Category Archives: Israel

THE DAY OF UNRECKONING

Posted on July 5, 2010 | 1 comment

 

    The heathen prophet Bilaam was prompted to bless the Jewish people, instead of exposing their weaknesses to his patron Balak, but one phrase stands out as curious. He described us first as a “nation that dwells alone” (Bamidbar 23:9) – a fact reinforced in modern times in that Israel is the only country in the world that cannot serve on the United Nations Security Council. Non-permanent members are selected based on the regional bloc to which they belong – and Israel is the only country that is denied membership in a regional bloc (it is not considered a formal part of Asia, Africa or Europe; it is literally, a continent to itself). So Israel has no natural allies, and is different than everyone else.

      But Bilaam added something else that is often lost in our reflections on dwelling in solitude: “and they will not be reckoned among the nations.” But what does that really add to our understanding – to be alone is by definition not to be reckoned ? What does it mean “not to be reckoned” ?

      The great commentator Rashi offers two explanations: first, it means that “we will not be destroyed like the idolatrous nations” on the day of judgment. Every other nation’s existence is finite; ours is eternal. We are not reckoned with them, in that we are not a nation like other nations. Rashi then added that ‘when we rejoice, no nation rejoices with us; and when the nations are in fine fettle, they celebrate with each other” – and we don’t make it to the guest list  – we just don’t count. What a dark and foreboding view of Jewish life – and what kind of  “blessing” is that ?

       Most thinking Jews live with a persistent frustration that is often suppressed, and rarely articulated, but goes something like this: how come the world never sees things our way ? Our most vehement critics are often evil people, but sometimes they are decent – or at least people who evince decency in other areas of their lives. And yet, it always seems that nothing we do is appreciated, and no suffering that we endure is of any import. I have been hearing for most of my life that Israel’s international image suffers from poor hasbara, a nice word for PR. And each time something happens that to us is so obviously moral and the world condemns it as patently immoral, we wonder where did we go wrong ? Was it something we said, or did, that we could have said or done differently ?

       Israel, time and again, has conducted its statecraft and military policy specifically in order to preclude criticism – and the criticism comes nonetheless. Israelis thought they would leave Gaza even at the cost of expelling thousands of Jews – so they wouldn’t be accused of the “occupation.” Having left, the “occupation” accusation still continues. They thought that if they removed the pretext of occupation and rockets continued to fall on Israeli towns, they would have free rein to attack the enemy. Wrong again – any military response is deemed a “disproportionate use of force.” (Usually, nations win wars because of the “disproportionate use of force;” evidently, not here.)

     Before Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and to forestall the charge that Israel was attacking civilians, Israel dropped millions of leaflets and made 250,000 cell phone calls urging civilians to flee! In the process, they relinquished the element of surprise. Did they then avoid that indictment ? Of course not ! The Goldstone Report appeared, accusing Israel of wantonly killed civilians, a criticism leveled with vehemence by, among others, the Russians, who just 10 years ago killed 50,000 civilians in Chechnya.  From Sudan to Afghanistan, mass murderers routinely accuse Israel of mass murder. The more Israel concedes and appeases, the worse its reputation becomes.

     So, what are we missing ? The Western world is currently expelling Israeli diplomats (one per country) to protest the Mossad’s allegedly use of forged passports in allegedly carrying out the killing of Mabhouh, the Hamas official in Dubai, just 4 months ago. Note: the West and Dubai are outraged – not by the terrorist who walks freely among them plotting his mayhem against Jews but by an arcane breach of diplomatic protocol – something every intelligence agency in the world does.

     The rules don’t seem to apply equally. Israel’s blockade of Gaza is legal, proper and wise – every nation at war does the same – Turkey, US, UK, Russia, etc. That is part of war – and the hand-wringing over the takeover in international waters, outside the 20-mile limit, is also a smokescreen. (If the enemy was within 20 miles, or three miles, would it have mattered at all ?)

      The new satirical web site www.latma.co.il is based on the premise that regular diplomacy or policy briefings no longer matter much in terms of public opinion – that PR can better enlighten through parody. And, indeed, the most effective PR Israel has had in 30 years was the “We Con the World” about the flotilla raid, and even there the double standard was obvious. The video has been removed from YouTube on grounds of a “copyright claim” by Warner-Chappell music, despite the fact that satire is permitted under the Fair Use Doctrine (otherwise, satirists from Paul Shanklin to Shlock Rock would be out of work); indeed, the original “We are the World” is so treacly and cloying that there are about twenty parodies that are still on the internet – that doesn’t seem to bother Warner-Chappell, who obviously came under pressure from anti-Israel forces.

     Every time we think something will happen that will make the world see things our way, it doesn’t – from the surrender of Sinai, to Oslo, from welcoming back Arafat to the lynching in Shechem, from the Arabs cheering the Arab terror of 9/11 to the suicide bombings, from the withdrawal from Lebanon to the rocket wars in the north and south, from the capture of the Iranian arms ship Karine-A to Gilad Shalit (four years in captivity), and on and on. What can we do to change this ? The answer is…

     Absolutely nothing. That is what it means “and they will not be reckoned among the nations.” We are not esteemed, our viewpoints are not valued, and our arguments mean nothing. We torture ourselves by thinking – “if only we said this, if only we had louder demonstrations, if only we took our more ads, if only we wrote more letters to the editor, if only we had more articulate diplomats, if only, if only. It will not make a difference. This fantasy of “universal acceptance” – that something will happen that will magically transform the world into Israel-lovers who extol the justice of our cause – is the elusive brass ring, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the Holy Grail – it’s the lure that the greyhounds chase at the races. “And they will not be reckoned among the nations.”      

      Nothing will change it. The nations of the world are pre-programmed not to be sympathetic to Israel. That is why their opposition is often so illogical and patently hypocritical. Sure, we will pick off a few people here and there – isolated individuals – who write beautiful, substantive, pro-Israel pieces. In fact, we are so excited when it happens – one week it’s journalist Joe McCain (John’s brother), the next week it’s the ex-prime minister of Spain, next week it will be someone else – that we widely circulate these articles via e-mail and wish we could fete them, at Jewish organizational banquets. All are agents of the Almighty sent to us that we should not lose our sanity. And Israel has many non-Jewish supporters – good people all – but they are exceptions, and can never become the majority.

      Rashi says that we are inherently different – not a nation like others, and not subject to the frailties and infirmities of nations. And something else: if “and they will not be reckoned among the nations” means anything, it means that they do not want to hear our story. They can’t hear it. They don’t grieve with us when our soldiers are captured or killed, they don’t mourn when our civilians are bombed or terrorized, and they do not rejoice in our military triumphs. On the contrary: we are constantly dehumanized (as the Netziv comments) so that from the perspective of our critics, we  never suffer. And if it looks like we do, then we deserve it because we brought it on ourselves. (Indeed, we did, in part: Israel has foolishly asserted for 20 years already that it wishes to share the land of Israel, recognizing the “legitimate” claims of others; the other side claims the land is all theirs, and that the thief always wants to share his ill-gotten gains. Their claim is more plausible – but that too is a subterfuge. It wouldn’t matter – “and they will not be reckoned among the nations.”) Nonetheless, the more we demonstrate a lack of faith in the justice of our cause, the more we embolden our enemies and dishearten our friends.

        Bilaam is the vehicle of this prophecy – which is important, like all of Israel’s PR – for us – not for them. That’s the blessing ! When we listen to their attacks, and wonder where we went wrong, we have our answer: “and they will not be reckoned among the nations.” We can yell and scream and demonstrate all we want – and we should, because it strengthens us and  makes us feel better – but it will not change their opinion, which is not based on reasoned analysis but on the natural and unavoidable implications of “and they will not be reckoned among the nations.”. From the perspective of the outsider – and only an outsider can teach us this – Bilaam verifies that we will not be reckoned, but also that, deep down, these same nations admire us and respect us, and concede that “ G-d sees in us no iniquity or perversity.”

      We may not always see it in ourselves – but they do – that is why they keep their distance, until the day comes when the remnant of Yaakov will perceived as a lion among the forest animals, when our hands will be raised over all our adversaries, and the Messiah brings to the world justice, brotherhood, peace and global acknowledgment of the reign of G-d.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Israel, Jewish History

The Wall and its Shadow

Posted on June 28, 2010 | 7 comments

   The controversy in Emanuel has certainly generated acrimony but even more confusion. What exactly happened is itself disputed, as is the essence of the dispute. What is certain is that this event illuminates some of the most pressing issues in the Jewish world, is not easily resolved, and might be a watershed moment. Or not. What follows is a preliminary analysis, because the true story has not fully emerged, and might never.

     The thumbnail sketch certainly sounded awful. As reported in the secular press, Ashkenazi parents in Emanuel, a largely Charedi settlement, refused to allow their children to study or socialize with Sefaradi girls in the same school. They even built a wall that divided the campus, and decreed there be separate lunch hours and recess time lest any mingling took place. After a lawsuit, Israel’s High Court ruled that the school must be integrated, and held in contempt (and jailed) parents who refused to comply with the Court order. Immense demonstrations ensued, by Charedim against the court, mainly in Yerushalayim and Bnai Brak, against the intervention of the secular court system in a Torah-education matter.

     Obviously, the secular media, willfully or not, followed the template of the American South, and trotted out terms like “separate but equal,” “segregation,” Bull Connor,” “racism,” and the like – and so got the story wrong. It seems that the dispute was not at all Ashkenazi v. Sefaradi; three of the families whose parents went to prison were Sefaradim. The “offensive” school in question has roughly a 27% Sefaradi population, and the school “discriminated against” has roughly a 33% Ashkenazi population. So racism was patently not the issue, although the accusation is so trite and familiar that it alone is tantamount to a conviction and sentence, and provoked a stream of lamentations about racism in the religious world. Good penance for the self-flagellation, or anti-religious, set.

     The real issue, apparently, is troubling for a different reason: the segregation was mandated because of religious differences between the parent bodies and hashkafot (world views) of the two schools. Parents who wanted their children to attend the “Charedi” school had to abide by a series of personal restrictions in their home life. The precise nature of those restrictions is unknown to me, but I can easily guess most of them – dress code, television, etc. The inability to create two completely separate schools led to the physical divisions on the school property, followed by the parental complaints about discrimination, the lawsuit and decision, and protests. Charedim do not take kindly to being ordered to compromise their religious practices, and especially by those – and Israel’s High Court is notorious in its disdain for the sanctity of Torah and the world-view of religious Jews (charedi, modern, or right-wing) – who do not share their core values.

     All sides are to blame for this fiasco, and the black eye given to Torah. The High Court’s involvement was a typical mistake; its tolerance for Torah is so infinitesimal that its decisions in this realm could never be accepted, no matter what they decided. They simply have no credibility, justifiably so, and most religious Jews – Chareidim or not – challenged to follow the Torah’s mandates or the dictates of this Court – so relentlessly anti-religious for many years – will obviously choose to obey the Torah, and not really think twice about it.

     But, what exactly was the great religious principle at stake here ? Certainly, parents have the right to create their own educational framework and insist on even very restrictive behavioral norms – but not when the school is publicly funded. Private schools have greater flexibility, and even if this particular Charedi school is somewhat autonomous, the government that provides the funding has the right to expand the student population, within reason.

     And there is the crux of the problem as I see it: were the differences between the religious standards in the two “schools” sufficient enough to warrant two separate schools  – and to build a wall between the schools – as if the less rigorous group is ritually impure ? Shouldn’t Jewish education encompass the notion of “love of all Jews” – not in theory but in practice, and especially all Jews who are committed to halacha ? Jewish law and practice are not so monolithic (to be sure, neither is it completely open-ended) that it cannot tolerate slightly different standards of practice, and even lower standards. Must we identify and isolate from religious schools children of parents who have a television or internet access in their homes, or whose the mothers don’t cover their hair or whose sleeves expose their forearms, or eat Rabbanut hashgacha, or serve in the army, or don’t serve in the army, or plan on learning full-time, or plan on working full-time ?

     One of my great teachers once said that there are Jews who act as if there are only 12 or 13 Jews in the whole world – only their tiny group constitutes the “true believers” – and everyone else is either illegitimate or inferior. But that is not how we were created; G-d formed us as a nation with all types of people, who would interact, learn from and try to better each other. That is why we were divided into twelve tribes, and why those tribes included great Torah scholars, farmers and craftsmen – and pious people, learned people, impious people and ignorant people. But we remain a nation, and that is best fostered by integration, not segregation.

     Saddest of all is that the protests, even if warranted, bring to the fore the great flaw of Charedi life and lifestyle – and interpretation of Torah. Advice in a nutshell: it is impolitic to bite the hand that feeds you. With an unemployment rate of close to 65% of males between the ages of 25-65 (astounding, and the highest in the industrial world), Charedim are financially sustained by a larger community that is growing more and more resentful of their antics, even as they are ignorant of their enormous contributions. Chesed is great, and Chevra Kadisha is wonderful, but those are not jobs that put money on the table. To vent against a society that works and fights for Charedim, when they largely absent themselves from these nation-building tasks, is imprudent, to say the least.

     To say the most, it puts the Torah in a negative light, broadcasting to the world – Jewish and general – that the Torah is incompatible with life in a modern state. It says, in essence, that a modern state cannot defend itself or support itself according to the laws of the Torah, and the Torah’s ideals can never be the foundation or governing policy of a real nation. That is heresy, but it is difficult to refute the charge that the Charedim are primarily responsible for fostering that heresy in our world.

    I understand their grievances, their antipathy to the High Court, and their fears of eroding the high standards they seek for themselves by interacting with society. But you can’t build a wall in a schoolyard and expect the insulted to pay for it and guard it. You can’t withdraw from the world because of fear. You can’t educate your children to be unproductive in society and expect others to foot the bill in perpetuity. Great acts of personal kindness cannot substitute for “you are praiseworthy when you eat the fruits of your own hands” (Psalms 128:2). Dedication to Torah study must accompany the obligation to love all Jews, especially when those differences are nuances and not fundamental principles of Judaism (and even in the latter case, the obligation remains to love those Jews as well). Otherwise we run the risk of disassociating ourselves from other Jews based on the minutiae of hat size or shape, following this Rebbi or that one, or other small things that become magnified amongst people that are so similar but do not at all define the individual’s spiritual state.

    We should remind ourselves that there is a prohibition to be poresh min hatzibur (separate oneself from the community), and that tzibur includes – as the acronym would have it – tzadikim, beinonim v’resha’im – the righteous, the intermediates and (even) the wicked. There are no “wicked” in this tale, and that should make it easier for all involved to co-exist, to build together, and to live and learn together, all for the glory of Hashem, His Torah and His people.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel, Machshava/Jewish Thought

Remembering Nothing

Posted on June 17, 2010 | 4 comments

      The Obama administration long ago deleted all references to “Islam,” “radical Islam,” or even the word “terror” in its discussions of America’s ongoing war against…radical Islamic terror. This, undoubtedly part of its world view, adheres to the troubling pattern that has afflicted Westerners for almost a decade now.

     The National Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the United States, routinely urges its educators to commemorate the anniversary of the Islamic-Arab terrorism on September 11, 2001, by omitting any reference to the perpetrators, Islamic-Arab terrorists. They feared that such an explicit rendering of the facts would harm efforts at diversity and arouse prejudice and intolerance.

     Sbarro’s Pizza Restaurant in Yerushalayim, destroyed amid terrible human carnage in August 2001, dedicated its memorial one year later. The plaque, which hung on the wall until the restaurant closed, read: “In eternal memory of the darkness that fell upon us” (translation mine) – as if Sbarro’s and its patrons had been afflicted by an electrical blackout, and not an Arab suicide bomber, on that fateful summer afternoon.

     The moving memorial (in front of the Teaneck Municipal Building) to Teaneck’s Sara Duker, hy”d, murdered in 1996 by Arab terrorists in the Gaza Strip, mourns her life which was tragically cut short by “violence” – place, purpose and perpetrators apparently unknown, or, at least, unmentionable.

     Imagine reading an account of the Holocaust that consciously and studiously deleted any reference to Germans or Nazis (or Jews, for that matter). Or, imagine if the Torah blandly commanded us to “remember what happened to you when you left Egypt”, period – instead of underscoring that we were attacked, in a dastardly and unprovoked way, by a nation which forever epitomizes evil – Amalek – and that we are adjured never to forget what Amalek did, even to wage eternal war against them. Imagine these two alternative, revisionist histories, and the examples brought above, and a clear pattern emerges: there is an ongoing, willful attempt to obscure, gloss over, or minimize the identity of the perpetrators of almost all of the terrorism in the world today, and for the last three decades. Why is that ?

     In the best-case scenario, many good-hearted people perceive man as naturally good, and evil as a gross aberration. Evil, therefore, exists as an entity, a concept, or as a failure of the human being – but it never inheres in the person. It is therefore unconstructive to associate the evildoers with the evil they have done. There are no evil people; there are only good people who do evil acts.

     This notion persists, despite its unequivocal rejection by the Torah. After the flood, Hashem advises Noach (Breisheet 8:21) that “the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth”, meaning from birth (Rashi). Judaism maintains that the unfettered, unrefined, untrained – i.e., morally unguided or natural – human being is a primitive, savage beast capable of committing the worst atrocities without a trace of guilt. As Jews, and after enduring two millennia of persecution, we should not need to be reminded of this.

      There are other possibilities why the identity of murderers is being systematically concealed. Perhaps, their identity is so obvious that it is unnecessary to state it. Or, it is unpleasant or unsettling to think about them. Or, there is a tangible fear that those who point it out will themselves become targets of attack (presumably from members of the same unnamed group). Or, perhaps there is concern that identifying the perpetrators as, disassociate themselves from the heinous crimes being committed and planned in their names.

      Of course, those standards were never applied (and are still not applied) when we classified past persecutors of Jews as Germans, or Poles, or Ukrainians, etc. Surely not every German, Pole, Ukrainian, etc. was a Jew-hater or Jew-killer. Yet, those groups were regularly categorized without qualification, i.e., stereotyped, because the stereotype was largely true. Those who disassociated themselves from the group – overtly or covertly – were so miniscule in number as not to be reflective of the group in general.

      The Arabs have escaped these natural consequences, largely because of the innate American reluctance to tolerate group stereotyping (cf. the abhorrence of racial profiling, which has made a mockery of attempts to upgrade airport security), but also because of a massive multi-billion dollar public relations campaign now underway in America, paid for by the Saudis, and designed to preclude and pre-empt such conclusions. But we ignore reality at our peril. It is undeniable that most Arabs are not terrorists, but equally undeniable that in today’s world most terrorists are Arabs (or Muslims). And if even 10% of America’s Muslims support terror, then there are well over 100,000 people in the United States willing to murder innocent people to achieve political goals. And if only 10% of the world’s Muslims support terror, that leaves 100,000,000 people out to commit mayhem. This alone should give us pause for thought, and for honest remembrance.

     One further example of the obfuscation of today’s evil is the media’s (and government’s) tendency to compartmentalize the “bad guys.” It’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Taliban, it’s Osama bin Laden, it was Saddam Hussein – in other words, an insignificant number of evildoers rather than a wealthy, sophisticated mass movement that numbers millions of adherents and tens of millions of tacit supporters.

     We are unfortunately well aware that since the Nazis, the primary murderers of Jews in the world have been Arab Muslims. We should be more aware that since the end of the Vietnam War, the primary murderers and tormentors of Americans in the world have also been Muslims, and primarily Arabs. The 1979 seizure of the United States embassy in Teheran, the American hostages there and in Beirut, the bombings of the embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 258 Americans, the destruction of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, the homicides of Rabbi Meir Kahane and young Ari Halberstam, hy”d, in New York, the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the Egypt Air flight that killed 217 people off the coast of New York City, the 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224, and the September 11, 2001 massacres which extinguished more than 3,000 innocent lives were all Arab/Muslim productions, and only a sampling at that.

     Certainly, one would hope, not every Arab or Muslim across the globe is a sponsor of terrorism, and a relative handful (mainly in America, but elsewhere as well) have denounced terrorism as a grave distortion of Islam. Many of those Muslim repudiators of terror have themselves become subject to death threats and hate mail, and have been silenced. And, of course, mere membership in a group is no indication of guilt, and no inherent reason to ascribe guilt. But, tellingly, many across the Middle East (the Saudis are a prime example) have condemned the attacks on America, while continuing to underwrite and exhort terrorism against Jews in Israel and elsewhere. It is not the murder or the mayhem that is inherently offensive, they seem to be saying, it is the lack of prudence in selecting an American target and not an exclusively Jewish one. In the Arab Muslim world, we have yet to hear of a substantial outpouring of soul-searching or even a massive wave of revulsion at the terrorism that blackens their names and defines their movements in the popular mind.

     Evil is not amorphous or abstract. It has a name, a face, an address, and an ideology. It is easier to forget, look away, and mask the hideousness of what Arab terrorists did and are still trying to do – mask it behind euphemisms, conceal it behind political correctness, submerge it in a torrent of pale palaver and innocuous nattering, and drown it in a raging river of wishful thinking. But we must be vigilant, as Jews and Americans, to combat evil, hate it passionately, weaken its perpetrators, hasten its demise, and avidly support the defenders of freedom and morality.

     Those who persist in believing in the intrinsic goodness of man have to account for the 150,000,000 human beings murdered in the 20th century alone. To distort the truth while purporting to remember the past is to remember nothing, to dishonor the victims, and to facilitate the murders of the future. Sadly, the Obama administration follows this naïve path, contorting to disassociate Islam from the Fort Worth killer, the underwear bomber, et al, and every murder whose root is directly traceable to radical Islamists.

    The Torah teaches us the nature of evil, how to recognize it, how to combat it, and how to defeat it. And it also teaches us that the destruction of evil – Amalek incarnate – is the precursor to the Messianic age, when man’s goodness, freed of the shackles of ego, strife, evil, greed, and jealousy, will flourish and triumph. Let us hasten that day by remembering Amalek (by name), by unflinchingly supporting the war against evil, and by being lovers of justice and truth.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel

Botches

Posted on June 3, 2010 | Comments Off on Botches

Was the flotilla raid “botched” ? Sure, in the same way the raid on Entebbe was “botched” – the mission was accomplished and some of the terrorists were killed. One should not lose sight of the fact that Israel had one operational objective: to prevent unsearched ships from landing at the Gaza port. Mission accomplished.

     Those who persist in maintaining that another operational objective should be the retention of favorable world opinion have set an unreachable goal that will inhibit Israel’s exercise of self-defense. In the current climate, nothing can be done that engender the support of the “world community,” a union of thugs, despots, potentates, secularists, socialists, religious fanatics, anti-religious fanatics and amoral Goodists who, like lemmings, would eagerly march to their own destruction. Europe, in its death throes as a civilization, is numerically disappearing and seeking to ensure its short-term survival by pandering to the Muslim hordes that are overwhelming it.

     It is hard to resist the conclusion that not only was the provocation staged – but so were the “spontaneous” protests across the globe, with the “hastily” manufactured placards, and the vitriolic Jew-hating speeches. Why should we be surprised – this type of rhetorical viciousness has been the norm since the end of the Six-Day War. As one Israeli general said last week, they knew that whatever Israel did would be criticized. There is a sinister pattern that has existed for at least two decades but became most prominent during last year’s Gaza War: Israel is granted the right of self-defense in theory but not in practice. Any military measure taken is considered “excessive” or “disproportionate.” Its civilians are supposed to be rocketed with impunity, and its soldiers attacked without response. The question to the world – “what would you do in similar circumstances?” – is not answered or even taken seriously, because behind the façade of anger is the reality of charade.

   Lies are difficult to combat. As King David wrote: “Lord, save me from lying lips and from a deceitful tongue” (Psalm 120). It is impossible to dialogue with, much less persuade, people who traffic in lies – to whom even video evidence is insufficient to convince them of the hostile intent of the dead thugs. After all, whom should we believe – the “activists” and their yelps, or our own lying eyes ?

     The second “botch” lamented by many is the state of relations between Israel and Turkey. Indeed, Turkey – as a secular Muslim but non-Arab state – was once a primary ally of Israel. But that changed dramatically – and not this past Sunday. PM Erdogan, whose violent countrymen apparently confused Israeli commandoes with Armenians and never expected a response to their attacks, embraced Iran’s Ahmadinejad – last week. Erdogan, at a public forum in Davos in January 2009 screamed at Shimon Peres that “you know well how to kill,” and stalked off.

      There are military ties between Israel and Turkey, owing to the fact that the Turkish military is not fully under civilian control and its generals are the old-school secular Muslims – and those military ties continue because Turkey benefits from the arms and training provided by Israel. But the diplomatic relationship deteriorated when Erdogan, a radical Muslim who is anti-West, anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Arab, became prime minister in 2003.

       Those who are wax nostalgic over the halcyon days of Turkish-Israel relations sound much like those who pine for the glorious centuries of Jewish life in Muslim countries – where Jews lived as humiliated dhimmis, like every other non-Muslim in the Muslim world.

         We must find every avenue to strengthen PM Netanyahu, who currently shows the appropriate resolve (what a great line: “this was not a love boat, but a hate boat”), but has been known to waver under pressure. Israel has seized several fully-loaded weapons ships – does anyone remember Karine-A? – and must retain the right to control the Gaza seas (as stipulated by the Oslo Accords, of all things). If Netanyahu caves and allows a third-party to assert that control, it would be typical Bibi but another obstacle to Israel’s ability to defend itself. So far, he has successfully deflected accusations that he has “botched” this operation.

     The world community is hopeless. Hatred for Israel and the Jewish people did not start in 2010, 2009, 1967, 1948 or even 1933. As our Sages state, it stems from Sinai – from the moment the Jewish people accepted G-d’s Torah and became His faithful servants. Sadly, we have “botched’ that relationship from time to time, but a major part of our return is our recognition of the gift of the land of Israel that He gave to our people. In our willingness to defend it from physical and psychological assault, we are defending G-d’s honor and that of His people, and bringing closer the day when this relentless hostile, hypocritical and spiteful world will acknowledge His majesty and that of His chosen tribe.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel, Jewish History, Machshava/Jewish Thought