ISRANET DAILY BRIEFING ARCHIVE
March 2002
A Service of CIJR
Canadian Institute for Jewish Research
Prof. Frederick Krantz, Director

Volume II, No. 355 • Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Note to our Readers: Due to the Passover holiday, the next ISRANET Briefing will be issued on Tuesday, April 2.

PASSOVER THOUGHTS, RESPONSES FROM OUR READERS

PASSOVER 5762 – THE FESTIVAL OF FREEDOM
Baruch Cohen

"Accordingly we, members of the People's Council by virtue of our
nature and historic right and on the strength of the resolution
of the UN General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment
of a Jewish State in Eretz Israel to be known as the ‘State of Israel.’”
—Declaration of Independence, 5th Day of Iyar 5708

Passover, the festival of Freedom, commemorates the dramatic deliverance of the people of Israel from Egyptian bondage.

Historically the spirit of Passover has played a glorious role in the democratic struggle for human dignity. Truly, the eternal quest for human freedom has received sustenance and encouragement from the story of the liberation from Egyptian slavery several millennia ago. For we Jews, Passover marks our birth as a free people, and its religious significance has therefore been profound. And its exalted theme--freedom--has marked the development of the modern world generally.

The Jewish sages have always emphasized this declaration: "I am the Lord Thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." [Exodus 20:2]. The idea that liberty must be won and re-won in every generation and by each individual, is an integral part of the daily prayers. Every person, in every generation, must regard himself as having been personally freed from Egypt. This identification of the Jewish religion with the struggle for freedom has given the Jewish people the will to live. Indeed, the springtime festival of Passover acts as a harbinger of new life and hope for men and women who have suffered the bitter cold of slavery's dark winter. Even as they celebrate, Jews remember their long, stormy history around the festive Seder table.

During centuries of adversity, Jews have found renewed strength and hope in the Passover festival. It unites today's generation with its heroic ancestors of the days of Moses, the Inquisition, the blood libels of the Middle Ages, the barbaric, cruel pogroms, the unspeakable horror of Nazi Germany, the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Arabs’ repeated efforts to crush the Jewish State. Yet, despite the degradation and sufferings, we survived, triumphant––and witnessed the re-birth of our State of Israel.

We drew from our past faith and confidence to struggle for our final victory. Around the festive Seder table we recall our long history, and gain the strength to hold steadfast to our conviction that justice and freedom for all men and women will yet prevail. The reading of the Haggadah reaffirms our confidence in God's concern for Israel, and for humanity.

(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of CIJR)

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LEAVE AN EMPTY SEAT AT THE SEDER TABLE
Gil Troy

…Let each of us, as we gather in our seders, intrude on our own celebrations by leaving one setting untouched, by having one empty chair at our table. And as we do that, let us not just remember the dead as hundreds of nameless and faceless people, but let us personalize it, let us take the time to find out the name of one victim of the current conflict, one Jew who can not celebrate this year’s holiday, one family in mourning. Let us call out the name of Benny Avraham, age 20, one of the Israelis kidnapped by Hezbollah in October, 2000, and now presumed dead. Let us call out the name of Koby Mandell, age 13, a young American immigrant brutally killed last May, whose father Seth Mandell talks about the…pain of watching other boys grow up, watching their voices deepen, their shoulders broaden, their gaits quicken, even as his son lies dead. Let us call out the name of Ayelet Haschachar Levy, age 28, who was "guilty" of the crime of walking down an alley near Jerusalem’s Machaneh Yehudah marketplace, the wrong place, at the wrong time. Let us call out the names of Mordechai Schijvescheurder, 43, Tzira Schijvescheurder, 41, Ra’aya Schijvescheurder, 14, Avraham Yitzhak Schijvescheurder, 4, Hemda Schijvescheurder, 2, five members of one family killed in the Jerusalem Sbarro Pizzeria bombing…

And as we call out these names, unlike too many of our enemies, let us not call for vengeance, let us not call for more bloodshed. Instead, as we mourn, let us hope; as we remember the many lives lost during this crazy and pointless war, let us pray ever more intensely for a just and lasting peace.

(CIJR Academic Fellow Gil Troy, is a professor
of political science at McGill University)

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OUR READERS ON ISRAEL AND TERRORISM

“We will have peace with the Arabs when they will love their children more than they hate us”—Golda Meir (forwarded by Eliahu Shvili, Haifa; March 25)

“Today’s most recent terrorist attack—the suicide bombing of Egged Bus No. 823, shows just how ‘serious’ the PA is about halting the terrorist attacks inside [Israel]. The attacks are not only being held in areas A and B--they are premeditated attacks inside the Green Line with the intention of killing as many innocent Israeli civilians as possible. I believe that Anthony Zinni’s latest visit to the region…is a complete waste of time. The political will on the Palestinians’ side is not evident. They refuse to arrest the perpetrators…The PA--headed by the infamous terrorist leader, Yasser Arafat--will not back down to U.S. pressure to impede his end game: the destruction of the State of Israel.”--David Granovsky (March 20)

“It is very distressing that you [CIJR] choose to present the news in such a biased way. ‘Israel having absolutely no choice, retaliates…’ is plain nonsense. Israel has a variety of choices, from not responding at all, to responding with what looks increasingly like over-kill. And you make no mention of the fact that Israeli forces continue to occupy Arab territory.”—Jerry Newman (March 12)

“The ghosts of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi would roll over in their graves at the brutality of the Palestinians.”—Dr. Norman E. Mann, San Diego (March 3)

“Arafat has wrecked what was an already fragile opportunity for peace. The peace prize, which he blackened with bullets and bombs aimed at babies, mothers, teenagers, and the elderly, is painfully ludicrous.”—Robert P. Medow, University City, MO (Jan. 27)

“Facts and events on the ground are…being distorted by diplomats, news reports, human rights groups and the Israeli Left to support their anti-Israel bias…Where is our human conscience that we cannot determine true victims of violence and hate…rather than being trapped in moral equivalence with evil?”—Felix Diawuoh, Executive Director, Free Africa Foundation-Boston Chapter (Jan. 4)

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JOHN DERBYSHIRE’S “ISRAEL'S FUTURE: THE ODDS”

This Briefing (No. 329, Feb. 5, 2002), which anticipated the possible defeat of the State of Israel, elicited the greatest number of responses. Reprinted below is a reader’s comment which best captured the essence of the moment.

“This one ruined my day! Tell me that John Derbyshire is wrong!”—Prof. Brian Smith (Feb. 6)

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ON U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND MIDEASTERN COUNTRIES

“I believe we are seeing a new Axis of terror. This time it is Iraq, Iran and the PLO (Arafat). Arafat is a pawn in their hands. This would give Iraq and Iran an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea. Ti would also destabilize and neutralize the influence of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt…”—Saul Troen (March 4)

“I was born on September 11, 1966, and every birthday I have now will never be a happy one. Why, do you ask? Because as I am out somewhere trying to have a nice dinner, someone will have a candle or a ribbon or something, crying about the anniversary of a national tragedy. And then I will think, about how insignificant my one little birthday actually is compared to everything else that had happened on that one day.”--Dr. Steven Tomaselli, Uvalde, Texas (forwarded to CIJR by Lois Mattero; Feb. 28)

“Why do editorialists continue to omit Saudi Arabia from the discussion?…Saudi Arabia is probably more supportive of destructive acts that North Korea and Iraq together.”—William Hill (Feb. 6)

“To my mind, the only way to bring peace to Israel is to defeat Iran…Not only would their defeat destroy much of the support all these anti-Israel and anti-American terrorist groups receive, it would be a serious setback for the Islamists who believe they are on a roll. Psychologically the defeat would be devastating. Short of that Israel will never be free of ever-escalating terror.”—Ted Belman (Jan. 27)

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ON CANADIAN MIDEAST POLICY

"Once again, our government and the Liberal party can’t miss an opportunity to say something against Israel. Even when the president [Moshe Katsav] of the only democracy in the Middle East is in town for the Canada Israel Committee parliamentary dinner, the foreign minister can’t help but look like an idiot. Once again, I am so proud to be a Canadian. Please take a look at this attached article for all the details. [This note is contained on the writer’s circulation of our Briefing, 'Double-Talk on Israel', an editorial in the National Post, March 7]"—Barry Diner (March 7)

“[T]he singling out of Israel time and again, the not allowing her a seat within those government bodies in the Security Council whose main target is Israel itself, whereby countries like Syria and the Sudan who are infamous for their terrorist agendas and histories are allowed such positions with Canadian approval, clearly indicates that Israel is being denied its place as an equal member in the family of nations. Canada can prove its commitment to democracy and democratic states such as Israel by recognizing the inconsistency of its own voting record and its manipulation by those Arab countries…intent upon Israel’s delegitimization.”—Sarah Bauer and Marilyn Abramovitz, Montreal, in a letter to Canada’s Dept. of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (Feb. 24)

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ON MATTERS JEWISH-WORLD RELATED

The Cancellation of the Israel Leg of the March of the Living

“I need to express my outrage about the news that this year’s March of the Living will be going to Poland and has taken Israel off the itinerary. What irony that these kids can travel to Poland, the site of some of the 20th century’s worst anti-Semitism (including the Kielce pogrom after the Holocaust)…Israel is such a crucial component that it would have been better to simply cancel the March this year. What can be learned from the sight of the gas chambers, without realizing the strength and courage that we are capable of…”--Lea Steinlauf (March 17)

Barenboim’s Now-Cancelled Ramallah Performance

“It is to be hoped that the [Israeli-born conductor Daniel] Barenboim concert tonight [the concert has since been cancelled] will find the hall mostly empty…Not only does he try to diminish the impact of the Nazi murders of 6 million of his own people…he sees fit to perform in Ramallah where the terrorist leader Arafat who is responsible for the deaths of Jews and Israelis for decades is holed up…How can anyone of good conscience perform for people who lynch and mutilate innocent people with relish, and dance in celebration when whole families are slaughtered, and babies are killed…?”—Reva Sharon, Israel (March 5)

The Unprecedented Rise of Antisemitism in France

The following unsigned letter to the French Embassy in Washington was forwarded by CIJR member Leo Grunstein in Montreal.

“As a Jew, I would like to thank…your President Jacques Chiraq for saying that Israel needs to be convinced that peace is better than war. Never mind that peace (shalom in Hebrew) is the most common word in Jewish prayers…[and] is mentioned 275 times in the Jewish Bible…Never mind that of all the world's literature the UN chose to inscribe the words of Israeli Prophet Isaiah on the wall across from its building in New York: 'And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'…[T]he President of [France]…would do better teaching cows how to make milk, or teaching grass how to grow quietly than teaching Jews (Israelis) that peace is better than war…

I would like also to thank the unnamed cinema near the Paris Opera for canceling a screening of the ‘Harry Potter’ film for Jewish kids. But I am even more grateful to the police of Paris, which has failed to provide protection for these kids. Apparently Jews of any age are no longer guaranteed complete equality with the rest of the population…

And how can I not mention the doctorate degree in history, which was offered to Mustafa Talas (Syria's Foreign Minister) by Sorbonne? …Dr. Talas has written a book on the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840, in which he claims that Jews kill Christians to obtain their blood for Passover…I am infinitely glad that good old blood libels…nearly forgotten in the last 50 years, are being revived in French academic circles…
I also cannot forget the events of October 2000, with synagogues firebombed and burned, Jewish worshipers attacked and stoned. I know that President Chiraq spoke out against all this…[His] criticisms of Israel had been (and remain) so extensive, so common and so unforgiving, that I cannot possibly believe him…And if there is any doubt about it, your ambassador to the United Kingdom Daniel Bernard has cleared it up…call[ing] Israel "that shitty little country"…

I have decided to join the campaign against France. I will not visit or fly through France…I will also boycott all products made in France, including perfume…designer fashion labels [and] French wines…I will use my money to buy Israeli products, and travel to Israel and other countries who still think that Jews are human and should not live at the mercy of Palestinian terrorists. I will also contact all people I know and try to get them to do the same. Let it be a humble manifestation of my gratitude.”

From the Jewish Community in South Africa

South African Briefing recipient Yitzhack Rubin forwarded the letter below written by Rabbi M.A. Kurtstag, head of the Jewish Ecclesiastical Courts of South Africa, to Johannesburg’s Star newspaper.

“…[The] Star’s editorial dated December claims that ‘Sharon’s declaring Arafat to be irrelevant has seen the introduction of one of the most ruthless programs of random intimidation and killing--in defense of civilization--in the last 50 years’ is the last straw…

Where have you been for the past 50 years? Have you heard of the Soviet Massacres in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in the 1980s? Have you heard of the killing fields of Cambodia, the Genocide of Burundi, the murder and slave trade of the Sudan perpetrated against the Christians in the country, Jordan’s Black September when 10,000 Palestinians were slaughtered by the Jordanian army in a couple of days [and] the cries ‘Maak die Jode dood’ from the Mosques of Cape Town?

All these Sir, whether you realize it or not have happened and are happening within your 50 year time limit. And yet, you choose Israeli whose children are blow to bits in discos and pizzerias and have the temerity to say “thus far and no further” to Palestinian acts of terror and wanton murder. The only conclusion to be drawn is that this has nothing to do with anti-Zionism. Like your colleagues in the media and the ruling party, your attitude is clearly one of anti-Semitism…I therefore cancel my subscription number 103266 to your ‘civilized’ newspaper and as a responsible rabbinical leader call on all Jews and fair-minded South Africans to do likewise.”

Editor’s Note: We urge all our readers to follow the Rabbi’s lead and have the courage to follow his example with respect to anti-Israel coverage in your local newspapers.

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OUR READERS ASK US TO SUPPORT PETITIONS

CNN poll regarding the sending of international monitors to Israel: http://home.netscape.com/ex/shak/international/packages/mideast/ --Ted Friedgut, Israel (March 7)

Petition to revoke the Nobel Peace prize of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat: http://www.revoketheprize.org –Eliahu Shvili, Haifa, Israel (March 6)


The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research thanks its readers all over the world for their insightful responses. We encourage you to continue to share your thoughts and comments with us.

Hag Pesach sameach to all CIJR members and friends. Next year in Jerusalem!

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Volume II, No. 354 • Tuesday, March 26, 2002

THE 1930S, AGAIN
A HARD RAIN IS GOING TO FALL
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, March 25, 2002

In some ways in our war against the terrorists we are like the democracies of the late 1930s. They knew that there was more to Hitler than his avowed quest for the return of the Sudetenland or the Alsace-Lorraine. They sort of suspected that an entire, venerable culture in Germany and Japan had gone off the deep end. And while there was a certain logic to Hitler's diatribes that a moralistic England had no more right to distant India than did Germany to nearby Danzig, most deep-down knew that such parlor-game banter simply masked a much larger dilemma--how to corral a very powerful dictatorship and its axis that wished dominance not coexistence, and whose fuel was brutal force and autocracy, not democracy and freedom.

For England, most of Western Europe, and the United States, reeling under recent economic depression and hardly recovered from the sheer horror of the First World War--carnage unlike any in the long history of warfare--the idea of forceful resistance was little short of insanity. Filmstrips of German Panzers, thousands of Japanese shouting "Banzai!," and even Mussolini's comically delivered, but hateful rants overwhelmed the senses.

How could one stop such madness? And might it just go away with proper diplomacy? And why did "militarists" in the West insist on rearming and thereby "provoking" war? And was not there some truth to German grievances and Japanese hurts? And did anyone really wish to risk millions of innocent Americans and British to kill equally innocent, although perhaps mesmerized, Germans? Who was stirring up such animosity?

We are in a similar dilemma--in our hesitation about Iraq, our pressure on Israel, and our worries about mission creep in pursuing the killers. Can't the Jews and Arabs just get along? If Israel would just give back all of the West Bank, wouldn't there be peace? Didn't we just fight in the Gulf a mere decade ago? How do we know that Saddam Hussein really has such dreadful weapons? Shouldn't our allies get involved too? Do these undemocratic Muslim countries really dislike us all that much? Who can trust polls anyway? Why are these saber-rattlers trying to get us into a war?

And so we Americans, like those 70 years ago who so wanted a perpetual peace, pray for a return of sanity in the Middle East. We chose to ignore horrific stories of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia--the embryo of 9/11. We are more amused than shocked that madrassas have taught a generation to hate us. When mullahs in Iran speak of destroying Israel we wince, but also shrug. We want to see no real connection between madmen blowing themselves up to kill us in New York and the like-minded doing the same in Tel-Aviv. We put our trust in peace with a killer like Mr. Arafat, who packs a gun and whips up volatile crowds in Arabic. All the while, no American statesman has the guts to tell the Arab leadership that statism, tribalism, fundamentalism, gender apartheid, and autocracy--not America, not Israel--make their people poor, angry, and dangerous.

Rather than preparing for what our enemies are preparing for us, we look to gestures of appeasement. Does not the Islamic world appreciate the presence of General Zinni? Do we not give billions to Arab countries? Did we not save Kuwait and Muslims throughout the globe? Who in the Arab world could really think that the murderous Taliban were preferable to the present more enlightened government in Afghanistan? And although Middle Eastern males blew up our planes, people, and monuments, have we not had a national discussion about the evils of profiling those from the Middle East in our airports and stations? Don't Muslims tell their kindred back home how much freer they are in America than in Iraq or Syria?

Like the dashed hopes of the 1930s such faith is not only misplaced, but also dangerous. The efforts of countries like Iraq to acquire nuclear weapons might under the present pressures grow dormant, but they will not cease. A nuclear Pakistan is a tottering military dictatorship away from Armageddon. Bribed autocracies in Jordan and Egypt are allies only in the sense that their unelected leaders promise to jail their nuts and fundamentalists who otherwise might turn on them as well as on us. Polls everywhere in the Middle East reveal not mere anguish, but real enmity toward Americans. Public pronouncements in Iran are not any less hateful than what emanated from Berlin in 1936. Thousands of al Qaeda killers have escaped--and thousands more are angry over the death of the comrades and kin and planning carnage for us as we sleep.

Only a few of us Americans really take the Islamic world at its word--that one in three is reported to think (representing, say, a small number of around 200 million?) that the murder of 3,000 Americans was justified; that two of three believed no Arabs were involved; and that even higher poll numbers reflected real antipathy for the West.

After 30 years of listening to nauseating chanting from Teheran to Islamabad to Nablus, hearing the childish rants about "The Mother of All Battles" and "The Great Satan," and witnessing presidents from Carter to Bush burned in effigy, the ritual torching of the American flag, the misspelled banners of hatred, the thousands of paint-by-the-numbers posters of psychopaths from Khomeini to bin Laden, televised threats that sound as hideous as they are empty, Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism, embassy takeovers, oil-boycotts, hijacked planes, cars, and ships, lectures from unelected obese sheiks with long names and gold chains, peacekeepers incinerated in their sleep, murders at the Olympics, bodies dumped on the tarmac of airports, shredded diplomats, madmen in sunglasses in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, demented mullahs and whip-bearing imams in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, continual Televised murders of Americans abroad, our towers toppled, our citizens butchered, our planes blown up, hooded Klansmen in Hamas and Hezbollah, killers of al-this and Islamic-that, suicide bombers, shrill turbaned nuts spouting hatred on C-SPAN broadcasts, one day the salvation of Kuwait, the next sanctions against the swallower of Kuwait, the third day fury against the sanctions against the swallower of Kuwait, the fourth day some grievance from 1953, the fifth another from A.D. 752; and all the time sanctimonious fingerpointing from Middle Eastern academics and journalists who are as bold abroad in insulting us as they are timid and obsequious under dictators at home in keeping silent, I've about had it. No mas. The problem is you, not us--you, you, youS.

I don't listen any more to the apologies and prevarications of our whiney university Arabists, our equivocators in the state department, and the really tawdry assortment of oil men, D.C. insiders, bought and paid for PR suits, and weapons hucksters. The truth is that a large minority of the Middle Eastern world wishes a war with America that it cannot win--and much of the rest is apparently either indifferent or amused.

So we should stop apologizing, prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and accept this animosity¾just as our forefathers once did when faced by similar autocrats and their captive peoples who threatened us in 1941. I don't know about the rest of America, but I am proud that thugs like Khaddafi, murderers like Saddam Hussein, inquisitionists like the mullahs in Iran, criminals in Syria, medieval sheiks in the Gulf, and millions of others who do not vote, do not speak freely, oppress women, and are not tolerant of religious, gender, or ethnic diversity don't like me for being an American. I would find it repugnant if they did.

No, their hatred is a badge of honor, and I would have it no other way. I am tired of the appeasers of the Middle East on our Right who fawn for oil and trade, and those pacifists and multiculturalists on the Left who either do not know, or do not like, what America really is. I'd rather think of all the innocent dead on 9/ 11 than give a moment more of attention to Mr. Arafat and his bombers.

The truth is that there is a great storm on the horizon, one that will pass--or bring upon us a hard rain the likes of which we have not seen in 60 years. Either we shall say "no more," deal with Iraq, and prepare for a long and hard war against murderers and terrorists--or we will have more and more of what happened on 9/11. History teaches us that certain nations, certain peoples, and certain religions at peculiar periods in their history take a momentary, but deadly leave of their senses--Napoleon's France for most of a decade, the southern states in 1861, Japan in 1931, Germany in 1939, and Russia after World War II. And when they do, they cannot be bribed, apologized to, or sweet-talked--only defeated.

In that context, we see much of a whipped-up Arab world entering this similar period of dangerous unreality. The problem is them and their unelected and unfree regimes, not us--just as it was Hitler, not us; Tojo, not us; Mussolini, not us; and Stalin, not us--just as it always is when unelected maniacs take control and hijack an entire country and culture. We can either step up and stop Islamic fundamentalism, Arab terrorists, and Middle Eastern dictators or we can step back and watch it all continue to grow. If 9/11 was the beginning of a war, then we should remember that wars usually end when one, not both sides, win.

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Volume II, No. 353 • Monday, March 25, 2002

WHY WE STAY IN ISRAEL
Sherry Mandell

It feels crazy to live in Israel right now. A few people are leaving. I understand them. It's horrible to live with the violence, and the attendant stress and anxiety. We Israelis are so vulnerable: travelling in a car or bus, going to a cafe, even staying home. All have been woven with terror. Every time of day and night, we know we are targets.

One recent Friday night, we were awakened at one in the morning by the loudspeaker in our community. The announcement said: "There is a warning that there is a terrorist in Tekoa. Lock your windows and doors, sleep with gun, guard your children. Turn out all of the lights."

We quickly turned off the lights even though we are Sabbath observers. We locked the doors and windows. We put a chair in front of the front door. Then the phone rang. Our neighbor was calling to make sure that we had heard the warning.

The kids were scared, shaking. I told them that we would protect them, take care of them. That they should try to go to sleep.

The kids fell to sleep, all of them in our bed. I prayed and then slept fitfully, hoping that morning would soon be on its way.

Around 3:00 the loudspeaker came on again. The warning was over. For now. But as I told my children, it's rare that terrorists warn you.

They certainly didn't warn my son, Koby, 13, before they stoned him and his friend Yosef to death, crushing their skulls so they were unrecognizable. Koby and Yosef were hiking near our home in Tekoa. The two boys wanted to know the canyon beyond our house like the backs of their hands.

They were killed for their love of the land. They were killed for being Jews.

My friend was at a movie in Jerusalem on Saturday night, the night of the massacre at the Moment Café when a terrorist killed 11 people. The manager stopped the movie and told the patrons what had happened and asked if they wanted the movie to continue. They didn't. They all went home.

Why do people continue to stay here even though we are being slaughtered by terrorists? Because many of us feel a deep sense of connection here, to our country, our heritage, and to each other.

The sense of connection manifests itself in surprising ways. Today I go to the makollet, the grocery store, and there is a man filling a cardboard box with goodies to send to his son in the army. The man picks out a bar of chocolate, plain milk chocolate. And the makollet lady, Rena, says: "Your son doesn't like that kind of chocolate. Noam likes crunchy chocolate."

Another story: My friend Ruth is at a kiosk buying a drink. A little girl says shyly to the proprietor: "What can I get for 2 shekls?" He says, "nothing." Then he hands her a shekl. "But now you have three. You can buy gum or a candy." Ruth fishes into her pocket. "Now you have four."

Here there is a feeling of family. Here in the face of pain and suffering, we don't feel alone. We feel that we are a net that is woven together and though it is full of holes, it is strong enough to lift us up.

If we make a hole in the net, the net is weakened. Of course it can be mended. But it will never be quite the same.

We don't want to make a hole in the net. We don't want to leave the place where our son is buried. We don't want to leave the only place in the world where time is measured by a Jewish calendar, where the celebrations center on the Jewish holidays, where the language is the language of the Bible. We don't want to leave the center of Jewish history. Now we are part of that long, hard history. We are part of the struggle of the Jewish people trying to live in their land.

My son died for being a Jew. I want to live as one.

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A WAR OF NO CHOICE
Israel Harel
Ha’aretz, March 21, 2002

The war of suicides is not the Arabs' war of despair. Anyone claiming so is looking for a way to validate the enemy and heap fallacious feelings of guilt on us. It is not despair that grips the Arabs, but a spirit of madness. They feel they have hit upon the most effective weapon against the Jews--a weapon that sows confusion, fear, suffocation and a sense of having reached a dead end, a weapon against which the Israel Defense Forces has no solution in the framework of the norms that form its core essence.

It is not a weapon of last resort, one that is employed after all other avenues have been explored, but rather the well-thought-out, coolly-calculated (and premeditated) use of a weapon that leads many Jews to the desperate conclusion that given the high costs claimed by terrorism in all areas of life, it is impossible to go on living in this country.

The feeling of the Arabs--and the moralistic reactions that gave rise to the refusal to serve in the territories, itself the product of despair, prove to them that they are right--is that when it comes to Jews, suicide terrorism is a much more effective weapon than anything else in the Arab arsenal, including those that are apparently in Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's stockpile.

It is a non-conventional weapon that sows despair in Israel, while elsewhere in the world, it, unsurprisingly, causes reactions that along with non-binding denunciations, primarily express understanding for and empathy with the Arab "despair." True, for a brief period after September 11, it wasn't very nice to be an Arab terrorist, even the sort that kills only Jews. But now the double standards are back: Only when terror strikes against Americans and Europeans is there a uniform response of condemnation and loathing, together with an unremitting war that uses every means at its disposal.

The enemy is aware of this double standard, which is also accepted by a sizable number of Jews in their own land, and this redoubles the enemy's motivation to continue using suicide terrorism that rocks, as it sees from the despairing responses in Israel, the foundations of their existence. And some Israelis, even some cabinet ministers among them, react with desperate thoughts and actions. It was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, not the enemy, who asked for a cease-fire earlier this week. On the other hand, the Arabs, who are ostensibly the big losers and the desperate party, were against it, and are continuing to blow up buses.

The tiny refusal-to-serve movement, which the media inflates beyond any reasonable proportion to its true significance, is the spearhead of the Israeli desolation camp. This camp has begun to understand the critical message sent by suicide terrorism. It has concluded that if in order to survive, we have to keep on fighting when there are no visible signs of peace on the horizon--and through "not nice" means, at that--then we give up.

This, in my opinion, is the deeper meaning of their refusal to serve in the territories. And since they cannot admit it was in fact despair, in a combination of self-indulgence and fastidiousness, that led them to forsake the struggle and their comrades in arms, the quitters wrap themselves in a moralistic mantle and seek the guilty parties among us: the settlement enterprise--the mother of all sins; the misdeeds of the IDF, the most moral army in the world, that stem, for the most part, from the soldiers' fear of suicide bombers blowing up alongside them, and from all the other harsh outcomes of the Arabs' cruel and inhumane warfare.

Basically, the signs that the Arabs will never give up the fight have been apparent ever since the start of the modern return to Zion. However, fairly few people, in each generation, were willing to admit it: Our war of existence will not, evidently, ever end, even in the distant future.

Not Zinni, not Tenet and not Mitchell; not Oslo, not 242 or 338; not the partition borders of 1947; not the boundaries of the Balfour Declaration (that included Transjordan and parts of what are now Syria and Lebanon) approved by the League of Nations; not the borders of June 6 or June 12, 1967: The objective of the Arabs' wars, from the war rejecting the partition borders in 1947 to the war rejecting the Camp David and Taba talks boundaries, is to prove that no sovereign Jewish presence, in any boundary whatsoever, was, is or will be accepted by the Muslim world, and certainly not by the Arab world.

This sentiment was well expressed by Osama bin Laden, hero of the Muslim world and heir, in the eyes of many denizens of that world, of Salah a-Din. The Islamic nation--and through his act bin Laden united the Arabs and the Muslims--will pursue its war until the last of the infidels is expelled from the holy lands of Mohammed. And Sheikh Ahmed Yasin echoed the sentiment: Bin Laden's words, he said, were mainly intended to describe the Jewish presence that defiles these holy lands.

When the war of terror first broke out, Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Moshe Ya'alon said that there had been no other conflict to compare to this one since the War of Independence. Essentially, he added, it was a continuation of that war. Everything we have been through since then proves that he was right; or maybe he was actually playing down the severity--and the crucial nature--of the current war.

Suicide terrorism is not only battling against Jewish independence, but against the fact of our mere presence here. As the 21st century begins, despite the fact that the Jewish people can exact an immeasurably high price from anyone trying to destroy it by unconventional means, the Jewish people in its homeland is the only people in the world whose enemies aspire to drive it out of its own country.

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THE SUICIDE OF THE PALESTINIANS
David Gelernter
The Weekly Standard, March 25, 2002

…The axioms that underpinned Zionism have been turned inside out. Modern Israel was conceived as a safe haven for Jews. It had other reasons for existing--but safety, and the dignity that only comes with safety, were Zionism's emotional mainsprings. In recent decades, though, especially since the end of Soviet tyranny, the safe-haven idea has lost cogency like an unwound watch running down. In the last few years, Israel has started to look (on the contrary) like the most dangerous place for Jews in the world--if we exclude the small Jewish communities that still exist in Arab countries. Israel must change the way in which it explains itself…

Israeli thinkers ought to speak less about the tragedy (or the ordinariness) of Israel's 3,000-year history, and more about its luminous greatness; ought to talk up the nation's brilliant prospects, and the central role it has played from Moses to Wittgenstein in creating and molding Western civilization. They don't like to talk this way, but they ought to steel themselves and do it anyway. "The Jew is a desert region," Wittgenstein wrote, "but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect."…

(David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard)

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Volume II, No. 352 • Friday, March 22, 2002

PALESTINIAN PRETENSE AND ISRAELI REALITY:
WHAT THE WORLD KNOWS, BUT CAN’T SAY, TO BE TRUE
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, March 18, 2002

A common theme throughout classical literature is the role of pretext (prophasis) contrasted with the actual cause of complaint (aitia)--the great divide between what aggrieved people say publicly and what they feel privately. Nations, the historian Thucydides reminds us, also adopt such strategic postures. Their spokesmen often voice complaints that are either groundless or--even if partly justified--at least different from the "real" or "true" causes of their discontent.

We know the prophasis of the Arab states at the heart of the Middle East question: Israel's occupation of the West Bank. But the aitia--the truest cause of the Palestinian lament--cannot be voiced so easily, either openly or in detail. Why? To do so would involve a systematic cultural, political, and social review of the entire Middle Eastern contemporary world--one that might explain, in terms other than the few thousand acres of the West Bank, why a tiny Jewish state is so prosperous, free, and confident amid dozens whose half-billion inhabitants are not.

Do any in Europe and the Middle East really wish to open the Pandora's Box of secular rationalism, religion, capitalism, democracy and a host of other issues that might hurt Middle Eastern feelings, cost real money, and incur danger--when chanting Zionism, colonialism, racism, and other alleged -isms and -ologies do not?

The Palestinians publicly allege that once given back 100 percent of the West Bank they will recognize Israel and thus the dispute will at last end with recognition by the entire Arab world of the Jewish State. Fair enough. Palestine will thereupon be democratic and prosperous, and so for the first time in its history live in peace side-by-side with Israel. Most Americans welcome just such a vision.

Of course, few in the Islamic world really believe that. Indeed, a number of its more impolitic spokesmen have already written that such a withdrawal would merely be the first step in a renewed struggle to end Israel altogether--as the Arab world was energized at a sign of "weakness," and the citizens of Israel demoralized by concessions made under duress. If one peruses translated newspapers and magazine articles from the Middle East, the rhetoric of destroying Israel is far more ubiquitous than the gospel of mutual coexistence. The Arab League will soon meet to promise acceptance of Israel's right to exist with the return of the West Bank--of course with the caveat that we can hardly expect the crazies like Syria, Iraq, and Libya to sign on publicly to such a "surrender." Mr. Arafat himself to domestic audiences screams "jihad," and "infidels," as he praises suicide bombers as "martyrs" and "heroes," and promises the capture of Jerusalem.

Europeans likewise publicly advance this prophasis, but in private conversation admit that within a few years of "peace" the Israeli-Palestinian relationship would return to its pre-1967 status of conflict over the very existence of Israel. Afraid of terrorism, desirous of trade, eager for steady supplies of oil, nervous over large groups of Islamic immigrants, eager to court third-world favor, and playing good cop to our bad, Europe can hardly express publicly what it privately knows to be true.

Indeed, if the West Bank were to be returned and a general peace declared, there might well be a decade of peace. But then after the hiatus, the madrassas, the autocrats, the theocrats, and the coffee-house intellectuals would, according to their station and methods, all move on to the next round of recovering "all" of "Palestine"--a task made somewhat easier in their mind by Israel's new nearly indefensible borders.

Unlike the Europeans and some others in the West, much of the Arab world does not see distinct and lasting periods of peace and war, but rather interprets the conflict as a continuum--one that will properly and only end eventually with the end of Israel itself. In this view, the Middle East discord is not unlike the first and second Peloponnesian Wars, the three Punic Wars, the First through Fourth Crusade, or perhaps even the interpretation of World War I and II as part of the larger Anglo-German conflict. Such a series of individual "wars" spanning decades ends not with mutual concessions and a brokered peace, but when one side--an Athens, Carthage, Crusader kingdom, or Germany--is militarily defeated and humiliated.

Why should we put credence in such a pessimistic appraisal of Arab intentions? History supports it. The first three wars were waged when the West Bank was in Arab hands; so why would the premises for the next war be any different from those of 1947, 1956, or 1967, when the goal, as Egyptian General Saad Ali Amer once put it plainly, was "the realization of our common goal--the elimination of Israel"?

The current conflict is surely not over the grievance of dead Muslims--Iraq and Iran make Israelis look like amateurs in that regard. Nor is the lament really over the cruel expulsion of Palestinians en masse--Kuwait garners that prize for expelling a quarter million after the Gulf War. Nor is there much historical precedent of according Palestinians any privileged position based on land lost through war. Compare the current borders of Germany with those of 1914, and then try and make the case for returning soil from France and Poland that was German since antiquity--and the world will answer back with a stern lecture about the wages that a state incurs when it repeatedly attacks its neighbors and loses.

Economically, there is no reason to believe that an autonomous Palestinian state will operate any differently from its other Arab neighbors--statist, corrupt, tribal, and unfree, with an intolerable situation of sending workers into a hated Israel to earn what they could not garner in a beloved Palestine. And without the grievance of the West Bank, the stark reality of such economic disarray might be more, not less difficult, for thousands to stomach.

Politically, the situation is depressingly similar. Why, if Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq are run by autocrats, will Palestine be any different? Why, if he were granted his entire agenda, would Mr. Arafat suddenly surrender his ironclad control of the media, and thereupon become the first truly democratic leader of the entire Muslim world to welcome discussion of his policies, Islamic religion, and Westernization?

The best to be hoped for would be a Palestine more similar to Jordan--a "nice-guy" autocracy without real democracy or freedom that supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, and lives in fear of its own Islamic extremists. So we continue with the present Orwellian scene in which loud Middle-Eastern journalists and intellectuals, who have never known true freedom at home, lecture the United States about Mr. Arafat's democratic demands for his own unfree Palestinians.

If the world knows the bleak prognosis, why all the idealistic demands for granting "freedom" and "democracy" to the Palestinians? To be crass, I think much of the discussion is simply a matter of anti-Semitism and the power of oil. Those two themes are central in many angry letters that I receive daily from critics--and not all of them are from Middle Easterners or survivalists in the northwest, who nevertheless exhibit a spooky commonality. If the Arab world were without crude oil, there could be an honest assessment of the true nature of Mr. Arafat's regime, and enlightened people could talk of a great faultline between a free democracy and a one-party autocracy. And if this dispute did not involve Jews--that is, if it were seen in the context of hundreds of murderous border disputes over lost lands now going on between Indians and Pakistanis, Chinese and Tibetans, Colombians, Congolese, Irish, Rwandans, Kurds and Turks and other aggrieved, the world would merely sigh.

Much of the problem, then, quite simply is also psychological and arises because a Jewish state is right smack in the middle of the Arab world--and by every measure of economic, political, social, and cultural success thriving amid misery. Without oil, without a large population, without friendly countries on its borders, without vast real estate, and without the Suez Canal, it somehow provides its citizenry with a way of life far more humane than what is found in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, or Egypt. Yet the world listens to the Palestinians' often-duplicitous leadership--despite the corrupt nature and murderous past history of Mr. Arafat's regime--because its sponsors sell a good part of the globe's oil. And to risk their wrath, one would have to support a few million Jews, not hundreds of millions of, say, British, Swedes, or Italians.

And so we give not a damn over millions of innocents elsewhere butchered over millions of acres each year worldwide, but instead focus on what the Palestinians lost while attempting to destroy their neighbors. For those who laugh at such reductionism, imagine the world's moral outrage if China were tiny and Jewish, while Tibet was backed by Asian nations with the world's oil reserves. I have not recently heard any European demanding an instant redress for the theft of Tibetan land, the destruction of its cultural heritage, and frequent forced expulsion of its population by a government that is neither democratic nor free.

If such a bleak appraisal of prophasis and aitia is accurate, is there any hope for Israel when the entire world knows the truth that it cannot confess without endangering its economic interests or moral pretenses? What then can Israel do as the West watches and wonders whether the supply of suicidal murderers will be exhausted before the weary Israeli public concedes? Such a strange place, the Middle East--where Klansmen-like terrorists in hoods, who blow themselves up in Israeli restaurants, and fire machine guns up into the air at funerals, try to pass themselves off as noble, underpowered freedom fighters because their fiery supporters in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan have learned long ago not to send any more of their own plentiful planes and tanks to destroy Israel.

Given pressure from all sides and short of an all-out war, Israel may well have to exist as a fortress next to Mr. Arafat's state, after unilaterally returning what it considers it can afford of the West Bank. It would then brace for a cold war of the type the United States waged against the Soviets and Eastern Europe, holding firm against a Palestinian state behind barbed wire and concrete for decades until (fat chance?) true democracy and secularism might appear among its neighbors. West Germany prospered for a half century behind mines, guard towers, and police dogs; apparently that was better than having Communists crossing the border to kill free German citizens.

But there is one final consideration for those smug utopian architects in our state department and Europe that is completely forgotten in all this. There will be no second Holocaust. If almost all of the West Bank is returned, as is likely, and in a few years hostilities nevertheless resume as they did during phases 1-3 of the Middle East wars, as is also likely, the battle will be over Israel itself, not Palestinian land. That will be a war Israel will not lose, and it will be fought outside not inside the Jewish state. And that will be a nightmare compared to the current crisis. Those in Europe and in the United States who now lecture about morality will then prove to be not only amoral, but also answerable for far, far more still.

Shabbat shalom to all our readers!

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Volume II, No. 351 • Thursday, March 21, 2002

BREAKING NEWS: TWO KILLED, 87 INJURED
AS SUICIDE BOMBER HITS DOWNTOWN JERUSALEM
Jonathan Lis and Haim Shadmi
Ha'aretz, March 21, 2002

At least two people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up in downtown Jerusalem on Thursday afternoon. According to Magen David Adom, more than 87 people have been evacuated to Jerusalem's four hospitals.

Security sources said that the bomber had previously been held in jail by the Palestinian Authority, but was subsequently released when the IDF entered the West Bank city of Ramallah a few weeks ago.

In a telephone call to The Associated Press, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a militia linked to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the bombing. The Al Aqsa Brigade identified the assailant as Mohammed Hashaika, 22, a resident of the West Bank village of Talooza, north of the city of Nablus.

______________________________________________________

ISRAEL, THE ONLY DEMOCRATIC STATE
IN THE MIDDLE EAST, DESERVES OUR MORAL SUPPORT
Declan McCormack
Irish Sunday Independent, March 10, 2002

It's open season for Jew-bashing in the West at the moment. As the Middle East's only democracy is subjected to wave after wave of vicious terrorist attacks by Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers the pious West and the sanctimoniously 'liberal' Western media lay the blame firmly where it has always lain with the Jews.

Yes, while every other democracy in the 'free world' claims a sovereign God-given right to extirpate terrorism and to protect their innocent citizens from the evil deeds of men and women of violence, the Jewish state of Israel is supposed to take the vicious, murderous attacks on its citizens lying down and presumably apologising for its existence, for the Jewish people's history and for 'going on about' the Holocaust.

The Jews were, after all, made to be attacked, annihilated and scapegoated. First the pogrom, then the expulsion, then the name-calling. How odd of God to choose the Jews, indeed. But, of course, no-one even the rabidly pro-Palestinian Western media really approves of these attacks on ordinary Jews. No-one, that is, except the gore-glorying mobs who celebrate every blood-bedraggled mission by dancing in the little streets of the Palestinian townships.

We in the West would rather the ordinary Israelis who travel on buses or who attend bar-mitzvahs or eat as a family in pizza parlours weren't blown to pieces by Palestinian suicide bombers because it doesn't square with our cherished notion that the poor Palestinian freedom fighters are being savagely bullied by the US-backed fascist colonial Semitic superpower that is Israel. Little urchin catapault-wielders fighting against Merkava tanks and Hellfire missile-shooting fighter jets.

Of course, all Palestinian violence is mere retaliation. Sure, wouldn't you blow yourself up right beside a mother and her small children if you had to queue everyday at checkpoints? Sure, we all know that Ariel Sharon is worse than Hitler. Remember the Lebanese massacres. (How could you ever forget when they're mentioned in every news reports even as the blown-to-pieces bodies of Israeli children are picked off the streets of Jerusalem.) Don't, of course, mention the 1997 suicide bomb which killed 13 Israelis in Jerusalem just after Israel had given the PLO control of Hebron. It doesn't really fit in with this schema whereby all Palestinian violence is just the understandable reaction of a downtrodden people to the gratuitous incursions and the targeted killings by Israel.

Don't mention, either, the fact that while Israel only targets terrorists who endanger the lives of their families by using them as human shields (thus the killing of the Hamas leader's family last week, for which Israel apologised) while the lovely, generous Palestinians (as described on Liveline last Tuesday) support terrorist organisations who kill Israelis at random. But then they're only Israelis. Jews. And what are they doing in Zion, anyway. Zionists! Fascists! Colonists!

And so the West lends immoral support to the Palestinians and delivers high-minded lectures to Israel about 'how to handle terrorists without hurting anyone'. Lesson one when, eh, we haven't worked out the details yet. The Swedes are very good at giving this advice. They had a great record in the last war facilitating Nazi steel transportations. And, of course, the UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson, formerly President of neutral Ireland, has been getting up on her high nelly lecturing Israel and telling them to be respectful of minorities. Especially, one presumes, suicide bombers at bus-stops. It wasn't that long ago since Ms. Robinson was emoting about how she herself was a Jew…She might just show a little consideration for the embattled and terrorised Jews of Israel now.

She might also bear in mind that someone else recently announced in public that he was a Jew. The kidnapped Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl was forced by his captors to say on video in a sick parody of the Palestinian Martyrs' final self-glorifying videos that he was a Jew and that his father was a Jew and his mother a Jew. That said, his Muslim captors slit his throat and cut off his head. Nice people.

In the ongoing Middle Eastern and potentially worldwide battle between Islam and Judaism it is sincerely to be hoped that this time out some European countries may learn the lesson of their obscene history and bring themselves to say and mean that 'in that case, I'm a Jew'. They could start by giving moral support to the only democratic state in the middle east as it tries to quell a coldly calculated uprising inspired by little else except the ideology and praxis of terrorism and the undiluted anti-Semitic hatred of the toxic wing of Islam.

_____________________________________________________

MAKE THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY PAY
David M. Weinberg
Jerusalem Post, March, 17 2002

News item: "Israel, US negotiating over tax monies to be handed over to Palestinians." Nothing could be more absurd. The EU and the US are pressuring Israel to release into Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's coffers some $1.6 billion in various taxes and customs duties collected by the Finance Ministry on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. US President George W. Bush himself raised the issue with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last month.

Now, I'm certain that Arafat has the best of intentions for the funds that our good friends abroad would have us deposit in his personal bank account in Tel Aviv. He plans to build old age homes, establish chess clubs, open soup kitchens, manufacture Kleenex, and sponsor the Palestinian Gaylee Boys Choir.

I'll even take Arafat at his word that he will not spend a penny of the $1.6b. to purchase guns, bullets, mortars, rockets and other projectiles that could hurt Israelis. Not even to pay-off his Iranian shipping bill.

I'm also willing to skip the argument that monies are fungible, meaning that if we give Arafat cash to spend on social welfare, it frees up other PA funds for the purchase of weaponry. Recall that the previous Bush administration wasn't so understanding. George Sr. coldly told Israel "no" when we requested loan guarantees to absorb Russian immigrants, because he didn't like Yitzhak Shamir's spending on settlements. Money is fungible, the elder Bush intoned.

Nevertheless, the notion that Israel owes anything to Arafat is both outrageous and ludicrous. Yasser owes us a lot more money than we supposedly owe him. It is time to make the PA pay, in hard cash, for the economic and financial damages it has caused Israel over the past 18 months.

To begin with, Jerusalem should use the PA's embargoed tax monies to pay the hundreds of Israeli companies that have been stiffed by the PA for supplied goods and services. Sources in the Israel Chambers of Commerce and the civil administration say the PA owes Israeli businesses over $100 million, including $13m. to Israel Electric and about $50m. to Bezeq.

In fact, 22 private companies, supported by the chamber and the Manufacturers Association, petitioned the High Court of Justice in January demanding exactly that. The companies--which include flour mills, air conditioning contractors, plastics, ceramics, chemicals and packaging manufacturers--hold about $5m. in bounced Palestinian checks. We should return these checks to the PA through Anthony Zinni. Call it a down payment on the $1.6b. we theoretically owe Arafat.

According to a 1994 Israeli law passed after the Cairo Accords (which established the parameters for economic relations between Israel and the PA), our Finance Ministry is empowered to deduct such Palestinian debts from tax monies we collect for the PA! Foolishly, the law has never been implemented.

PA liability is compounded by the whopping, devastating 95 percent drop in foreign investment that Israel has suffered since the armies under Arafat's control began shooting; from $2b. to $100m. in one year! That makes for another $1.9b. that the PA owes Israel. Some $100 million more has been lost in tourism. Tack it on to Yasser's bill.

The actual fighting has cost the IDF well over $2.5b., I estimate. One hour's operation of an Apache attack helicopter runs over $4,500; an F-16, over $12,000; a Merkava tank, at least $2,000. We have several thousand bulletproof vests for the police and for reservists on order, at $400 each, a new necessity courtesy of Mr. Arafat. The cost of security guards at schools, wedding halls, community centers, and synagogues is adding up, too.

Don't forget the high cost of maintaining so many Palestinian informants, and funds for hundreds of additional ambulance drivers, surgeons, social workers, occupational therapists, trauma support groups, etc. Valium, Prozac and Seroxat use in this country has gone through the roof. The Health Ministry says it needs an additional $300m.

I think we should add to Arafat's bill the enormous cost of the election to dump Ehud Barak, and the overtime paid to Carmela Menashe of Israel Radio so that she can broadcast her trenchant criticism of IDF operations.

Now for compensation to the approximately 1,500 Israeli victims of Palestinian terror: each victim should get no less than the Palestinian dead are receiving.

Reportedly, Hamas gives $10,000 to the family of every suicide bomber. According to The Financial Times of London, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said last Monday that Baghdad would raise its financial contribution to the families of Palestinian martyrs from $10,000 to $25,000. That's a total shahid package of $35,000. The principle of equity demands that our dead--and I think even our wounded--get the same. Which adds $52.5 million to the reparations owed to Israel by Yasser Arafat's Evil Authority. Not including punitive damages.

Arafat shouldn't count on pocketing too much change once we get through adding up the costs of the nasty little war he forced upon us.

(The writer is director of public affairs at Bar-Ilan
University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.)

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Volume II, No. 350 • Wednesday, March 20, 2002

WEDNESDAY'S "NEWS IN REVIEW" ROUND-UP

WEEKLY QUOTES

“The Tenet work plan requires 100 percent effort from Chairman Arafat to stop the violence and the terror. I would expect a 100 percent effort to begin immediately. [Arafat] must speak to his own people personally about the importance of ending violence and terrorism, issue clear instructions to his security services to enforce the cease-fire, and to follow-up closely these efforts to ensure [their] implementation…”—U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney during his visit to Israel, declaring that he would meet with Chairman Arafat on condition that the P.A. leader first implement the Tenet cease-fire plan (Jerusalem Post, March 20) [CNN reports that a potential meeting between Vice-President Cheney and Arafat might be held in Egypt and could happen just before or just after next week's Arab League summit in Beirut.]

“Every morning I travel with fear. I know that they don’t care who you are."—Israeli Arab nurse Kamli Massalha, who was injured in this morning’s suicide bombing bus attack in northern Israel which killed seven and injured 30, saying the bombers made no distinction between Arabs and Jews. (Jer. Post, March 20)

“If [Arafat] does travel to Beirut, we expect to hear a speech addressing the importance of peace and stability in the region.”—P.M. Ariel Sharon suggesting that Arafat might not be allowed to return to the West Bank and Gaza should a surge of terrorist attacks erupt while he was gone or if he incited violence at the Arab League meeting (New York Times, March 20)

“The [cease-fire] test will be in results on the ground only. All of the signs indicate that, regrettably, we are in a re-run. While the IDF indeed carried out its part and withdrew from ‘A’ areas, IDF Intelligence reports reveal a chilling picture, and there is no change in the Palestinians’ extremist rhetoric. Yasser Arafat feels that the wave of violence he has been riding for 1.5 years is finally beginning to bear diplomatic fruit. Then why shouldn’t he continue on his current path?”—Editorial (Ma’ariv, March 20)

“The Aksa Brigades are the noblest phenomenon in the history of Fatah, because they restored the movement’s honor and bolstered the political and security echelon of the Palestinian Authority.”—West Bank Preventive Security Service head Jibril Rajoub, praising the Aksa Brigades, one of the most deadly of the terrorist wings of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah-controlled movement. [Jibril Rajoub, a prominent Palestinian figure close to Yasser Arafat, also admitted to being behind a secret mission in 1992 that attempted to assassinate P.M. Ariel Sharon when he served as housing minister.] (Jer. Post, March 19)

“The occupation killed my son. I have no doubt this death was unnecessary, but I am sure that I will have a harder time coping with it if I continue to think it was unnecessary, so I prefer to make things ‘pretty’ by saying he died while protecting his country. But I do not believe that.”—Malka Tzemech, mother of murdered Lieut. Tal Tzemech, harshly attacking Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Her son was killed in his sleep and three others wounded, by Palestinian gunmen who yesterday infiltrated an Israeli paratrooper training camp in the northern Jordan Valley. (N.Y.T., March 20)

“It is important to recognize that in the Arab world the threat is perceived quite differently. The people who are dying today on the streets are not a result of any Iraqi action. The people are dying as a result of an Israeli action. And likewise the people in Israel are dying as a result of actions taken in response.”—Crown Prince Salman Hamad Al-Khalifa of Bahrain (Wall Street Journal, March 20)

“…Saddam is not merely the devil they know…The prospect of a new regime for such a powerful neighbour, and in particular one which espouses Western-style democracy (which is quite certainly what the U.S. would install), truly horrifies [the Arab world]…The Arab states are trying effectively to obtain a trade. In its crudest terms: You can ‘do’ Iraq if, first, you ‘do’ Israel, by forcing them to accept something resembling the Saudi Arabian ‘peace initiative.’…The Israeli bête noire is their other prop…[I]t presents itself, thanks to the recent explosion of violence, as the only available delaying tactic…What we need is a [sic.] U.S. plausibly to say: ‘Do what we ask or to hell with you.’ That requires a willingness to contemplate the collapse of a ‘moderate’ regime in Arabia or Egypt, and therefore an ability to confront the whole Arab world as the agent of democracy…Instead, the Bush administration is holding on for dear life to anything that remains of the old, more comfortable Middle Eastern order…”—Columnist David Warren (Nat’l Post, March 20)

“In the sphere of the United Nations, Canada is always immediately behind the U.S. in helping to support and defend Israel. We certainly expect that in Geneva they will perform likewise.”—Israel’s ambassador to the UN Yehuda Lancry, looking to Canada to prevent Arab states from achieving uncontested condemnations of the Jewish state at the annual meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva next week. With the U.S. ejected from the commission last year, Canada is the only member in a strong position to demand a ballot on a series of anti-Israel resolutions (Nat’l Post, March 16)

“Israel’s acts are seen in a totally different light. Israel is taking steps to defend itself in extremely difficult circumstances. We have urged…only that it do so in a way…which moves the peace process along…[W]e will work in consultation with Israel during this [next] session”--Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Bill Graham, backing Israel’s charges that the UN Human Rights Commission has been unfair in its attacks on the Jewish state. (National Post, March 20)

“There’s been a successive series of important initiatives such as we’ve rarely seen in some time. There was the initiative by Crown Prince Abdullah—which for my part I approve of completely and I hope it will be taken up by all the Arab countries at the summit in Beirut on March 27—that is, the peace-for-land exchange. It would be the first time that the Arab countries have taken this position; it’s a far-reaching and important change. And still, there are questions in Israel about the prime minister’s action. You know, I understand perfectly well the horror of Israeli citizens in the face of terrorist attacks. It’s a normal reaction which no one can dispute, just as I understand the reaction of the Palestinians who feel humiliated and under attack.”—French President Jacques Chirac, in an interview with the International Herald Tribune. (I.H.T., March 20)

“I cannot imagine what caused me to make those comments, which I totally repudiate. Whatever the reason, I was wrong for not disagreeing with the president [Richard Nixon], and I sincerely apologize to anyone I have offended. I don’t ever recall having those feelings about any group, especially the Jews, and I certainly do not have them now. My remarks did not reflect my love for the Jewish people. I humbly ask the Jewish community to reflect on my actions on behalf of Jews over the years that contradict my words in the Oval office that day…”—Rev. Billy Graham apologizing for his remarks in which he discussed “total Jewish domination of the media” as recorded on a 1972 Oval Office tape that was made public by the National Archives. Until recently, the evangelist who said the nation’s problem lies with “satanic Jews” had denied having made such a statement. (N.Y.T., March 17)

___________________________________

SHORT TAKES

7 KILLED IN SUICIDE BOMBING ON BUS IN NORTH—(Jerusalem) Seven people were killed, four of them IDF soldiers, and nearly 30 were injured when a suicide bomber set off a powerful bomb that ripped apart an Egged bus this morning near the Afula-area Israeli Arab town of Umm al Fahm. The Islamic Jihad organization claimed responsibility. The soldiers have been identified as Non-Commissioned Officer Meir Fahima, 40, Staff Sergeant Shimon Haderi, 20, Sergeant Michael Altfiro, 19, and Corporal Aharon Revivo. Two of the civilians killed in the bombing have been identified as Alon Goldenberg, 28, and Mahanto Mogus, 75. A number of Israeli Arabs were among the dead. Israel Radio said the bus was traveling from Tel Aviv to Nazareth Ilit. (Ha’aretz, March 20)

ISRAELI, PALESTINIAN OFFICIALS TO MEET TONIGHT—(Tel Aviv) Senior Israeli and Palestinian officials are scheduled to meet this evening in Tel Aviv to discuss ways to implement the Tenet plan. Following its complete pullout from Bethlehem and northern Gaza, Israel is expected to request that the Palestinians take a number of steps against terrorism which include the arrest of wanted terrorists, the dismantling of terror organizations, and the confiscation of illegal weapons. The Palestinians will request that the IDF pull back to positions occupied before the outbreak of violence in September 2000. They are also expected to request the dismantling of all IDF roadblocks of Palestinian villages, and that Palestinian civilians be allowed full freedom of movement. U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni, Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, and Palestinian Preventive Security heads Jibril Rajoub and Mohammad Dahlan will participate in the meeting. (Jer. Post, March 20)

MARCH OF THE LIVING CANCELS ISRAEL TRIP—(New York) The Israel leg of next month’s March of the Living trip, which brings 1,500 teenagers to concentration camp sites and the Jewish state, has been cancelled. In the face of this decision, the United Jewish Federation of MetroWest, New Jersey, decided independently to provide teens with what they say is an integral component of the march--a week of Jewish life in Israel to offset emotions stirred by a week of witnessing the killing grounds of the Holocaust. “I think it's a disgrace that they're willing to go to Poland and not to Israel," said Mark Sarna, a child of Holocaust survivors and chairman of the American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters Museum. His 17-year-old daughter, Danielle, will fly from Poland to Israel with the federation. The march organizers, he said, "showed cowardice and basically buckled in to pressure and fear, particularly when Israel needs American Jewry so much." (Jer. Post, March 20)

ISRAEL ASSAILS UN CHIEF FOR PUBLIC LETTER—(New York) The Israeli mission to the UN assailed Secretary General Kofi Annan for a critical letter he sent to P.M. Ariel Sharon last week and released publicly on Monday. The Israeli mission said “the tactic of using the media for selective criticism, so as to exert pressure on those combating terror rather on the terrorists and those states supporting them is at the least counterproductive.” The Israeli statement criticized Annan’s letter for “fail[ing] to reflect the basic fact that it is Palestinian terrorists that are deliberately targeting civilians.” Annan’s report claimed that as a result of Israel’s actions, “hundreds of innocent non-combatant civilians…have been injured or damaged or destroyed.” (N.Y.T.; Jer. Post, March 20)

GERMAN DOCUMENTARY CASTS DOUBT ON PALESTINIAN ICON-- (Jerusalem) A documentary aired Sunday on German television has cast doubt on the authenticity of a Palestinian icon of the intifada: Muhammed al-Dura. The 12-year-old Gazan boy was shot to death in a crossfire two days after the violence began on September 30, 2000, while crouching for safety with his father. The incident was filmed by the France2 television network, and the pictures had a dramatic impact on the public perception of Israel's use of force, with the IDF widely accused of killing the boy. The documentary raises the issue of whether France2 released all its footage, and whether it was physically possible to have hit al Dura from the IDF’s position. An IDF investigation after the event raised similar doubts. (Jer. Post, March 19)

NETANYAHU PLAN WOULD OUST ARAFAT—(Jerusalem) Former P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu told Time magazine that Israel should invade the West Bank and Gaza Strip if P.A. Chairman Yasser Arafat will not budge on the right-of-return issue and continues to sponsor terrorism. His plan would deport Arafat, and the PA’s 35,000 paramilitary police would be stripped of their weapons. Israel would then create a separation between Israelis and Palestinians with a network of fences and defensive positions maintained by tanks. Netanyahu added that if Palestinian leaders give up on the issue of the right of return, he would be willing to sign a full peace agreement. (New York Post, March 18)

U.S. CHARGED WITH IGNORING SAUDI CHARITIES TIED TO TERRORISTS—(Washington) John Loftus, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, says U.S. officials refuse to move against fraudulent American-based charities that allegedly channeled money from the government of Saudi Arabia to terrorist organizations. “The Saudi relationship is so sensitive that, for more than a decade, federal prosecutors and counterterrorist agents have been ordered to shut down their investigations for reason of foreign policy.” Loftus claims that planned raids and arrests against terrorist-related targets have been halted and that criminal investigations into Saudi-backed charities have been interfered with. (Nat’l Post, March 20)

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION OMITS JERUSALEM IN LIST OF CAPITALS—(Jerusalem) The Foreign Ministry of Israel has issued a formal protest to the World Health Organization and the United Nations for the intentional omission of Jerusalem as Israel's capital in printed and on-line lists of nearly 200 countries--the rest of whose capitals are named. Asked to explain Jerusalem's absence from the list, WHO spokesman Jon Liden said the decision was based on UN guidelines and follows resolutions “by the General Assembly and the UN Security Council, as well as by the World Health Assembly.” (Jer. Post, March 19)

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Volume II, No. 349 • Tuesday, March 19, 2002

NAMING THE WAR
Ari Shavit
Ha'aretz, March 15, 2002

A name is needed. This war needs a name. If you don't give your war a name you can't fight it. If you don't give your war a name you can't win it. You will lose. And in losing, die. One possibility is the Al-Aqsa Intifada. But that is the Palestinian name, not the Israeli one. And for a long time now the point hasn't been Al-Aqsa. Not only Al-Aqsa. Nor is there an intifada here. There are no mass demonstrations, no popular uprising, no stone throwing. So those who say intifada are lying. Merely laundering words.

Another possibility is the End of the Occupation War. The Palestinians' war to end the occupation. But this war broke out immediately after the Palestinians were offered the end of the occupation. By exchanging Ehud Barak for Ariel Sharon, this war itself actually perpetuated the occupation. And in large part, this war is being waged outside the areas of the occupation. It makes no distinction between Israelis of occupation and Israelis of outside the occupation. So anyone who speaks about the End of the Occupation War is lying. Merely laundering words.

Perhaps the Peace for the Settlements War. The war of Ariel Sharon to perpetuate the settlements. But this war broke out immediately after Israel agreed to dismantle about a hundred settlements. The war broke out immediately after the Palestinians ostensibly agreed to accept the existence of the remaining settlements. And in none of their ideological platforms do the Palestinians posit the settlements as a sufficient condition for ending this war and establishing peace. In none of their war cries do the Palestinians posit the goal of dismantling the settlements as a final goal. So anyone who says that this war is the Peace for the Settlements War is lying. Merely laundering words.

So as I lean on the stone fence across the way, as I watch the highly skilled teams wash the blood off the road, it comes to me that maybe the right name for this war is an awkward, old name: the War of the Life of the Jews. Or a slightly more updated version: The War of the Jews' Last Chance. After all, the inhuman human being who was sent here by a national liberation movement that is not a national liberation movement did not want to kill the people sitting at the bar in Moment in order to avenge the humiliation of the checkpoints. That Palestinian Goldstein who was sent here by this Palestinian Duce in order to plunge bolts and nails into the girls of Moment didn't do it in order to win himself freedom. He did it in an ecstasy of religious hatred the likes of which exists nowhere on earth. He did it in a convulsion of a cult of land and a cult of blood and a cult of death. He did it in an attack of fascist zealotry that does not know the value of the individual. And he did it not to affirm them but to deny us. Not to liberate them but to annul us. To chase us out of here.

The window-shattered prow of Moment glows with a kind of strangely pleasant light. As though the cafe were a boat that has already been hit by a torpedo and all its sailors killed--but has not yet sunk. And as I wander by these windows and look at the half-empty beer bottles and the uneaten bowls of pasta and the red Cinzano that survived, it comes to me that it is really very simple: After all the complexity, what it boils down to is: They want to take our lives. Religious nationalist fanatics want to take our lives. And in their messianic fervor, they are sending us a very clear message with their bombs: We cannot bear you. We cannot bear your freedom, we cannot bear your sovereignty, we cannot bear your way of life. We cannot bear your girls. We cannot bear your children, we cannot bear your infants. We cannot bear your happiness. We cannot bear your happy occasions. We cannot bear your laughter. We cannot bear the blood that flows in your veins, the very beating of your heart.

The explosive device had something of the effect of a small neutron bomb. It hardly touched property, only killed people. The chairs are overturned and the glass is shattered, but the counter is almost unharmed. Above the espresso machine are piles of small Segafredo cups. Rows and rows of whiskey, arak, liqueur. The two rings of Carlsberg and Tuborg glow in the distance above the two beer taps. Only the entrance area is blackened. There are only a few bloodstains on the window bars. And in the northeast corner a wall perforated by nails. Bolts and nails.

A name is needed. A name is needed urgently. Because this killing is not taking place out of the blue. This killing is taking place the way it is and on the scale that it is because in the past few months the laundering of words has accorded it legitimization. This killing is taking place the way it is and on the scale that it is because in the past few months Israeli politics has infused it with motivation. This killing is taking place because in the past few months we have behaved wantonly. We have blurred lines. So we need a name in order to draw new lines. Lines here and now. So that it will be possible to understand what we are fighting for. What we are being killed for. Killed on the counter of the bar. Killed in the midst of lovemaking. In the midst of life.

At four in the morning a family arrives. The father, wearing a knitted kippa, is composed. The mother's eyes are large and frightened. They have come to look for items of clothing. Maybe they will be able to find some items of clothing here. Because at Shaare Zedek Medical Center they said no and at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Karem they said no, and at Abu Kabir, the forensic institute, they found nothing. She only started working here today. Today of all days she started work here. They have been wandering around all night, not knowing what to do. Not knowing who to turn to. Maybe some items of clothing remained by the bar. Some signs of identity.

Only one name comes to me: the War of Sovereignty. Maybe the War of Israeli Sovereignty. Maybe the War of Jewish Sovereignty. Because this is the goal of the war: not to bring about the collapse of the occupation but to bring about the collapse of Jewish sovereignty. To deny the Jews the right to be sovereign in any part of the Land of Israel. And this is also both the strategy and the tactic of this war: by means of killing in cafes and killing in restaurants and killing in malls and pizzerias and in night clubs, to show the Jews that they are no longer safe any place in Israel. By generating fear and sowing separation, it wants to isolate the Jews in separate political and geographic cantons that are alienated from one another and turn away from one another and devote all their efforts to mutual gratuitous hatred.

By means of murder and massacre, this war is trying to force the Jews out of every public place and deny them any feeling of public order, to insulate them in terrified, helpless individual life. In order to disrupt completely all the workings of their common life. In order to void of content their political independence. And in order to demonstrate to them, by means of bombs, that they are no longer sovereign. That the Jews are not sovereign anywhere in this country.

I won't sleep tonight. It's better not to sleep. As long as the eyes are open, the eyes don't remember. As long as the eyes are open, they don't reconstruct what happened. They don't have to watch the horror movie that Moment projects incessantly on the screen of one's consciousness. But down below on Gaza Street and on Radak and on Ben Maimon it is very dark. In the center of town, too, the night cafes are closed. Here and there a police van speeds by. Here and there one sees a policeman with an assault rifle. And there is the wailing of the muezzin on the Temple Mount. Apocalyptic Bratslav Hasidim congregate.

Maybe it's not too late after all. Maybe it is still in our hands. Now, with the sirens chasing one another, with all the lights flashing, with the writing shouting from every wall. And 350 who are silent. Eleven hundred Palestinians and 350 Jews who are forever silent.

One thing is clear: if we do not get up now, we will never get up. If we allow ourselves to go on wallowing in this helplessness and this factionalism and this self-hatred, we will never get on our feet again. And if we do not make it clear to ourselves immediately that this war is the War of Israeli Sovereignty, that sovereignty will fall apart. If we do not demand right now that this war be followed by peace--the peace, too, will fall apart. And if we go on laundering words and if we do not draw lines immediately and if we do not define the fundamentals, the little order that still remains will also fall apart. The little remaining quiet will disappear. Because the Bratslavers are already congregating in the corner; the muezzin is calling from the Temple Mount.

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IT IS NOT A CYCLE OF VIOLENCE
Marcus Gee
Globe and Mail, March 16, 2002

We all know about the "cycle of violence": Israeli troops kill a carful of Palestinian militants; a Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a group of diners in a Jerusalem restaurant. The Israelis kill more militants; the terrorists send more suicide bombers.

On and on it goes, a series of tit-for-tat attacks that builds relentlessly on itself. Both sides are equally to blame and the only solution is for both to forswear violence and get back to talking peace.

That, in any case, is how most of the outside world sees what is happening in the Middle East. The "cycle of violence" is a neat way of understanding a confusing situation. No wonder that it has been embraced by governments and media nearly everywhere.

Only one problem: It is dead wrong. The idea that both sides are equally to blame for the current violence is absurd. The violence has one cause and one cause only: Palestinian terrorism.

Israel today is suffering the most intense and sustained terrorist assault that any modern nation has endured. When its military hits back, its purpose is to stop that terrorism, and it would stop attacking tomorrow if the terrorism stopped. The same is not true of the terrorists, who would keep sending their suicide bombers even if there were no Israeli response.

The leaders of the Palestinians would have the world believe it is they who are reacting to Israeli violence. When a suicide bomber detonated his device in a Jerusalem café near Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's residence last weekend and killed 11 people, a Palestinian spokesman said it was only a spontaneous "human reaction" to Israeli violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But it isn't a reaction at all. The terrorist war is a deliberate campaign designed to demoralize Israelis and create a crisis that would bring international intervention that would favour the Palestinian cause. There is nothing spontaneous about it.

Distinctions like that may seem like hair-splitting when bullets are flying and blood flowing. But they matter. To frame the Mideast conflict as a simple "cycle of violence" is to put the response to terrorism on the same plane as terrorism itself. Seen this way, the Israeli general who sends his tanks after gunmen in a refugee camp is every bit as debased as the terrorist leader who sends his suicide bombers to blow up a café.

That is clearly not so. Every nation has the right to defend itself against terrorism. That includes the right to retaliate with military force if necessary. Even when that retaliation ends in the loss of innocent life, as it too often has in the Palestinian areas, it does not put the retaliator in the same moral league as the terrorist.

There is a world of difference between the Israeli soldier who accidentally shoots an innocent child in the heat of battle and the terrorist who deliberately blows up a bus full of Israeli children. The deaths are equally tragic, but the killers are not equally culpable.

When the United States retaliated for Sept. 11 by attacking the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, all but the most fervent anti-Americans recognized that its use of violence in self-defence was different from the terrorist violence inflicted on it. Yet when it comes to Israel, that distinction is blurred.

Even Washington buys the "cycle of violence" theory. When Israel moved forces into the West Bank town of Ramallah this week to root out terrorists, George W. Bush called it an "unhelpful" move that would only provoke more killing.

It may well do that, just as the U.S.-led campaign to root out terrorists in Afghanistan may bring more attacks on Americans. But the way to stop terrorism is not to stop retaliating. It's to stop the terrorists.

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Volume II, No. 348 • Monday, March 18, 2002

NO EQUIVALENCE
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2002

General Anthony Zinni is returning to the Middle East today in search of a cease-fire. On Tuesday the U.S. sponsored a United Nations Security Council resolution supporting a Palestinian state. And State Department spokesman Richard Boucher has called for Israel to "exercise the utmost restraint and discipline to avoid further harm to civilians"--as if the difference between Palestinian suicide bombers and Israel's measured response isn't abundantly clear. Even President Bush said yesterday that Israel's recent military actions are "not helpful."

The reason for the Administration's sudden re-engagement on the issue is no secret. Vice President Dick Cheney is in the region trying to build support for regime change in Iraq, and the deteriorating Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a sore spot in our relations with the Arab world. The trouble is, this activity comes just as Israel has started to win some important victories in its war on terror. And worse, it threatens to undermine the moral case for our own war--a case President Bush couldn't have put any better than he did Monday, declaring: "There can be no peace in a world where differences and grievances become an excuse to target the innocent for murder."

A couple of years ago, perhaps, it was still possible to argue that Palestinian violence was the work of a few Islamic extremists, and that punishing Yasser Arafat only made it harder for him to rein them in. But in the summer of 2000 Israel offered Mr. Arafat a state, and Mr. Arafat launched a war. The lion's share of recent attacks have been carried out not by Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but by the military wing of Mr. Arafat's own Fatah movement. And after Saturday night's deadly suicide bombing at the Moment cafe in Jerusalem, Mr. Arafat's state radio praised the bomber as a "heroic martyr."

In short, the targeting of innocents is Mr. Arafat's explicit strategy to address the "grievance" of Israeli occupation. Israel, on the other hand, has pursued a policy of carefully targeting militants, and has been risking its soldiers over the past week to arrest suspects and confiscate weapons in Palestinian towns and refugee camps. Some non-combatants have been killed, but there is no moral equivalence here--certainly not the kind implied by U.S. proposals for monitors to keep peace between the two sides, or by Colin Powell's declaration last week that "if you declare war on the Palestinians and think you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed, I don't know if that leads us anywhere." The message all this sends Mr. Arafat is unmistakable: Ratchet up suicidal bombings of Israeli civilians, induce a military response, and the U.S. will heavily pressure Israel for concessions.

The Saudi peace "plan," meanwhile, seems to be going nowhere fast. [I]f Crown Prince Abdullah were serious, he might have presented it to Ariel Sharon as Israel's elected leader, not to a New York Times columnist. He might also have presented it two years ago, when it could have made a difference, instead of urging Mr. Arafat to reject the hugely concessionary offer made by former Israeli Prime Minister Barak at Camp David. Now there's even talk among the Arab League of removing any reference to "normalization" at all. Without that, it amounts to nothing but a demand for unconditional surrender.

We understand the Bush Administration's concerns as it makes the case in foreign capitals for an expansion of the war on terror. But the White House should understand that both strategic and moral consistency means sometimes telling people what they don't want to hear. To wit: The U.S. has already spent more than a decade sponsoring talks for Israel to return to something like the 1967 borders, and the Palestinian grievance over Israeli occupation must be addressed by a return to the negotiating table, not violence aimed explicitly at innocent civilians.

The definition of such violence is terrorism. It is the very kind of anti-civilian terror as an instrument of politics that President Bush so eloquently condemned on Monday. Until such time as the Arab world is ready to seek solutions by civilized means, the U.S. has no moral alternative to standing firmly behind Prime Minister Sharon's war against such terror.

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ISRAEL UNDER SIEGE
Ehud Olmert
Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2002

Responding to terrorist attacks and attending funerals are the two most dreadful public duties elected officials are called upon to perform. For the mayors of many Israeli cities they have also become a routine part of our work. For those of us in Jerusalem, this week began as tragically as the last. First, on Saturday, March 2, we witnessed the terrorist bombing outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, as the Jewish Sabbath drew to a close. Then, barely had the city been granted a moment's grace to recover from its shock, bury the dead and conclude its mourning rituals before the senseless carnage, this time in the crowded Moment Café on Saturday, began the now-familiar rites anew.

As Vice President Cheney now travels throughout the region building support for America's expanding war on terror, our Palestinian peace partners seem intent on escalating their campaign to reduce the daily lives of Israelis to an unremitting stream of ambulance sirens, shattered bodies and funerals.

As I responded to Saturday night's bomb blast scene, I thought of the other funerals I attended last week, a total of five in the course of three days. On Sunday, March 3, I had been asked to eulogize an entire Jerusalem family, a mother, father and two small children. Their only mistake was standing in the street outside a family bar mitzvah celebration when a suicide bomber walked up next to them and detonated himself. Then this Saturday night, another Palestinian bomber successfully blew up an entire coffee bar full of twenty-something patrons. As I arrived at the Moment Café the ambulances were evacuating the bodies of a young engaged couple who now would never attend their wedding… planned for May 15.

This is the reality Mr. Cheney will find in the Middle East and it is the logical conclusion of the disastrously ill-conceived Oslo Accords. That reckless process revitalized a vanquished Yasser Arafat and brought tens of thousands of armed guerillas into the administered territories…Once widely demonized as Saddam Hussein's closest ally during the Gulf War, Mr. Arafat has managed to acquire a sheen of legitimacy even as he personally directs the violence against Israel.

No doubt that as Mr. Cheney is treated to endless cups of strong coffee in Middle- Eastern capitals, he will be plied with demands that the United States pressure Israel for concessions. As they have done since the beginning of this long conflict, our neighboring kings and dictators will spin yarns portraying the region's only democratic nation as an aggressor, and alleging that U.S. support for the Jewish state is the source of anti-American sentiments. Along with their dismal records on human rights and their regimes' outlawing of free speech, Mr. Cheney will be encouraged to overlook the fact that virtually all the rhetoric turning the Arab streets against the U.S. is being pumped out by state-controlled media. Indeed, the Arab world's support for Palestinian terrorist organizations has not diminished even in the wake of Sept. 11.

The U.S. must act in its own self-interest, of course, but it must also recognize Israel's need to continue to carry out policies to safeguard its citizens… Facing the tireless terrorist organizations that have spent the last eight years smuggling illegal weapons and explosives in for use against Israeli civilians requires unrelenting vigilance… The Palestinians have turned too many of their homes and communities into terrorist laboratories and launch pads. Nothing short of the comprehensive confiscation of weapons and arrests of the terrorist leaders would thwart the danger that menaces us.

…Either by negligence or design, the world community seeks to weaken our resolve by repeatedly comparing our legitimate acts of self-defense with the terrorism we are struggling against. It is a frustrating double standard that causes foreign diplomats to spend countless hours complaining about each of Israel's alleged infractions while refusing to even once take sanctions against Mr. Arafat for his documented role in the terror. Those who sincerely seek a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should set about demanding that Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian leadership answer some of the hard questions they have evaded for the more than eight years that the Palestinian Authority has been in existence. Mr. Cheney might ask how…enormous quantities of terrorist weapons and explosives… have been illegally stockpiled inside the Palestinian Authority. There are other mysteries worth exploring with Mr. Arafat and other Middle East leaders as well. Who is behind the manufacturing of the Kessem missiles that have begun to rain down upon us? How are Hamas and Islamic Jihad permitted to maintain offices and training bases inside the Palestinian Authority? Why are so many members of Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction engaging in suicide attacks?

The red line maintained by every civilized society is repeatedly and intentionally crossed by the Palestinians. The terrorists continue to target wedding halls, pizza places, cafes and schools with ghastly results. As I stood, this past Saturday night, in the midst of the shattered remains of the trendy Moment Café, I shuddered at the thought of a people that believes this sort of destruction is a legitimate path to statehood. I agonized, too, over the sickening reality of leaders who send youngsters out with belts of explosives and nails, and then proudly claim responsibility for the attack. With these Palestinian partners, how can Israel be expected to negotiate peace?

In the years that followed the Six-Day War until quite recently, Israel's ever-optimistic political left promoted the naive belief that compromises…could lead to a lasting political accommodation. They adopted…the slogan of "Give Peace A Chance."…For the eight and a half years…we gave Mr. Arafat a chance. The gamble killed many Israeli citizens and Palestinians, and it left too many families grieving. Now Israel must prepare itself for what comes next.

(Ehud Olmert is the mayor of Jerusalem.)

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ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO THE TERRITORIES
Letters to the Editor, Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2002

In your Feb. 28 article “Saudi Leader Pushes His Peace Plan,” one sentence demands rebuttal… “[R]ight wing politicians…believe Israel has a historic claim to the lands.” This implies that only Israel’s right-wing politicians think Israel has a right to be in those territories…Let’s set the record straight, once and for all: There is no debate…as to Israel’s legal and historical claim to the Land of Israel… What disagreement there is, involves if and when and how to pursue or waive this right.

This claim…is fully based on legal and historical facts…The last legal sovereign in the area was Britain [whose] mandate, and…Balfour Declaration, followed by the U.N. and all Western states’ acceptance of the establishment of the state of Israel, is the foundation of Israel’s “claim”…There never has been a country called “Palestine,” just an area…re-named by the Romans to attempt to erase the Jewish people’s connection…in 125 A.D… Britain’s arbitrary carving “Trans-Jordan” out of Mandatory Palestine (70% of it) more than fulfills the “Arab state” called for by the U.N. in 1947.

Furthermore, Israel’s capture of the territories in 1967 occurred during a war of defense, and its right to remain in those territories until peace is…enshrined in the U.N. charter…U.N. Resolution 242 specifically refers to Israel’s withdrawal from “territories” following a peace agreement—not unilaterally—and the definitive “the” describing “territories” was rejected by the framers…precisely as it was understood that Israel was not to be forced to retreat from strategically vital defensive positions following unprovoked attacks… Israel’s left and much of the Western world believe (or used to) that to give up the territories in return for even a cold “peace” is worth trying. Israel’s right and center, and now more Western thinkers, hold that until …the Arabs and specifically the Palestinians accept Israel’s existence as legitimate—and truly pursue peace as an end in itself (rather than a means to weaken and destroy Israel)—the risk to Israel…is far too great..--Aryeh Green, Beit Shemesh, Israel

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…Jerusalem has never been of any significant religious importance to Arabs or Muslims. It appears in the Jewish Bible 669 times and the Christian Bible 154 times. Jerusalem or its Arab variants appear as often in the original Koran as it does in the Buddhists’ sacred text—which is to say, not once… In fact, the only time the Arab nations cared about Jerusalem was after they lost the 1967 war…The PLO’s claims to Jerusalem are motivated not by religious concerns but by political ambitions. Let’s keep that fact straight.--Mike Jackman, Mill Valley, Calif.

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…The map of judenfrei Palestine appears not only on the Palestinian Authority's Web site, but in its school textbooks, courtesy of the U.N. The myth that Jews are colonizers who have stolen Arab land is being taught as well; also, that there was no Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, there was no Holocaust—but, these are the little lies…for Palestinian consumption. The big lie is the one intended for the rest of the world to believe: A return to 1967 borders will bring peace.--Rochelle Wolf, Wynnewood, PA

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Volume II, No. 347 • Friday, March 15, 2002

HOW TO WIN WORLD WAR IV
Norman Podhoretz
Commentary, February, 2002

(PART II OF A TWO-PART BRIEFING)

…I have speculated that, with respect to the war against terrorism, Bush probably came to identify more with Reagan than with his father. And yet in the days just after September 11, his administration went through what looked like a knee-jerk imitation of the method by which the elder Bush had maneuvered his way into a military engagement with Iraq.

Like his father, George W. Bush set about forming a coalition, even though he was in an entirely different position. The elder Bush had enjoyed the support of only half the country during the run-up to Desert Storm, and thus needed a coalition… But the younger Bush, with about 90 percent of the people and a nearly unanimous Congress behind him…had more than enough political support to act on his own… Nevertheless, before going into Afghanistan, the President (acting for the most part through Colin Powell) went around courting and wooing countries throughout the Middle East, some of which were on the State Department’s own list of state sponsors of terrorism…Under the doctrine the President himself had promulgated in describing his war aims, these countries should have been seen not as potential allies but as enemies…

To add to the absurdity, none of these countries could or would provide us with assistance of any great value…Nor, for that matter, were our great friends, the “moderate” Middle Eastern governments like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, willing to give us much, if any, help. The claim was that they were providing us with valuable intelligence, but if so, it was not valuable enough to result in the capture of Osama bin Laden… Worse yet—and even leaving aside the awkward detail that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September 11 carried Saudi passports—we had…difficulty getting the Saudi rulers to freeze the assets being sent by private “charities”…to al Qaeda, or to make available the passenger lists of flights coming…to the United States… Even Kuwait, the country we had liberated from Saddam Hussein…refused our request for such lists, thus setting a new world record for chutzpah.

Then there was Egypt, whose official government newspapers continued spewing out viciously anti-American diatribes, while its president, Hosni Mubarak, not lacking in chutzpah himself, pretended that there was nothing he could do about this. As he shamelessly and with a straight face told several American interviewers, the press enjoyed the same freedom in his country as it did in ours.

Like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan…had a population sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, and…its security services maintained close connections with al Qaeda and…the Taliban…Yet there was a huge difference between Pakistan and the other Islamic countries… Most of these other countries clucked their tongues sympathetically over what had been done to us on September 11… But…their contribution to our war effort consisted of urging us to prevent the Israelis from retaliating against terrorist attacks by Palestinians, and to suspend our own military operations during…Ramadan (something none of them had ever done while at war either with one another or with Israel). By contrast, Pakistan, by permitting us to launch air operations from its territory…made our eventual victory…far easier than it would have been if we had depended on distant bases and aircraft carriers…

But even here there was a downside, since some…al Qaeda fighters escaped from Afghanistan into Pakistan…Whether they would pose a threat to us again in the future remained to be seen, as did the extent to which President Musharaff of Pakistan would…cooperate with us against them.

But if the coalition was unnecessary…and if the inclusion within it of states harboring terrorists undermined and obfuscated the moral clarity of the war…why did the administration devote so much energy to assembling it? The explanation is that getting a minimal endorsement from…Muslim states…helped create the impression that our war was not against Islam but against terrorism. Bin Laden might claim to be fighting…the Christian “Crusaders” of today, but with the backing of several Islamic countries, Bush could charge the terrorists with having “hijacked” a religion that…in reality stood for peace and love. (Actually, the word “Islam” means not “peace” but “submission.”)…

[T]he focus is now on phase two of the war, and the main issue is whether or not Iraq should be next. Some commentators are convinced that Saddam Hussein had a hand in September 11, as well as in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and that Iraq was the original source of the anthrax sent through the mails… [N]o one seems ready to absolve Saddam Hussein of the responsibility for attempting to assassinate the elder Bush after he left office. Anyway, it is by now no longer necessary to prove that Saddam is a sponsor of terrorism…since the President has already established a rationale in stating that, “If you develop weapons of mass destruction [with which] you want to terrorize the world, you’ll be held accountable.” There is no doubt that Saddam already possesses large stores of chemical and biological weapons, and may (according to Khidhir Hamza, a defector who was once his chief nuclear adviser) be “on the precipice of nuclear power.”… Some urge that we…concentrate on easier targets first. Others contend that the longer we wait, the more dangerous Saddam will grow.

Yet whether or not Iraq becomes the second front in the war against terrorism, one thing is certain: there can be no victory in this war if it ends with Saddam Hussein still in power. As Eliot A. Cohen, one of our leading students of military strategy, has written in the Wall Street Journal:

War with Iraq will have its perils. Some are likely to be illusory: the Arab “street,” for example, which never quite rises as promised. Others may be quite real, to include the use of chemical and biological weapons. Should the U.S. fail to take the challenge, sooner or later it is sure to find Iraqi terror on its doorstep…Should the U.S. rise to the occasion, however, it may begin a transformation of the Middle East that could provide many benefits to the populations of an unfree region. That will, in the end, make us infinitely more secure at home.

…In a different piece in the Wall Street Journal, Eliot Cohen has also proposed that we look upon this as World War IV, the immediate successor to the cold war, which he rightly characterizes as World War III and to which he sees many similarities in the struggle we are now conducting:

The cold war was World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multi-million-man armies, or conventional front lines…The analogy with the cold war does, however, suggest some key features of that conflict: that it is…global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots.

The last point—around which “Americans still tiptoe”—again cuts to the heart of the matter. The real enemy in this war, Cohen argues—as Daniel Pipes has…—is not the generalized abstraction “terrorism,” but rather “militant Islam.” Militant Islam today represents a revival of the expansionism by the sword that carried the new religion from its birthplace in Arabia…through North Africa, the Balkans, Spain, and as far West as the gates of Vienna in the 1680’s. In the East, it swept through…India, Iran, Afghanistan, and Indonesia, and also penetrated southward into the African lands that became Nigeria and Sudan. Never…did Islam undergo anything resembling the…modernization and reform that took place within Christianity and Judaism. The lone exception was Turkey after World War I… But the expectation that Turkey would set a model for the future was not fulfilled…

Certainly not all Muslims are terrorists…But…Islam has become an especially fertile breeding-ground of terrorism…This can only mean that there is something in the religion itself that legitimizes the likes of Osama bin Laden, and indeed there is: the obligation imposed by the Koran to wage holy war, or jihad, against the “infidels.”

Two months before September 11, a talk show on the Arabic TV network al-Jazeera broadcast a debate on the topic “Bin Laden—The Arab Despair and American Fear.”…[T]he host…cited “an opinion poll in a Kuwaiti paper which showed that 69 percent of Kuwaitis, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians think bin Laden is an Arab hero and an Islamic jihad warrior.” He also cited a poll…in which "82.7 percent saw bin Laden as a jihad fighter, 8.8 percent as a terrorist, and 8.4 percent didn’t know."…If these numbers are even remotely accurate, what hope is there for winning the war we are fighting against militant Islam and the terrorism it uses as its main weapon against us?

One answer is that the defeat of bin Laden will diminish his support dramatically…But…a better answer…lies in the outburst of relief and happiness that became so vivid among the people of Kabul after we had driven out their Taliban oppressors. Surely what we saw in Kabul provides evidence that Muslims no more like being pushed around and repressed and beaten and killed…than does anyone else…Surely they would welcome the comforts and conveniences that are taken for granted in the developed world (remember the poignant run on videocassettes in liberated Kabul?).

In this connection, Bernard Lewis, the greatest contemporary scholar of the Islamic world, makes a very striking observation:

Generally speaking, popular good will toward the United States is in inverse proportion to the policies of [Islamic] governments. In countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with governments seen as American allies, the popular mood is violently anti-American, and it is surely significant that the majority of known hijackers and terrorists come from these countries. In Iran and Iraq, with governments seen as anti-American, public opinion is pro-American. The joy displayed by the Afghan people at the ending of Taliban rule could be repeated, on a larger scale, in both these countries.

It does not follow that capitalist democracies can be established overnight… But it is not so outlandish to expect huge changes…that will bring about the long-delayed reform and modernization of Islam. This…would finally give adherents of Islam a chance to set their feet on the path to greater freedom and greater prosperity—and…to make their peace with the existence of Israel.

…[T]he Middle East we know today was not created by a mandate from heaven, and the miserable despotisms there did not evolve through some unstoppable natural or historical process. [M]ost of the states in question were conjured into existence less than a hundred years ago out of the…defeated Ottoman empire… Their boundaries were drawn by the victorious British and French…and their hapless peoples were handed over…to one tyrant after another. There is thus no warrant to assume that these states will last forever in their present forms, or that the only alternatives to them are…worse.

In a long article in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria has contended that the way “to save the Arab world” is for the United States to get over this “fear of the worse alternative”…:

We do not seek democracy in the Middle East—at least not yet. We seek first what might be called the preconditions for democracy . . . the rule of law, individual rights, private property, independent courts, the separation of church and state. . . . We should not assume that what took hundreds of years in the West can happen overnight in the Middle East.

…[F]ulfilling Zakaria’s agenda would be a tremendous leap forward. But I have to take issue with the idea that democracy and capitalism can grow only in a soil that has been cultivated for centuries. After all, in the aftermath of World War II, the United States managed in a few short years to transform both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into capitalist democracies. And thanks to our victory in World War III, something similar seems to be happening…in Central and Eastern Europe, and even in the…evil empire itself. Why should the Islamic world eternally remain an exception?

Consider: the campaign against al Qaeda required us to topple the Taliban…and we may…find ourselves forced…to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world (including… Arafat’s Palestinian Authority). I can even go along with David Pryce-Jones in imagining…an imperial mission for America…to oversee the emergence of successor governments…more amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place. …I can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more…wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert so much leverage over us and everyone else.

I fully realize that we are judged both by others, and by ourselves, as lacking the stomach and the skills to play even so limited an imperial role as we did in…Germany and Japan after World War II… I myself am sometimes prey to such doubts…Moreover…I fear a relapse into appeasement, diplomatic evasion, and ineffectual damage control.

Yet…who can tell what we may wind up doing and becoming as we fight our way through World War IV? …Islamic countries in particular…will look very different by the time this war is over…. Unless, that is, the United States is held back by its coalition from moving all the way forward, or the President breaks the promise he made, in his magnificent speech to Congress on September 20, not to waver or falter or tire or lose patience until victory is achieved—a victory that would leave us not with “an age of terror” but with “an age of liberty here and across the world.”

Shabbat shalom to all our readers!

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Volume II, No. 346 • Thursday, March 14, 2002

HOW TO WIN WORLD WAR IV
Norman Podhoretz
Commentary, February, 2002

Ever since the very beginning of the war into which the United States was violently hurled on September 11, efforts have been made to define its nature. The Bush administration…kept telling us that this would be a war unlike any other, but the very nearly self-evident truth of that proposition did not prevent an energetic search for analogies. On the contrary… the ghost of conflicts past immediately materialized, each one croaking in menacing tones, “Remember me.”

In a piece in the Weekly Standard, for example, I summoned up the Gulf war… I said, the broad coalition assembled by the United States…resulted…in an act of military and political coitus interruptus. Having driven Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait…we did not…drive him out of Baghdad… My worry was that the same kind of thing might happen now… I never doubted that…we would unseat the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and deprive the al Qaeda terrorists of their main sanctuary. What I feared was that then, succumbing again to the pressures of the coalition and the timorous counsels of Colin Powell…we would declare victory and go home.

Others were not so confident that we would accomplish even that rather narrow objective. R.W. Apple of the New York Times, among others, was haunted by…Vietnam…When, however, the B-52’s and the 15,000-pound “Daisy Cutter” bombs were unleashed (which many, including me, interpreted as a victory of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell), the ghost of Vietnam was exorcised… [T]he reputedly fearsome Taliban fighters, and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorists…emerged as the paper tiger that they had imagined us to have become.

But is important to recognize that bin Laden and his followers had good reason to arrive at this contemptuous assessment of our present condition. For a very long time…the United States had been the target of terrorist attacks in the name of Islam or the Palestinian cause… Yet we had done virtually nothing in response to those attacks…

Thus, from 1970 to 1975, during the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, several American diplomats were murdered in Sudan and Lebanon while others were kidnapped. The perpetrators were all agents of one or another faction of the PLO. In Israel, too, many American citizens were killed by the PLO, though except for the rockets fired at our embassy and other American facilities in Beirut by the PFLP, these attacks were not directly aimed at the United States. In any case, there were no American military reprisals.

Our diplomats, then, were for some years already being murdered with impunity by Muslim terrorists when, in 1979, with Jimmy Carter now in the White House, Iranian students…broke into the American embassy in Tehran and seized 52 Americans… Carter dithered. At last…he authorized a military rescue operation that had to be aborted after a series of mishaps… After 444 days, and just hours after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, the hostages were finally released by the Iranians, evidently because they feared that the hawkish new President might actually launch a military strike…

Yet if they had foreseen what was coming under Reagan, they would not have been so fearful. In April 1983, Hizbullah…sent a suicide bomber to explode his truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut… Sixty-three employees, among them the Middle East CIA director, were killed…But Reagan sat still. Six months later…another Hizbullah suicide bomber blew up an American barracks in… Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. marines… This time Reagan signed off on plans for a retaliatory blow, but he then allowed his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, to cancel it (because it might damage our relations with the Arab world…)… Reagan again remained passive…when the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed. Nor did he hit back when…the [Beirut] CIA station chief…William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered…and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992…

These kidnappings were apparently what led Reagan…to make an unacknowledged deal with Iran… which triggered the Iran-contra crisis. But whereas the Iranians were paid off handsomely [with] nearly 1,500 antitank missiles (some of them sent at our request through Israel), all we got in exchange was three American hostages.

In September 1984…the U.S. embassy annex near Beirut was hit by yet another truck bomb… Again Reagan sat still. Or rather, after giving the green light to covert proxy retaliations…he put a stop to them when one such operation…failed to get its main target while unintentionally killing 80… In December 1984, a Kuwaiti airliner was hijacked and two American[s]…murdered. The Iranians, who had stormed the plane after it landed in Tehran, promised to try the hijackers themselves, but instead allowed them to leave the country. [A]ll the Reagan administration could come up with was the offer of a $250,000 reward for information that might lead to the arrest of the hijackers…The following June, Hizbullah operatives hijacked…TWA flight 847 [forcing] it to fly to Beirut…[A]n American naval officer…was shot, his body ignominiously hurled onto the tarmac, after which the demands of the hijackers for the freeing of hundreds of terrorists held by Israel began to be met…Both the United States and Israel denied that they were violating their own policy of never bargaining with terrorists…

…In October 1985, the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, was hijacked…under the leadership of the PLO’s Abu Abbas, working with…Libya. One of the hijackers threw an elderly wheelchair-bound American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard… the Italian authorities let Abu Abbas himself go…Libya’s involvement in the Achille Lauro hijacking was…the last free pass that…Muammar Qaddafi, was destined to get…under Reagan. In December 1985, five Americans were among the twenty people killed when the Rome and Vienna airports were bombed, and then in April 1986 [a] bomb exploded in a discotheque in West Berlin that was a hang-out for American servicemen. U.S. intelligence tied Libya to both…bombings…the eventual outcome was an American air attack in which one of the residences of Qaddafi was hit. In retaliation, the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal executed three U.S. citizens… But Qaddafi…seems to have gone into a brief period of retirement as a sponsor of terrorism. [I]t took nearly three years (until December 1988) before he [undertook] the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which…270 people lost their lives…

In January 1989, Reagan was succeeded by the first George Bush, who…intensified the law-enforcement approach to terrorism…

In January 1993 Bill Clinton became President. [S]everal…terrorist operations occurred… The first, on February 26, 1993…was the explosion of a truck bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. As compared with what would happen on September 11, 2001, this was a minor incident… [S]ix Muslim terrorists…were caught, tried, convicted, and sent to prison… But in treating the attack as a common crime, or the work of a rogue group acting on its own, the Clinton administration willfully turned a deaf ear to outside experts like Steven Emerson and even the director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey, who strongly suspected…a terrorist Islamic network…called al Qaeda, and its leader…Osama bin Laden.

…In April 1993…former President Bush visited Kuwait, where an attempt was made to assassinate him by…Iraqi intelligence agents. [Clinton] spent two more months seeking approval from the UN and the “international community” to retaliate… In the end, a few cruise missiles were fired into…Baghdad, where they fell harmlessly…In the years immediately ahead, many Islamic terrorist operations in which Americans were murdered or kidnapped or injured continued…In March 1995…a van belonging to the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, was hit…killing two American diplomats… In November…five Americans died when a car bomb…exploded in Riyadh…[I]n June 1996…another building in which American military personnel lived—the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia—was blasted by a truck bomb. Nineteen…were killed, and 240 other Americans…wounded.

In 1993, Clinton had been so intent on treating the World Trade Center as a matter for law enforcement that he refused…to meet with…CIA director, James Woolsey…Now, in the wake of the bombing of the Khobar Towers, Clinton again handed the matter over to law enforcement, but…his FBI director, Louis Freeh, who had intimations of an Iranian connection, could no more get through to him than Woolsey… In June 1998, grenades were…hurled at the U.S. embassy in Beirut. A little later, our embassies in… Kenya (Nairobi) and Tanzania (Dar es Salaam) were not so lucky. On…August 7, 1998…car bombs went off in both places, leaving more than 200 people dead… Clinton fired cruise missiles at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan…and at a building in Sudan, where al Qaeda also had a base... Woolsey’s retrospective description of Clinton’s overall approach to terrorism is devastating: “Do something to show you’re concerned. Launch a few missiles in the desert, bop them on the head, arrest a few people. But just keep kicking the ball down field.”

Bin Laden, picking up that ball on October 12, 2000, when the USS Cole docked…in Yemen, dispatched a team of suicide bombers. [S]eventeen American sailors died… But…the United States did not…lift a military finger… As for Clinton, so obsessively was he then wrapped up in a futile attempt to broker a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians that all he could see in this attack…was an effort “to deter us from our mission of promoting peace and security in the Middle East.”…In any event, it was Clinton who failed, not bin Laden. The Palestinians…unleashed a new round of terrorism. But bin Laden succeeded all too well in…striking another brazen blow at the United States.

The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on to do on September 11 was unquestionably a product of his contempt for American power. Our persistent refusal…to use that power…reinforced his conviction that we were a nation on the way down, destined to be defeated by…the same Islamic militancy that had once conquered…large parts of the world by the sword…

Bin Laden was never reticent or coy in laying out this assessment of the United States. In an interview on CNN in 1997, he declared that “the myth of the superpower was destroyed…in the minds of all Muslims” when the Soviet Union had been defeated in Afghanistan… [I]n an interview a year earlier, he had belittled the United States… “The Russian soldier is more courageous and patient than the U.S. soldier”… Bin Laden summed it all up…in Esquire in 1998: “After leaving Afghanistan the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle thinking that the Americans were like the Russians. The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized…the American soldier was a paper tiger…” In short: just as Khomeini had been emboldened by the decline of American power in the 1970’s… and just as all the hysterical talk here in 1990 about the tens of thousands of “body bags” that would be flown home if we went to war with Iraq had encouraged Saddam Hussein…so the ineffectual policy toward terrorism adopted by a long string of American Presidents… persuaded bin Laden that he could strike us massively on our own soil and get away with it.

[H]however…Osama bin Laden misread how the Americans would react to being hit where, literally, they lived. He probably expected a collapse into despair…what he elicited instead was an outpouring of rage and an upsurge of patriotic sentiment such as younger Americans had never witnessed…In that sense, bin Laden did for this country what the Ayatollah Khomeini had done before him. By this I mean that the humiliation Khomeini inflicted on us…in 1979 bred a resistance to Carter’s view that American decline was inevitable and that we should…accept… this inexorable historical development. The entire episode…became one of the forces behind the already burgeoning determination to rebuild American power that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan… For all the shortcomings of his…handling of terrorism, Reagan [kept his] promise to rebuild American power, which was what set the stage for victory in our long struggle with the Soviet Union.

The horrors of September 11…effected a transformation in the new President. One hears that Bush…feels that there was a purpose behind his election all along: as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world…I would even guess that…Bush identifies more…with Ronald Reagan—the President who rid the world of the “evil empire”—than with his own father, who never finished the job he started…

…Bush vowed that we would also uproot and destroy the entire network of interconnected terrorist organizations… Furthermore, the governments that gave terrorists help of any kind…would also be regarded as in a state of war with the United States. [T]here was to be no middle or neutral ground… Perhaps most important of all was the corollary of such an analysis: that… terrorists were not individual psychotics acting on their own but agents of organizations that depended on the sponsorship of various governments. Not that this analysis of terrorism had exactly been a secret… But aside from the…token lobbing of a cruise missile or two…the law-enforcement approach still prevailed.

September 11 changed much—if not yet all—of that. While atavistic phrases like “bringing the terrorists to justice” kept being used, no one could any longer dream that the American answer to what had been done to us in New York and Washington would begin with an FBI investigation and end with a series of ordinary criminal trials. War had been declared on the United States, and to war we were going to go.

[Part One of a Two-Part Briefing]

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Volume II, No. 345 • Wednesday, March 13, 2002

WEDNESDAY'S "NEWS IN REVIEW" ROUND-UP

WEEKLY QUOTES

“To the Israelis, I say: you have the right to live in peace and security within secure internationally recognized borders. But you must end the illegal occupation… To the Palestinians, I say: you have the inalienable right to a viable state within secure internationally recognized borders. But you must stop all acts of terror and all suicide bombings. It is doing immense harm to your cause, by weakening international support and making Israelis believe that it is their existence as a state, and not the occupation, that is being opposed.”—UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, addressing the UN Security Council yesterday. His statement marks the first time he has branded the Israeli presence “illegal”. (New York Times, March 13)

“Mr. Annan had firm words for both sides, and we welcome any call for the Palestinians to stop violence and terrorism. But the words 'illegal occupation’ are definitely regrettable. It feeds the notion that Israel woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s take over this land.’ But history does not bear out that version of events.”—A spokesman for the Israeli Mission to the UN, reacting to the Secretary-General Kofi Annan (National Post, March 13)

“We have no choice but to kill the occupier, to kill him everywhere, every village and every city. There’s no other way to defend ourselves.”—Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, threatening bloody revenge after Israeli defense forces mounted the largest military offensive in 20 years, thrusting into Ramallah as well as the Jabalya, Khan Yunis, Dehaishe, and Deir el Balah refugee camps. (Colonel Gad Hirsch, the IDF head of military operations in the West Bank, says that in its sweep Israel has captured scores of hardcore militants, and destroyed weapons arsenals and bomb-making factories.) (Nat’l Post, March 13)

“We intend to form a wall—figuratively speaking—between Ramallah, a capital of terrorist activity, and Jerusalem.”—A senior army officer, explaining Israel’s motive in surrounding Ramallah (Nat’l Post, March 13)

“This is a major offensive aimed at reoccupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Sending [U.S. envoy Anthony] Zinni to the region was a manoeuvre because we believe the United States was informed of Sharon’s major offensive and intentions.”—Palestine Information Minister Yasser Rabbo (Nat’l Post, March 13)

"I am determined to make every effort to reach a cease-fire. I have therefore informed [the Americans] that…we are ready to begin discussions on the Tenet Plan. If the terrorism continues, we will continue our activity. This is the change. I had thought it would be possible to achieve a period of calm…before such a discussion. However, this is not the situation today, due to the intensity of the fighting…The negotiations to achieve a cease-fire will be conducted under fire… Nevertheless, if the Palestinian terrorism continues, we will operate using all the force at our disposal…"--Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (Channel 2 News [Israel], March 8)

"We are in a war. All of us must stay united and make every effort to stand up to this wave of terror."--Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, speaking at Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting, before saying he was prepared to lift the travel ban against Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. (Globe and Mail, March 11)

"We are not going there to say, 'Look, we won.' No, that is not the point. Our aim is to foil attacks. When you come to Dehaishe or any other refugee camp and uncover laboratories for making bombs and rockets with solid fuel, TNT, and explosive belts, what else do you expect us to do?"--Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, saying that military actions against refugee camps will continue as long as terror attacks against Israel continue. (Jer. Post, March 12)

"We are not doing these military operations because of the women [a reference to the heaven full of virgins promised to suicide bombers]. We are doing them because of my house in Ashkelon. My house is stolen. I want it to go back to my children…” Dr. Nizar Rayan, a leader of the Islamic group Hamas. When asked if it was hard for him to have lost his son during a suicide attack in Gaza last fall, Rayan replied, "No, no, no, it was very easy… If we want to get back our land, it seems we have to lose half this generation." (N.Y.T., March 10)

"If they do such a thing here, next to the prime minister's residence, then where aren't you going to be afraid?"--Baka resident Avi Tubul, stepping around shards of broken glass at Jerusalem’s Moment Café after Saturday night’s terrorist attack. "If there was an attack in the city center…you would come to Moment…Moment was the place to go after there was an attack. Where will I go now?" Yankel Amzaleg, a frequent customer (Jer. Post, March 11)

“The liberal fantasy describing Yasser Arafat as ‘a partner for peace’ with Israel has always been farcical…in a 1972 conversation with the Italian journalist Orianna Fallaci, he made his views perfectly plain: ‘The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation…We don’t want peace. We want war, victory...Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else.’”—Columnist George Jonas, citing Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat (Nat’l Post, March 10)

"Deadly terrorist attacks in Israel have escalated to a daily basis, and it is time to formally designate the Palestinian terrorist groups responsible for these attacks on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. Doing so will demonstrate to these groups, those who direct them, and those who associate with them or support them that the failure of these groups to conform their behavior to civilized norms has a price."--Letter to U.S. President George Bush, signed by 202 members (out of 435) of the U.S. House of Representatives, calling on Bush to add Yasser Arafat's Fatah-linked Tanzim, Force 17, and the Aksa Martyrs Brigades to the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. (Jer. Post, March 12)

"I chose to [speak] about the Jewish holiday of Purim… For this holiday, the Jewish people must obtain human blood [to] prepare the holiday pastries…I would like to clarify that the Jews' spilling human blood to prepare pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact, historically and legally, all throughout history. This was one of the main reasons for the persecution and exile that were their lot in Europe and Asia at various times… For this holiday, the victim must be a mature adolescent who is…Christian or a Muslim…[for Passover the] blood of Christian and Muslim children under the age of 10 must be used, and the cleric [rabbi] can mix the blood [into the dough] before or after dehydration." Saudi columnist Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faysal University, writing this week in the Saudi government daily Al Riyadh (Middle East Media Research Inst. Special Dispatch, March 13)

One of the strategic oddities of the Middle East is that Iraq is a more natural candidate for friendship with the United States than Saudi Arabia…Iraqis have traditionally been a sophisticated and commerce-oriented people, with few of the traditions of Islamic radicalism… In a post-Saddam world, U.S. policy could change completely. The United States could withdraw its security guarantee from the Saudis, fulfill its basing requirements elsewhere…and give the Saudis some time to think about the Bush doctrine… This new U.S. posture might well give us the leverage necessary to force the Saudis to put an end to the subsidies that spread radical Islam throughout the world.—Columnist Rich Lowry, on possible diplomatic roles for Iraq and Saudi Arabia (Washington Times, March 7)

____________________________

SHORT TAKES

ISRAEL LAUNCHES BIGGEST OFFENSIVE IN 20 YEARS—(Jerusalem) Israel mounted its largest military offensive in 20 years yesterday, storming Palestinian militants in refugee camp strongholds and seizing the town of Ramallah, the unofficial Palestinian capital. Thousands of troops pushed into Ramallah and raided the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in a ground offensive that left 32 Palestinians dead and scores wounded. Lt. Gil Badihi, 21, was killed in the operation. Gunmen disguised as Israeli soldiers killed 6 Israelis and wounded 6 others near the Lebanese border in an apparent reprisal attack. Palestinian assailants also attacked buses and cars in the Galilee, killing 3 residents of Kibbutz Hanita. The military operation occurs even as U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni prepares to arrive in the region, and as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney began a tour of 11 nations to rally Arab support for a possible attack on Iraq. (Reuters; AP; Jer. Post, March 13)

MOFAZ: RAMALLAH OPERATION TO CONTINUE—(Jerusalem) The aim of the ongoing military campaign, “Operation Security Imperative,” is to reach cease-fire negotiations and the start of the Tenet and Mitchell plans in a position of advantage, Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz said yesterday. Mofaz also declared that the IDF has “no intention of conquering” the A areas under full Palestinian control, or to topple the PA, but to uproot “terror infrastructures.” Appearing before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Mofaz said the Ramallah operation would continue over the next few days, and may even be expanded. (Jer. Post, March 13)

ISRAEL, PALESTINIANS WELCOME UN RESOLUTION—(Jerusalem) Israel and the Palestinians are reacting positively to the first U.S.-drafted UN Security Council resolution to refer to a Palestinian state existing alongside Israel. The resolution, passed by a 14-0 vote by the Security Council last night, with Syria abstaining, was the first text in recent memory on the region to be written by Washington. U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said Washington's surprise move aimed to give momentum to the peace mission being launched this week by U.S. Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni. Israel's UN Ambassador Yehuda Lancry termed the resolution balanced--"which is quite a novelty for Israel." Only Syria's UN envoy, Mikhail Wehbe, dismissed the text as "a weak resolution that fails to deal with the root cause of the problem--namely the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories." (Ha’aretz, March 13)

SHARON ALLOWS ARAFAT TO LEAVE RAMALLAH; VISIT TO BEIRUT CONFERENCE STILL IN QUESTION--(Jerusalem) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will permit Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to travel throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But Communications Minister Reuben Rivlin said it is unlikely Sharon will permit Arafat to attend the March 27 Arab League summit in Beirut. Sharon released Arafat from Ramallah following the arrest of all six men wanted for the assassination of tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi, as well as of Fuad Shubaki, mastermind behind the Karine-A arms shipment. Saudi Arabia has said it will present its peace initiative at the summit only if Arafat is present. (Jer. Post, March 12)

POLL: ISRAELIS SAY SHARON WAS RIGHT TO DROP 7-DAY PERIOD--(Jerusalem) A majority of Israelis--55%-- feel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made the right decision by dropping his insistence on a 7-day period of calm before negotiating with the Palestinians, an opinion poll by the daily Yediot Aharonot said after Sharon announced his change of policy last Friday. Some 43% opposed it, and 2% did not express an opinion. The morning before, Sharon had seen his ratings plummet when the same newspaper published a poll in which 76% of respondents said they were dissatisfied with his handling of security issues. (AFP, March 11)

CHENEY RECEIVES WARNING IN JORDAN ABOUT IRAQ--(Amman) U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney received a public warning Tuesday from Jordan's King Abdullah that expanding the war to Iraq could destabilize the region and undermine gains in Afghanistan. U.S. officials had hoped for a more muted message from the king, whose comments came as Cheney began a tour of the Middle East. At the meeting, Cheney stressed the importance of having UN weapons inspectors return to Iraq and said the inspections must be "wide open, robust, everywhere, anywhere, anytime." Cheney came to Jordan after a stop in London, where British Prime Minister Tony Blair voiced strong support for widening the war against terror. (AP, March 12)

U.S. BYPASSES LAW IN FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM—(Washington) Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has secretly transported dozens of people suspected of links to terrorists to countries in which it can bypass extraditions procedures and legal formalities, according to Western diplomats and intelligence sources. Suspects have been taken to countries including Egypt and Jordan, where they can be subjected to interrogation tactics—including torture and threats to their families—that are illegal in the United States. (Int. Herald Trib., March 12)

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Volume II, No. 344 • Tuesday, March 12, 2002

PALESTINIAN ATROCITIES, ISRAELI RETALIATIONS
AND THE LAWS OF WAR
Louis Rene Beres

The cycle is familiar. Palestinian terrorists intentionally attack Israeli women and children. Israel, having absolutely no choice, retaliates against PLO infrastructures, aiming exclusively and conscientiously at military targets. But sometimes Israeli fire unavoidably kills and injures Palestinian noncombatants, creating the false impression of lawlessness on both sides. This delusionary view can be compared to an interpretation of current U.S. attacks against al-Qaida fighters which blames this country for harms done to Afghan civilians.

It is important to better understand the profound moral and legal differences between Palestinian terrorism, which is always deliberately barbarous and indiscriminate, and Israeli retaliations, which are always consciously designed to avoid civilian casualties. From the standpoint of international law, two points must be made. First, the criminal intent of Palestinian terror represents an incontestable violation of humanitarian rules of armed conflict. It is essential, therefore, to distinguish between such terror and Israeli responses to terror, which are never intended to harm innocent parties.

When television news reports create parallel images between Palestinian attacks upon Jews leaving the synagogue with nail-studded bombs and Israeli reprisals against PLO targets with infantry and air-launched missiles, they obscure an essential truth: The Palestinian resort to violence is grotesque and gratuitous, seeking only to inflict maximum pain and suffering upon the innocent, while the Israeli use of force is designed only for survival and self-protection. Does anyone really believe that Israel would use armed force against any Arab targets if the Palestinians ceased their campaign of mayhem and murder?

There is a second point. Ordinary people watching the evening news now routinely see pictures of Israeli reprisals against "refugee camps." What they are not told is that these camps are the constructed sources and seedbeds of anti-Israel terrorism, and that the deliberate PLO/PA use of these camps for such criminal purpose is an example of "perfidy" in international law. In the case of calculated Palestinian placement of Arab civilians in harm's way, it is a crime that assigns full legal responsibility for Palestinian losses with the PLO and Palestinian Authority. The PLO/PA practice of intentionally placing its terrorist forces and assets in the midst of civilian populations is unequivocally a war crime.

Although it is certainly true that the Law of War is designed to protect all noncombatants from armed attack, this authoritative body of rules also makes it perfectly clear that responsibility for civilian harms must ultimately rest with the side that engages in perfidy. When IDF infantry from the Golani and Paratrooper brigades, in coordination with armored units, head into the Jenin and Balata camps to root out would-be Palestinian suicide bombers, full responsibility for resultant civilian casualties rests with Yassir Arafat.

Deception can be an essential and acceptable virtue in warfare, but there is a meaningful distinction between deception or ruse and perfidy. The Hague Regulations in the Laws of War allow "ruses" but disallow treachery or perfidy. The prohibition of perfidy is reaffirmed in Protocol I of 1977, and it is widely and authoritatively understood that these rules are binding on the basis of general and customary international law. What, exactly, are the differences between permissible ruses and perfidy? The former include such practices as the use of camouflage, decoys, and mock operations. False signals, too, are allowed; as an example, the jamming of communications.

Perfidy, on the other hand, includes such treacherous practices as improper use of the white flag; feigned surrender or pretending to have civilian status. It especially constitutes perfidy to shield military targets from attack by placing or moving them into densely populated areas or to purposely move civilians near military targets. Indeed, it is generally agreed that such treachery represents the most serious violation of the Law of War, what is known as a "Grave Breach." The legal effect of such perfidy-- the practice now engaged in by the PLO/PA--is this: Exemption (in this case, for Israel) from the normally operative rules on targets. Indeed, even if the PLO/PA had not intentionally engaged in treachery, any Palestinian link between protected persons and military activities would place all legal responsibility for Arab civilian harms squarely upon Yassir Arafat.

None of this is meant to suggest that terrorism represents a permissible use of force under international law. By its very nature, the PLO/PA plan of violence is overwhelmingly illegal. At the same time, the rules of war are as binding upon Palestinian terrorists as they are upon Israeli or American uniformed military forces. This is the result of a binding jurisprudential expansion of the laws of war at the common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and at the two protocols to these Conventions of 1977.

The recent harms to Arab civilians in PA Area A caused by Israeli reprisals are tragic and deeply regrettable, but the legal responsibility for this tragedy lies entirely with those whose perfidious conduct brought about such harms. Moreover, Israel has the indisputable right of self-defense against terrorist attacks originating from this territory, both the post-attack right codified at Article 51 of the UN Charter and the customary pre-attack legal right called "anticipatory self-defense."

Israel has the right and the obligation under national and international law to protect its citizens from criminal acts of terrorism. Should Prime Minister Sharon ever decide to capitulate to perfidy and restrict essential retaliations accordingly, the State of Israel would surrender this basic right and undermine this basic obligation. The net effect of such capitulation would be to make victors of the terrorists, an effect that would assuredly increase rather than diminish the overall number of civilian victims, in both Israel and in the Palestinian territories.

"Just wars," we learn from the seventeenth-century legal philosopher Hugo Grotius (a major source for Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence). "arise from our love of the innocent." Recognizing this, Israel--confronted by Palestinian terrorists who now seek to soften Israel for much larger forms of civilian destruction--must continue to use all applicable military force within the boundaries of humanitarian international law. Although perfidious provocations by the PLO/PA might elicit Israeli actions that bring harms to noncombatant Palestinian populations, it is these provocations, not Israel's response, that would be in serious violation of international law.

International law is not a suicide pact. Faced with a murderous terrorist adversary that persistently follows an announced strategy of unrestrained barbarism, Jerusalem cannot permit egregious Palestinian manipulations of civilian populations to preclude needed uses of Israeli military force. Rather, Israel must now make the entire international community aware that perfidy is a crime under international law, and that it is the Arab practitioners of perfidy, not those who are strategically disadvantaged by such a practice, that must be identified and punished as war criminals.

In the final analysis, Israel has no alternative to maintaining lawful self-defense operations against the Palestinian terrorist forces. Such operations need not be injurious to noncombatant populations so long as the PLO/PA do not seek to hide behind these populations as human shields. Bound by the laws of war of international law, these terrorists, whenever they choose to commit perfidy, are the responsible party for all resultant harms done to Palestinian civilians.

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Volume II, No. 343 • Monday, March 11, 2002

JEWS WORLDWIDE URGED TO FAST FOR PEACE ON WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13

“We of the Rabbinical Council of America and the Orthodox Union declare in solidarity with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel that Wednesday, March 13, Erev Rosh Chodesh Nissan, Yom Kippur Katan, be observed as a day of prayer. Just as there will be a mass prayer gathering at the Kotel and prayers throughout Israel, we urge our congregants and constituents to participate as well.
Our Sages state that in the month of Nissan we were redeemed and in Nissan we shall be redeemed in the future. May we hear only glad tidings and experience tranquility and salvation speedily in our days.”

— Rabbi Hershel Billet, President, Rabbinical Council of America
    Rabbi Steven M. Dworken, Executive Vice President, Rabbinical Council of America
    Mr. Harvey Blitz, President, Orthodox Union
    Rabbi Dr. Tzvi H. Weinreb, Executive Vice President, Orthodox Union
    (for details, please consult the Web site of the Orthodox Union, http://www.ounetwork.org)

_______________________________

ENDING THE WAR PROCESS
William Safire
New York Times, March 11, 2002

Ari Fleischer was teased at the Gridiron dinner the other night for being "the only White House press secretary with his own Middle East policy."

That was because the president's spokesman had blurted out an incontrovertible truth last week, as pressure mounted for renewed U.S. intercession between Palestinian attackers and Israeli defenders.

What was the unspeakable truth? Only this: that the intense pressure for a comprehensive settlement brought to bear two years ago by the previous administration (which remained nameless) had led to the diplomatic disaster at Camp David and, in its aftermath, the current violence.

But that self-evident truth, so widely accepted until recently, is impolitic to recall today. Therefore, a media corps that had just furiously denounced a "disinformation" scheme planned in the Pentagon demanded an immediate dose of disinformation from the White House. Dutifully, Condoleezza Rice disavowed the truth about the path to war and rebuked the spokesman who had uttered it, thereby mollifying the press, dovish partisans and Gaza terrorists.

The unspeakable is still printable here, however. Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, desperate for a deal that would get him re-elected, made egregious concessions of land that would have endangered Israel. Bill Clinton, eager to wash away memory of his transgressions, pressed Barak for even more concessions to appease Yasir Arafat. That Saudi-sponsored Palestinian, seeing Israel's panicked leader on the run, was thus emboldened to make greater demands. Envisioning total victory, he launched the terror war on civilians.

That's what happened. No soft, nonpartisan politesse can erase that well-recorded, hard history. Though Clinton's motive was Nobel, his incessant intercession was a gamble that failed spectacularly — paving the path to Arafat's war.

That history, frantically being buried by diplomatists, is exhumed to draw its lessons: One is that unilateral compromise is appeasement, which only whets the appetite of Arab extremists. Another is that the prospect of intervention — by the U.S., U.N. or Europeans — gives Palestinian terrorists an incentive to prolong the bloodshed in hopes a horrified world will coerce Israel into submission.

What should Israel do to give Palestinians reasons to reorient their leader or replace him with a group that can control Hamas, end the carnage and create a viable state?

1. Make plain that Israel's population will be aggressively defended. Invading Arabs, as previous Israeli generations learned, are defeated by pre-emptive action and fierce counterattack. Reject all "cycle of violence" moral relativism: only the Palestinian side is targeting civilians.

2. Pursue all openings to negotiation, even undelivered royal speeches taking rehashed extreme positions, as Ariel Sharon is doing — but let Arabs understand at the outset that the Barak-Clinton surrender terms are far from reasonable expectations.

3. Cock an ear to Benjamin Netanyahu. If the Israeli left destroys the unity government, Bibi might wrest control of the right, which would likely win the election. A frank presentation by the former prime minister of his plans to pulverize terrorism would strengthen Sharon's hand as the best maker of an interim deal.

4. Send ambassadors to the U.S. and U.N. who can make a persuasive case on television that America's war on Al Qaeda and Israel's on Hamas is the same war.

How can the U.S. help end the war process?

1. Reject any linkage between the present Arab war on Israel and the coming American war on Iraq's dictator. Saddam Hussein's game is to get pan-Arab support by embracing Palestinian terrorists; he has awarded over 60 "martyrdom" checks of about $10,000 each to the families of suicide bombers.

If forgetful Saudis and Kuwaitis link their cooperation with our cleanup of Baghdad to U.S. pressure on Israel, our traveling vice president should tell them this would mean the withdrawal of their much-needed American protection.

2. Demand Arafat use his army to defeat the other terrorist organizations, so that a solid truce can be arranged. Then advise him that there will be no "Powell plan" rammed down Sharon's throat; instead, Arafat should aim for an interim agreement to be signed in a new Palestinian state's capital — which he should not expect to be Jerusalem.

________________________________

REWARDING PALESTINIAN TERRORISM
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, March 10, 2002

In a stunning reversal of policy, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Friday night that he would agree to negotiate under fire with the Palestinian Authority and would no longer insist on seven days of absolute quiet as a precursor to such talks. Interviewed on Channel 2 television, Sharon said, "Yes, there will be negotiations to attain a cease-fire, even under fire." After months in which he refused to countenance such a step--stating repeatedly that to do so would constitute a reward for Palestinian terror--Sharon's latest zig-zag is as misguided as it is inscrutable.

The shift in policy capped off one of the bloodiest weeks in recent memory, in which more than 30 Israelis were killed and hundreds wounded by a string of Palestinian terror attacks across the country, from Jerusalem to Atzmona to Tel Aviv. The wave of terrorism--whose scope and intensity were indicative of a Palestinian decision to escalate the conflict--elicited a stronger Israeli response, with the IDF entering Tulkarm, Jenin, and Bethlehem to round up wanted fugitives. This led to heightened criticism of Israel's actions by Europe and the United States, and threats from the Labor Party to bolt the coalition.

Thus, if ever there were an inauspicious moment for Sharon to concede a major point of principle, last week was most assuredly it. By suddenly reversing course, Sharon has done precisely what he warned against all along--he has rewarded Palestinian intransigence, handing Yasser Arafat a major diplomatic victory while receiving nothing in return. Sharon has also demonstrated to his coalition partners, as well as to Israel's friends and critics abroad, that even his most non-negotiable of red lines are not really that red after all. This sets a dangerous precedent for the future, one that will almost certainly come back to haunt Sharon, both politically and diplomatically. By failing to stand firm on the principles which he himself enunciated and insisted upon, he risks inviting unremitting pressure on Israel in the future.

Such pressure is sure to come, as evidenced by the mounting criticism of Israel's military operations over the weekend. In Amsterdam, the Dutch Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying the European Union and the United States are "preparing a diplomatic initiative that will call on Sharon to implement an immediate cease-fire, as well as request that both sides return to the negotiating table," as if the obstacle to achieving a cease-fire were Sharon, rather than wanton Palestinian terrorism.

In Paris, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine was even more scathing in his criticism, suggesting that Israel is out to kill as many innocent Palestinians as possible. The United States also joined the fray, with State Department spokesman Richard Boucher telling reporters on Friday, "It's important for the Israelis to think hard about their policies, think through the consequences of things like going into heavily populated areas with heavy military force, because those consequences can be tragic as well."

This barrage of unbalanced criticism comes on the eve of the visit of American special envoy Anthony Zinni, who is to arrive later this week. It also coincides with U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney's visit to the Middle East, in which he will reportedly discuss the possibility of an American military operation against Iraq with various countries in the region. Obviously, the pressure on Sharon to restore some semblance of quiet must be immense, with the U.S. presumably trying to show the Arab states that it is not indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians. The problem with this approach, however, is that it is both short-sighted and ultimately ineffective.

While it might be easier for Europe and the United States to tighten the diplomatic screws on Jerusalem, the cause of the current crisis lies a few miles up the road, ensconced in an office in downtown Ramallah. Yasser Arafat has been waging an unrelenting war of terror against Israel for the past 18 months, seeking to kill as many Jews as possible and provoke an Israeli response, one that would bring about international intervention on behalf of the Palestinians. As last night's shooting attack in Netanya and bombing in Jerusalem demonstrated, Arafat has no intention of halting the violence any time soon. He continues to target Israeli civilians, thinking he can do so with impunity. The only way to stop the bloodshed, then, is to disabuse him of that notion. While sending envoys and hurling criticism at Israel may help to appease the Arab states, it will do little to convince Arafat that violence is not the answer. And that, unfortunately, is a recipe for further bloodshed.

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Volume II, No. 342 • Friday, March 8, 2002

THE HATRED THAT WON’T DIE: WHY ISN’T THE LEFT PROTESTING AGAINST THE GROWTH OF ANTI-SEMITISM?
Jonathan Sacks
The Guardian (UK), February 28, 2002

I never thought I would have to write about anti-semitism. Until recently I hadn't experienced it. I might have done. I went to Christian schools, St Mary's Primary, then Christ's College Finchley. We Jews were different and a minority. Yet not once was I insulted for my faith.

Like many others born after the Holocaust, anti-semitism was something I associated with the past. My late father spoke about it. He had come to Britain as a child fleeing persecution, and he always argued that Polish anti-semitism went deeper than that of the Germans. It was not until after he died that I discovered that in Kielce, his home town, a pogrom had taken place as late as July 1946. Local Poles shot, stoned, butchered or otherwise murdered 42 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Yet despite all he knew, my father never warned me to expect prejudice. If anything, he made a joke of it. "Anti-semitic traffic lights", he would say whenever they turned red at our approach.

Until now, I have been reticent about talking about anti-semitism. There is all the difference in the world between the virulent anti-Jewishness that dominated western Europe during the 19th century and its genteel English equivalent (perfectly captured in Isabel Colegate's novel, The Shooting Party, when the host remarks, after the Jewish guest has arrived: "The semite is among us"). Indiscreet remarks by ambassadors at dinner parties do not constitute a new Dreyfus case. Over-reaction is as foolish as under-reaction. Anti-semitism is dangerous only when it enters the mainstream of political discourse, something that has not yet happened in Britain.

Then again, some Jews see anti-semitism as part of Jewish identity. So did Jean-Paul Sartre, who claimed in his Sur le Question Juif that the only thing Jews had in common was that they were the victims of hate. It is not Jews who create anti-semitism, he said, but anti-semitism that creates Jews. I have fought that view all my adult life. It leads to the tortured psychology of an Arthur Koestler, who wrote: "Self-hatred is the Jews patriotism", or Franz Kafka, who said: "What do I have in common with the Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself." To me, Jewishness is about moral responsibility, not victimhood; about trust, not fear. Anti-semitism is something that happens to Jews; it does not define who we are.

Equally we can too easily dismiss all criticism of the state or government of Israel as anti-semitism. It is not. No democratic state is entitled to consider itself beyond reproach, and Israel is a democratic state. Indeed it was ancient Israel who, in the biblical prophets, invented the art of self-criticism. Zionism is categorically not, as it is sometimes claimed to be, "My people right or wrong". Yet some recent assaults on Israel have gone beyond mere criticism. They have entered darker territory. The question is, where do we draw the line?

Anti-semitism is so emotive a topic that it helps to perform a thought experiment. Suppose someone were to claim that there is a form of prejudice called anti-kiwism, an irrational hatred of New Zealanders. What might convince us he was right? Criticism of the New Zealand government? No. A denial of New Zealand's right to exist? Maybe. Seven thousand terrorist attacks on New Zealand citizens in the past year? Possibly. A series of claims at the UN Conference against Racism in Durban that New Zealand, because of its treatment of the Maori, is uniquely guilty of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, accompanied by grotesque Nazi-style posters? Perhaps.

A call to murder all those with New Zealand loyalties even though they were born and live elsewhere? A suggestion that New Zealanders control the world's economy? That they are responsible for AIDS and poisoning water supplies? That they arranged the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center? That they are a satanic force of evil against whom a holy war must be fought? By now we have moved from criticism to hatred to evil fantasy. But delete "New Zealand" and insert "Israel" and "Jews", and all these things have happened in the past year. What more has to happen before an impartial observer concludes that anti-semitism is alive and well and dangerous?

A week ago a cleric in east London was charged with "soliciting to murder" after allegedly distributing videos calling on his followers to attack Jews ("How do you fight the Jews? You kill the Jews.") Within days another video appeared, showing the gruesome murder in Pakistan of American journalist Daniel Pearl. He is shown being forced to kneel and confess that he and his parents are Jewish. His throat is then cut. Over his writhing body, a voice warns: "Other Americans and Jews should be ready to face a fate like Daniel Pearl." These are only the most newsworthy of a wave of anti-Jewish incidents that have gone round the world in recent months, affecting even student life in Britain. This is not polite and genteel. This is the real, ultimately murderous thing.

Anti-semitism is undeniably the most successful ideology of modern times. Fascism came and went. Soviet communism came and went. Anti-semitism came and stayed. Its success is due to the fact that, like a virus, it mutates. At times it has been directed against Jews as individuals. Today it is directed against Jews as a sovereign people. The common factor is that Jews, uniquely, are denied the right to exist in whatever form their collective existence currently takes. There is a direct line from "You have no right to live among us as Jews" to "You have no right to live".

What disturbs me is that, were this cumulative hate to be directed against anyone else, the left would be the first to protest. Have we learned nothing from history? An assault on Jews is an assault on difference, and a world that has no room for difference has no room for humanity itself.

(Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks is Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth.)

Shabbat Shalom to all our readers!

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Volume II, No. 341 • Thursday, March 7, 2002

DOUBLE-TALK ON ISRAEL
Editorial
National Post, March 7, 2002

Yesterday was a grand opportunity for our federal government to set out its views on the Middle East conflict. Both Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his Foreign Minister, Bill Graham, made major speeches on the occasion of a state visit by Israeli President Moshe Katsav. Unfortunately, Messrs. Chrétien and Graham performed a dubious good cop-bad cop routine, with resounding support for Israel from the former, and a deceptive piece of moral equivalence from the latter. The government may think this allows it to have its diplomatic cake and eat it, too, but in truth it makes Canada seem either confused or cynical.

Mr. Chrétien's speech was brief, but was long enough to make all the necessary points. The Prime Minister affirmed Israel's right "to secure borders and to live in peace with her neighbours." He also spoke of the terror in which Israeli citizens live--"where allowing your children to go to a pizza parlour or a disco or just to play in the park can be a choice between life and death"--and called on Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to take "effective action against extremist groups who continue to use the territory under his authority for safe harbour." Yet these fine words carried the air of damage control--as just hours before, Mr. Graham had delivered a speech in which he both expressed support for an impossible peace plan put forward by Saudi Arabia, and suggested a false moral similitude between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterterrorism. It was a performance that rightfully elicited catcalls from the crowd, and which calls for debunking here.

First, let us examine the Saudi proposal, which Mr. Graham says "deserves serious consideration." In fact, it is not a serious peace plan, but an attempt by Crown Prince Abdullah to rehabilitate his country's terror-tarnished image and put Israel on the defensive diplomatically. According to the plan, which Prince Abdullah says he may promote at this month's Arab League meeting in Beirut, Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for normal relations with all Arab nations. As Prince Abdullah knows well, the suggestion that Arab nations would fulfill their end of this bargain is absurd.

For proof of this, look back just one year to the 2001 Arab Summit in Jordan, at which Iraq's delegate ended his speech with the words, "May God damn the Jews!" Bashar Assad, President of Syria, told delegates that Israel is "even more racist than the Nazis." Now consider that Prince Abdullah's plan would have Israel building embassies in Damascus and Baghdad. This is not even remotely likely, and it is naive and unproductive for the Canadian government to suggest it is.

Mr. Graham's delusions about the Saudi plan--based on an overly benign assessment of Arab attitudes--perhaps explain why the Foreign Minister yesterday also doled out blame for the ongoing violence to both the Israelis and Palestinians. Although he urged Mr. Arafat to prosecute Palestinians responsible for terrorist attacks, he also said that Canada must question "certain practices which we do not believe ultimately contribute to peace. Innocent civilian casualties, for example, no matter what their background or religion, are not justifiable and ultimately compromise Israel's image as a vital and compassionate nation." Given that Israel cannot possibly be compromised as a vital and compassionate nation by Israeli deaths, Mr. Graham is clearly referring here to Palestinian and Muslim deaths--and his use of the word "practices" makes it clear he is suggesting Israel's army excessively endangers innocent Palestinian civilians. This is false.

Moreover, what Canada's Foreign Minister did not say, but should have, is that there are two types of civilian casualties--(a) those killed deliberately, by suicide bombers for instance; and (b) those killed accidentally by soldiers hunting terrorists. By conflating the two categories under a broad denunciation of "civilian casualties," Mr. Graham falsely blurs the moral distinction between terrorism and counterterrorism.

In fact, for all the hand-wringing heard about the complexity of the Middle East violence, the moral dynamic at play is actually quite plain. While both sides characterize their strikes as retaliatory, only one side is being honest. Everyone knows there would be no more Israeli missile strikes and armoured incursions if the terrorist attacks halted. But the reverse is clearly false: Palestinian leaders openly admit they will keep blowing things up until they get all they want. Witness Mr. Arafat himself, and his recent call for "a million martyrs" to help wrest Jerusalem from the Jews.

The Canadian and European Union view that Israel and the Palestinian Authority are fundamentally well-intentioned actors locked against their will in a destructive cycle is wrong. Israel wants to live in peace; its enemies want it to be destroyed. As for Mr. Arafat, he does not want 90% of the West Bank and Gaza, or 95% or even 100%. What he and many other Palestinians seek is a regional war that will destroy Israel. Mr. Graham and other Western politicians should stop making specious rhetorical concessions to terrorism. The damage he did was not undone by the fulsome support for Israel expressed by the PM a few hours later.

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PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY
Editorial
New Republic, February 18, 2002

Yasir Arafat is one of the great survival artists of his time, but he may have survived his own significance. He is, politically speaking, already living posthumously. He is a mere place-holder for a Palestinian politics that has not yet emerged. And he owes his marginalization, his historical impotence, not merely to the Israeli tanks that are surrounding him in Ramallah, in deserving recompense for his failure to bring to justice the Palestinian assassins of an Israeli Cabinet minister, and not merely to Ariel Sharon's long-standing grudge against him. He owes his impotence to his failure to have delivered to his people anything except a vast suppurating sense of grievance, a self-pity the size of Palestine.

Arafat has been condemned to the periphery of history by the facts of his history. And he has not been condemned only by Israel. The really remarkable thing about Yasir Arafat's physical and diplomatic isolation is that the government of the United States supports it and the governments of most of the Arab states do not vociferously or even sincerely object to it. The man seems to have reached the end of his elasticity. It is deeply satisfying to watch the escape artist, the man who pandered to everybody, fail to escape, and find no object for his pandering. In 2000 at Camp David and then in 2001 at Taba, he was offered almost everything, and he walked away from it. Perhaps he was counting on everybody to forget that this was so. Oddly enough, they have not forgotten.

And yet it is important to think beyond the diabolization of Yasir Arafat, because it cannot be the end of the story. The story is grimmer even than that. There is Arafat and there are the Palestinians. The discrediting of Arafat is fine and just, but it runs the danger of reducing the analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a difference of views about one man. The really disturbing thing about the conflict is not that Arafat stands in the way of peace. The really disturbing thing is that if Arafat got out of the way, there would still be no reason to think hopefully about the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

The controversy about Arafat must not be allowed to obscure the reality of Palestinian politics, which is that the Palestinian community is in a condition of severe internecine conflict. Over the past decade, the political culture of the Palestinians has undergone a dramatic transformation. The supremacy of secular Palestinian nationalism is long gone. The secularists have been overwhelmed by the jihadists, by the Allah-intoxicated haters of Israel; and it did not help the secularists that they saw the Oslo accords as an opportunity to enrich themselves, and that they failed to offer any principled opposition to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, for whom Hezbollah represents the glittering model of how to think about, and act against, the Jewish state.

Who are the Palestinians? Are they nationalists who want security and dignity, or are they chiliasts who want revenge and redemption? Do they aspire to sanctity or to statehood? Do they wish to go to heaven or to the World Trade Organization? The later years of Yasir Arafat's rule will be remembered as the period in which the Palestinian leadership attempted to dodge these questions. The sterility of the Palestinians' present situation is the direct consequence of a leadership that thought it could praise moderation in the morning and martyrdom in the evening, a leadership that bequeathed a dreadful confusion about the moral and political substance of Palestinian life.

Israel can make peace with the Palestinians, Israel must make peace with the Palestinians, but not until the Palestinians decide who they are. Are they Abu Mazen and his diplomatic reason, or are they Wafa Idris and her suicidal bomb? (Suicidal, but also homicidal: The self-immolation of these Palestinian zealots is so fascinating to the media that they forget sometimes to mention that these people are also plain murderers.) Yasir Arafat likes to believe that he is all of the Palestinians, but he cannot be all of them, at least not coherently. And it is the incoherence of his leadership that has brought him to the little siege in Ramallah. There is a war--sometimes a shooting war--taking place between Palestinians, and it can no longer be disguised by the war taking place between Israelis and Palestinians. Arafat refuses to take sides in the Palestinian-Palestinian war, and so he has nothing to offer the future of Palestinian politics, which is to say, he has nothing to offer the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations. He is over, but the struggle for Palestinian identity is not over; and that struggle imposes upon Israel not so much the obligation of peace as the obligation of vigilance.

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Volume II, No. 340 • Wednesday, March 6, 2002

WEDNESDAY'S "NEWS IN REVIEW" ROUND-UP

WEEKLY QUOTES

“I want to conduct negotiations, but we cannot do that until the Palestinians are hit very hard…In the current situation, it’s either them or us. We are at war and our backs are against the wall. I don’t expect the P.A. to halt terrorism. They are terrorism. Arafat is the father of all terrorism...”—P.M. Ariel Sharon (Jerusalem Post, March 5)

“We have to act like we are at war. When 22 of our citizens are murdered in 24 hours, I approve any operation aimed at punishing the Palestinians until they beg for a ceasefire.”—Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, who is usually viewed as a dovish Likud Party member (National Post, March 5)

“Which population in the world would allow itself to be intimidated and terrified as this whole population is, where you can’t send your kid out for a pizza at night without fear he’ll be blown up? Let’s really let the [Palestinians] understand what the implication of their actions is. Very simply, wipe them out. Level them.”—Rabbi David Hartman (International Herald Tribune, March 2-3)

“…[F.M. Shimon] Peres…insist[s] that Israel continue talking with the leadership of the P.A. despite the mounting death toll from terror. ‘We must give hope to the 3.5 million Palestinians,” Peres reportedly said. To which I cannot help but respond: And what about giving some hope to the 5 million Israeli Jews, Mr. Peres? Isn’t it time we start worrying a little more about ourselves and a little less about our neighbors’ hopes and aspirations? Even more troubling is the response of…Meretz MK Yossi Sarid, who…said after the weekend attacks in Jerusalem and Ofra: ‘So long as the occupation continues, the terror will continue…’. Not a word of condemnation for the murder of Jewish children, nor even an expression of criticism…Remarks such as these only serve to strengthen the resolve of Arafat and his gang, who see how easy it is to provoke discord among Israel’s leadership….”—Columnist Michael Freund (Jer. Post, March 6)

“If I would have known the reality would get this bad, I would not have joined this government…If Arafat is irrelevant, we have nothing to ask from him and it does not matter whether he is in Ramallah or elsewhere. But if he is relevant, we need to be talking to him.”—F.M. Shimon Peres pleading to the security cabinet not to return the tanks removed last week from the area around Yasser Arafat’s compound (Jer. Post, March 6)

“If Arafat disappeared…I tell you, it would be a state of disorder…We cannot say that without Arafat we can reach an agreement. It’s a grave mistake…I’m not pro-Arafat. I’m pro-peace and stability and the welfare of the people in the whole area, Israelis and Arabs. Settlements [are] illegal, but we leave this to the negotiations to reach a decision.”—Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during his visit to Washington, D.C. (Jer. Post, March 6)

“Balata refugee camp welcomes you. Its martyrs will win.”—Lettering on the arch of the West Bank camp raided by Israel last week. [Of the 20 Palestinians killed in Jenin, half were policemen, Col. Moshe Tamir reported. But they were also terrorists, he said. “They were on duty around the refugee camp and they opened fire on us even after we asked them to lay down their weapons. You can be a policeman in the morning and a Hamas man in the afternoon.”] (New York Times, March 3)

“You must turn your rifles on all Israeli army checkpoints. No soldier posted at one of these roadblocks should be safe. They symbolize the humiliation that Israel imposes on our people day after day.”—West Bank leader of Arafat’s Fatah faction, Marwan Barghouti, speaking to a crowd of 10,000 Palestinians attending the funeral of a Fatah activist (Nat’l Post, March 6)

“The U.S. believes that this goal is only possible if there is a maximum effort to end violence throughout the region, starting with Palestinian efforts to stop attacks against Israelis.”—U.S. President George W. Bush, while applauding Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s offer to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, refused to budge from American insistence that violence must cease before Washington will involve itself directly (Globe and Mail, March 6)

“According to…columnist Thomas Friedman, Prince Abdullah demanded a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 border. But, according to Henry Siegman, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, unnamed Saudi officials said Saudi Arabia would settle for less. Siegman wrote, ‘Saudi officials told me that normalization of relations with Israel does not preclude Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall in the Old City and over Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem…’ But Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, editor-in-chief of the Saudi London-based daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat…reported something different. “Prince Abdallah’s conversation [with Friedman] was based on the word ‘entire,’ because this word is everything…It is the key, just as it was the main obstacle in past peace negotiations. If the Israelis want peace, they must give something whole, not a part. They must return the West Bank in its entirely, occupied Jerusalem in its entirety, the Golan Heights in its entirety, and [give] a full Palestinian state.”— Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Feb. 19 (MEMRI, Inquiry and Analysis, No. 87, March 3)

“A decision calling for a complete withdrawal to the ’67 lines makes negotiations superfluous, and Israel cannot accept the principle of the initiative prior to negotiations nor decisions that harm its security. Withdrawal to the ’67 borders is an absolute blow to Israel’s security.”—Cabinet Secretary Gideon Sa’ar, expressing Israel’s opposition to the Saudi peace initiative (Ha’aretz, March 4)

“Israel, it’s suggested, should give up territory, buffer zones, and Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in exchange for a declaration of ‘recognition’ by Middle East countries—that is, the very countries whose inhabitants [according to USA Today’s recent Gallup Poll] either think that Sept. 11 was the work of the Israelis (about 60%), or that crashing hijacked airliners into Lower Manhattan was justified (about 30%). If Oslo was supposed to be about ‘land for peace,’ what should one call the Saudi deal? ‘Land for empty promises by irrational people?’…I’d be more inclined to consider it suicidal.”—Columnist George Jonas (Nat’l Post, March 2)

“The accumulation of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq poses a threat, not just to the region but to the wider world. And I think George Bush was absolutely right to raise it.”—British P.M. Tony Blair, endorsing possible U.S. action against Iraq (Nat’l Post, March 1)

“If we succeed in toppling the Saddam regime in Iraq and replacing it with a pro-Western government, then Iran will be facing its worst nightmare—a pro-American, Western-oriented regime on its eastern border in Afghanistan and a pro-American regime with American forces on the ground on its western border in Baghdad. The Iranians would understand this as a pincer movement against them. That puts us in a position to speak softly to them, while carrying a big stick, two big sticks in fact. And that, combined with internal pressure for reform, could put us in a position, over time, to affect their behavior positively…”—Martin Indyk, Clinton administration Assistant Secretary of State and former U.S. ambassador to Israel (Jerusalem Report, March 11)

“If Congress cranks up the Pentagon’s budget as much as President Bush would like, the U.S. will soon be spending more on defense than all the other countries of the world combined. That is just one measure of America’s armed might—and a global imbalance of power the likes of which has probably not been seen since the height of the Roman empire.”—Editorial (N.Y.T., March 3)

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SHORT TAKES

DEADLY PALESTINIAN ATTACKS KILL 28 ISRAELIS SINCE FRIDAY—(Jerusalem) Givati Brigade Officer Lt. Pinchas Cohen, 23, was killed in a clash with Palestinians overnight in IDF operations in the Gaza Strip. A second soldier was killed while on patrol along the border with Egypt. The killings occurred amid a brutal week in which 28 Israelis were murdered since Friday. Among the dead is a family of 5, killed in an attack outside a Jerusalem synagogue on Saturday night. Others were slain in suicide bombing attacks in Tel Aviv and Afula. At an army roadblock on the Ramallah-Nablus road on Sunday, 7 soldiers and three civilians were killed by a Palestinian sniper. [full reports on Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site, www.mfa.gov.il] (Jer. Post, Ha’aretz, March 3-6)

SYRIA SUPPORTS SAUDI IDEA BUT DEMANDS REFUGEES’ RIGHT TO RETURN—(Damascus) Syria today expressed support for the Saudi peace overture but said there can be no resolution without acknowledging the Palestinian refugees' right to return to Israel. President Bashar Assad met with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia to discuss the proposal, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from territories--including the Golan Heights--in exchange for neighborly relations with the Arab world. Syria's willingness seriously to consider Abdullah's ideas, increases the chances the proposal will be adopted as the official Arab position at a March 27-28 Arab League summit in Beirut. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, however, has rejected the Saudi proposal, saying the Palestinians need weapons and funds, not peace proposals. (Jer. Post, March 6)

LABOR PUTS OFF DEBATE ON BOLTING GOVERNMENT—(Jerusalem) The Labor Party, citing unspecified “technical reasons,” decided today to postpone tomorrow’s scheduled meeting to discuss leaving Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s ruling coalition government. Party chairman Benjamin Ben-Eliezer leads a minority position that favors staying in the government. In a related matter, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres has stated that if the Prime Minister refuses to hold a cabinet vote on the draft agreement worked out between Peres and Palestinian Legislative Council speaker Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), Peres will support Labor’s departure. (Ha’aretz, March 6)

SECURITY OFFICIALS CANCEL BARENBOIM’S RAMALLAH CONCERT—(Jerusalem) A scheduled concert by conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim in Ramallah today has been cancelled by the Israeli government due to concerns over his safety. Barenboim, an Argentine-born Israeli citizen, said that he was informed by security officials that as an Israeli he could not go to the West Bank due to the deteriorating security situation. Last summer, Barenboim defied Israel Festival planners by performing a work by Richard Wagner at a Jerusalem concert. (Jer. Post, March 6)

500 BLINDFOLDED AND HANDCUFFED YOUTHS RALLY FOR ELHANAN TANNENBAUM--(Jerusalem) Some 500 youth group members, blindfolded and handcuffed, took part in a rally this evening in Jerusalem for Elhanan Tannenbaum, who was abducted by Hizbullah activists while in Switzerland in October 2000. The youths say they symbolize the 500 days that Tannenbaum has been held hostage. Tannenbaum's daughter Keren made an impassioned plea to his kidnappers, asking Hizbullah to allow Red Cross officials to visit her father. (Jer. Post, March 6)

PEARL MEMORIAL HELD AT WESTERN WALL—(Jerusalem) A memorial service was held today at the Western Wall for Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Among those attending the service were members of Pearl’s family, Religious Affairs Minister Asher Ohana and Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior. Pearl’s Israeli grandmother said during the ceremony that Pearl had a warm Jewish heart. "All he really wanted to do is mend the world," she said. (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 6)

ISRAEL BARS BUILDING OF MOSQUE NEAR NAZARETH CHURCH—(Nazareth) Under stiff pressure from the Vatican and a united front of Christian factions, the Israeli government reversed earlier decisions and declared that a mosque being built by Muslim militants near a Roman Catholic basilica will not be constructed. At the Pope’s request, U.S. President George Bush added his voice to Christian opposition at a meeting in February with P.M. Ariel Sharon. A leader of the Islamic Movement in Nazareth described the government's decision as a declaration of war against Islam. (N.Y.T., March 4)

PRESIDENT KATSAV VISITS OTTAWA TODAY—(Ottawa) Israeli President Moshe Katsav is paying an official visit to Canada today. He begins his visit on the same day that Bill Graham, Canada’s newly appointed Foreign Affairs Minister, delivers his first speech on the Middle East, giving Ottawa’s encouragement to the peace proposal by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. P.M. Jean Chrétien is scheduled to deliver a speech tonight at a gala hosted by the Canada-Israel Committee. (Nat’l. Post, March 6)

DAVID IRVING, BRITISH HOLOCAUST DENIER, DECLARED BANKRUPT—(London) Revisionist historian David Irving, who denied the extent of the Holocaust, was declared bankrupt after failing to pay legal costs to American professor Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books. Irving had sued Lipstadt over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. High Court judge Charles Gray ruled that Irving had "misrepresented and distorted" historical evidence and that he was "anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism." (Jer. Post, March 4)

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Volume II, No. 339 • Tuesday, March 5, 2002

THOUGHTS ON GENOCIDE: THE PEARL MURDER,
ARAFAT'S WAR AGAINST ISRAEL, AND TERRORISM
Frederick Krantz

Palestinian terrorists have murdered twenty-seven Israelis since Friday, including five over the last twenty-four hours. Over the weekend, acts of carnage included another strike in Jerusalem in which an entire young family of four was wiped out. These murders put the recent brutal killing of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan--which coincided with the Jewish holiday of Purim--into context, and prompt the following reflection.

Pearl's murder, like the now almost 300 murders of Israelis since September, 2000, was entirely gratuitous. It neither sought, nor achieved, any rational political end--indeed, no attainable demands were made. He was kidnapped and he was killed because he was a Jew, an American, and a truth-seeking journalist. (A Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, Pearl was probing the links between al-Qaeda networks in Pakistan and the recently-foiled "shoe-bomber", Richard Reid.)

Like the Palestinian murders of innocent civilians and the terrorist bombing of the Twin Towers, which also involve no negotiable demands, the act was the nihilistic product of pure hatred. In the brutal videotape of the murder, Pearl is forced to "admit" to the primary charge against him, that he, and his mother and father, were Jews. His throat was then slit, and he was decapitated. (Was the timing of the slaying, which coincided with the Muslim Aid-el-Adha holiday celebrating Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, entirely accidental?)

The Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide-bombers, indiscriminate killers of young and old, in pizzerias, shopping centers, social clubs, Bat Mitzvah celebrations, rural towns and urban thoroughfares, likewise make no "demands". Their murders, too, are "non-negotiable", the issue of a sheer Jew-hatred which evokes that of the Nazis and their collaborators.

"Secular" Palestinian killers, from Arafat's Fatah "Tanzim" militia and Presidential "Force 17" security guards, and other PLO factions, are no less lethal. They too kill without quarter, for their supposed "demands"--return of all Palestinian refugees to Israel, removal of all Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, control of Jerusalem and the Temple site--cannot be met by Israel without committing national suicide.

Indeed, extremist Arab-Muslim terror expresses a clear genocidal drive. It targets Jews as Jews, in an insatiable hatred quenchable only by an orgy of utter destruction--of individual Jews and, potentially, of the State which represents them as a people. The same drive lies at the core of Islamic extremism generally, as recorded clearly by the BBC in the delight expressed in Palestinian refugee camps over the recent slayings of Israeli civilians, and in wide sectors of the Muslim world over September 11's extermination of 3,000 innocents.

In this grotesque nightmare vision, it is hunting season on Jews, and now Americans, everywhere. Americans have become surrogates for Jews, and hence "legitimate" targets. Hence the fear of an Iraqi or Iranian (or al-Qaeda) nuclear weapon (imagine if the September 11 suicide-bombers had had one). This explains, too, the renewed American determination to deal with Iraq before that eventuality becomes actual.

Antisemitism has, historically, been nourished by an unreasoning fear and hatred of a supposedly diabolical or traitorous or lethally infectious "other"--the Jew. Purim's celebration of the Jewish triumph over threatened extermination tells the Biblical story of how Esther and her uncle Mordechai triumphed over the genocidal plans of a Persian king's hateful adviser, Haman. Such genocidal hatred nourished the long, dark night of the Holocaust; and so too is it alive today in parts of the Muslim world, as September 11 in New York City, the Islamicist and “secular” PLO suicide attacks in Israel, and the murder in Pakistan of Daniel Pearl, indicate.

The war against terror will be long and hard, with many short-term reverses before any final, long-term victory can be claimed. For now, one hopes that the more than symbolic meaning of Purim, of a persecuted people's triumph over hatred and planned genocide, may be of some consolation.

For today, to paraphrase a famous observation, we are all Jews.

(Prof. Krantz, Editor of ISRAFAX, is Director
of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)
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FIGHTING THOSE WHO ARE PREPARED TO DIE
Ze’ev Schiff
Ha’aretz, March 5, 2002

The suicide bombers who blow themselves up in Israel's population centers are the Palestinians' ultimate weapon. Many Palestinians, including some intellectuals, view the bombers as heroes. On the other hand, by conventional definition, and not just in the West, they are terrorists, because their sole purpose is to deliberately attack civilians, including women and children.

The fact that the suicidal terrorists appeared long before the outbreak of the current military confrontation with the Palestinians is being ignored in the fruitless ongoing political debate in Israel, and also in the coverage of the phenomenon in the international press. During the period between the signing of the Oslo accords and September 2000, no fewer than 36 terrorists blew themselves up. In other words, they operated even during the period Arafat calls "the peace of the brave."

Since the outbreak of the current military confrontation, 55 suicide bombers have managed to blow themselves up. Another 11 were caught and are being held in Israel. Almost all of them chose their civilian targets inside Israel, within the Green Line, not in the settlements. This is also evident in the casualty figures. Some 49 percent of the Israelis killed so far in the intifada have died in terrorist attacks inside the Green Line (17 percent of them in Jerusalem); over 70 percent of the wounded were injured inside Israel proper.

When the suicide operations were carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it was clear that they were setting their sights on all of Israel and that they had hardly any interest in the settlements. Now the Tanzim have joined the trend of carrying out attacks inside Israel. The cooperation between the Tanzim and Hamas has reached new heights, not only in attacks and in the preparation of explosive charges for suicide bombers, but also in the development of the Kassam rockets.

Familiar figures from the past have suddenly appeared on the scene. Mohammed Deif, who played a key role in the suicide bombings during the period when the late Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were prime ministers, has come out of hiding in Gaza and is planning operations against Israel from there.

When Hamas led the terrorist activities of the suicide bombers, preparing a bomber took several weeks and also involved preparing the people who would assist the bomber to reach the target of the operation. Now that the Tanzim have entered the suicide-bombing picture, the preparation time has become a lot shorter. The latest bombers have also been indoctrinated with the Islamic religious belief in the orgy with virgins that Allah is preparing for them in heaven. They are also told that all the sins of their family members will disappear and that their relatives will also reach paradise.

The possibility of being killed will not deter someone who is willing to die in order to kill Israelis and Jews. It is also doubtful that he will cringe at the idea, raised recently, of his remains being put into a pig skin for burial, when all the while his spiritual leader is promising him that in any event he will enter paradise as a martyr. If there is anything at all that will deter him, it is the knowledge that his family, which he cares about and which he is certain will benefit from his self-sacrifice, will be harmed.

It seems that the day is approaching in the terrible war that is developing here, when anyone who comes to destroy Israeli families, including children and babies, will have to consider that Israel will harm his family, and not only his property.

It is already clear that damaging property is not enough, because those who would not build one house for their refugee brothers are willing to build a new house for the martyr's family after he kills Israelis.

Now, with Palestinian terror cutting down entire families, perhaps the voices calling for physically harming the families of the suicide terrorists will drown out the voices that reject this idea out of hand as unethical. The terrorists, those who send them, and their families are liable to find out that a terror-battered Israel is being drawn into merciless responses.

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Volume II, No. 338 • Monday, March 4, 2002

AN ANGUISHED ACCOUNT OF SATURDAY’S
HORRIBLE BLOODSHED
Harvey Tannenbaum
Jewish World Review, March 4, 2002

“…Chana felt blood coming from her shoulder and realized that her hand was severed at the elbow. ‘Where's my arm, where's my arm?’ Miriam Esther, her 2 year old, had fallen asleep in the stroller about 15 minutes before the bomb in Meah Shearim. Miriam Esther and Chana were now separated as the Eema, mother, cried in pain without half of her hand as she listened to the screams of her 2 year old who was burning in her stroller.
Chana woke up at Shaarei Zedek Hospital a few hours ago. She has talked to the nurses to find out about Miriam Esther. The tear on her husband's clothing of his kaftan (Sabbath garb) as he stood near her bedside confirmed that Miriam Esther had burned to death.
The toddler was named after a great grandparent of Chana's whom had burned to death in Auschwitz in 1943…
There is no difference between a ‘settler,’ ‘soldier,’ ‘secular,’ or ‘Chassidic Jew.’ The target is the JEW.”

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JEWISH NEW YORKERS PROTEST
OUTSIDE PLO MISSION TO UN
Melissa Radler
Jerusalem Post, March 4, 2002

Shocked and outraged at the shooting and bombing deaths of 22 Israelis over the weekend, Jewish New Yorkers held a memorial service in front of the PLO mission to the United Nations while others sat glued to the TV, frustrated by the increasing death toll of the past 17 months of violence.

"This is so frightening. Here you have flagrant, horrendous, barbaric attacks, with babies killed and a whole family wiped out," said Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Executive Vice President Malcolm Hoenlein, who is meeting with the 54-member conference today to discuss a plan of action.

A group led by the Coalition for Jewish Concerns' Rabbi Avi Weiss held a protest and memorial service yesterday morning in front of the PLO's Park Avenue mission, where they express their outrage that the Aksa Martyr's Brigade, affiliated with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed credit for the weekend's carnage. A group of Jewish students calling on the city to close the PLO office also protested in front of the mission.

"Instead of reining in his terrorists to create conditions for negotiations for peace, Arafat has further unleashed them," said Weiss.

Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, in Jerusalem awaiting the arrival of State Comptroller Carl McCall on a solidarity visit, said he heard Saturday night's bomb blast from his Jerusalem hotel room. He said he watched ultra-Orthodox volunteers gather body parts and scrape blood off the walls to provide each of the deceased a proper Jewish burial.

"What's going on here is not normal, it is insanity, it's sick," he said. "I'm here as often as I can be here during this difficult time but things are out of control."

Hikind said that he became particularly incensed after an Israeli minister vowed, during an interview on CNN, not to "over-react" to the attacks. "How much blood, how many children have to slaughtered? It doesn't have to be that way. There are ways to deal with terror," he said. He added that he does not plan on changing his own schedule, which includes visits to Efrat and Betar Illit on the West Bank.

From New York, Hoenlein, meanwhile, voiced the frustration many Jews here have felt as terrorist attacks continue with increased frequency and barbarity. "The real problem is we all are waiting for the other shoe to drop. We all know there is going to be another one and another one and another one," he said.

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A PRINCELY PROPOSAL? HARDLY.
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2002

"Our plan recognizes the right of Israel to exist only after acceptance of a Palestinian state, the return to the 1967 borders and an end to the state of belligerency."
--Prince Abdullah, November 1981

"Saudi Arabia believes the time has come to end the Arab-Israeli conflict and achieve a just and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian question."
--Prince Saud Faisal, April 1991

"This is exactly the idea I had in mind--full withdrawal from all the occupied territories, in accord with U.N. resolutions, including in Jerusalem, for full normalization of relations."
--Crown Prince Abdullah, February 2002

Give the Saudis high marks for consistency. Every 10 years, they trot out the same Mideast peace plan, invariably to curry favor in Washington. Invariably, too, Washington returns the compliment by lavishing praise, and often assistance, on the desert kingdom. In 1981, President Reagan applauded the so-called Fahd plan for its "moderation," then promptly sold the kingdom Awacs radar planes. In 1991, it was Secretary of State James Baker's turn to thank the Saudis for "breaking taboos" by giving their qualified endorsement, after repeated American entreaties, to the idea of a Middle East peace conference.

Now comes Saudi Arabia's latest regurgitation, first issued in the form of a reported conversation between Prince Abdullah and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In a Feb. 17 article, Mr. Friedman wrote that he proposed his idea for Middle East peace--full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines in exchange for full diplomatic recognition from every member of the Arab League--during an off-the-record dinner with Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler. Turns out this was the prince's idea, too! Mr. Friedman then asked permission to publish the prince's remarks in his column. Permission was promptly granted.

As the quotations above attest, Prince Abdullah's ideas are not fresh. Still, they have diplomatic capitals buzzing. On Tuesday, President Bush is said to have phoned the prince to commend his helpfulness. The European Union sent Javier Solana to Riyadh to flesh out details. Here in Israel, President Moshe Katsav publicly invited the Saudis to Jerusalem to discuss details--an invitation that so far has not been accepted. Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat, confined to his headquarters in Ramallah, called it "a very strong platform"--no surprise, since it meets all his demands.

Why the excitement? In part, because diplomatically there's nothing else doing. Negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis barely even take place, while the U.S. has wearied of being lied to by Mr. Arafat. Shifting the axis of negotiation from the Palestinian Authority to the Arab world thus provides fresh opportunities for diplomats like Mr. Solana to make busy in places like Riyadh.

Then there are the opportunities that the prospect of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli deal hold for the Palestinian situation. If the Arab states were indeed prepared to make peace with Israel, the strategic concerns that justify Israel's possession of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights would vanish. The road would then be clear for Israeli withdrawal from the territories and the creation of a Palestinian state.

The trouble is that Israel has traveled this road before. In 1999, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to return virtually the whole of the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a peace deal. The offer was refused. In January 2001, Israeli negotiators made a similar pitch to the Palestinians, which included compensating Palestinians with pre-1967 Israeli territory in exchange for maintaining possession over a few consolidated settlements. This, too, proved a nonstarter with Mr. Arafat.

It is possible that the Arab League--Iraq, Syria and Libya included--may nonetheless unite behind Saudi Arabia's proposal when they meet later this month in Beirut. What then? The Arab states would reap immense praise in the West for their "moderation." And Israel would come under intense international pressure to offer a positive response. But while this might turn the diplomatic tide, it behooves serious policy makers to consider long-term implications.

First is the matter of sincerity. A Bashar Assad who signs on for a conditional peace with Israel is not a better man, only a wilier one. As for the Saudis, they could have pursued Prince Abdullah's idea at any time during the past few years. That they chose to do it only when relations with Washington had frayed suggests their newfound helpfulness won't last long beyond the mending of those relations. Indeed, no sooner had President Bush called in his congratulations to Prince Abdullah than Saudi Arabia's United Nations ambassador denounced Israel for "one of the worst forms of pressure and persecution and racism and occupation and systematic terrorism in the history of mankind," adding that "Palestinian violence is only a result of Israeli terrorism."

Then there is the matter of detail. "Full withdrawal from all the occupied territories…including in Jerusalem," as Prince Abdullah would have it, entails a population transfer of more than 200,000 settlers, some of whom have been living where they do for decades; a return for Israel to a seven-mile margin between Arab borders and the Mediterranean Sea; and a handover of Jerusalem's Old City, including the Jewish Quarter and the Wailing Wall. True, some of this may be negotiable; Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations believes the Saudis might be flexible on the last point. But will the Syrians be flexible? Or the Iraqis? Unlike in the European Union, in the Arab League the lowest common denominator position has always been the hardest line.

Finally, there is the matter of the four or five million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who claim a right of return to their homes in Israel, whether real, vanished, or imagined. Though Mr. Friedman apparently did not press Prince Abdullah on this point, every Arab regime today insists on it, and it is scarcely conceivable that the Arab League could agree to a peace with Israel that didn't include it. The "right of return" means, of course, the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

During the Oslo process, the issue of refugees was punted downfield as a matter of final-status negotiations. Yet while this may have given Oslo its longevity, it also guaranteed its bitter result. The Bush administration must consider carefully whether it, too, wants to exhaust its diplomatic energies by playing a roughly similar game.

No doubt it's a good thing that the House of Saud is entertaining the possibility of recognizing the state of Israel. It would be a better thing if, before they fall over themselves praising Prince Abdullah, Western governments calculate the price Israel will have to pay to seal the deal.

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Volume II, No. 337 • Friday, March 1, 2002

Friday Reflection

A HERO FOR TODAY'S WORLD
Adin Steinsaltz
Ha’aretz “Week’s End”, February 15, 2002

Throughout the world, the earth is now shaking, quivering and wet with blood. And with that in mind, I shall try and define what heroism is.

The simple definition of heroism is the one we can find, for instance, in the story of Samson: heroism is taking apart the gates of the city of Gaza and carrying them away, it is grabbing a lion and tearing it into two, making a building topple and thus killing three thousand people at once.

But there is also a different definition of heroism. In Pirkei Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers, Chapter 4, Mishnah 1) it says "Ben Zoma says ... who is a hero? He who conquers his desires." As it is written (Proverbs 16:32): "He who rules his spirit is greater than he who conquers a city." Ben Zoma was considered the greatest expounder of homilies. The question is, what is the novelty in Ben Zoma's words?

By presenting the person who is slow to anger and the hero--the one who rules his spirit and the conqueror of cities--as analogous to each other, the verse is actually saying that they belong in the same category. It is impossible, therefore, to compare two things that have nothing in common. One cannot say, for instance, that an elephant is bigger, or smaller, than a mathematical equation, because they are not things of the same kind.

Ben Zoma's innovation, then, was that he read the verse and drew a conclusion from it: He saw the verse as telling us that there are different kinds of heroism. There is the heroism of he who rules his spirit and subdues his evil nature, and the heroism of a hero who can "devour the arm and the crown of the head" (Deuteronomy 32:20). And in comparing the two, it emerges that one is preferable over the other.

Here in Israel, we have become acquainted mainly with heroism of the first kind. We have many lists of warriors who endangered their lives and displayed heroism, bravery and resourcefulness in real wars. But there is the second kind of heroism, a more private and personal heroism, the heroism of victories within one's own soul. It is a different kind of heroism, not only because it is mostly spiritual, but also because it reveals a different aspect of what it means to be a hero.

We can learn something about this kind of heroism from the second verse of the Shema which is, perhaps, the second most significant verse in the entire Torah. This verse (Deuteronomy 6:5) says: "And you shall love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might."

The heroism that expresses itself in outbursts of occasional heroic deeds, such as that of the person who jumps into the fire, is momentary; while the heroism of "with all your might" is a kind of heroism that continues day after day, year after year, in distress, poverty and need, in a state of hopelessness.

The devotion and self-sacrifice of "with all your might," then, is a continuous kind of devotion--day by day, year by year, without seeing an end to it, and without expecting a better and brighter tomorrow. This world-view exacts a heavy price, not only economically, but also in terms of how one conceives of life and experiences it.

My wife once said to me that at any party where there are Israelis and others, she could immediately tell who the Americans and Europeans were--they were laughing. Indeed, at a party in which Israelis participate, it is very rare to find people just standing around and laughing together. It is not because people here are always sad, but because life here is always enveloped in a feeling of dread, pressure, fear and heaviness. Within all this, one can, and must live. There may even be moments of merriment; but the overall picture is one of "bearing the yoke and keeping silent" (Lamentations 3:27-28).

Not only in Israel but also throughout the world, people are now learning about the need for this other kind of heroism. The world, that has seen and sometimes even admired the heroism of violence, must now learn the kind of heroism that has nothing to do with swords, cannons and bombs. It is the heroism of the person who lives in an extended state of terror, knowing that wherever he may go, it may be his last journey, and that danger lurks everywhere--and still does not break down, and rules his spirit and is slow with anger, and keeps going.

This heroism is the ability to be in a state of distress and under pressure, and still live and build, and continue fighting this war in which there are no immediate prospects of victory, and live a life of quiet heroism, of ongoing self-sacrifice. This kind of heroism lacks the grandeur that is the share of the conqueror of cities, for conquerors of cities are honoured with triumphal processions. But nobody makes such celebrations in honor of a person who rules his spirit, especially since tomorrow and the day after, he will have to do this again and again.

The contemporary hero then, is not the one described in Pirkei Avot as "heroic as a lion." It is the contemporary hero, the one whose heroism is not discernible, who is the greater hero. It may be the man who wakes up in the morning and opens his grocery store, even though there was a terrorist attack there the day before. It is the person who does not flee into the realm of oblivion, or to a different place, but rather continues doing all the things that must be done. It is the person who walks with his backpack on his shoulder and continues walking even when he gets hit, the person whose buildings are destroyed, yet he rebuilds them, whose plants are uprooted yet he replants them, whose descendants are killed, yet he gives birth to new ones.

Thus we have the level of loving G-d "with all your heart." Beyond that, we have "with all your soul," which is the one-time sacrifice. And above and beyond that is "with all your might," which is the determination to continue indefinitely although the future is unclear and there is no promise as to when this all will end. This heroism is not fit for movies or theater, but it is a kind of heroism that is suitable not only for great, prominent people, but also for the simple and the small.

Shabbat shalom to all our readers!

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