"The Most Successful Christian Communities Embrace the State of Israel"

Eternity Envy

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
May 31, 2013


In response to the Church of Scotland's "An Inheritance of Abraham?," a veritable potpourri of reasons for rejecting the Jewish claim of a historical connection to the Land of Israel, the ever brilliant David Goldman offers one of his startling aperçus: "The most successful Christian communities embrace the State of Israel, while the least successful abhor it."

The Church of Scotland certainly falls into the latter category. Since 1956, the Church of Scotland has shed two-thirds of its members, and continues to lose them at a rate of 5% a year. (Ironically, in happier times for the Church of Scotland, it was a hotbed of Christian Zionism. A nineteenth century Church of Scotland cleric coined the phrase, "A land without people for a people without a land.")

Jonathan Rosenblum: Remembering Rav Mendel Weinbach, zt"l

Remembering Rav Mendel Weinbach, zt"l

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Mishpacha Magazine
December 20, 2012


As I was leaving Ohr Somayach after my most recent visit about a month ago, one of the veteran rebbeim mentioned to me that Rabbi Mendel Weinbach, zt"l, had been in the office that morning. I quickly ran back to the office hoping to catch a few minutes with Rav Mendel.

The last time I had seen him was a few months earlier, when he gave the opening address at the English-language Siyum HaShas. He was barely recognizable at the time, as a consequence of the treatments he was undergoing. But the voice was every bit as powerful and impassioned as I remembered from my days in Ohr Somayach 33 years ago.

Though I knew that Rav Mendel had been battling the dreaded disease for some years, it was evident that night, despite the power of his speech, that he was very sick. So it was with some urgency that I ran back to Ohr Somayach. But the secretary told me that Rav Mendel had left for the day. I made a note to call the next day, but never did.

Mearsheimer & Walt and The Rise of Judeocentrism

Jonathan Rosenblum asks: Mearsheimer and Walt may be many things--but are they outright Anti-Semites?

Stupid, Yes; but is it Anti-Semitic

Part II [Read Part I here]

At the end of last week’s cliffhanger, we promised to answer this week the question: Is Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s book The Israel Lobby anti-Semitic? But we have changed our minds. First of all, outside the pages of Yated Ne’eman, anti-Semite is not such a big insult anymore. Jews are not on the official list of “endangered minorities.” Moslems are, however, despite there being more than a billion of them worldwide.

Point out that Moslems pose a significant threat to virtually every Western democracy, and you might find yourself hauled before the European Court of Justice for actionable Islamophobia. But Jews are pretty much fair game.

Anti-Semites today are, in any event, generally careful to stress that they are merely anti-Israel. And even if they talk about “the Jews,” they always have a fallback position: We meant the Jewish establishment. Very rarely is anything to be gained by accusing someone of being an anti-Semite. And the charge, once made, usually ends with the accuser thrust into the role of the accused for having attempted to stifle legitimate debate with charges of anti-Semitism.

So let us just say, following Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Republic, that Walt-Mearsheimer are peculiarly Judaeocentric. They have geneology on the brain.

Thus they feel it important to inform readers that Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean is married to a Jew and his children are being raised as Jews (whatever that might mean), by way of explaining his inclusion in the pro-Israeli lobby. Timothy Rutten (not a terribly Jewish-sounding name) reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times, noted some unpleasant odors wafting from its pages: “[R]eaders are treated to an explication of the religious affiliations of various Bush administration officials that reads like it was inspired by the Nuremberg Laws. The fact of the matter is, however, that the figure most responsible for pushing the attack on Iraq – Vice President Dick Cheney – is not Jewish, nor even ideologically neo-conservative. He is a card-carrying member of the oil industry elite, however, and names like Halliburton and ExxonMobile never seem to make their way into these pages.”

David Remmick, editor of New Yorker, noted that Walt-Mearsheimer have undertaken to provide Americans distraught about the war in Iraq with a scapegoat: the Israel lobby. “They conclude that the United States was, in fact, tricked into a disastrous war in Iraq by a domestic Fifth Column and that the ranks of that subversive formation are filled with Jews, their friends and willing dupes.” Remmick labels the book “sinister.”

No doubt the two professors have Jewish friends, perhaps even many of them. (That itself should have alerted to them to the weakness in their working premise that American Jews are all enlisted in the Israel lobby, and that they are far and away the most influential element of that lobby.) But as one friend who attended a book signing by Mearsheimer put it, they have certainly made the world a happier place for unabashed anti-Semites. Ex-Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke, for instance, was in ecstasy over The Israel Lobby, which he claims confirms everything he has been saying for years.

Walt-Mearsheimer may not be anti-Semites, but they have written, in the words of Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, “a book anti-Semites will love.” Jeffrey Goldberg made a foray into Amazon.com, and discovered that purchasers of the book were also likely to purchase other works with names like The Power of Israel in the United States; Beyond Chutzpah: on the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; They Dare Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, and, of course, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.

The very concept of a Israel lobby has unpleasant associations with all the various alleged Jewish cabals in history, including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The accusation of Jews secretly wielding power on behalf of their co-religionists in other lands and to the detriment of their home country is an ancient one. And sadly Walt-Mearsheimer’s treatment of the Israel lobby does not prove itself to have sufficient analytical rigor or explanatory power to free it from those historical associations.

Mead clears Walt-Mearsheimer of the charge of being anti-Semites, but acknowledges that they have done “what anti-Semites have always done: they overstate the power of Jews. . . . [T]he picture they paint calls up some of the ugliest stereotypes of anti-Semitic discourse. The Zionist octopus they conjure – stirring up the Iraq war, manipulating both U.S. political parties, shaping the media, punishing the courageous minority of professors and politicians who dare to tell the truth – is depressingly familiar.”

For one thing, they grossly overestimate the power of the “lobby” to bring American policy into congruence with Israel’s bidding. Thus the various sales of the most advanced armaments to Saudi Arabia, which aroused great anxiety in Israel, are scarcely mentioned. Nor are the pressures brought to bear on Israel by Henry Kissinger to spare the Egyptian Third Army in 1973 or the American arms embargo at the outset of the Yom Kippur War or Israel’s failure to secure Jonathan Pollard’s release. Walt-Mearsheimer do not compare the power of pro-Israel groups with that of other powerful lobbies, like the NRA or the farm lobby, which has managed to maintain high farm subsidies with virtually no debate for over half a century, despite the enormous daily cost to American consumers.

The evidence that they cite to prove the existence of an all-powerful Israel lobby is frequently laughable. They take at face value, for instance, AIPAC’s self-serving claims of its own influence because it supports their case of an all-powerful Israel lobby. They obsess over the pro-Israel money Hillary Clinton raised for her 2006 Senate campaign, without noting that it was less than 1% of the total, and less than one-tenth of that contributed by lawyers and law firms.

Moreover, the Israeli lobby in their treatment is highly amorphous concept. With respect to their treatment of the Iraq War, their focus is almost exclusively on a small group of Jews – Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby – who in Walt-Mearsheimer’s view are virtually card-carrying Likud party members. In the process, they turn the president, vice president, secretary of defense, and secretary of state into mere ciphers helplessly manipulated by their Jewish subalterns. That portrayal, as Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out in The New Republic, echoes “the ancient idea . . . that Jews, operating in the shadows, manipulate gentile leaders to unknowingly advance Jewish interests.”

If the Israel lobby is synonymous with neo-conservatives, however, the vast majority of American Jews are not part of the Israel lobby. No group in the United States opposed the war in Iraq in higher percentages than American Jews. Nor are most American Jews supportive of Israeli settlements or the Likud. They loved Bill Clinton, and they supported both the Oslo process and the last failed attempt to rescue it at Camp David.

But when Walt-Mearsheimer expand the definition of the Israel lobby to include everything from Michael Lerner’s Tikkun to the Zionist Organization of America, they quickly descend into incoherence. The organizations, individuals, and newspapers – including remarkably The New York Times – that they lump together under the rubric the Israel lobby are at bitter loggerheads over virtually every aspect of internal Israeli policy and over American foreign policy as well, including American policy to Israel.

How can one assess the strength of the lobby, when every possible American policy is identified with the lobby, from Bill Clinton’s approach at Camp David to President Bush’s subsequent rejection of the Clinton approach in favor of a long period of benign neglect towards Middle East peacemaking? Mead tartly observes: True, the Israel lobby always wins, but only in the way that a person who bets on every square always wins at roulette.

If supporting Israel’s right to exist – about the only point upon which most American Jews agree – constitutes membership in the Israel lobby, then almost every American belongs, including Walt-Mearsheimer, who assure their readers that they support Israel’s right to exist.

ONE OF THE REASONS that Walt-Mearsheimer are so convinced that only the existence of a super-powerful Israel lobby can explain the allegedly “uncritical and unconditional support” for Israel from the American government is that they take such a low view of Israel. In their view, there is no plausible strategic or moral argument that can be advanced in favor of U.S. support for Israel. It beggars belief that their fellow Americans could possibly support Israel to the extent they do absent the manipulation of the lobby. For that reason, they consistently downplay Christian support for Israel and its significance on American foreign policy.

But how, then, do they explain that some of the strongest support for Israel in the U.S. Congress comes from rural states in which there are few Jews and The New York Times is not the paper of record? How can they explain that Republicans, according to every poll, support Israel at higher rates than Democrats, though Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat and contribute to Democrats.

Of course, the picture they paint of Israel rivals in its one-sided presentation that of Jimmy Carter, to whom Mearsheimer has served as an advisor. Whenever there are two possible interpretations, Walt-Mearsheimer invariably adopt the one unfavorable to Israel, no matter how wildly implausible. They believe, for instance, that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip to bring about a Hamas takeover and with it an end the “peace process.” A perfect example, no doubt, of the diabolical cleverness of the Jews.

Walt-Mearsheimer, like Carter, reject the account of former president Bill Clinton, Dennis Ross, and just about everybody who present at Camp David and subsequently at Taba, of what Israel offered. They accept the Palestinian claim that they were offered non-contiguous Bantustans. Yet they offer no explanation for their rejection of Clinton’s account. (They do manage to quote a Palestinian participant who commented of Ross’s participation that he felt he was negotiating with two Israeli teams – one sitting with an Israeli flag and the other sitting with an American flag.)

Again like Carter, Walt-Mearsheimer consistently downplay or ignore Palestinian terrorism in analyzing Israeli policy decisions. They write, for instance, that the impact of terrorism on the Israeli economy has been minimal. That statement is roughly on par with saying that 9/11 had minimal impact on the United States, as evidenced by the fact that the Dow-Jones is higher today than at the time of the attack.

The settlements are portrayed as the major source of Arab animosity towards Israel. But no mention is made of the Arab League’s “three no’s” at Khartoum, in response to Israel’s offer to return the territories after the Six Day War. Walt-Mearsheimer even deny that the Arabs sought to destroy Israeli in 1967, despite the chanting mobs in Cairo and Damascus calling of the blood of the Jews.

And when they do mention terrorism at all, they invariably treat it as the only alternative left to downtrodden Palestinians. It never occurs to them that the Palestinians could have done what Ben-Gurion did in 1948 – i.e., accept the state offered to them and show their worthiness of statehood. Nor does it occur to them that the Palestinians bear any responsibility for their own situation, and that the tens of billions of dollars in aid showered upon them by the international community could have been used to build a decent Palestinian society rather than padding the bank accounts of Arafat and his cronies and maintaining massive security forces.

Walt-Mearsheimer’s undisguised distaste for Israel comes through in their statement that it is “impossible to argue that the United States took the side of Israel [against Hezbollah] “because it was the morally correct policy choice.” Impossible to make such an argument? Why? Did Israel cross the Lebanese border and kidnap Hezbollah fighters? Did it fire unprovoked on Lebanese cities? Their statement is a curious one for another reason as well. As self-professed realists, surely they can understand the United States’ vital interest in the defeat of Iran’s leading proxy.

In Walt-Mearsheimer’s telling, there is no significant threat to the United States today that would not disappear if Israel were to disappear tomorrow – not Islamic jihad, not a nuclear Iran. A world without Israel would be a virtual Elysium. Ira Stoll remarked drily in the New York Sun that a reader of Walt-Mearsheimer could gain the impression that Osama bin Laden would return to the family construction business if it were not for Israel.

Walt-Mearsheimer point to Europe as an exampled of the more “balanced” view of Israel that would prevail in America were it not for the nefarious Israel lobby. That would be the Europe in which it is commonplace to describe Israel as having engaged in genocide against the Palestinians since 1967, despite the rapid Palestinian population growth, decline in infant mortality, dramatic increase in life expectancy, and jump in literacy under Israeli rule, the Europe in which polls list Israel as the greatest threat to the world peace.

Walt-Mearsheimer lament the absence of truth-telling journalists in America like Patrick Seale, Hafez al-Assad’s court biographer, and Robert Fiske, who has of late lent his name to various conspiracy theories as to who was really behind 9/11.

EVEN IF WALT-MEARSHEIMER are not anti-Semites, they are certainly anti-anti anti-Semites. In the manner of the anti anti-Communists of the ‘50s, who viewed the excesses of the anti-Communists as far more threatening than Communism itself, they worry more about those who focus on anti-Semitism than about anti-Semitism itself. In their view, Jews complain far too much about anti-Semitism and blow its extent out of all proportion.

They systematically downplay the alleged threats to both Israel and Jews, as part of their rhetorical strategy. For if Jews overstate the threats they face, does that not suggest that they do so deliberately in order to immunize themselves to criticism and silence their critics.

Walt-Mearsheimer, for instance, claim that Ahmadinejad never threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the map. In their telling, he simply expressed the hope that Israel will gently disappear from the pages of history. Jeffrey Goldberg points out that among the media outlets describing Ahmadinejad as having called for Israel’s destruction are Al Jazeera and the official Iranian broadcast service, neither of which are known to be under Zionist control. And Ahmadinejad’s personal website quotes him predicting that the new wave of confrontations in Palestine would soon wipe Israel away.

Walt-Mearsheimer similarly minimize European anti-Semitism, and attribute most of what there is to understandable Moslem anger over Israeli actions. But a British parliamentary report on anti-Semitism in England found that anti-Jewish incitement had reached crisis levels. And the author of that report wrote recently, “Europe is reawakening its old demons, but today there is a difference. The old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into something more dangerous.”

The rate of French Jews leaving their native land for Israel has doubled in recent years in response to a long string of violent anti-Semitic incidents. Perhaps French Jews are being hysterical (though they have a considerably closer view of the scene than Walt-Mearsheimer), but they are not making up their fears. People do not generally flee their homes in order to gain a debating advantage over their adversaries.

Part of the reason that Walt-Mearsheimer do not perceive the rising anti-Semitism in Europe is due to their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the routine European equation of Israel with Nazi Germany and Israeli leaders with Hitler does not strike one as off-the-wall, then there is no reason to consider Israel to be the victim of a double-standard deriving from anti-Semitism.

Walt-Mearsheimer’s intent is to confront Jews with the tar baby problem: The more they seek to confront their accusers the more ammunition they provide for the charge that they are stifling all debate. That tactic, as Mead notes, is also of ancient provenance: “The authors also end up adopting a widely used tactic that has a special history in anti-Semitic literature. When anti-Semitic writers and politician make vicious attacks, Jews are in a double bind: refrain from responding with outrage and the charge becomes accepted as fact, express utter loathing at the charge and give anti-Semite the opportunity to pose as the victims of a slander campaign by venomous Jews.”

The best-seller status of The Israel Lobby and Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is the best proof, if any were needed, that there exists no Israel lobby in America capable of stifling debate on Israel. But by prophylactically predicting that Jews will attempt to silence them and others like them with the charge of anti-Semitism, Walt-Mearsheimer have written, in Goldberg’s words, a “book [that] is not an act of scholarship, but an act of intimidation.”

The proper question is not: Are Walt-Mearsheimer anti-Semites? But rather: What difference would it make if they were?

You can read all of Jonathan Rosenblum's articles on Jewish Media Resources.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Israel Lobby and Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Young American Jews Opt Out

Jonathan Rosenblum writes about the waning sense of identification that Reform and non-religious Jews have with Israel.

But don't take young Orthodox Jews for granted either--seepsychologist Irwin Mansdorf's Is Modern Orthodoxy the “great white hope” for the Jewish world? and his April 2004 survey Knowledge and attitudes of post high school Jewish-American orthodox students in Israel (PDF). There is an online forum of The Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora that discussed the survey.

Young American Jews Opt Out
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Mishpacha
September 24, 2007

The historic bargain linking American Jewry and Israel since the founding of the State is coming to an end. The terms of the deal were unspoken, but clear: Israel would provide American Jews with a sense of pride and identity as Jews, and they, in turn, would shower upon Israel their financial and political support. But Israel is no longer a source of pride for non-Orthodox Jews, and the identity it provides is not one which they wish to share.

That conclusion emerges from a recent study published by sociologists Stephen Cohen and Ari Kelman. They found that American Jews under 35 do not care very much about Israel. They are not just apathetic about Israel, that indifference is "giving way to downright alienation," write Cohen and Kelman.

More than half of Jews under 35 said that they would not view the destruction of Israel as a personal tragedy. The death and expulsion of millions is something they could live with. By those standards, they probably would not see the Holocaust as a "personal" tragedy either.

What young Jews under 35 feel towards Israel goes beyond apathy to outright resentment. Israel complicates their social lives and muddies their political identity. Only 54% profess to be comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state at all. In Europe and on elite American campuses, internationalism and a world-without-borders are the rage. The Jews of Israel, with their stubborn insistence on protecting their nation-state, are, as always, out-of-sync.

Young American Jews do not wish to be tarred with their atavisms. On campus and where enlightened folk meet, Israel is scorned as a colonial oppressor. Who wants to be identified as a sympathizer with apartheid? Once Reform Judaism disavowed Zionism for fear of being thought disloyal to their host countries, and young American Jews today share similar fears of being out of step with their enlightened peers.

Molly Umberger, whose mother is program director of the leftist New Israel Fund (NIF), told the Jerusalem Post that she views both Israel and Palestinians as having made lots of mistakes and the situation as complicated, but generally "tries not to think about [Israel]." (No wonder when Bruce Temkin, the director of the NIF, describes Israel as a "turn-off.") Daniel Alperin, 33, describes his interest in Israel as waning when he began to hear "the bad stuff" – probably about the time he entered college.

Already the trends lines were pointing in this direction forty years ago. In a 1965 Commentary symposium of younger Jewish intellectuals – the least religiously identified segment of American Jewry – only one Eliahu expressed complete comfort with Israel's creation and pride in its accomplishments, and he eventually made aliyah. The rest expressed various degrees of discomfort with Israel's militarism (and this was before 1967 and the "occupation"). The only Jewish identity they acknowledged at all was that of the "Jew" as the perpetually alienated critic of those in power – not exactly one upon which to base a connection to other Jews. Now the rest of American Jewry is catching up to those once young intellectuals.

JEWISH AGENCY chairman Zev Bielski labeled the results "very distressing," and then proceeded to give a ridiculous explanation for those numbers: the comfortable life of most American Jews.

Cohen and Kelman know better. And their answer is summed up in the demographic they did not interview for their study: Orthodox Jews. For a survey of young Orthodox Jews would have yielded a diametrically opposite result.

Among younger Jews, those for whom their Judaism is important – primarily the Orthodox -- will remain connected to the fate of their fellow Jews in Israel. Most Orthodox American youth will study in Israel after high school, some for many years. And almost all will visit Israel many times. Eretz Yisrael is not a mere abstraction for them, but the center of the spiritual life of the Jewish people.

Even an anti-Zionist Satmar chassid living in the secluded village of Monroe will intensify his prayers when Israel is at war and follow the action closely. Why? Because for him the name Jew means something.

The majority of young American Jews and the majority of young Israelis share in common a lack of interest in their Judaism. But that shared negativity provides little basis for a relationship. Shared gene pools won't do it either – that smacks of racism. And ethnic identity, it turns out, cannot be passed down, or survive the breakup of ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods.

But the survey signals something else as well: a declining understanding on the part of American Jews of Judaism in terms of a national identity that imposes obligations to one's co-nationals. That is being replaced by a return to the self-definition of classic German Reform: German (or in this case American) nationals of the Mosaic persuasion.

Cohen and Kelman are wrong to argue that ethnic identity is being replaced by religious identity. For when young American Jews say that they view their Judaism as a religious not national identity, the religion they refer to is a pretty tepid affair. Precisely because it is so tepid does it fail to provide them a sense of connection to their fellow Jews, whether in America or abroad. It is a religion largely lacking connection to the Land of Israel, and even more importantly to the defining event in Jewish history the giving of Torah at Sinai. Absent the latter, there is no common mission to link the descendants of those who stood at Sinai.

Lawrence Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College (Reform), described the new Reform prayer book as emphasizing Reform Jews’ increased interest in spirituality over national identity. Unfortunately, however, the Torah defines us as a nation, not just a faith community. Any religion that downplays the common national identity of Jews is not Torah Judaism, but some new creation.

The impact of the declining sense of responsibility to one's fellow Jews is being felt within American Jewry itself, not just in attitudes towards Israel. Already only 6% of giving by mega-Jewish foundations goes to remotely Jewish causes. It is hardly surprising, for instance, that non-Jewish spouses are not eager to contribute to Jewish causes. In time, funding the institutions of American Jewry will become ever more difficult. And the Orthodox will be left to donate to Israel.

The political implications for Israel are large as well. Fortunately, Professors Walt and Mearsheimer are wrong about an Israel Lobby comprised mostly of those with Jewish-sounding names. It is devout Christians, and not some nefarious Israel Lobby, which is the primary bulwark of American support for Israel today. That we have to rely on Christian support, rather than our fellow Jews, however, is a very mixed blessing indeed.

Read Jonathan Rosenblum's other articles on Jewish Media Resources

Technorati Tag: Israel and Jonathan Rosenblum.

IT TAKES ONE TO FIGHT ONE. Jonathan Rosenblum argues that that "religious people are better at defending themselves from threats to their survival."

Think Again: Dangerous godlessness
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
September 7, 2007

The tripartite division of the recent CNN series God's Warriors into Jewish, Christian and Islamic segments conveyed its underlying message: Religions produce murderous fanatics. That particular trope features in all the recent spate of books proclaiming, "I am an atheist, and if you had any brains, you would be too."

That thesis, however, is badly flawed. First, religious fanatics prove no more about the inherent nature of religious belief than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot prove about non-belief.

And the implicit equation of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious fanatics is absurd. In the first two categories, CNN's Christine Amanpour dredged up Dr. Baruch Goldstein and a handful of (largely unsuccessful) Jewish terrorists from the 1980s and a few Christian abortion clinic bombers. (The former allowed Amanpour to segue into a BBC-style frontal attack on Israel and the "Israel lobby," already admirably dissected by Jonathan Tobin and Andrea Levin in these pages.)

Radical Islamists, by way of comparison, have killed thousands around the globe in recent years - in New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Afghanistan and Iraq. An Iranian regime with the declared mission of spreading the worldwide reign of Islam is on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons, and an already nuclear Pakistan could fall under Islamist rule.

Political Islam, according to Mary Habeck of Johns Hopkins University, recognizes no permanent political boundaries with unbelievers, for doing so "would end the expansion of Islam and stop offensive jihad, both of which are transgressions against [divine] law that commands jihad until the entire earth is under the rule of Islamic law."

That mindset, in both its Sunni and Shi'ite variants, claims millions of adherents around the world, including tens of thousands who have declared their willingness to kill and be killed furthering the cause. By contrast, Judaism has never recognized a divine mandate for territorial expansion, and it has been centuries since Christians spoke with a straight face of Christendom.

AMANPOUR'S EFFORT to undermine religious faith in general is not only wrong-headed; it is dangerous. Radical Islam may be the greatest threat to world peace today. But the likeliest antidote is a resurgence of Jewish and Christian religious belief.

Without entering into fruitless debates about whether religious or non-religious people are more moral - fruitless since we lack even the common moral language the Decalogue once provided - there is one point even Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation) should concede: Religious people are better at defending themselves from threats to their survival.

FOR EVIDENCE, we need look no further than the Europeans' helplessness in the face of the continent's growing Islamization. Secular Europeans are unwilling to undertake any sacrifice - even if it's only producing more children - to save their civilization.

A lack of religious imagination prevents pleasure-loving children of the Enlightenment from grasping the threat of militant Islam. EU bureaucrats consistently treat Islamophobia as a greater danger than radical Islam. They cannot imagine that Islamic terrorists engage in terrorism because that's what they do best, and not to advance rational, obtainable goals. Nor do they comprehend that Osama bin Laden is deadly serious when he proclaims a war of civilizations, and that there can be no splitting the difference between his goal of imposing worldwide Shari'a and the West's desire to live in peace and comfort.

When the danger finally slaps them in the face, Europeans respond by assuming a posture of abject deference to Islam, in the hope they will be treated mercifully. A Dutch priest urges using Allah in place of God, the British prime minister forbids his ministers to mention the religion of native-born Islamic terrorists, British schools cancel classes on the Holocaust in the face of Muslim protests, BBC broadcasters invariably add "peace be upon him" to Muhammad's name and one European country after another falls over itself to apologize for printing cartoons Muslims deem offensive.

MORE THAN four years after Iran's nuclear ambitions became clear, and after being repeatedly led around by the nose, European nations are still unable to agree on more than symbolic sanctions. Even the threat of nuclear-armed mullahs sitting athwart the Straits of Hormuz (through which one-fifth of the world's oil passes) cannot spur them to action.

Young Europeans have chosen flight over fighting. Emigration from prosperous Germany and Holland exceeds immigration. A young Dutch writer, responding to the advice of German author Henryk Broder to flee to Australia, spoke for many when he wrote: "I am not a warrior, but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."

His only reaction to the loss of his country: "a feeling of sadness."

That passivity in the face of threat is directly linked to Europe's loss of religious belief. Those who view themselves as nothing more than sophisticated, pleasure-seeking animals, whose life has no purpose outside itself and ends with death, consider nothing worth dying for and war to be an invariably irrational option.

Not by accident is the United States, by far the most religious Western country, the only one that shows a determination not to submit to external enemies. American defense spending dwarfs that of all Europe combined. And since 1945, Europe has left the burden of its defense to the U.S. A poll by the German Marshall Fund found that 80 percent of Americans agree with the proposition "[under some conditions] war is necessary to obtain justice." Less than one-third of Frenchmen, Germans, Italians and Spaniards responded in kind.

"A man who has nothing he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature, who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself," writes John Stuart Mill.

Godless Europe has become that man.

Read other articles by Jonathan Rosenblum at Jewish Media Resources

Technorati Tag: Richard Dawkins and Christine Amanpour and Christopher Hitchens and Atheism and Jonathan Rosenblum.

FREE WILL: ACCEPT NO IMITATIONS. Jonathan Rosenblum on Rav Dessler's insight into the awesome meaning of free will--and its implications for our Avodas HaShem and the Chinuch of our children.

Coercion is not Chinuch

In his Kuntras HaBechirah, Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler makes a truly frightening statement. No matter how elevated one's actions, if those actions are only the result of one's training, then they confer no merit upon the one performing them. Only those actions that result from the exercise of one's free will are attributed to a person.

That which we do as a form of imitation of our role models or as a result of some form of coercion is not truly ours. One only can only lay claim to those mitzvos to which one brings something of oneself – some thought, some feeling while performing the mitzvah.

Rav Dessler taught that we define ourselves only through the exercise of our free will. And that only takes place when there is an aspect of internal struggle. That struggle is the opposite of rote behaviour – mitzvos anoshim m'limuda.

Our very relationship with Hashem depends on the exercise of our bechirah. Any true relationship must be based on the individuality of both parties – on what is intrinsic to them and not compelled by circumstances beyond their control. And that process of self-definition requires the exercise of our bechirah.

With this insight, we can understand a puzzling Rashi.

The Torah tells us that Yitzchak Avinu and Rivka Imeinu stood opposite one another – each davening for a child. Hashem answered Yitzchak (and by implication not Rivka) ( Bereishis 25:21).. Rashi explains that Yitzchak's prayer was answered because his merit as a tzaddik who was the son of a tzaddik was greater than that of Rivka, a tzadekes who was the daughter of a rasha.

Most of us experience a certain puzzlement upon first confronting this Rashi. After all, isn't it more meritorious for Rivka to have formed herself into tzadekes, despite having no models to emulate? One possible answer is that we do not fully appreciate what it means that Yitzchak was a tzaddik.

Yitzchak was the son of Avraham Avinu, the greatest man who had ever lived, the one who discovered Hashem through the power of his own reason, and proclaimed His existence to the world. With such an overwhelming image in front of him, the natural thing would have been for Yitzchak to emulate his father's derech avodah (path of Divine service). Had he done so, however, Yitzchak Avinu might have been an exemplary person, but he would not have merited the title tzaddik.

Only by adding an entirely new aspect of avodas Hashem to that of Avraham Avinu did Yitzchak merit to be called a tzaddik. Despite the power of the parental example in front of him, Yitzchak initiated an entirely new aspect of Divine service – gevurah ­– and added it to the chesed of Avraham. Even when performing the same external actions – e.g.., redigging the same wells that his father had dug previously – Yitzchak made those actions his. And that achievement, Rashi informs us, is even greater than Rivka's ability to escape the negative example of her father Bethuel.

IN ADDITION TO THE IMPLICATIONS OF RAV DESSLER'S INSIGHT for our own avodas Hashem , it relates to each of us in our roles as parents and educators. In those roles, our success will be determined not just by our children's conformity to halachic norms, but by the degree to which we inspire them and provide them with the tools to make their mitzvah observance something more than mitzvos anoshim m'limuda.

To coerce our children, either negatively through punishment through praise and rewards or praise, is relatively easy at an early age. And at an early age, it is perfectly valid, even necessary, to accustom them to the performance of mitzvah. At an early age, the child can understand little of the deeper significance of a mitzvah or why it is incumbent upon him to perform the mitzvah.

Yet while various forms of coercion have a place within a proper program of chinuch , coercion should never be confused with chinuch itself. Indeed it can be antithetical to true chinuch, which involves the development of a person's own understanding and capacities from within, not the imposition of patterns of behavior from without.

I recently read an interview with Rabbi Moshe Goldstein, Rosh Yeshivas Sha'arei Yosher and widely considered Israel's foremost expert on yeshiva students who have experienced spiritual crises, in which he emphasized this distinction between coercion and chinuch. "The goal of chinuch, " he said, "is to cause the child to perform because he understands why he is do what he's doing. Proper chinuch has as its goal that the child will do what is incumbent upon him from his own free will. . . . [That process of internalization] requires explanation, dialogue, and influence."

Rabbi Goldstein makes the striking point when a child's behavior is consistently perfect, and his parents find themselves the envy of other parents, this can often be a warning sign of dangers ahead. Such perfect behavior often reflects a pattern of behavior imposed from without. When a young person's mitzvah observance it internally generated, and results from his or her own personal struggles, it will not be perfectly consistent because in that internal struggle there will inevitably be ups and downs.

But what is imposed from without triggers an impulse to rebel. The external behavior may remain perfect on the outside, especially in the presence of the coercive agent, while internally everything is fraying, until one day the whole structure collapses.

Chinuch is a long, slow process. Its results are cumulative and rarely evident immediately. By its very nature, it must be individualized to each particular child. Coercion, on the other hand, has an immediate impact. But the benefits of proper chinuch are long-lasting, while those of coercion can vanish into thin air.

Yet the temptation to focus exclusively on coercion remains strong precisely because it yields immediate results and is easier than providing inspiration. Our educational institutions lack the resources to provide each student individual attention and thus tend to emphasize conformity to norms – too often without proper explanation of their significance. Every yeshiva, Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky, zt"l, once said, is to some extent a Sdom bed, cutting or stretching talmidim to a certain standard.

The temptation of the quicker and easier path must be resisted. That requires constantly stressing that the goal of chinuch is provide our children with the internal resources to exercise their free will properly in order that their mitzvos be truly theirs and not ours.

Only by doing so can we be confident of their long-term adherence to the proper path. As the wisest of men taught us, "Educate the youth according to his way, so that even as he grows old he will not swerve from it" (Mishlei 22:6).

Read Jonathan Rosenblum's other articles at Jewish Media Resources

Technorati Tag: Rabi Eliyahu Dessler and Michtav MiEliyahu and Free Will and Bechirah.

DID SHIMON PERES KNOW--AND WHAT ABOUT US? Hillel Fendel writes in Arutz Sheva:

In fact, Peres himself, in a book he wrote in 1978 (Tomorrow is Now, Keter Publishers, Jerusalem; page 232), accurately outlined the dangers of a Palestinian state:

"The establishment of such a [Palestinian] state means the inflow of combat-ready Palestinian forces (more than 25,800 men under arms) into Judea and Samaria; this force, together with the local youth, will double itself in a short time. It will not be short of weapons or other [military] equipment, and in a short space of time, an infrastructure for waging war will be set up in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Israel will have problems in preserving day-to-day security, which may drive the country into war, or undermine the morale of its citizens. In time of war, the frontiers of the Palestinian state will constitute an excellent staging point for mobile forces to mount attacks on infrastructure installations vital for Israel's existence, to impede the freedom of action of the Israeli air-force in the skies over Israel, and to cause bloodshed among the population in areas adjacent to the frontier-line."

So what happened? Why has Peres gone along with this today?

Last year, I wrote a post quoting an idea from Rabbi Yisroel Reisman that the underlying principal of Secular Zionism is yei'ush, despair. He said that politicians such as Shimon Peres do not advocate the policies they do because they are stupid, but rather because of the sense of despair that is part of what Zionism is and where it historically comes from. After all, Theodore Herzl's Zionism originated as a reaction to Anti-Semitism, to a threat to Jews, seeing the only hope for Jewish survival in the creation of a Jewish State.

A friend of mine mentioned an idea that he heard that one of the underlying forces behind the surrender of territory that we are seeing is itself a subconscious reaction against Judaism and the frum Jews in society. It is as if to strike back against religious Jews and what they say is holy and special and intrinsic to Israel--and then b'shitah to give it away in the interests of peace in the real world.

I don't know what the reason is, but I lean towards the idea of yei'ush as the cause. As Jews, we do not seem to have handled the idea of holiness, of kedusha, too well. We tend to surrender it, without a fight.

• Hebrew--Lashon HaKodesh--was to a large degree abandoned in favor of Yiddish, leaving it to Eliezer ben Yehudah, an irreligious Jew, to create modern Hebrew today.
  
  
• Chumash we abandoned to the Bible Critics.
  
  
• Nach has been abandoned to Christians, who seem to be more familiar with it than we are.
  
  
• The Temple Mount...you know the story.
  
  
• And the land itself--Eretz HaKodesh--is given away at the slightest excuse.

Jonathan Rosenblum wrote in an essay about Torah Extremism and its Opposite:

Indeed Goldwater’s defense of extremism was preceded by the Chazon Ish. In Igros Chazon Ish (III, 61), the Chazon Ish identifies extremism as deriving from the quest for perfection, and writes that without extremism perfection is impossible. Those who are forever proclaiming their disdain for extremism, he writes, "will inevitably find themselves consorting with counterfeiters [of Torah] and the feeble-minded."

We seem as a group to lack the inner-strength to insist on what is ours historically, legally, and Biblically. Muslims are not alone in having religious claims, but if we as Jews do not repeatedly, consistently and confidently express our right to what is ours--and take a stand--then we will surely lose it all. We will continue to find ourselves with the US dictating feeble-minded ideas requiring that Israel unilaterally make concession after concession to a known terrorist group led by a weak, ineffectual and corrupt leader.

Technorati Tag: Israel.

GAZA AS FANTASY ISLAND. Jonathan Rosenblum on President Bush's latest speech on initiative for Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

The President's New Initiative

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Yated Ne'eman
July 25, 2007

It's too bad that President Bush was not able to attend a recent conference sponsored by the Shalem Center on the aftermath of Hamas's takeover of Gaza . Had he been there he would have heard Palestinian human activist Bassam Eid declare, "There is no Palestinian today who demands a state. We want health, education, and a chance to work." Eid went on to say that there is not one Palestinian leader today who can be counted on to keep his word in any matter or who is capable of imposing any order on Palestinian society, The last thing that Israel or the United States should be contemplating, he said, is giving Mahmoud Abbas more arms. "We [the Palestinians] are a nation that does not deserve a state," Eid concluded.

A Palestinian state has never seemed further away than it does in the wake of Hamas's seizure of power in Gaza, leading to a complete separation between the West Bank and Gaza. Abbas proved himself totally hapless in the wake of the Hamas onslaught in the Gaza. Even if Abbass's intentions were as pure as the driven snow, Eid is surely right, that he has proven himself totally ineffectual and incapable of making good on any commitment he might make.

Abbas's newly appointed prime minister Salaam Fayad says the right things: he calls for governmental transparency and the end of endemic corruption: advocates large-scale building projects that could house many of those still living in refugee camps after 60 years where they have remained a bottomless pool of hatred for Israel and a breeding ground for terrorists (though Fayad does not explicitly declare any such purpose); and urges the centralization in the government of the means of force, though he has also declared that he will not resort to force to achieve that goal.

But as Evelyn Gordon pointed out in the Jerusalem Post last week, even if these goals could once have been achieved, a lot of water has passed under the dam since the first Oslo Accords, and the experience since then has made their achievement far more difficult today than at the outset of the Oslo process.

Then Israel was eager to help in the Palestinians economic development. But the escalating terrorism under Oslo, eventually shut-off the Israel to both Palestinian workers and products. And the checkpoints and other security measures that Israel has been forced to impose in the West Bank make economic development that much more difficult.

Yasir Arafat might have had the authority, if he had wished to use it, of creating a single security apparatus, but he preferred for his own reasons to proliferate the number of militias, each one on his payroll. Similarly, he preferred skimming off most of the unprecedented international aid lavished on the Palestinians for arming his various militias – approximately 60% of the Palestinian Authority budget under Arafat went to the various security forces --and to padding his bank accounts to investing in Palestinian infrastructure. As a consequence, trust in Fatah is near zero. Nor is there reason to believe that the Arafat cronies who joined him at the feeding trough will willingly give up their perks, even if Fayad were serious about transparency.

At the same conference at which Eid renounced any aspirations for a Palestinian state in the near future, Gen. Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council under Ariel Sharon, listed four reasons why there will be no two-state solution under the current model of dividing up the territory west of the Jordan between Israel and Palestine: (1) Hamas is strong enough to torpedo any settlement; (2) The gap between what Israel will offer and what the Palestinians will accept has only widened; (3) The Palestinians will not do anything to stop terrorism until Israel has agreed to their political demands; Israel will not negotiate final status issues until the Palestinians undertake serious efforts to curb terrorism and end incitement against Israel; and (4) Any Palestinian state will be inherently unstable (with the current population of the Gaza Strip projected to double by 2020). .

MY GUESS IS THAT PRESIDENT BUSH KNOWS that there will be no Palestinian state any time in the near future. The Palestinians have convincingly demonstrated to the world that they are very far indeed from being able to run a state of their own.

Nevertheless, the President chose to reprise last week his Rose Garden speech of June 22 2002, in which he first declared his support for a Palestinian state. And in last week's address, he expressed his hope that "we can soon begin serious negotiations toward the creation of a Palestinian state." The President announced his intention to convene an international conference to "review the progress that has been made toward building Palestinian institutions [and} to look for innovative and effective ways to support further reform."

Like the two leaders he seeks to bring together – Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas – Bush knows that this is pure political theater. But each man has his own reasons for furthering the illusion of movement. Bush would like to distract attention from Iraq for awhile, and also to get those critics who blame a lack of American involvement for the stalled Palestinian-Israel peace process off his back. (In fact, it was the hyper-involvement of the Clinton administration in the Oslo years and the failure to hold Arafat to account that gave rise to the present impasse.)

For his part, Abbas is grateful for any increased international aid he can commandeer and for the international legitimacy that Bush confers upon him. Olmert knows that only the appearance of movement on the peace process can win the Israeli press to his side. He is caught, however, in a vise, since virtually any concession he offers to the Palestinians at this point will be deeply unpopular in Israel.

Not that Bush's speech lost all touch with reality. He did not claim that the time is ripe for final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The first item on his agenda, as Michael Oren pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, was not negotiations between Abbas and Olmert, but laying the foundations for Palestinian state-building. President Bush emphasized that the mandate of the newly appointed Quartet representative Tony Blair is to help the Palestinians build their institutions not to involve himself in peace negotiations. First, the Palestinians need to establish the rule of law and a sound financial system, move towards economic development, and dismantle the various militias.

In short, claimed Oren, the President clearly placed the onus on the Palestinians for showing a commitment to peace as a pre-condition for negotiations. They must demonstrate, the President said, a desire for a future of "decency and hope" and not a future of terror and death." In addition, the President reiterated the United States' commitment to Israel's existence as a Jewish homeland, an implicit rejection of the Palestinians' claimed "right" of return. The President also anticipated that the eventual border between any Palestinian state and Israel will have to take into account not just previous lines (i.e,, the 1949 Armistice Lines), but also "current realities," thus leaving the door open for Israel's retention of the major settlement blocs.

The Oren view of the speech is the one that the administration chose to emphasize: It sent thousands of copies of his WSJ op-ed to journalists, and at a press conference shortly after the speech, Press Secretary Tony Snow was at pains to stress that the international conference called for by the President was not "a big peace conference. . . . This is a meeting to sit down and try to find ways of building fundamental and crucial institutions for the Palestinians that are going to enable them to have self-government and democracy."

But even Oren has to admit that the President's message was not quite as "unequivocal" as one might have wished. And even if the President's intentions were exactly as stated by Oren, there are still dangers ahead in the President's call for an international conference. For one thing, the United States will not be the only party at such a conference, and other invitees will surely have agendas of their own. Those will likely include efforts to extract from Israel a whole slew of concessions and "confidence-building" measures. Even Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice cannot be counted on to hold unswervingly to the focus on Palestinian institutions. She has been trying to coax Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into final status negotiations for months.

In addition, the President's speech contained a fair amount of wishful thinking about the true desires of the Palestinian people. He described at length the savagery of Hamas in the recent fighting in Gaza. But throwing enemies to their deaths from rooftops was not a technique confined to the Hamas. Fatah engaged in plenty of savagery of its own, just less successfully. In short, the effort to contrast a brutal Hamas to an almost civilized Fatah fails.

Among the positive developments of the past five years, according to Bush, is that the PA is now headed by a President committed to peace. But the fact that Hamas continues to seek Israel's destruction, does not suddenly turn Fatah into Israel's friend, just because Fatah and Hamas are bitter rivals. Sometimes my enemy's enemy is also my enemy.

The evidence for Abbas's commitment to peace is scanty. He has consistently refused to take the slightest risk for peace. He has done nothing to stop Kassam fire at Sderot and beyond, or to stop the incitement on the official Palestinian TV and radio, or to disarm the militias, or to stop the flow of heavy armaments into Gaza across the Egyptian border or to foster economic development in Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal.

Some of Bush's rhetoric was dangerously naïve, as, for instance, his call for Israel to reduce its "footprint [in the West Bank] without reducing its security." That's like calling for the squaring of the circle. The Israeli checkpoints and nightly patrols in Palestinian cities have resulted in a huge reduction in terrorist activities. Amazingly, however, Israel picked up on the hint. Last week, Prime Minister Olmert granted amnesty to over 200 highly sought after terrorists, in return for their pledge to forswear terrorist activity and give up their weapons (which they can quickly retain by joining the local security services.

Even if President Bush knows in his heart how far the Palestinians are from accepting Israel's existence – Palestinian polls consistently show majority support for non-recognition of Israel and ongoing attacks on Israeli civilians – the way these issues are discussed has a way of coming back to haunt. Stupid talk tends to generate stupid policies. (The British government's refusal to discuss the religion and religious beliefs of the terrorists who sought to detonate two car bombs outside of London clubs and attacked Glasgow Airport last month hardly gives one confidence that the government will prove capable of dealing with Britain's internal Islamic threat. It's hard to develop strategies for a problem one dare not name.

At the end of his Mideast speech, President Bush described a 16-year-old girl in Gaza who allegedly told a reporter that the Hamas executioners "want to destroy the culture of our fathers and grandfathers. We will not allow them to do it. I'm sayings it enough killing." This girl was meant to stand for all the non-Hamas Palestinians, as if clan-based Gaza society was some kind of peaceful paradise before Hamas came onto the scene, and as if the killings she regretted also included those of Israelis.

That, unfortunately, is a fantasy. And if President Bush believes it, then it is a dangerous fantasy.

Read all of Jonathan Rosenblum's articles at Jewish Media Resources.

Technorati Tag: Israel and President Bush and Jonathan Rosenblum.

TIME TO LAY DOWN THE LAW. Jonathan Rosenblum knocks the Dickens out of the concept of "International Humanitarian Law"

The law is an ass

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
July 12, 2007

The term "collective punishment" conjures up images of Nazis executing entire villages in retaliation for a partisan ambush. No wonder Jews are acutely sensitive to charges of imposing collective punishment or targeting civilians.

And we hear those charges a lot: last summer in Lebanon; every time Israeli artillery hit back at the source of Kassam fire from Gaza. Were Syria to fire missiles at Israeli cities, and Israel to strike back at Syrian cities with even greater force, the international community would undoubtedly condemn Israel.

Accusations of war crimes by states attempting to defend against terrorist attacks have become a major weapon in the terrorist arsenal. In the words of Boaz Ganor of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, so-called customary international humanitarian law (CIHL) is a "force multiplier" for terrorist groups, who think nothing of putting civilians in the line of fire.

That requires some serious rethinking of the laws of war predicated on an outdated model of opposing armies facing off on an open field far removed from civilian populations. Modern warfare inevitably implicates civilian populations.

The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which protected against nuclear conflagration during the Cold War, for instance, is predicated on the threat of collective punishment on a massive scale. Few citizens of the Soviet Union would have had any input into the decision to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. But they would nevertheless have been incinerated by the American retaliation. Similarly, Israel's survival today depends on the credibility of our willingness to respond in kind to any attack on Israeli civilians by Iran or Syria.

One might distinguish Soviet citizens from residents of Gaza or southern Lebanon on the grounds that the former were part of a hierarchical governmental structure. But the distinction is far from clear. Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in southern Lebanon essentially function as autonomous governments. And they are far more representative of the populations they rule than the government of the Soviet Union ever was. Hamas was popularly elected, and Palestinian polls show widespread support for the ongoing Kassam attacks on Israel. And residents of southern Lebanon have more to say about Hizbullah rocket launchers in their backyard and weapons stored in their basements than Soviet citizens had about the actions of their regime.

IT IS TIME we recognize, to paraphrase Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire, that "customary international humanitarian law" is neither customary, nor law, nor humanitarian. It is not customary because it is not based on the actual behavior of nations past or present. When the Southern states began executing captured former slaves fighting in the Union Army, president Lincoln announced that the Union would execute captured Confederate soldiers in reprisal. The executions stopped. (In the same vein, denying Palestinians access to security prisoners held by Israel would be far more effective in securing access to our captive soldiers than beseeching the international community to intervene.)

During World War I, the Allies blockaded the Central Powers to force them into submission via starvation. And in 1943, Churchill ordered 1,000 British bombers to hammer Hamburg. (For good reason did the British omit the bombing of civilian populations from the Nuremberg indictments.) The firebombing of Dresden in the waning days of World War II killed tens of thousands of German civilians. Was that firebombing, however, self-evidently immoral if it also saved thousands of far more innocent Jews in the death camps by hastening the end of the war?

Yet if Israel engaged in any of these actions, it would be roundly condemned by the international community.

NOR IS customary international humanitarian law law in any meaningful sense. Its "rules" were not enacted by any international governmental body to which sovereign nation-states ceded the right to legislate. Nor are they even embodied in reciprocal treaty obligations entered into by sovereign states. They are nothing more than "rules" derived from declarative statements made by any and everybody - from various tinpot dictators and tyrants to Human Rights Watch - on what they think international law should be; and presto, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), it is.

Nor are the "rules" humanitarian. As Ganor points out, they render civilian populations more vulnerable by creating incentives for terrorists to operate from their midst.

And notes Jeremy Rabkin, an incisive academic critic of the inanities of CIHL, the rules are designed to favor guerrilla and terrorist fighters. In particular, they sever the obligations on states trying to defend themselves against terrorism from any reciprocal obligations on the part of terrorists.

Those "rules" are the outgrowth of a Geneva Conference convened by the ICRC in 1975, at which Third World countries outnumbered Western powers. And they form a pattern with UN General Assembly resolutions of the period demanding a New World Economic Order. In effect, they have redistributed military power to terrorist groups.

In responding to claims that Israel has violated CIHL, our recourse must be to elementary logic and an examination of the actual conduct of nations. Just as the US Constitution is not a "suicide pact," neither is international law. Until human rights advocates tell us what we can do to protect our cities from missiles and our citizens from suicide bombers, CIHL has no claim on our attention.

In the meantime, let Israel begin to place the lives of its citizens first, as has every other nation in history. We have no wish to see the people of Gaza starve, but unless the Hamas government stops the Kassams, closes the tunnels bringing in lethal weapons and returns Gilad Schalit, neither does Israel have any obligation to supply food, water and electricity to a quasi-state that has declared war on its existence.

Other articles by Jonathan Rosenblum are available on Jewish Medial Resources

See More Discussion of Gaza Options

Technorati Tag: Israel and International Humanitarian Law and CIHL and Jonathan Rosenblum.

"THERE'S NO RETIRING FROM THIS," as Tony Soprano might have advised Tony Blair, who seems also unable to stay away from Middle East politics and has chosen to deal with a different kind of crime family. Jonathan Rosenblum describes Tony Blair as someone who is critical of the complaints on the Left while at the same time still seems to suffer from the same desire (desperation?) to establish his place in history as Clinton, Sharon, and Rabin.

Tony's New Job

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Yated Ne'eman
July 11, 2007

According to his biographer Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill viewed himself as a failure because he did not succeed in arousing his countrymen to the danger of Hitler when he might still have been stopped short of war. If so, Churchill's successor Tony Blair must have left office with a similar sense of failure over his inability over to arouse the Englishmen of his day to an appreciation of the threat of global jihad.

And that is too bad, for Blair had a clear vision and eminently sensible things to say on the subject. Last August, in the midst of the second Lebanon War, Blair gave a major address in Los Angeles to the World Affairs Council. He made it clear that the West is under attack from a "specifically Muslim version" of religious extremism. That religious extremism constitutes a world movement that "resembles in many ways early revolutionary Communism" in that it "doesn't always need structures and command centers or even explicit communication. It knows what it thinks."

With that insight, Blair could have solved the question that much exercised Britain last week: Were the terrorist car bombs planted in London and the attack on Glasgow airport homegrown terrorism or part of an international movement? Answer: Likely both. The terrorists were in the main homegrown, and may not even have received direction or training from any international terrorist group, like Al Qaeda. Yet their goals and tactics are very much those of a decentralized international jihadist movement.)

In the Los Angeles speech, Blair showed no patience for the familiar blame the West whining on the Left. He noted sarcastically that many proponents of that view are blissfully unaware that 9/11 preceded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was not a response to those wars. The existence of jihadist terror groups in virtually every major nation in the world, including those who cannot conceivably be said to be allies of the West, he argued, gives lie to the claim that the United States and its allies are to blame.

He further dismissed as "rubbish" the argument that global terrorism is the product of poverty, for its champions are hardly the avatars of economic development. Its goal in Iraq and Afghanistan is to prevent the spread of democracy and freedom, at any cost. "The purpose of the terrorism in Iraq is absolutely simple: carnage, causing sectarian hatred, leading to civil war," said Blair.

On Israel too, Blair eschewed the familiar cant. At a time when he was under tremendous pressure at home to demand an immediate halt to Israel's military actions in Lebanon, Blair acknowledged the tragedy of the deaths of Lebanese civilians. But he continued: "[J]ust for a moment, put yourself in Israel's place. It has a crisis in Gaza, sparked by the kidnap of a soldier by Hamas. Suddenly, without warning, Hizbollah, who have been continuing to operate in Southern Lebanon for two years in defiance of UN Resolution 1559, cross the UN blue line, kill eight Israeli soldiers and kidnap two more. They then fire rockets indiscriminately at the civilian population of Northern Israel. Hizbollah gets their weapons from Iran, [whose] president has called for Israel to be wiped off the map."

And he legitimated Israelis' feelings of injustice that it is "only on their shoulders that the weight of the troubles of the region should always fall" and their fears "that in our anxiety for wider reasons to secure a settlement, we will sacrifice the vital interests of Israel."

RATHER THAN EMBARK on a lucrative international speaking career, in the manner of former president Bill Clinton, or seek to turn his vast array of connections into big bucks, like former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder or Israel's own Ehud Barak, Blair has now accepted an appointment engineered by President Bush as special envoy of the Quartet to the Palestinian Authority.

If such a position can serve any purpose at all, then Israel has reason to be well-pleased with the appointment of Blair: He is a friend of Israel, possessed of a clear vision of the threat of radical Islam, and blessedly free of the tendency to view the Palestinians only as victims with no responsibility for their plight. In short, he is a far cry from the EU's Mideast envoy Javier Solana.

At the same time, Blair has given signs on more than one occasion (even in the otherwise admirable Los Angeles speech) of subscribing to the dangerous fallacy that resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the Rosetta stone that will provide the solution to all the other ills of the Middle East. That tendency can only be exacerbated by the fact that resolving that conflict is his best hope of restoring his badly tarnished image both at home and abroad.

Britain's longest-serving modern prime minister, and the one-time wunderkind of British politics, it surely rankles with Blair that he left office so deeply unpopular – albeit for all the wrong reasons. His natural human desire to repair his legacy can be dangerous in peacemaking. The desire to secure a place in history led Bill Clinton to dramatically overreach at Camp David, and also helps explain the about face of Ariel Sharon prior to the Gaza withdrawal and Yitzchak Rabin's growing identification with the Oslo process.

Fortunately, Blair was not appointed as a mediator between the Palestinians and Israel, but rather as a special envoy to help prepare the Palestinians for statehood – a tacit recognition that they are far from ready for statehood today. As a mediator, there is, in any event, little that he could achieve in the current climate, as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is about to find out, if she has not already. Israelis watched the recent goings-on in Gaza closely, and have no desire to have yet a third terrorist enclave on their borders. Even the architect of the New Middle East, Shimon Peres wrote in Yediot Acharonot last week, "Even if we were ready to pull out [of Judea and Samaria] we have no one to hand them over to at this stage, because of the Palestinian inability to establish a single army, and a single state that will assert their control over the territories."

Even some Palestinians have begun to show a bit more realism about their future. Salam Fayyad, the newly appointed prime minister (at least as far as the West Bank goes) described the recent savagery in Gaza, and the split of the Palestinian Authority into two as having "destroyed" the vision of a Palestinian state. Disgust with the current leadership runs very deep. In one recent Palestinian poll, 41% said they would like to see the Palestinian Authority dismantled, and 42% supported some kind of confederation with Jordan, a subject about which no Palestinian would have dared to speak, even a few months ago. Another poll showed that Palestinians now place attaining an independent state way down on their list of concerns – way behind ending the current anarchy and violence and restoring some minimal economic viability.

Fayyad told CNN, that he is eager to work with Israel , and that the seven years since Arafat lit the fires of the Al Aksa intifada have witnessed the deterioration of the Palestinian situation in every respect to the point of catastrophe. He vowed that "no longer will guns out of the purview of the national authority . . . be tolerated." (In response, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, which is nominally affiliated with Fatah, vowed that they would not allow themselves to be disarmed.) Fayyad even issued a directive to West Bank preachers that incitement to violence would no longer be tolerated in the mosques.

Does this glimmer of realism among the West Bank Palestinians offer Blair an opportunity to achieve something in his new role? Certainly he can repeat a message that any viable Palestinian government must exercise a monopoly over the armed forces in its territory. But he has no power to go out and take away the guns from all the various armed groups, nor even the ability to give President Mahmoud Abbas the courage to do so.

And he can emphasize the necessity of economic transparency with respect to foreign aid. Fatah is deeply despised, even on the West Bank, for its notorious corruption. Clips of Hamas fighters ransacking the Gaza mansions built by various Fatah chieftains with money that was supposed to go to the Palestinian people left an impression on the West Bank as well.

The need for transparency is a message the new prime minister Fayyad, a former World Bank official, certainly understands. Even the Fatah Old Guard knows that the days of its kleptocracy are limited. The best thing that Blair could do for the Palestinians is to make them understand that they cannot go on depending on the beneficence of the international community without taking any responsibility for their future.

Blair once described the biggest obstacle to peace not as the Palestinian desire to bring into being a Palestinian state, but the desire for the going out of being of the state of Israel. Now the Palestinians must show that they are truly committed to a better life for themselves more than they are committed to making life miserable for Israelis. That would entail, inter alia, tearing down the refugee camps, and directing international aid to building up an economic infrastructure not to buying off armed men. And it would mean a complete revamping of the state educational system and media away from incitement against Israel.

Should the new Palestinian government on the West Bank implement any changes in the directions indicated, then Blair will no doubt prove effective in obtaining new international funding. But his first task is to make the Palestinians understand that with aid goes accountability and benchmarks. For decades, Fouad Ajami observes, the Palestinians have lived on "a sense of historical entitlement [and the feeling] the world owed them a state come what may. . . . Now they know better."

Ajami's first statement is certainly true; whether the second one is also remains to be seen. A sense of entitlement dies hard. Blair's success in delivering the tough love message of Palestinian responsibility will also depend, in large part, on the willingness of the Europeans and other international donors, like UNRWA going along. (At least with respect to the entrenched UNRWA bureaucracy that's probably a non-starter.) If the international community keep pouring in money to keep the Palestinians barely afloat, regardless of what they do, as happened after the election of a Hamas government in 2006, then Blair can have no impact.

And even if the Europeans do play their role, the final decision will lie with the Palestinians themselves. The deep deformations in Palestinian society revealed by the recent bloodletting in Gaza – the result of a cult of violence unleashed by Arafat – are not of the type that can be cured overnight. Whether they can be cured at all is the question.

Read Jonathan Rosenblum's other posts at Jewish Media Resources.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Tony Blair.

THE HONDLING GENE: IS IT IN YOU? Jonathan Rosenblum may not, but he has an abiding respect for those who do--and know how to use it.

On Making Money

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Mishpacha
July 5, 2007

Most of us tend to be impressed by talents that we completely lack: the ability to hit a fastball thrown at 100 mph, dunk a basketball, solve differential equations. Me? I'm fascinated by those with the ability to make money.

I don't mean the young hotshots in bright red suspenders pulling down million dollar bonuses on Wall Street. No, the ones who really impress me are the guys in frock coats who arrived in America without a penny to their name, little or no English, few connections, and the kind of education one picks up in the death camps or Siberia, and who somehow managed to make millions selling one type of shmatte or another.

How does someone with that background end up manufacturing costume jewelry for young Puerto Ricans or Lacoste knock-off sports shirts that he would not be caught dead wearing? What does he know about what will sell in Spanish Harlem or even how costume jewelry is manufactured. And even if he does, what distributor would believe him?

One Holocaust survivor who is rumored to own a fair percentage of the oil wells dotting the Los Angeles landscape could only find a job cleaning out leaves from under houses when he arrived in America. I still cannot work out how many leaves one has to sweep out to purchase one's first oil well.

This week I was chatting with a new friend. He and his brother took a single failing bridal gown store and turned it into a chain of more than a 100. From his description of his youthful poverty, it is doubtful that his wife could have even afforded one of the stores’ gowns when they were married. In short, he knew nothing about wedding gowns when he and his brother scraped together enough to purchase the first store, and I’m far from clear he knows much more about them today. But in his early sixties he is able to spend all his time on Jewish philanthropy, kvelling about his frum children and grandchildren, and enjoying the King David Hotel when he’s in Jerusalem.

Perhaps the maxim "buy cheap sell dear" is genetically encoded in many Jews. If so, that gene continues to be passed on. My secretary has two young female relatives with thriving eBay businesses.

Of course, necessity helps as well. Many of the post-war immigrants to America had already started families in the DP camps or hoped to do so soon after their arrival in America. They had no choice but to find a way to make a living, and quick. Only in the Torah community in Israel do neither genes nor economic necessity seem to have given rise to a large entrepreneurial class.

That hondling gene has atrophied completely in the Rosenblum family. If someone gave me a million dollars to start a business, I would not have a clue what to do. My first instinct would be to purchase a CD yielding 3% per annum.

Both my grandfathers made enough money to ensure that their children and grandchildren would be able to afford fancy educations so that they could end up as professionals or salaried employees. But as a Satmar Chassid once told me, "An education is helpful for earning a living, but it's irrelevant if you want to make MONEY." He made clear that he preferred the latter.

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, none of my friends would have admitted that they planned to go into business or that they hoped to become rich. Even doctors and lawyers were vaguely disreputable. Anyone planning to go to law or medical school would invariably add that they were doing so only to save humanity – or at the least the spotted salamander – or to find a cure for cancer.

But as I've gotten older, my respect for businessmen has grown and that for professionals waned. Anyone who has ever tried to collect tzedakah from businessmen and lawyers will appreciate the difference. (Please no angry Emails from my doctor and lawyer friends. I know there are many exceptions to the rule, you chief among them.)

Businessmen are far less likely to attribute their success solely to their own abilities. Many of them have been up and down over the course of their careers, and have lost fortunes as well as made them. That makes them a lot more prone to recognize the role of siyata d'Shmaya in their success.

"Hashem has been very good to me," is a phrase that rolls trippingly off the tongues of businessmen, not of lawyers. The Vilna Gaon comments on the verse (Mishlei 17:13), "[If] one repays good with evil, evil will not depart from his house:" One who has been favored with an extra portion of chesed from Hashem (the Gaon specifically mentions great wealth) has an extra obligation to serve Hashem. Most frum businessmen intuitively understand that.

The aforementioned hondling gene appears later than that for the type of intelligence that gets one into a good medical or law school. One of the community's major philanthropists jokes that he made a fortune in real estate only because he didn't do well enough on the exam to become a New York City school teacher, like his more studious friends from yeshiva. Many successful businessmen are remembered from their yeshiva days chiefly as the one who ran the laundry-machine concession.

Because few of them grew up being praised as the next Rabbi Akiva Eiger, successful businessmen rarely view their success as something coming to them as a matter of right. Not so those who always got the best grades. The praise showered upon them in their early years leads them to forget that academic intelligence is also a gift from Hashem, not something they earned.

The late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick developed an entire theory about why intellectuals hate capitalism. He speculated that they grow used to teachers' praise in their youth, and resent a system that apportions reward according to different criteria than those for praising kids in school. "Why are my stupid clients so much richer than I?" was the most frequently discussed topic in my old law firm.

On second thought, the respect for so many of the entrepreneurs I know derives not from the fact that they can do something I can't – that would be true of most skills – but from the fact that they have used their business acumen to both make themselves better people and to help those less fortunate.

Read Jonathan Rosenblum's other articles at Jewish Media Resources.

Technorati Tag: Hondling and Making Money and Jonathan Rosenblum.

L'CHAIM--V'LO L'MAVET: Jonathan Rosenblum writes about the attitude in the frum community towards looking after one's health.

Taking Care of Our Bodies: Making Time for Our Souls

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Mishpacha
June 20, 2007

Many years ago, my rosh yeshiva remarked of avid joggers: They are running in order to live longer. But they have no idea what they are living for.

In the secular world, we see many people who act as if swallowing sufficient Omega-3, eating a high fiber diet, and consuming lots of brightly colored vegetables will help them live forever.

Devoting all one’s energy to the Sisyphusean quest for immortality is draining.

That’s why the people one meets in health food stores tend to be a grim-looking lot, wrinkled and prunish in appearance. The guy slicing pastrami in the local deli is much more likely to sport a beaming countenance.

Our world, on the other hand, too often suffers from the opposite malady: an apparent unconcern with all matters pertaining to health. Health and exercise, if they are treated at all, are invariably consigned to the women’s pages of our magazines. Wives are expected to still fit into their wedding gowns, no matter how many children they have had, even as their husbands proudly sport another inch around the waist for each child.

I once asked a member of a large charedi community, "Why is everybody here so fat?" My friend, an incisive wit, neatly captured the mindset, "The goy says its not good to be fat. What does the goy know?"

Give us an anecdote about a heavy smoker who lived to 90 or an avid jogger who dropped dead in the midst of his daily run, and we are happy: no need to worry further about adopting a healthier lifestyle or diet. And we pat ourselves on the back for not allowing ourselves to become thrall to our physical side.

The truth is, however, that that the cost of ignoring our bodies, of not paying Azazel its due, is often paid in terms of our ruchnios. "The dead cannot praise Hashem" (Tehillim 115:17) Too many of us are walking time-bombs just waiting to explode.

Last Shabbos, a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile sat down next to me at a Kiddush. I barely recognized him. He had lost forty pounds since I last saw him. I asked him what happened to him. He described how his wife had announced one day, in a tone that brooked no opposition, that they were going to the doctor.

"What should I tell the doctor?" my friend asked. "For starters, tell him that you sound like you are going to die when you sleep," his wife replied. The doctor ordered a battery of tests, which revealed that in his mid-40s he had already developed diabetes and his triglycerides were three times the danger level. "My wife saved my life," he told me.

That same Shabbos another friend related how he had asked someone near him at a shalom zachor why he was breathing so hard. The man explained that he had just climbed several flights of stairs. Still not satisfied, my friend insisted that he speak to a doctor sitting nearby. The doctor told the man to meet him in the hospital on Sunday. While there, the man had a heart attack, which, Baruch Hashem, he survived.

Judging from number of four-color glossy pamphlets still being passed out in shul, there are too many young men in our community who are not so fortunate as to collapse in a hospital.

PREMATURE DEATH IS ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. By ignoring our bodies when we are young too many of us our heading for an old age in which we are imprisoned by our own bodies.

Between 1900 and 2000, the average life expectancy in the United States increased by 30 years. Modern medicine has found many ways to cure disease and keep us alive, but the body still wears out. If we are fortunate enough to live long lives, we can count on losing ten percent of our muscle mass every decade past forty, on our hair graying, our eyes growing more far-sighted.

Much of that is inevitable. What is not inevitable is that old age should become a virtual prison, in which even the simplest daily tasks sap all one’s energy. Just getting up out of a chair requires a huge investment of time and energy for many elderly people. Think about what it means to have to plan out each move from one place to another in the room, and decide whether it’s worth the effort.

Fear is the constant companion of the elderly. Each year, 350,000 elderly people in the United States fall and break a hip. Of those one-fifth will never walk again, and two-fifths will have to move to a nursing home. The three best predictors of such a fall are poor balance, muscle weakness, and taking four or more prescription medications. (Those with all three have a 100% chance of falling within the next year.)

But medications can be simplified and even a moderate exercise and weight-lifting program can do much to improve balance and reverse muscle deterioration. We are not talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger-style pumping iron, but repetitions with small weights.

Exercise "is the closest thing we have to a fountain of youth," says Dr. S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois. As far as exercise goes, it is never too late, and never early enough to get started. Many studies show significant benefits from moderate exercise even for those who have lived sedentary lives until their mid-70s.

Experts stress that no more than 30% (and some say as little as 6%) of longevity is determined by heredity. The rest depends largely on lifestyle. And research shows that most of the healthy behaviors that help fight disease also slow down the aging process. Keep moving, shed excess weight, and eat well are the golden rules.

Even where longevity is not increased, much can be done to improve the quality of life. In one controlled study of 568 men and women over seventy identified as at high risk of becoming disabled, the group assigned trained geriatricians, as opposed to their normal physician, were 33% less likely to become disabled and 50% less likely to develop depression over the next eighteen months.

Bottom line: Exercising and proper eating is not at the expense of one’s ruchnios. Rather it provides is with the tools to enjoy productive old age, with a lot more to think about than the most recent physical breakdown.

Read more of Jonathan Rosenblum's articles at Jewish Media Resources

Technorati Tag: Health and Jonathan Rosenblum.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT SDEROT? (It's not even clear that Olmert even has learned the lesson of what not to do in the future.) Jonathan Rosenblum has thoughts.

What do do about Sderot?

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Yated Ne'eman
June 13, 2007

Two things are ever clearer about the current situation in Sderot. The first is that it is intolerable; the second, that nobody has any clear idea of what to do about it. "There are no good answers, no good options," says Gerald Steinberg, director of Bar Ilan University’s Center of Conflict Resolution.

Two weeks ago, under heavy Kassam fire from Gaza, over half of Sderot’s 24,000 citizens had fled the city. Three-quarters of the city’s children are suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress, and over a dozen Jews have been killed by Kassams. In peak season, residents find themselves scurrying for cover, after the sounding of the Red Dawn alert system, five or more times a day. In short, Sderot has become a place that no one would continue to live in, if they had the slightest alternative.

The great fear hovering over Israel’s Jews is that this border town, populated mostly by immigrants from Arab lands, who were shunted to the periphery of the country over half a century ago and newer Russian immigrants, could easily become a model for other Israeli towns and cities.

Already Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin warns that terrorists have succeeded in smuggling into Gaza across the Egyptian border missiles that can target Ashkelon, with over 100,000 citizens and strategic oil refineries, and will soon be able to reach even more heavily populated Ashdod just up the Mediterranean coast. In other words, some solution must be found for Sderot lest it become a harbinger for an even more intolerable future.

THE SUFFERING OF SDEROT did not begin with the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Kassams were already a regular fact of life for Sderot’s residents before that. But unquestionably the situation has worsened significantly as a result of the Gaza withdrawal, in particular because of massive arms smuggling from Sinai into Gaza via the Philadelphia Corridor. According to the Shin Bet, 20,000 guns, 1,000 anti-tank rockets, and an additional 100 tons of armaments have flooded into the Gaza Strip over the past year. While some of these will doubtless be employed in the internecine fighting that has turned Gaza into a war zone, most are aimed at Israel.

The Philadelphia Corridor was far from hermetically sealed even when patrolled by Israeli forces, but the stream of weapons formerly coming into Gaza has turned into a flood. When the Gaza withdrawal was first proposed, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stated that Israel would maintain control of the Philadelphia Corridor precisely to prevent the massive arms smuggling currently taking place. But the logic of withdrawal always made that unlikely, for as long as Israeli troops remained in Gaza, Israel would still be considered responsible for its residents by the international community.

The Egyptians, who are now responsible for preventing arms smuggling, have almost no incentive for doing so – certainly none that would put Egyptian troops at risk. They do not mind seeing Israel bleed by Kassams.

Prime Minister Sharon promised that after the Gaza withdrawal Israel would respond very harshly to any further rocket fire from Gaza. Similar promises were made by Prime Minister Ehud Barak after the withdrawal from Lebanon. And just as they were not acted upon in Lebanon, they were not acted upon in Gaza, and for the same reason.

In both cases, the withdrawals were designed to win international favor, and a harsh military response to Hizbullah or Palestinian attacks would have immediately cost Israel any diplomatic capital in accrued. In addition, the necessity of any major military action would have exposed the initial withdrawal as poorly conceived.

So the logic of withdrawal itself made it unlikely that Israel would ever make good on its promises to react forcefully against future attacks from the evacuated areas. But the consequence of not acting was that missile attacks on Israel – of a type that no country would tolerate – are now viewed as part of the status quo.

And that status quo is intolerable. But when Israel eventually responds to missile attacks against its cities in the same fashion that any other country in the world would, it will be blamed for breaching the status quo, precisely because of its earlier policy of restraint.

SO WHAT ARE SOME OF ISRAEL’S OPTIONS NOW? One, of course, would be to admit that the 2005 withdrawal was a huge mistake, and retake the Gaza Strip. That, however, seems to be an option no one wants. The last thing that Israel seeks is to become responsible again for 1.25 million Palestinians just as Gaza breaks down into complete anarchy and returns to the primitive state of nature. Nor does it wish to provide the one thing that might perhaps reunite the feuding Palestinian militias – an Israeli invasion.

Two weeks ago, Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin warned the cabinet that Hamas has prepared for an Israeli invasion with a vast network of booby-traps, mines, suicide bombers, and snipers. After the Winograd Commission findings, it would be impossible to deny that Diskin had a duty to present the cabinet with an assessment of the likely costs of an invasion. But the way his warnings were leaked to the media and then reported in scare headlines handed Hamas a huge propaganda victory by making it seem that Israel could not reconquer Gaza.

That is almost certainly not the case. The real question is what it would do once it did so. How could it avoid a low level war of attrition with Jewish soldiers killed every week? For that reason, others, like former chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, argue for a large-scale ground action designed to destroy the terrorist infrastructure currently leveled at Israel, along the lines of the 2002 Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank to be followed by an Israeli withdrawal.

Unquestionably Operation Defensive Shield, which began just after the Seder night suicide bombing in Netanya, did reverse the terrorist momentum in Judaea and Samaria. But that result has required a continuous military presence in Judea and Samaria, lots of checkpoints, and the building of a huge security fence. In short, for the results to be sustained the IDF must remain in large numbers, and that is what the government wishes to avoid in Gaza, at this time.

To have any lasting impact an operation against the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza would have to be coupled at least with Israel retaking control of the Philadelphia Corridor. Some have even suggested building a sea-water channel along the Philadelphia Corridor to prevent future tunneling under the border by smugglers. Such a step, however, would run the risk of a confrontation with the Egyptians, who are currently responsible for the border.

In addition, the Philadelphia Corridor is too narrow to be defended by itself, and Israeli troops would have to clear a wider swath and knock down hundreds of dwellings in Rafah to do so, with the predictable international outcry to follow.

Others urge Israel to employ a series of strong disincentives to Palestinian missile strikes against Israel. For some that means a forceful artillery or missile response at the place of any missile launch, even if that launch comes from a rooftop in a highly populated area. For others that means threats to cut off Gaza’s water and electricity, both of which are supplied by Israel.

Former head of the National Security Council, General Giora Eiland, offers as a possible option declaring Gaza an enemy state and sealing the border and ending the supply of water and electricity. He acknowledges that such a step would provoke a strong international response, but it would also force the international community to recognize that Israel cannot allow the current situation to continue and to take some responsibility for the situation.

In 2006, despite Hamas’s takeover of the Palestinian Authority, international aid to the Palestinians actually increased by 200 million dollars over the previous year. The Palestinians are by far the largest recipients of international aid in the world – $300 per person as opposed to $44 per person for the even poorer inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. They have not been forced to pay any price for continued terrorism against Israel. Eiland would like to see that change.

Either cutting off Palestinian water and electricity or heavy strikes against launch sites would unleash an international chorus accusing Israel of practicing collective punishment. And that would be correct. But it is worth noting that the entire doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, which prevented nuclear war during the Cold War, was also predicated on collective punishment. Presumably few citizens of the Soviet Union would have had much input into the Kremlin’s decision to launch a nuclear strike. But they would have been the victims of American nuclear retaliation.

The best deterrence against Syrian or Iranian missile attacks on Israeli cities is the fear of the leaders of these countries of an even more powerful Israeli response against their own cities. If those leaders came to believe that Israel would never strike their cities, but would rather strike only military targets, that would be a virtual death-knell for Israel. So at some level, Israel cannot afford to take the possibility of collective punishment completely off the table. And there is a certain logic to collective punishment in the form of cutting water and electricity to places from which terrorists strike. Such action would presumably make the missile launchers unpopular with the local population, and encourage locals to prevent their neighbors from setting up launching pads on their roofs.

In the meantime, the Israeli government has adopted a policy of targeting terrorist groups and the Hamas leadership, coupled with limited ground operations within northern Gaza. That policy has worked in the past to bring about a relative calm, at least for a period to time. But the problem is that a ceasefire only offers a temporary respite. And by providing the Palestinians an opportunity to go on arming, it may only pave the way for a more difficult day of reckoning in the future.

In the meantime, the choice for Israeli policymakers seems to be largely one between least bad alternatives.

Read other articles by Jonathan Rosenblum on Jewish Media Resources.

See More Discussion of Gaza Options

Technorati Tag: Israel and Sderot and Gaza.