each year? There are a maximum of 100-200 deaths, and generally the people intercepted by the IDF are terrorists preparing for an attack and not civilians. But how many Muslims have been killed in Chechnya? And in China? The minority Uighur Muslim community in China has been massacred, more than 2 million people killed. And regarding Darfur—where Muslims are killing other Muslims—there have been more than 300,000 deaths and even more displaced people. In Iraq, there are 60 deaths on average per day as a result of the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. But these deaths are never mentioned. So, blaming Israel is simply an excuse, the Jews are a scapegoat…. These people, and the media who rush to interview them, are out of touch with reality… When I was in Israel recently, I spoke with many Israeli Arabs who expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian people. So I asked them, if a Palestinian state were created tomorrow, would you move there? Well no, they replied. And this is the reality—why doesn’t the media report this? Why are the media, in general and here in Canada, satisfied with reporting propaganda?”—Noted French-Muslim writer and philosopher, Morad El Hattab, at a CIJR seminar in Montreal today. (Translated from French by CIJR, April 30) “Even 60 years later, who would believe that the ugly head of Jew hatred and Israel [hatred] is rearing all over the world; still inciting, poisoning and enticing. The voice of the deniers is not absent from among these; those who are driven insane with hatred; those who deny the greatest horror that humanity has ever known. To those who hate and deny and hatch evil and to any who allow them to operate in their vicinity we say on this day: Never again!" You who deny truths documented in millions of documents; you who deny the railroad tracks leading to the crematoriums and the extermination camps that remain a mute monument; you who deny the eyewitness accounts of millions of people are not interested in historical accuracy - you wish to deny Israel's right to exist and mistakenly think that the Jewish State was established because of the Holocaust.”—Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a passionate speech during the opening ceremony for Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. (Jerusalem Post, April 30) “[T]he leaders of Hamas are increasingly serving as the proxy warriors of an Iranian regime that is destabilizing the region, seeking a nuclear capability and proclaiming its desire to destroy Israel… How can any government negotiate with a group that sees every agreement, every choice not as a compromise to advance peace, but as a tactic to later advance war?… No, the only responsible policy is to isolate Hamas and defend against its threats until Hamas makes the choice that supports peace.”—Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking yesterday at an American Jewish Committee meeting in Washington. Moreover, Rice was not optimistic that Israel and Syria could negotiate peace. “It is hard to see there is a Syrian regime receptive” to negotiations with Israel at this point", she said. “Syria is like Iran's sidecar,” she said, aligning itself tightly with a country that threatens Israel's existence. And “you know about Syria's nuclear program,” Rice added, in reference to the Syrian nuclear facility built with North Korea's cooperation and allegedly destroyed by Israeli jets last September. (Agence France-Presse, April 30; Washington Post, April 29) “We see Hamas as responsible for everything that happens there, for all injuries. The army is acting, and will continue to act, against Hamas, including inside the Gaza Strip. Hamas is also responsible, by way of its activity within the civilian population, for part of the casualties among uninvolved civilians.”—Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, while on a tour of an Israeli weapons factory, concerning the explosion in Gaza when an IDF operation targeting two terrorists ignited their explosives-filled backpacks, engulfing a neighbouring home. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “Our sorrows are true and more real than the fake remorse of the terrorist organizations that expose their citizens to such injuries.” (Ha’aretz, April 28; Ha’aretz, New York Times, April 29) “The PLO is the sole legitimate representative [of the Palestinian people], and it has not changed its platform even one iota. In light of the weakness of the Arab nation and the lack of values, and in light of the American control over the world, the PLO proceeds through phases, without changing its strategy. Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at last, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine.”—PA representative in Lebanon Abbas Zaki, also known as Sharif Mash’al, former head of Fatah operations, in an interview with NBN TV. (MEMRI, April 14) “It would be naive to think Syria will neglect or abandon its strategic alliances that do not stem from the Arab-Israeli conflict.”—Dr. Samir Taqi, a Syrian analyst who is reportedly very close to decision-makers in Damascus, indicating on Al Manar TV, that Syria will not sever ties with Iran and Hezbollah even as part of a possible peace agreement with Israel. Taqi has received the official title of adviser to the prime minister, and heads the Center of Oriental Studies, a political think-tank. (Ha’aretz, April 30) “You must have heard recent statements on the process with the Syrians. I can only say one thing about that: Due to the fact that there is a strengthening of the radical axis, and Syria is a very central and dominant component of the radical axis, any handover of the Golan Heights to them means Iranians in the Golan Heights.”—Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, talking to reporters about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s reported message to Damascus that he would be willing to exchange the entire Golan Heights for peace. Mofaz also said Hezbollah had doubled its arsenal of long-range rockets in Southern Lebanon despite UN Resolution 1701. (Jerusalem Post, April 29) “[Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter] went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas.… [During the visit, Hamas] was shelling our cities and maiming and injuring and wounding Israeli babies and Israeli children.”—Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman, at a news conference sponsored by The Israel Project. He added, for all the good Carter’s done, he has “turned into what I believe to be a bigot.” Noting that Hamas is sponsored by Iran, he added, “The real danger, the real problem is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the real threat is Iran.” (Ha’aretz, April 25) “It is Gillerman’s prerogative to criticize Carter. However, Israel is perpetually indebted to a person who saved many Israeli lives by bringing peace with Egypt with his own hands.”—MK Yossi Beilin, suggesting, further, that Ambassador Gillerman be recalled from the UN for his recent remarks about Jimmy Carter. (Jerusalem Post, April 25) “[Naeem Muhammad] Khan [a twenty-three-year-old Karachi-born Toronto resident and Canadian citizen] is an Islamist, not a terrorist, but what most disturbs moderate Muslims like Tahir Gora are his harsh comments about those who do not subscribe to fundamentalist beliefs. In his online postings, Mr. Khan calls Tarek Fatah, Irshad Manji and other moderates ‘apostates’ and says that under Islamic law the punishment for apostasy is death. The same goes for those who insult Islam. ‘Behead her!!! And make a nice video and post it on YouTube,’ he writes about one so-called ‘Islam basher.’ As for ‘Jews who support Zionism and Israel...since they are killing Palestinians...killing them [Jews] is not bad...they deserve to die.’… ‘In recent times, hundreds of Islamic radicals have settled in Canada,’ said Mr. Gora, a Pakistan-born writer who has been tackling the issue in his Hamilton Spectator columns. ‘They are spreading hatred and extremism in the guise of freedom of expression. On the other hand, they put death penalties to those dissidents who challenge the traditional medieval way of Islam.’ Mr. Gora heads the Canada Safety Think Tank, which monitors what he calls the growing Islamic radicalization in the country. He wants Ottawa to take the issue more seriously and believes police should lay hate crimes charges against extremists who pronounce death sentences on moderates like himself. The government says it is trying to tackle the problem. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s latest annual report listed radicalization as a top priority.”—Stewart Bell, in a National Post article on Naeem Muhammad Khan called “Home-grown ‘champion of Islam’”. (National Post, April 25) SHORT TAKES PA COURT SENTENCES ACCUSED COLLABORATOR TO DEATH—(Jerusalem) Palestinian judges in Hebron on Monday ordered the execution of a man for collaborating with Israel. Judges say the man provided information that helped Israeli forces kill four Palestinian terrorists. The order still has to be signed by the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas. In November last year, authorities in Jerusalem arrested four residents of East Jerusalem for allegedly conspiring to kill a man they suspected of cooperating with the Israeli security services. (Ha’aretz, April 28) HAMAS STOLE 60,000 LITERS OF GAZA FUEL—(Jerusalem) The head of the Palestinian Authority’s gas agency confirmed Tuesday that Hamas gunmen had raided the Palestinian side of the Nahal Oz fuel terminal, stealing at least 60,000 liters of fuel meant for the Gaza power station in order to fill their own vehicles. Also Tuesday, an Egyptian security official said that Egyptian border guards discovered five new underground smuggling tunnels in part to pump fuel north of the Rafah border crossing. (Jerusalem Post, April 29) 100 UK JEWISH INTELLECTUALS DECRY CREATION OF STATE OF ISRAEL (London) In an article published in Wednesday's Guardian under the title "We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary", about 100 self-professed Jewish intellectuals and academics accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing, violating international law, and denying Palestinians "their human rights and national aspirations". The statement continues to call on the Israeli government to end the embargo on Gaza and grant the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Signatories include playwright Harold Pinter, and Prof. Steven Rose, British Radio 4 broadcaster Mike Rosen, Daniel Machover, the judge who filed charges against IDF reservist Doron Almog, and Haim Bresheeth, the professor of communications at the University of East London who issued the call for an academic boycott of Israel. The statement made no mention of any aggression, hostilities or responsibility on the part of the Palestinians. (Jerusalem Post, April 30) IRAN: BAN CANADA JEWISH GROUP FROM ANTI-RACISM MEET—(Jerusalem) Iran is seeking to block a top Canadian Jewish group from receiving accreditation for a major international conference on racism next year, according to the Toronto Star. The report said Iran claimed that the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA) was not a non-profit organization and had “made no significant contribution to fighting racism.” CIJA has until next Monday, the report says, to counter the claims made against it. If the issue cannot be resolved, the paper says, the group’s attendance will be decided in a vote by all member states. (Ha’aretz, April 23) U.S. AMBASSADOR WALKS OUT AFTER ISRAEL LIKENED TO NAZIS—(United Nations) Several Western ambassadors, including the U.S. ambassador to the UN, walked out of a Security Council meeting last week after a Libyan representative compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis in the concentration camps. The comment was made during closed-door consultations on a proposal to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza. South Africa’s UN ambassador, Kumalo Dumisani, ended the meeting soon after the walkout, explaining that it became clear that no agreement over a statement would be reached. (New York Sun, April 24) TUNISIAN ENVOY TO ADDRESS HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE—(Jerusalem) Tunisia’s representative to the Palestinian Authority, Ahmed el-Abassi, spoke last week at the opening of a three-day conference at Jerusalem’s Yad Ben Zvi Institute that focused on the fate of the Jews of North Africa during WWII, Arutz Sheva reported. A spokesman for Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, said “[El Abassi’s] presence expresses solidarity with the subject and recognition of the trouble and hardships of the Tunisian Jewish community under the German occupation.” Researchers from Israel, Europe and the U.S. took part in the conference. (Arutz Sheva, April 28) BUSH PICKS PETRAEUS TO HEAD MILITARY OPERATIONS IN MIDEAST—(Washington) The Bush administration has picked General David Petraeus, its top commander in Iraq, to take charge of operations across the Middle East and Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno to take over in Baghdad. President Bush will send the nominations to the U.S. Senate, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Monday. If confirmed by the Senate, Gen. Petraeus will replace former admiral William Fallon, who resigned recently after a reported break with the Bush administration over Iran policy. (Globe and Mail, National Post, April 24) PENTAGON: IRANIAN WEAPONS INCREASING IN IRAQ—(Washington) Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaking at a Pentagon press conference, said recently made Iranian weapons are entering Iraq at a steadily increasing rate. There is also evidence that Iran is continuing to train insurgents for the fight in Iraq. He said, “I just don’t see any evidence of them backing off.” (New York Post, April 26) TERRORISTS KILL TWO ISRAELIS—(Tulkarm) Two Israeli security guards, Shimon Mizrachi, 53, and Eli Wasserman, 51, were killed Friday morning when Palestinian terrorists opened fire at the Nitzanei Shalom industrial complex. The gunmen had initially intended to infiltrate into Israel but returned to the complex after they were unable to breach the security barrier, Army Radio reported. In a text message to the Associated Press, Hamas and Islamic jihad said they had carried out the attack jointly. Riad al-Maliki, the Palestinian foreign minister, condemned the attack and said it was meant to “embarrass” Mahmoud Abbas’ government. (Ha’aretz, Jer.Post, April 25) INTELLIGENCE WARNS OF ATTACKS ON ISRAEL’S 60TH—(Jerusalem) Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin warned the government Tuesday that Palestinian terror organizations are interested in executing a large-scale terrorist attack ahead of Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations. Yadlin added that Hamas was also trying to break the blockade of Gaza by causing another border breach. Due to Egypt’s tightened security, however, Yadlin believes that this time Hamas will focus on the Israeli border. (Ha’aretz, April 29) ISRAEL LAUNCHES AMOS 3 FROM KAZAKHSTAN—(Jerusalem) Israel successfully launched the Amos 3 communications satellite from Kazakhstan on Monday morning, days after the launch was cancelled due to a technical malfunction in the launching system. The satellite, which joins the Amos 1 and 2 in space, will provide high-quality broadcasting and communications services to Europe, the Middle East and the East Coast of the United States. The satellite, which cost $170 million and is to remain in space for 18 years, was built by Israel Aerospace Industries’s MBT Space Division. (Jerusalem Post, April 28) KARZAI ESCAPES ATTACK BY GUNMEN—(Kabul) An assassination attempt on Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai at the Afghan national day military parade failed this week, but three people were killed Sunday in the assault. The dead included a tribal chief, a member of Parliament and a 10-year-old boy caught in the crossfire. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying its aim had been to disrupt the ceremony and show that it could strike in the heart of the capital. (New York Times, April 28)
Volume VIII, No. 1,833 • Tuesday, April 29, 2008 MAINTAINING DIGNITY DURING THE SHOAH In memory of beloved Malca z”l Many ask, “Why did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter?” This superficial question, in and of itself, is evidence that people, including many Jews, have confused Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust with passivity. People conclude wrongly that because Jews were not able to mount significant, sustained and effective strong opposition to Nazi barbaric persecution, they did not resist at all. The question, it must be stated, is based on a false premise. An adequate answer to the question involves understanding the contexts in which Jews found themselves, the lack of knowledge of their situation, the inconceivable choices they were forced to make, the limited options that were available to them, the unimaginable isolation of their communities, and the overwhelming strength and ruthlessness of the enemy. To understand the chaos of the situation requires knowledge of the many ways Jews tried to maintain their dignity, to spread word of their fate in order to ensure that the situation would be known and hence, to save as many fellow Jews as possible. It is a myth that all Jews went passively to their deaths. The following are a few examples of moral resistance, of personal symbolic responses to impossible situations, as cited in Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust, edited by Yitzchak Mais, published by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2007. Friedl Dicks Brandeis and Adela Bay were involved in symbolic resistance on a community level, using their skills to instil a sense of dignity, humanity and even joy in others. Brandeis, a renowned artist from Vienna, reached out to children in the Terezin ghetto, teaching them to express themselves artistically, thereby releasing their imaginations from the cage imprisoning their bodies. The pianist adela Bay, another artist in the ghetto and slave labor camps, used her talent to sustain hope and meaning. Defying hunger, misery and forced labor, Bay and others used their inner resources to maintain their humanity and identity. Under conditions of unimaginable hardship, they wrote poetry and created musical performances. In the desperate conditions of the Warsaw ghetto, Rabbi Yitzchak Nissenbaum is said to have declared: This is time for Kiddush HaHaim, not Kiddush Hashem -- Sanctification of Life, not Martyrdom through Death. Dr. Janusz Korczak, director of the orphanage of the Warsaw Ghetto, became an island of peace, morality and serenity in a chaotic and very dangerous environment. Two hundred children learned, played, and performed in the protected world that Dr. Korczak and his dedicated, devoted assistants created for them. Rabbi Leib Geliebter, realizing that his and others’ deaths were close, left written testimonies, letters, and messages for future generations which appeared in a written report in Czestochowa, Poland, March 28, 1943. The Jewish scouts in Germany had a tradition of holding an annual Scouts Day on the holiday of Tu Bishvat. The last celebration took place in a school in Berlin in February 1942, half a year after the start of deportations from Berlin. Wearing white shirts under their jackets, fifty male and female scouts attended the remnant of their Berlin Jewish scout troop. The meeting was disguised as an educational lecture with slides, still permitted under Nazi laws, but at this time any meeting of Jews was extremely dangerous. Herman Kruk, an historian who lived in the Vilna Ghetto, documented the life of the people until his deportation and death in Estonia in 1944. He wrote that “the Vilna Jewish community was for years known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” so the Vilna Ghetto, in respect to its cultural life, was during those terrible years called Jerusalem of the Ghetto, because it was a symbol of Jewish spiritual resistance under the criminal Nazi regime. It is known that the historian Simon Dubnow was taken to his death in Riga. He turned to his fellow Jews and urged them: “Write and Record” (schreibt farschribt). This message resonates with a strong Jewish tradition of recording history for posterity, its urgency highlighted by the Nazi German policy of secrecy and deception. The Jews responded to their isolation in many courageous ways, defying German restrictions and establishing clandestine means of communication. They sent out couriers where possible who travelled illegally from one community to another, carrying news, medicine, and at times arms. The Jewish tradition of recording history for posterity reaches back more than two millennia! “I believe that my constant urge to draw sustained me,” said Halina Olomucki, who at the age of seventeen began drawing powerful images of inmates in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Auschwitz, “Drawing is my weapon of survival. When I draw I have the impression of being invulnerable. I have survived!” Arnold Dagani, a Romanian Jewish artist, was deported to Transnistria and interned in Mikhailovka, a labor camp, in 1942. In 1943 he and his wife escaped to the Bershad ghetto. In both places he created art clandestinely, inspired by the harsh life. He chose to portray the dignity of inmates rather than their beatings and executions. Dagani said: “I would have certainly lowered the almost superhuman dignity with which the slaves went to the grave; why cheapen that by atrocities painted or drawn, even if they surpass imagination and happen to be true”. The Nazis confiscated radios and printing presses. Only one official Jewish newspaper was permitted by the Germans in Poland – Gazeta Zydovska. In Lodz, the Jewish Council (the Judenrat) approved one newspaper – Ghetto Zeitungs. Despite heavy censorship and harsh punishment, Jews who hungered for real news published their own newspapers clandestinely and at great risk. In Poland there were more than 100 clandestine newspapers and journals. These papers gathered news from diverse outlets like the BBC and other sources. All these publications promoted solidarity with the underground movement, encouraged resistance, raised morale and reduced the suffocating isolation enforced by the Nazis. Photographs are rarely neutral images. During the Holocaust, German photographers deliberately photographed Jews in the most unfavourable light possibl, to promote Nazi propaganda that Jews were inferior, unworthy and weak. Sadly, these Nazi photographs are the images most often used. The few exceptions are images taken by Jewish photographers who used their cameras to record the grim realities of Jewish life as a form of resistance. “I don’t have a gun,” said George Kadish, a photographer in the Kovno ghetto. “The murderers are gone. My camera will be my revenge!” Many ghetto photographs were lost when the ghettos were destroyed, but thousands of images miraculously survived, becoming invaluable documents for future generations. Finally, there are examples of Jews chanting prayers or singing national anthems and Zionist songs, as they were led to the gas chambers. These desperate but heroic last acts were a clear defiance of the Nazi murderers’ attempts to dehumanize Jews. The cited heroic examples of moral resistance and symbolic acts confirm the fact that many of our sisters and brothers endeavoured to leave – for future generations – the highest example of Jewish dignity and strong love for life, despite horrifying conditions! Never Forget! Am Yisrael Chai! (Baruch Cohen is a Holocaust survivor, member of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre and the Yom Hashoah Committee, and Research Chairman at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)
INVASION! Half a century ago, on June 2, 1944, two Hungarian gendarmes came to our home in Gyergyoszentmiklos, a small Transylvanian tow, to escort us to the ghetto of Czaszregen. Our family had been exempt from the roundup of Jews during the night of May 2 because my parents were doctors in charge of the central civil air-defense first aid station in the basement of our house. We couldn’t have used that month’s grace to escape, because the ground-floor of our house had been requisitioned for the Wehrmacht headquarters in our area. In any case, my parents were law-abiding citizens. They wouldn’t have gone into hiding. The gendarmes ordered my mother to remove her wedding ring. I sobbed as she grimly rubbed her finger with soap and water to ease the ring off. “Aren’t you ashamed of humiliating yourself in front of them?” she chided me sternly. A German officer, sitting on our deckchair, played my sister’s accordion as the family was led away. The cock-plumed gendarmes did their dirty job with blatant enthusiasm. Ours was the last transport to be herded into cattle-cars at the Szaszregen railway station on Tuesday, June 6. I though of my fiancé on his 22nd birthday. Where was he, with his forced labor battalion? Maybe it was better that he didn’t know of his family’s deportation to Auschwitz. My father was put in charge of our sick-car, most of whose passengers had been beaten and tortured to reveal the hiding places of their valuables or the names of Hungarian friends to whom they had entrusted them. The doctor’s duties were to administer a few gulps of water from time to time and lower the overflowing waste-bucket from the train for emptying. Old Alter from our town went mad. Until he died, he kept screaming, “Kill Dr. Rosenfeld! Take the key from him! Let’s get out of here!” His body stayed with us. When we crossed the Polish border and the SS took us over from the Hungarian gendarmerie, my self-controlled father, a veteran of World War I, suddenly broke down. “I want to commit suicide,” he sobbed. “Oh, why did I let the gendarme take my morphine from me?” My mother tried to calm him down. “How can you talk like this? You have two children…” We had heard gruesome descriptions of mass-shootings of Jews into pits in the East, from some Polish Jews who had managed to escape to Hungary. My father stood by the cattle-car’s small iron-barred opening watching in panic as the stations passed by. When and where would our train stop? On Thursday or Friday it came to a halt opposite a passenger train. A man was leaning out of a window. When his eyes caught my father’s searching glance, he cupped his hands to his face as if he wanted to whisper something without being noticed by his fellow passengers. To my father’s amazement, his lips silently, repeatedly formed one German word: “Invasion.” The he made Churchill’s “V” sign for Victory, and rubbed his hands together. It was a handshake with my father. Was he a German or a Pole? A mensch. My father nearly fainted as he turned around. Trembling with emotion, he announced the event we had hoped and prayed for. Only the opening of a second front in Western Europe could hasten the victory of the Allies. Unfortunately, it came too late for too many. A flicker of hope may have risen in the hearts and minds of the few in our cattle-car who were able to grasp the significance of this historic message from the world outside. But there was no rejoicing amid those who were destined for death. Only my mother seemed to cheer up momentarily. Or was she pretending for our sake? She was gassed and her body burnt on Shabbat, June 10. Of the 80-odd tormented souls only three were condemned to life behind the Gate of Hell. My father died in a US military hospital two weeks after the liberation of the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. He died a free Jew. Thank you. American GIs. My sister, A-9617, and myself, A-9618, returned from that Other Planet. (Lidia Vago, a retired high school teacher, is former leader of the World Organization of the Survivors of the Auschwitz “Union” munitions factory.) ON
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GATE I see them trembling in many
places, Black boots marching high, The piles of dead keep on growing
higher, As rifles blow, Pain and torture is what I see, Our cruelty and viciousness
is the gate that sets us apart, (Shavaun Stendel, 14, is a grade 8 student at The Study, in Montreal. Inspired to write after reading the Diary of Anne Frank, Shavaun wrote this poem from the perspective of a German soldier.) Volume VIII, No. 1,832 • Monday, April 28, 2008 SYRIA’S NUKES 'SYRIAN REACTOR WAS HIT WEEKS
BEFORE BECOMING OPERATIONAL' The tape shown to US officials Thursday was filmed by an Israeli spy inside the Syrian reactor, the American ABC TV network claimed. A top member of the US House of Representatives' intelligence committee said after the briefing which included airing the footage that an alleged Syrian nuclear reactor built with North Korean help and reportedly destroyed last year by Israeli jets threatened to spread nuclear weapons technology. The reactor, senior officials said after the briefing, was only weeks or at most months from becoming a fully operational facility…. The committee was shown a video and briefed on intelligence showing that the destroyed reactor was designed to produce a small amount of plutonium, a highly radioactive substance that can be used to build a powerful nuclear weapon or a radiological bomb. Earlier, a US official said that intelligence officials who had seen the evidence considered it "extremely compelling," adding that it was gleaned from a variety of sources, not just Israeli intelligence. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information…. The Syrian reactor was similar in design to a North Korean reactor that has in the past produced small amounts of plutonium, the US official said. It was not yet complete but was far enough along to demonstrate a resemblance to the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon. The official said no uranium—the fuel for a reactor—was evident on site. Syria's UN Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari on Wednesday denied his country has any undeclared nuclear sites and denied cooperating with North Korea on a new reactor. "We said it many times in the past. There were no Syrian-North Korean cooperation whatsoever in Syria, and we deny these rumors," Ja'afari said. Syria has not declared the alleged reactor to the International Atomic Energy Agency nor was it under international safeguards, possibly putting Syria in breech of an international nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Plutonium-producing reactors are of international interest because plutonium can be used to make high-yield nuclear weapons or conventional bombs that disperse radioactive material when they explode, rendering an area potentially unsafe for humans for years. Israeli warplanes reportedly bombed the site in Syria on Sept. 6, 2007. Private analysts said at the time it appeared to have been the site of a reactor, based on commercial satellite imagery taken after the raid. Syria later razed the site. A new, larger building has been constructed in its place…. John Rood, the under secretary of state for arms control, called IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei on Thursday to detail the presentation and an inter-agency intelligence team was in Vienna to brief IAEA representatives either Thursday or Friday, a senior US official said…. COVERING
FOR THE ENEMY It has taken seven months, but it appears that the Bush administration has finally buckled under Congressional pressure and is ready to give US lawmakers a full briefing on the September 6 IDF bombing raid against the North Korean-built nuclear installation in Syria…. Israel, which initially was upset with the administration's insistence on silencing all discussion of the Sept. 6 operation, is now reportedly unhappy with the administration's decision to release its details…. Defense officials fear that the revelation of Syria's rogue activities will push Syrian dictator Bashar Assad over the edge…. Israel’s position reflects a conflict between immediate and long-term interests. Israel has an immediate interest in dissuading Syria from attacking either directly or through any of Syria's multiple terror proxies. It also has an interest in protecting intelligence sources and methods which may be compromised by a disclosure of the operation. Israeli politicians have no need to inform the Israeli public of the nature of the raid because among the Israeli public, there is a consensus regarding the nature of the threat that Syria poses to the country. Israelis understand that Syria cannot be permitted to acquire certain arsenals and they understand that some things are better left unreported…. While Israel's immediate interests are understandable, in the medium and long terms, given the rogue nature of the Syrian regime, its strategic alliance with Iran and its strategic collaboration with North Korea, Israel has its own strategic interest in exposing Syria and building an operational alliance with the US to defeat Syria and Iran in the war that they wage with North Korean assistance against Israel and the US…. Syria is the headquarters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and several other Islamic terror groups. It is Hizbullah's logistical backbone. While all of these actions are sufficient to place Syria squarely in the camp of US enemies, its apparent nuclear proliferation with Iran and North Korea requires a reclassification of the threat posed by Syria from nuisance to strategic threat…. American lawmakers have argued that understanding the Israeli operation is essential for understanding the nature of the Iranian-Syrian-North Korean alliance. By preventing the release of details on the raid, the administration is denying Congress and the American public the ability to understand the rationale and the modes of operation of arguably the greatest threat to US national security. How can Congress support an ally like Israel if it doesn't understand why what Israel does promotes US national security interests? And how can Congress support US actions in the war if it isn't aware of the nature of the axis fighting the US? What is most striking about the Bush administration's unwillingness to reveal the nature of the Israeli raid to Congress is how it seems to upset the administration's own war efforts in Iraq…. [R]ather than make clear to Congress and to the US public that the war in Iraq is not an Iraqi war per se but a key battleground in a regional war in which Iran and Syria have combined forces on multiple fronts in a bid to defeat the US and its allies, the Bush administration obfuscates that central truth… repeat[ing] the bizarre claim that Iran and Syria share the US's interest in bringing stability to Iraq and that responsibility for ending the war rests solely on the shoulders of Iraq's government rather than on the shoulders of the foreign governments who are waging the war…. [A]s it wages war against the US in Iraq and against Israel in Lebanon and Gaza, supported by its Syrian and North Korean allies, Iran moves brazenly and swiftly forward in its bid to acquire nuclear weapons. And as it moves, it drags the US and Israel ever closer to a great war. The question is how can the US be expected to handle the coming conflagration when it demurs from explaining its eminently more manageable current situation either to itself or to its public? DETERRING
THE UNDETERRABLE The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived. The six-party talks on North Korea have failed miserably. They did not prevent Pyongyang from testing a nuclear weapon and entering the club. Now North Korea has broken yet again its agreement to reveal all its nuclear facilities. The other test case was Iran. The EU-3 negotiations (Britain, France and Germany) went nowhere. Each U.N. Security Council resolution enacting what passed for sanctions was more useless than the last. Uranium enrichment continues. When Iran's latest announcement that it was tripling its number of centrifuges to 9,000 elicited no discernible response from the Bush administration, the game was over. Everyone says Iran must be prevented from going nuclear. No one will bell the cat…. We must face reality and begin thinking how we live with the unthinkable. There are four ways to deal with rogue states going nuclear: preemption, deterrence, missile defense and regime change. Preemption works but, as a remedy, it is spent. Iraq was defanged by the 1981 Israeli airstrike, by the 1991 Persian Gulf War (which uncovered Saddam Hussein's clandestine nuclear programs) and finally by the 2003 invasion, which ended the Hussein dynasty, père et deux fils. A collateral effect of the Iraq war was Libya's nuclear disarmament. Seeing Hussein's fate, Moammar Gaddafi declared and dismantled his nuclear program…. But the cost of preemption is simply too high. No one is going to renew the Korean War with an attack on Pyongyang. And the prospects of an attack on Iran's facilities are now vanishingly small. What to do? Deterrence. It worked in the two-player Cold War. Will it work against multiple rogues? It seems quite suitable for North Korea, whose regime, far from being suicidal, is obsessed with survival. Iran is a different proposition. With its current millenarian leadership, deterrence is indeed a feeble gamble, as I wrote in 2006 in making the case for considering preemption. But if preemption is off the table, deterrence is all you've got. Our task is to make deterrence in this context less feeble. Two ways: Begin by making the retaliatory threat in response to Iranian nuclear aggression so unmistakable and so overwhelming that the non-millenarians in leadership would stay the hand or even remove those taking their country to the point of extinction. But there is an adjunct to deterrence: missile defense. Against a huge Soviet arsenal, this was useless. Against small powers with small arsenals, i.e., North Korea and Iran, it becomes extremely effective in conjunction with deterrence. For the sake of argument, imagine a two-layered anti-missile system in which each layer is imperfect, with, say, a 90 percent shoot-down accuracy. That means one in 100 missiles gets through both layers. That infinitely strengthens deterrence by radically degrading the possibility of a successful first strike. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might refrain from launching an arsenal of, say, 20 nukes if his scientific advisers showed him that there was only an 18.2 percent chance of any getting through—and a 100 percent chance that a retaliatory counterattack of hundreds of Israeli (and/or American) nukes would reduce the world's first Islamic republic to a cinder…. We are, of course, dealing here with probabilities. Total safety comes only from regime change.… Regime change will surely come to both North Korea and Iran. That is the ultimate salvation…. Deterrence plus missile defense renders a first strike so unlikely to succeed and yet so certain to bring on self-destruction that it might—just might—get us through from the day the rogues go nuclear to the day they are deposed. We have entered the post-nonproliferation age. It's time to take our heads out of the sand and deal with it. DESTROY
IRAN'S NUKES TO SAVE OUR CITIES One of the most terrifying possibilities the world faces is that al-Qa'eda, or some other Islamist group, gets hold of a nuclear bomb. Islamist terrorists are certainly trying to obtain one: Osama bin Laden has issued a document entitled The Nuclear Bomb of Islam, which insists it is "the duty" of Muslims to acquire a nuclear bomb in order to use "as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God"…. A 10 kiloton nuclear bomb would be a relatively small one by today's standards, but a 10 kiloton explosion in a city would mean that, from the centre of the blast for a distance of one third of a mile, every structure above ground level would be obliterated and every person would be killed instantly. For the next third of a mile, the city would look like the weird moonscape which Berlin had become by the end of World War Two, after almost a year of Allied bombing raids. And for a third of mile beyond that circle of hell, buildings and people would burn, both with flames and the effects of radiation. To consider that outcome is to realise that it must be prevented. But how? Deterrence—the threat that if you detonate a nuclear bomb in our country, we will retaliate in kind on yours—has so far prevented nuclear war between nations. The only time nuclear bombs have been used, it was against a country without the capacity to retaliate. Deterrence, however, depends on your enemy having cities and a population that can be threatened with obliteration. The problem is that terrorist organisations have neither. They are simply groups of individuals with no responsibility for, and no control over, a state or its population. Deterrence breaks down as a consequence…. Which means that the over-arching aim of the civilised world must be to ensure that they cannot get hold of a nuclear bomb, because that is the only way we can protect ourselves against nuclear terrorism…. Nuclear bombs are still, mercifully, beyond the capacity of terrorist groups to engineer for themselves: a terrorist organisation would have to get one from a government. When the governments trying to acquire the technology for making nuclear bombs are known to train and supply Islamist terrorist groups—as Syria and Iran, for example, certainly do—the importance of preventing them obtaining the capacity to make such bombs is overwhelming. That is why the Israelis destroyed Syria's "not for peaceful means" nuclear facility last September, and why the rest of the world acquiesced in the destruction, which broke international law and had no United Nations resolution. It is also why the US continues to send signals to Iran that it will not oppose, indeed might even join in, any attempt by Israel to hit Iran's fledgling nuclear facilities: sending precisely that signal must have been at least part of the point of last week's very public announcement that the Israeli raid on Syria's putative nuclear bomb factory had been successful. Governments can perhaps be deterred from leaking nuclear weapons to terrorist groups by the thought of what the Americans would do to them if there were a nuclear explosion in an American city…. Governments, however, are not always able to control all their members…. If Iran builds a nuclear bomb factory, you can be sure that Israel will try to destroy it. You can also be sure that, when it happens, the rest of the world will not object.
Volume VIII, No. 1,831 • Friday, April 25, 2008
ON JEWISH BEING THE LUCKIEST JEWS IN THE WORLD I just published a collection of my essays in English. Each time I am asked if I am also releasing the volume in Hebrew I feel a pain deep inside me when I answer that no, right now, my publisher is only interested in an English edition. Indeed it is a shame because I wrote most of the essays in Hebrew as well. Writing in Hebrew is a qualitatively different experience than writing in English. Hebrew is a more compact language than English. It has fewer words and the words it has are denser and more flexible than English words. A 1,200-word essay in Hebrew will be 1,800 words in English. This is a mechanical difference. But there are deeper distinctions as well. One level beyond the mechanics is the multiple meanings of Hebrew words. The density of meaning in Hebrew is a writer's dream. Nearly anyone can imbue a seemingly simple sentence with multiple, generally complementary meanings simply by choosing a specific verb, verb form, noun or adjective. These double, triple and even quadruple meanings of one word are a source of unbounded joy for a writer. To take just one example, the Hebrew word "shevet" means returning and it also means sitting. And it is also a homonym for club – as in billy club – and for tribe. In 2005, the IDF named the operation expelling the Israeli residents of Gaza and Northern Samaria "Shevet Achim," or returning or sitting with brothers. But it also sounded like it was making a distinction between tribesmen and brothers. And it also sounded like "clubbing brothers." As this one example demonstrates, one joyful consequence of the unique density of the Hebrew language is that satirical irony comes easily to even the most dour and unpoetic writers. For a Jew, knowing, speaking and writing Hebrew is an intimate experience. This is particularly so for those of us whose mother tongue is not Hebrew – because as the secrets of the language slowly reveal themselves to us we feel we are discovering ourselves. Hebrew encapsulates the entirety of the Jewish story. Modern Hebrew in particular is an eclectic amalgamation of classical Hebrew, Yiddishisms, and expressions from the Sephardic Diaspora experience. Greek, Roman, Aramaic, Turkish, Arabic and English expressions meld seamlessly into the stream of words. It is not simply that it is the language of the Bible. Hebrew is also an expression of the unique culture of a small, proud, often besieged, often conquered and permeable people. Its power to explain that cultural experience and that historical baggage is something that often leaves a newly initiated member of the Hebrew-speaking world gasping in a mixture of disbelief and relief. It is unbelievable that a language can be so immediately and unselfconsciously expressive of feelings that have traversed millennia. Understanding its power as a tool of expressing the Jewish condition is one of the most gratifying discoveries a Jew can make. But the experience of speaking in Hebrew and of living in Hebrew is incomplete when it is not experienced in Israel. It is one thing to pray in a synagogue in Hebrew or even to speak regular Hebrew outside of Israel. The former is a spiritual duty and a communal experience. The latter is a social or educational experience. But speaking Hebrew in Israel is a complete experience. Hebrew localizes the Jewishness, Judaism and Jews. It anchors us to the Land of Israel. Taken together, the Hebrew language and the Land of Israel stabilize a tradition and make the Jewish people whole. I write all of this as a means of explaining why a Jew in the Diaspora, particularly the United States, would want to live in Israel. Leaving America is difficult on several levels. In my own experience, it involved physically separating from my entire family. It also involved cutting myself off from my language – English – and immersing myself completely in a tongue I had yet to master. Beyond that, it meant leaving a country that had done only good for me and for the generations of my family who fled to America from the pogroms in Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century…. Coming to Israel is not rejecting America. It is embracing a choice to become whole in a way that life outside of Israel cannot provide. That doesn't mean life cannot be fulfilling for a Jew outside of Israel. Millions of Jews can attest to the fact. It certainly doesn't mean that life in Israel is easier or safer or more lucrative than life is elsewhere. Israel is a troublesome, hard, often irritating place. It is a young country that belongs to an ancient, eternal people who are all imperfect. Some Israelis, particularly those who today occupy the seats of power, are weak and irresponsible and often corrupt and self-serving. Israelis have quick fuses. Among other things, this distinctively Israeli rush to anger makes being stuck in rush hour traffic a bit like dancing a waltz in the middle of a shooting range. Then too, service is not a concept that most Israelis – particularly in service professions – are even vaguely familiar with. Beyond the general fallibility of Israelis, there are the wars and the hatred and the terror that make up so much of life in Israel. Being surrounded by enemies and living in the midst of jihad-crazed Arab states is like sitting on the edge of a volcano. And rather than acknowledge the danger and contend with it, Israelis – frustratingly and dangerously – more often than not blame one another for the heat while ignoring its source. Yet once a Jew catches the Zionist bug, none of that is important. Once a Jew allows himself or herself to feel the pull of our heritage, of our language and our land, the frustration, danger and hardship of living in Israel seems like second nature – as natural as breathing in and out…. People ask me all the time why I insist on living in Israel. Usually I just shrug my shoulders and smile. I, a woman who makes my living from words, find myself speechless when challenged with this simple question. I spend several months a year away from Israel working. But every time I go away on a long trip, inevitably after three weeks or so, I begin to feel incomplete. I start to long for the smells of Israel. My ears ache to hear Hebrew all around me. I want to go back so I can walk down the streets on Friday afternoons and smile at perfect strangers as we bid each other Shabbat Shalom. Why do I live in Israel? Because Israel lives in me, as it lives in all Jews. It is who we are. And those of us lucky enough to recognize this truth and embrace it in all its fullness and depth are the luckiest Jews in the world. (Caroline Glick is deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post. Her Jewish Press-exclusive column appears the last week of each month.) A
VITAL AFFIRMATION OF OUR AWE-INSPIRING HISTORY Judaism is twice as old as Christianity, three times as old as Islam. Yet there are 82 Christian nations, 56 Muslim ones, but only one Jewish state. A country smaller than the Kruger National Park, less than one quarter of one percent of the land mass of the Arab world, Israel is the only place on earth where, in 4,000 years of history, Jews have formed a majority. The only place where they've been able to rule themselves and defend themselves. The only place where they have been able to do what almost every people takes for granted: live as a nation shaping its own destiny, and create a society according to its own values. Only in Israel can a Jew speak the Jewish language, see a Jewish landscape, live by the Jewish calendar, walk where our ancestors walked and continue the story they began. Yet still it has to fight for the right to be. These are not my words. They are, rather, those of Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and form part of his narration on a double CD he has produced to mark next month's 60th anniversary of the establishment of the modern state of Israel. Sacks continues that narrative with a question that has particular relevance in his own Britain today, so filled with hostility to Israel: "Why, after everything, is it still so hard for the nations of the world to grant the Jewish people a place to live without fear? Israel is the West's oldest nation. Its religion is the West's oldest faith... Why must the people who first taught the world the sanctity of life so often be made to walk through the valley of the shadow of death?" His dramatically intoned recounting of Jewish history constitutes what Sacks may consider to be the minor component of "a fairly unusual project for a chief rabbi to be involved in." The primary focus, and the major proportion of the two compact discs, is the music - an eclectic selection featuring not only the most traditional of Hebrew texts and the most popular of modern Israel's patriotic standards, but also tracks and artists so diverse that few first-time listeners will be familiar with all of the material. Selections range from the "Exodus" theme, "Yedid Nefesh" and compositions by Reb Shlomo Carlebach, via the pulsing "Hasidah" (The Stork), Gad Elbaz's heartfelt "Inshallah" and Matisyahu's Hasidic-rapped "Jerusalem," to the wrenching standouts "Arim Roshi" (I'll Raise my Head, sung by Shai Gabso) and "Ke-she-halev Bocheh" (When the Heart Weeps, sung by Levi Levin). As Sacks acknowledges, "I spent lots of time listening to Israeli music... I didn't know these people." … He had been thinking for several years about how best he could contribute to the 60th festivities, and realized that "the most effective means of communication nowadays is audio." So he spent months - "much longer than I had expected" - delving into appropriate musical material, newly recording some of it (in part because he deferred to Orthodox sensibilities and eschewed female singers), and assembling the discs for distribution throughout the Jewish world. He says he was particularly struck "by the depth of spirituality in Israel's modern music," and that this helped complete a musical tour through Israel's history that he hopes will convey "the sense of awe and drama" of our people's epic saga. "I think my faith is not naive," he muses quietly and simply in our conversation, "but some moments in history have the Almighty's handwriting all over them." … Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's oft-repeated depiction of our modern state as Europe's apology to the Jews for the Holocaust, unfairly imposed as an alien colonialist upstart on the blameless Palestinians, is recognized all-too infrequently as the viciously revisionist misrepresentation it is, air-brushing the Jews out of all our millennia of attachment to this place. For that reason, I have long argued that Israel, as it publicly celebrates its modern 60th next month, should also be talking more about a three thousand and 60th anniversary, overtly reconnecting this young nation to its indomitable past, and stressing that far from an injustice, its rebirth marked the catastrophically belated righting of a dire historical wrong.… [Sacks] begins the first CD by introducing a fragment of David Ben-Gurion's speech on the day of our independence, containing the prime ministerial assertion of the "natural right" of the Jewish people to live like any other nation in its own sovereign land. With independence, Sacks ringingly declares, "The longest exile ever endured by a people was at an end. After almost 2,000 years of homelessness, the Jewish people came home." Then Sacks takes us back in time, to the very origins of Judaism, tracing "a story without parallel in history - the story of the love of a people for a land, the love of Jews for Israel. There, in ancient times, our people was born. And there, in modern times, our people was reborn." And as he trails through the centuries - the periods of brief sovereignty and long, dark exile - Sacks summons all the incandescent legitimizations for Israel that need to be invoked whenever, and it is with increasing frequency these days, cynical critics distort our history to undermine our emphatic, peerless relationship with our homeland. Incandescent legitimizations too often unrecognized and unsaid. "Never did the Jewish people leave Israel voluntarily," he reminds us at one point. "When they could, they returned... For centuries they lived suspended between memory and hope, sustained by the promise that one day God would bring them back." Later in the narrative, he completes that circle when describing the faith-affirming modern ingathering of exiles: "They came from more than 100 countries, speaking more than 80 languages. More than 3,000 years earlier, Moses had prophesied: 'Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back.' And so it was. A dismembered people, torn into 100 fragments and scattered across the world, came together again as a living nation. There's nothing like it in all the annals of history." … Sacks's own connection to Israel, he recounts on the discs, dates to the rabbinical great-grandfather who arrived here from Lithuania in 1871 "and built the first house" in Petah Tikva... "Today, it's the sixth-largest city in Israel." And he is particularly adept in encapsulating the triumphs from those pioneering days to the present, the achievements we ourselves too often take for granted: learning to cultivate desolate lands, reviving an ancient language, integrating new arrivals from around the world, creating the political and economic infrastructure of a nation, prevailing in war after existential war, resolutely maintaining a free and democratic society in a ruthless region alien to such values, and flourishing economically, scientifically, culturally, religiously - in short, as he says, defying "the normal parameters of history." In essence, Sacks's text is a fierce championing of Zionism - an articulate recitation of what ought to be utterly familiar to everybody worldwide, but much of which is, dismally, disputed by many, and barely known even to all Jews, in Israel or overseas. In our conversation, Sacks, who has himself appropriately just turned 60, pays tribute to the "immense strength" of the Israeli public, noting with admiration how we came through such potentially wrenching and tearing processes as the Gaza withdrawal. But he says he wonders sometimes "whether Israel has forgotten its own narrative. … He notes, in the interview and on the CD, that the greatest empires in history, throughout history, attacked Israel, and that Israel was tiny and the Jewish people vulnerable and these empires seemed impregnable. The first reference to Israel outside the Bible, he points out with delicious irony, is an ancient obituary notice, on the 13th-century BCE Merneptah Stele. "It says, 'Israel is laid waste, her seed is no more,'" he quotes. And yet, 32 centuries later, all those empires have "been consigned to the dustbins of history while Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel lives." … The Israeli-Arab conflict, he says, "will continue for a long time." In the meantime, Israel, apart from political and diplomatic processes, "must ask itself: 'What are the long term things we have to do to endure and to hold together?'" … "I've tried to create not only a narrative but to invest it with the kind of emotion it needed," he says. "I just want people to listen to it." He's entitled the CDs, "Israel - Home of Hope." I hope they'll find the audience he seeks. I hope he'll widely publish his accompanying text - in Hebrew, too. … Shabbat Shalom to all our readers.
Volume VIII, No. 1,830 • Thursday, April 24, 2008 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA WHAT A LONG, STRANGE RACE IT’S
BEEN If Americans selected their president by the party they preferred, no one doubts that a Democrat would be moving into the White House next January. Since their sweep of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, Democrats have been enjoying what, under different circumstances, they would likely be calling a surge. From a position of parity in partisan identification in 2005, with each party having about a third of the electorate, Democrats have opened up an impressive five-point advantage (32.5% to 27.7%, according to Gallup). Republicans have been in a free fall. This year’s nomination races have also revealed a clear enthusiasm gap between the parties. Far more voters participated in Democratic than in Republican primaries (by nearly a 3 to 2 margin, during the period when both races were undecided), and Democratic candidates have dramatically outraised and outspent their Republican counterparts. Though wealthier voters still lean Republican, the GOP is rapidly becoming the poor man’s party, its fund-raisers reduced to watching in amazement as Barack Obama’s Internet cash cow keeps giving and giving. Unfortunately for Democrats, however, the election of the president is not a contest between generic party labels. As Alexander Hamilton observed in The Federalist, it is “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust [is] to be confided.” This fact gives John McCain a fighting chance. And fighting is what Mr. McCain knows best. Since Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency 28 years ago, all of the presidential elections have been fought within the same ideological framework.… Electoral analysts from across the political spectrum have begun to argue that this structure is ready to crumble—a prognosis that seems about half right. There is now strong evidence that significant segments of the electorate are no longer much concerned with the old liberal-conservative divide.… Nonetheless, it is not true that the ideological edifice inherited from the Reagan era is in immediate danger of collapse. It remains intact—no alternative ideological way of thinking having yet been offered as a viable replacement. From this perspective, the most noteworthy aspect of the current campaign is surely something that has not taken place. Neither party will select a candidate who has campaigned on the basis of a call to alter or reconfigure the party’s ideological position. There has been no general programmatic theme akin to Bill Clinton’s “New Democrat” agenda or to George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” On the Democratic side, Barack Obama, the candidate who enjoys an uneasy lead at this writing, rarely discusses his party’s public philosophy. Although liberalism fits him like a glove—National Journal rates his voting record the most liberal among current senators—his whole campaign has sought to transcend the realm of general ideas. Nor is the situation much different with Hillary Clinton. She is a faithful liberal, ready and eager “on day one” to propose a bundle of new liberal policies, but she, too, has shown no interest in trying to articulate a new public philosophy. The current one suits her fine.… It is no wonder, then, that the question of oratory itself emerged finally as the central “issue” of the Democratic race, far surpassing in significance what the candidates ritually refer to as the “real issues of concern to the American people,” such as health care, trade, or the war in Iraq. Hillary Clinton tried to exploit doubts about the orator, at first questioning the value of speeches as such, praising “deeds rather than words,” and then mocking Mr. Obama as the “messiah” who preaches that the “celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect.” Her hope is that the spell that Mr. Obama has cast will be broken and that his believers will cease to believe. Time, in this sense, plays in her favor. The revelation of Sen. Obama’s complicated relationship with his radical pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., could be the event that precipitates a reevaluation: messiahs have very little margin for error.… But Mrs. Clinton has not been able to escape another aspect of the personal factor, which revolves, paradoxically, around the question of whether she is her own person. Her problem is the widespread concern, at issue from the moment her presidential ambitions blossomed, about what role an ex-president—a particular ex-president—might play in her presidency.… Mrs. Clinton’s problem is that while she cannot win the nomination without Bill Clinton, she might not be able to win it with him, either.… John McCain is a candidate of a different breed [from other Republicans]. His prominence owes much to his extraordinary personal story as a prisoner of war for nearly six years in North Vietnam, including 31 months in solitary confinement. This record has obviously given him immense credibility, but what has made this tightly wound man so distinct—and so often the scourge of his party—is a strong independent streak, coupled with a certain irreverence, that backs down at no challenge. His career, even in the military, often found him just at the edge of staying inside the rules. Mr. McCain is a great patriot, but not a pious one. He stands up for his country rather than preaching about God and country.… Mr. McCain’s fighting spirit has also been on display during the presidential campaign this year. Having plunged from near the top among Republican candidates in national polls in winter 2006 to slightly better than asterisk status last fall, he persisted in a race in which it would have been easy, especially for a man of his age, to withdraw. And not only did he persist, he did so by actively supporting the surge in Iraq, a risky plan that most of the other Republicans backed but preferred not to emphasize. Mr. McCain’s appeal during the campaign calls to mind Plutarch’s assessment of Pericles’ sway over the public in Athens, which he attributed not chiefly to “his power of language, but…the reputation of his life, and the confidence felt in his character.” Character can speak as loudly as words. For a longshot to win a party nomination in America is, by definition, unlikely. For this to occur in both parties in the same year would be unprecedented.… (James Ceaser is a professor
of politics and co-author of GOOD
NEWS FOR THE GOP Last night was an almost perfect outcome for the GOP. Hillary Clinton won by a wide enough margin to keep her in the hunt, infuse her campaign with much-needed cash, and keep super-delegates from breaking en masse to Obama. But the results by themselves are not enough to change–at least not yet–the eventual outcome. Barack Obama will probably still win the nomination. But he is looking far less formidable than he did even six weeks ago. Senator Obama outspent Clinton by around 3 to 1–and he was wiped out. He lost badly among women, Catholics, union households, working class voters, and those who didn’t attend college. Clinton carried both white voters 45 and older and weekly churchgoers by more than 60 percent. Only six in ten Democratic Catholic voters said they would vote for Obama in a general election; more than one in five said they would vote for McCain. Nearly one-third of Clinton voters said they wouldn’t vote for Obama if he’s the nominee. As Fred Barnes wrote, “After Pennsylvania, Clinton’s argument that she’s a stronger opponent against McCain will be impossible to ignore or dismiss.” The Democratic contest, which is already heated and personal, is only going to get worse. The anger that supporters of Obama and Clinton feel for the other candidate is palpable. The Democrats appear headed for what Andrew Sullivan calls a “death struggle.”… Barack Obama has presented himself as a fundamentally different kind of political figure. But he now looks more and more conventional–in his liberal policy positions, in how he is conducting his campaign, and in his associations (including Reverend Wright, William Ayers, and Antoin “Tony” Rezko). All of this is building a narrative quite problematic for the junior senator from Illinois. People are beginning to wonder whether his candidacy of transcendence was merely an illusion…. The political environment still favors Democrats. And Obama is a money-making machine, his political operation is quite good, and he still possesses impressive skills. Every person who has run for the presidency goes through a period of trial and testing, when things seem bleak and sometimes even hopeless (like John McCain in the summer of ‘07). But if and when Obama secures the nomination, he’ll receive a big boost. Democrats will begin to rally around him just as the GOP rallied around McCain and his poll ratings vis-à-vis McCain will get better. But what seemed improbable just three months ago now seems possible: a Republican victory in November… IN
PENNSYLVANIA PRIMARY VICTORY, CLINTON WINS JEWISH VOTE Exit polls showed Hillary Clinton taking the Jewish vote in winning Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Pennsylvania. Clinton, a U.S. senator from New York, defeated U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.), winning 55 percent of the overall primary vote to his 45 percent. Exit polling found that Jews comprised 8 percent of the electorate, and went 62 percent to 38 percent for Clinton. Her margin was similar among whites overall, winning 63 percent to 37 percent. Clinton’s performance among white Catholics was particularly strong, winning 70 percent to 30 percent. “I think much of the Jewish vote voted for their comfort level, and they were more comfortable with Senator Clinton,” said Marcel Groen, a Clinton supporter and the head of the Montgomery County Democratic Committee, in an interview with JTA a day after the primary. “I just think generally from a Jewish perspective, Hillary Clinton was a known commodity.” Groen speculated, however, that among Jews who are less Jewishly identified, and for whom Israel is not a primary electoral concern, Obama may have actually won. “I think that Jews who are more concerned with Israel will always go with people they have a history with,” he said. Betsy Sheerr, a Jewish communal activist who also is supporting Clinton, said the lingering concern over Obama’s ties to his controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., hurt Obama in the primary. Wright has harshly critcized the United States and Israel. “The Pastor Wright issue left a lot of people feeling uneasy,” Sheerr said. “And I don’t think that’s going to go away so easily.”… Clinton had the support of several prominent Jewish politicians, most notably Gov. Ed Rendell, as well as many top donors to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. She made a surprise appearance at a major federation event and gave an interview to the local Jewish newspaper. Obama also reached out to the Jewish community, granting a 20-minute interview to JTA and meeting with 75 Jewish communal leaders April 16 at a Philadelphia synagogue, Rodeph Shalom.… The Wright issue in particular came up repeatedly at campaign events aimed at Jewish voters. During the April 16 meeting with Jewish leaders, Obama sought to further distance himself from Wright, saying he was “my pastor,” not “my spiritual adviser.” At another point, Obama asked his audience “to not base decisions on who to support or not on e-mails or superficial characteristics or associations that are tangential to who I am or what I believe in.” Clinton pounced on the issue in her interview with the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, saying that she would have left the church. “We don’t have a choice when it comes to our relatives,” she said, “but we do have a choice when it comes to churches or synagogues.”… [T]he continuing uncertainty surrounding the Democratic nomination battle has begun to worry some activists, who caution it may harm the party in November in the general election against the presumptive Republican candidate, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “The main issue among all Jewish Democrats is a sense of coming together for November,” Sheerr told JTA. “I think there’s a tremendous amount of concern about healing within the party no matter what happens and an attempt to keep our eye on the ball, which is beating McCain.” THE
DEMOCRATS TURN A funny thing happened on the way to Senator Clinton’s primary win Tuesday night in Pennsylvania, her party started moving back toward reality on the war. It may not be all the way, yet. but it turned in the right direction. And it’s not just that the former first lady’s campaign ran ads asking whether Senator Obama was ready to handle international crises as a president and featuring, for the first time of any ads in the campaign, the image of Osama bin Laden. Mrs. Clinton herself began to come back to reality on the next front—Iran. In a series of television interviews in the two days before the vote, Mrs. Clinton made it clear that were she president, she would authorize a devastating retaliation against Iran if it attacked Israel. In response to a question from Christopher Cuomo on Tuesday’s Good Morning America, the New York senator said, “I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” Now she’s talking, and, voila, the votes started coming her way. They followed her veering away from the caution she’d been voicing but six months ago. At the October 30 debates at Philadelphia, she declined to state any conditions ahead of time where she would use force against Iran. At one point she even said, “The Republicans are waving their sabers and talking about going after Iran. I want to prevent a rush to war.” Senator Obama has not gone as far on the Iran front, though even he subtly changed his rhetorical emphasis. When asked about his stated position that he would be open to meeting with Iranian leaders at a meeting with Philadelphia Jewish leaders last Wednesday, the senator said, “My interest in meeting with Iran is practical; it is not based on my assessment of who they are or my judgment about their values, but rather it is a practical assessment in terms of how we can best achieve our ultimate goal, which is an Iran that is not threatening its neighbors, is not threatening Israel, does not possess nuclear weapons, is not funding organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.” This may seem rather, how could one put it, naive or even flakey, and it may leave the hard-headed Jewish leaders rolling their eyes. But what strikes us is Mr. Obama’s acknowledgment that Iran is a threat and must be countered. It is a far cry from his attacks on Mrs. Clinton last fall for helping to enable Republican war mongering by voting for a non-binding resolution that urged the White House to designate the Iran’s Quds Force as a terrorist entity. The shift on Iran for the two leading Democrats also tells us about the war for the soul of their party. One faction believes that Iran is not a threat to world peace and that to describe Iranian behavior in such terms is to monger fear. But quite a few Democrats know that such nonsense is a recipe for electoral defeat. No doubt many Democrats expect the next president to confront the Iranian threat instead of pretending it does not exist. And a big margin of them, it turns out, live in Pennsylvania.
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