So It Goes

Fighting for What's Right

I SAW THE DOCUMENTARY "REFUSENIK" ABOUT TEN DAYS AGO, and it provoked a lot of thoughts about what happens when people fight for what's right.

 The film chronicles the plight of Jews who tried to free themselves from the persecution of the Soviet Union and of the people -- mostly in the United States -- who tried to help them. It shows how what ultimately became a celebrated global movement for human rights started with only a few rather passionate and determined people inside and outside the U.S.S.R.

The movement was powered by a relatively small  (as compared to the vast numbers in the U.S.S.R. overall) group of Jews, who took enormous personal risks by daring to apply for exit visas from their country. The subsequent refusal (thus the moniker "refusenik") by the Soviet authorities ensured these applicants and their families would lose their jobs, be monitored and harassed constantly by the KGB, committed to psychiatric hospitals and/or exiled to remote, inhospitable locales such as Siberia.

Starting in the early 1960s, small groups of vocal activist students began to publicize the cause of Soviet Jews, later capturing more widespread attention first from what the film repeatedly refers to as the "establishment" of the Jewish community and then leaders and grassroots from many non-Jewish backgrounds.

With the benefit of some rather remarkable film footage from the time and of more recent interviews (with many of the most famous refuseniks such as Natan and Avital Sharansky, Vitali Rubin, Vladimir and Maria Slepak, and Ephraim Kholmyansky, as well as with figures such as Eli Wiesel, Mikhail Gorbachev, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz), we hear the captives and their supporters in the West talk about some of the brazen efforts to outwit the KGB and to inflict pain on the Soviet government. Like survivors and rescuers during the Holocaust, the refuseniks leave you wondering whether you could ever endure what they did if you had faced the same harsh choices.

For so many years, their efforts appeared rather like a flea stepping on the toe of an elephant. Little by little, as the movement for Soviet Jewry grew around the world and the heroic refuseniks themselves loomed larger as symbols of Soviet oppression, the Soviets started to relent. The elephant yielded. In the 1970s, the Soviets allowed the incremental release of a few small groups of Jews and some higher-profile refuseniks, whose celebrity embarrassed the regime. Eventually, as the Soviet system began to crumble, hundreds of thousands eventually left for refuge elsewhere.

Second to the extraordinary and inspiring heroics of the refuseniks themselves, what moved me also was the Soviet Jewry movement itself, which was committed not to let the refuseniks' struggles be forgotten. The movement drew on people far beyond the Jewish community -- civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, leading Christian clergy, sympathetic public commentators and the political leadership of many nations, especially my own. They created a juggernaut that put the refuseniks' plight high on the list of U.S. foreign policy priorities and on the agendas of summits between American and Soviet Presidents.

Learning about this (again, as I had some involvement with it in the '80s), I was struck that nearly no one, certainly no one thoughtful and influential in American political life, questioned this massive mobilization by the American Jewish community in the way many do the efforts today of pro-Israel activists.

Why is that? I know this might sound willfully ignorant to those who have criticized Israel's actions against Palestinians, but tell me, please, how Israel's struggle to defend itself from terrorism and possibly all-out destruction is any less just a cause than that of Jews trying to throw off the yoke of repression in the U.S.S.R.?

How is it that a well-organized, passionate community of pro-Israel activists is accused -- even by otherwise respected political analysts -- of subverting the U.S. foreign interests, when there was no similar opposition to the Soviet Jewry movement some 20 or 30 years ago (at least not as much as I think there was)?

Part of the answer, of course, is that the cause of Soviet Jewry served the cause of anti-Communism, which enjoyed broad-based support in the U.S. And the Rooskies were the villains and the poor suffering Jews were the victims; it was a simple frame.

To most, the Arab-Israeli conflict looks far more complicated -- and in many ways it is, not least because the Israelis are well armed, and, notwithstanding horrific acts of terror against Israelis, they don't always appear to be the victims. And to some, the very notion of Zionism -- of Jews having their own state -- is illegitimate.

What's most disturbing about all that is a willful ignorance to see that the cause of peace and prosperity for Israel -- and, yes, for non-Israelis, too -- is as just as the cause for Soviet Jewry, or for any oppressed group around the world. No people should be forced to endure a 60-year siege, to be subjected to murderous attacks on its streets and to be constantly targeted for extinction, as Mssrs. Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Meshal and others like them would have it.

Still there are those who question pro-Israel activism. They almost invariably assume that the goal of U.S. support for Israel is the result of some immoral deal that lawmakers cut for political expedience. Did it ever occur to them that political leaders believe in U.S. support for Israel because they see it as a just cause?

I'm not defining "U.S. support for Israel" as unconditional support for any Israeli policy, no matter how misguided. Israel, like any grown-up, modern state is not perfect. And, as I have argued here several times before, it is faced with two bad choices -- on the one hand, the insecurity that comes with a policy of restraint, and the opprobrium that comes with taking firm, decisive action to defend itself.

Still, tell me what is unjust about sticking by a nation that shares what we believe are enlightened values, that is an agent of intellectual, human and cultural progress in the world and that is the object of so much irrational and vitriolic hatred. Is it that some are uncomfortable with the prospect of Jewish power -- either in the form of a well-organized community of advocates or in the form of a state capable of protecting itself?

What's this really all about?

Jeff

The Moral Equation In Killing

THE WASHINGTON POST RAN A REMARKABLE AND FASCINATING ARTICLE the other day giving an inside account of the decision making that goes on within the Israeli military, intelligence and political community when it comes to targeted killings. That's Israel's practice of pinpoint killings of terrorist leaders.

It was remarkable not only for the level of detail the reporter, Laura Blumenfeld was able to gather and describe (she has, over the years, filed many great stories like this one on a pretty wide range of topics). It was notable also because it showed the exquisite dilemmas the Israelis go through before they decide to pull the trigger, as it were, to eliminate their supreme enemies.

The article illustrates vividly what I have noted on this blog several times in the past: Israel is constantly offered two equally bad choices: attacking its adversaries, which sometimes involves killing innocents and, even when it doesn’t, usually brings about the opprobrium of the international community; or backing off and exposing its citizens to harm.

According to the article, Israel arrived at this practice as a way of getting at the hardest of the most hardened leaders of the terrorists who plan deadly attacks against Israelis. They reason that it might be a deterrent to get the guys who don't really kill themselves in these operations and get their own hands dirty, to speak. And they go after them only when all other means of capturing them are exhausted.

But it's not so easy, especially when you consider that doing so could mean hurting or killing innocents. 

Blumenfeld portrays Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, one of the Israel's top military commanders as the proponent of some restraint, as the one more driven by the moral considerations than by the cold military needs. And, in the other corner, she puts Avi Dichter, who at the time of the events described in the piece was the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency.

As far as Dichter is concerned, Israel's approach to counter-terrorism is, "It's not an eye for an eye. "It's having him for lunch before he has you for dinner." He adds elsewhere: "And if the terrorists walk out [of a targeted attack] alive, and tomorrow another bus explodes, how do we explain it to our people?"

That is the toll Dichter is trying to prevent, and Yaalon is on the same team. But he is also trying to prevent a more insidious toll. "How can we look in the eyes of our pilots if they kill innocent people?"

And, just as we saw in Lebanon and as the Israelis have seen in other battles (such as the 2002 battle in Jenin), there is always a danger that targeted killings will kill innocents. And, as was the case in the operation Blumenfeld describes, that can scuttle a whole mission.

In fact, the Israelis are so concerned about the possibility of killing innocents that they consult with ethicists and have actually taken what sounds like an absurd step of engaging a mathematician to calculate how many civilian casualties in such an operation would morally acceptable. (Maybe not so absurd, a colleague of mine explained. Isn't that what the Environmental Protection Agency does when it calculates many illnesses are acceptable versus the benefits of allowing a certain agent to be released into the environment? And doesn't the FDA do the same with drugs? I dunno, it's just hard to fathom quantifying a moral idea. And, by the way, according to Blumenfeld, "the mathematician whom the military had enlisted had failed to produce a formula.")

What's more the fail safes Israel puts in place to insure it is targeting the right person are formidable, and, as the article points out, they can scrub an operation at the last minute.

I see no evidence that Israel’s adversaries have taken any steps to fight in anything in the neighborhood of a just manner. Indeed, instead of trying to avoid innocents, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have deliberately targeted them.

This is not to say that killing is ever a purely morally just practice, even if all the ethicists in the world can argue that there are times it is. I'm glad it is not my job to carry out this practice of targeted killing, and it leaves all of us, even those of us who root on a government that practices it, a little sullied.

Still, I don’t see that Israel has much better options considering what it is up against, and I’m glad to see (and not surprised) that it doesn’t take its responsibility to wage war lightly.

Jeff

A Letter to an American Christian Leader on the Current Arab-Israeli Conflict: Part II

BECAUSE I WROTE EARLIER ABOUT THE “Pastoral Letter to Palestinian Friends and Partners,” by Rev. John H. Thomas, General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ (USA), I thought it would be worth sharing also a Religion News Service column on the same subject by Rabbi A. James Rudin.

Copyright restrictions don't allow me to share the entire column here, but Rabbi Rudin has some tough criticisms and concludes that the Pastoral letter "removes Thomas from playing any constructive role in achieving Middle East peace."

Jeff

"The status quo is untenable."

JOHN WATERBURY, the president of American University of Beirut, argues on today's Washington Post Op-Ed page that Israel's "distinct preference for the status quo, founded on conventional military superiority over all its neighbors and some strategic depth through its retaining the occupied territories" is the essential source of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It all began, he says, "at the end of formal combat in 1967, [when] Moshe Dayan declared 'mission accomplished.'"

By Waterbury's lights, I guess, the "mission" was the subjugation and colonization of poor Arab peoples by Israel.

Never mind that on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War the armies of those Arab peoples had massed on Israel's borders and were calling for the extinction of the Jewish state.

Never mind that the doctrine of pushing the Jews into the sea remains clear and present even today among Islamic militant groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and many others, not to mention wonderful guys like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, who has been unambiguous about this.

Never mind that, as far as Israel is concerned, the "mission" has never been about asserting its hegemony across the Middle East but about survival, which is what Moshe Dayan and his Army accomplished in 1967. It has always been about being left alone to thrive on its own small patch of earth. Good relations between Arabs and Jews would be nice, but even the most idealistic doves in Israel would settle for disengagement and peace.

I find it ironic that Waterbury would invoke the term "status quo" because for years I have heard Israelis from the left to the right of the spectrum repeat this mantra: "The status quo is untenable." That's to say, 'Israel's occupation of Gaza and all of the West Bank will undermine Israel's own future well being.' Now, it's fair to say that both the left and the right in Israel (and their supporters in the diaspora) had very different views about how to break away from the status quo, and I personally believe that the right wing was at times disingenuous about their willingness to do so.

I also find it startling that someone so close to the scene as Waterbury can conclude the conflict is all the fault of the Israelis. Even the unilateral withdrawal by Israel from Gaza and Southern Lebanon is, to Waterbury, a suspicious act!

It is yet more startling that Waterbury would tacitly say, by omission, that voraciously ambitious and morally corrupt terror groups, which deliberately put at risk the very people they claim to be fighting for, bear no responsibility at all. Not even the Saudis would agree with him.

What is Waterbury thinking?

Jeff

How Not to Wage a War?

ISRAELI MILITARY HISTORIAN Michael Oren, writing in The New Republic, declared today that "for three weeks now, Israel has presented a textbook case of how not to wage a war." Oren argues that the aerial war has left "Hezbollah largely intact militarily and with its political prestige greatly enhanced. Syrian and Iranian influence will be immeasurably strengthened. A disaster of regional and perhaps global dimensions appears imminent -- unless Israel seizes its last opportunity to regain the initiative and deliver a decisive blow to Islamic extremism."

That opportunity, Oren says, "is a massive ground campaign to gain control of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. By clearing the terrorists from the area adjacent to its northern border and by eliminating Hezbollah's most strategic strongholds, Israel will have won a concrete achievement. And though long-range rockets will continue to be launched at Israel from central Lebanon."

Just such a ground campaign appears to be underway right now. But while Oren may be right that the aerial bombardment has not eliminated Hezbollah and may have emboldened it, was there any other way to go? Could they have dispensed with the aerial campaign, which might have exposed more of the ground troops -- not to mention civilians in Northern Israel -- to even more harm? Again, was Israel faced with two equally bad choices as they were in Jenin in 2002?

To support Oren's case, just yesterday I heard Fawaz Gerges, a Sarah Lawrence College and native of Lebanon who had been there on vacation with his family when the bombing began, say, as he does from quote in the New York Sun:

"Hezbollah has become now a symbol of resistance and defiance, not just for Lebanese, but I think for many Arabs and Muslims. And the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, I think has become one of the most undisputed Arab heroes for Arabs and Muslims.
  

"Mr. Gerges added,"Just this week… a very prestigious Beirut research Institute, along with the Lebanese-American University, did a survey of thousands of Lebanese.And the findings, they show almost 87% of all Lebanese, Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians support Hezbollah.… This tells you that there has been a swell of support for Hezbollah inside Lebanon.… The longer the war continues, the stronger Hezbollah would become, and, in fact, the weaker the democratically elected Lebanese government would be."

Gerges, who had no kind words to say about Hezbollah and called Hezbollah's kidnapping of the Israeli soliders an monumental mistake, said that prior to the conflict there was a strong and growing antipathy for Hezbollah in Lebanon and maybe even a lack of antipathy (if not a fondness for) Israel there. That is a major casualty of this war.

No doubt that much of what Israel has done over the last three weeks has contributed to this overnight change and that it could take longer to repair this than it will take to rebuild the physical infrastructure of the country. But, not to play the finger pointing game, but how can we not say that siting missile batteries in residential areas is not a trap to make Israel look bad and that the bait is the people of Lebanon?

But, again, the Catch-22 for Israel: should it have just not retaliated? Indeed, I have to believe that one of the reasons Israel absorbed rocket attacks from southern Lebanon over the last several years is that Israel saw that the Lebanese were rallying away from Hezbollah and wanted to give that movement time to gel. But this latest step was too much.

And as for proportion, I, too, have struggled with this question, and I think reasonable minds can disagree. But would a measured tit for tat have done the job? Would Israel have been respected by its enemies and liked by its allies? Hard to believe, but we don't know, and this war isn't over yet.

Jeff

Playing Games with Body Counts

IT NOW TURNS OUT THAT THE BODY COUNT at the collapsed building in Qana in Lebanon is 28, not twice that number, as was originally reported on Sunday.

That is, of course, no comfort at all to those families who suffered losses there. It certainly doesn't make me feel good, and I want to be careful not to appear to be playing games about proportionalism when every life is sacred and the conditions for the people of Southern Lebanon must surely be miserable. 

But who's playing the games?

We saw a similar phenomenon when in 2002 the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) invaded the Jenin Jenin Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank to root out the reputed masterminds of suicide bombing attacks on Israelis. The initial reports were that "hundreds" of innocent residents of the camp had been killed in the fighting, and people were calling for hauling Israel into the international war crimes tribunal. But when the dust cleared, a U.N. investigative team counted 52 dead Palestinians, still a lot of people in what was described as a hideous scene. But it was not hundreds.

The problem then was the same as it is today: how to extricate these bad boys from a densely populated area without hurting innocents they were using as shields? Three choices: 1) don't go in, which will ensure that the suicide bombings continue; 2) level the town with bombs, as Hafez al-Assad did in the Syrian town of Hama when it didn't like the political movement arising there. Or 3) Conduct a ground campaign, eliminating the enemy block by block, which will subject IDF soldiers to a lot of peril.

They went with Option Three, and, indeed, 23 IDF soldiers died, a huge toll for Israel, and many others were wounded. My cousin, who lives in Israel, knew a kid who fought in Jenin and was wounded (not seriously). During the whole few days the battle raged, the soliders on the ground who were were calling to the guys outside, called, "Bring in the daisy cutters," 15,000-pound bombs that obliterate everything in sight, as President Assad would have done. Even as IDF soldiers died, the superiors would not pull exercise that option. They knew that the retribution in the world community would be too great.

There is also some chatter, coming only from the Israelis, of course, that Israeli bombs may not have been responsible for the fateful strike that collapsed the building on the 28 people (many of them children) in Qana. The building collapsed, Israel says, at least seven or eight hours after the air strikes. The implication is that the Hezbollah folks must have bombed the building themselves to make it look like the Israelis did it.

Whoa. These Hezbollah guys are cold blooded, but that's ice cold. I'd like to believe it's not true, but buildings don't just fall on their own, though it's certainly possible that the air strikes could have seriously destabilized them.

The truth is we don't yet know the truth about this. But we do know that Hezbollah and has made a perverse practice of locating its missile batteries in populated areas for the purpose of either keeping Israeli bombers away or embarrassing Israel when it goes ahead and bombs anyway. The Israelis have clear video evidence that Hezbollah launched rockets from Qana, and the IDF simply could not let this stand.

In that sense, Hezbollah is reckless and uncaring of the people it purports to protect, and it bears responsibility in the deaths of these poor people (many of them children) in Qana. It was the same bad scenario as in Jenin and the many other hornets' nests Israel has had to stick its hands into.

Jeff

Update on August 2: So as not to be playing games with body counts myself, I should say that Human Rights Watch has announced that at least 13 people from the wreckage in Qana are not accounted for. That could mean many of those missing died, so the total number of dead could be higher. In any case, it's too high now.

A Letter to an American Christian Leader on the Current Arab-Israeli Conflict

RECENTLY, REV. JOHN H. THOMAS, the General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ (USA), produced a  “Pastoral Letter to Palestinian Friends and Partners,” which outlines his views on the current chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. I offer here a letter I have sent to him in response.

July 30, 2006
Dear Rev. Thomas,
I write to you with profound concern about your recent “Pastoral Letter to Palestinian Friends and Partners.” I know your aim, as is mine and many others around the world, is to bring about peace and justice in the Middle East and elsewhere. But I would respectfully submit that your interpretation of events in this letter may do more to frustrate progress toward that goal than to help it along.

A letter like this is no idle matter, as you are the leader of an important faith community in the United States, and with that role comes a high moral authority and a significant forum. For that reason and because you speak candidly and forthrightly, I hope you will not mind some candid and forthright feedback reflecting how your words ring in the ears of at least one American Jew – and, I think, you will find, a great many others. Just as we in the American Jewish community and our brethren in Israel are constantly urged to be mindful of how our views and actions sound to other communities, please allow me to say that you trouble me greatly in this letter when you:

•    single out “lobbying by Jewish groups” of “many in our own churches” as if that is something sinister or unjust, because it renders some of your ecumenical partners to speak “what may seem to you to be an uncertain voice.” According to your letter, this very letter that you’re reading now would be suspect, rather than something that people do in an open society: carry on civil dialogue, in which the parties are free to agree or disagree. Are you saying that there is something improper when Jews “lobby” the Christian community (and others), but that what everyone else argues is perfectly fine? Is there a double standard for honest, open public discourse?

•    characterize Israel’s actions toward the Palestinians as “systematic oppression,” which carries with it undertones of “apartheid,” “fascism,” and even “Nazism,” terms that, as you surely know, are often applied to Israel by many of its fiercest enemies. Whether or not you mean to associate yourself with the use of those ugly terms with respect to Israel, you must surely be aware that when a major American religious leader uses a phrase like “systematic oppression,” it gives others what they think is license to use the more vile terminology I mentioned above.

•    fail to acknowledge the extraordinary and imminent threat Israelis face with the barrage of missile attacks over the last two-and-a-half weeks and how the build up of Hezbollah and Hamas military capability represents an existential threat to the State of Israel. You do cite “Hizb Allah’s attack on military personnel near Lebanon,” and say that “we pray for the Israeli soldiers’ release and safe return to family,” but you make absolutely no mention of the fact that thousands of rockets have rained down on Northern Israel in recent weeks, killing and wounding many civilians – human lives, which I hope have room in your prayers alongside the many other victims of this and other conflicts around the world. Similarly, you say nothing that about how Hamas has fired Katyushas on Israeli towns almost constantly since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last year.

•    offer any criticism of Hezbollah and Hamas, two groups that have taken over the Palestinian and Lebanese populations by force and represent a source of destruction and death that I’m sure must offend your spiritual and moral sensibilities.

If I have misinterpreted you, Rev. Thomas, or taken your words out of context, please tell me. But I have read your letter carefully and repeatedly, and I find it hard to come to any other conclusions than these.

Before I conclude, please indulge me a few thoughts.

First, throughout its history, Israel has been forced to choose between two options, both of them bad.

The first bad option is, to put it simply, turn the other cheek when its people or its existence as a state is threatened. With every conflict in which it is engaged, there’s significant pressure from many in the international community (and even within Israel and the world Jewish community) for Israel to back off, to restrain itself. But the cost of restraint could very well be exacted in the killing or maiming of Israeli lives – and I’m not talking just about soldiers, as you do in your letter, but also about, say, civilians sitting on buses targeted by suicide bombers in Israeli cities or in their own private homes in the North of Israel targeted by Hezbollah missiles.

That, Rev. Thomas, is why the barrier, the wall, the fence – whatever you want to call it – was erected between Israel and the West Bank. It is there not to oppress Palestinians as you say. Indeed, the barrier has dramatically reduced the number of suicide bombings. That, Rev. Thomas, is why Israel is retaliating ferociously against the Hezbollah missile attacks from Lebanon and Hamas attacks from Gaza.

That is the second bad option, firing back, imposing the terrible privations on the Palestinian people that you have decried and that I assure you no one, most especially the Israelis, likes or cheers for from the rooftops. Israel would gladly stop those actions in a minute if she could trust that the extremists among the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims would not carry out their unambiguous vows to wipe Israel off the map. But, surely you must agree, Palestinian extremists have given Israelis no reason to believe that they want anything but the destruction of the Jewish state.

I agree with you 200 percent that is heart-shattering that innocent Lebanese civilian lives are being lost in these retaliations. The images on our TV screens of these victims sadden me greatly, and you can bet that the vast majority of Israelis feel the same. Most, I’m sure, likely subscribe to the famous quote by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who said in 1969: "When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons."

But what is Israel to do when Hezbollah is putting its missile batteries in residential neighborhoods in Lebanon? Please, put yourself in Israel’s shoes. Should it just continue to allow the attacks to shatter Israeli lives? In Friday’s New York Times (July 28), an article reported from Tyre, Lebanon, noted that “for some of the Christians who had made it out of this convoy, it was not just the privations they wanted to talk about but their ordeal at the hands of Hezbollah…. ‘Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,’ said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. ‘They are shooting from between our houses. Please,’ he added, ‘write that in your newspaper.'”

If you were presented with these two bad options, and these are truly the only two options, what would you do? Would you leave your own people exposed to violent threats, in violation of what any sovereign nation is sworn to do? Or would you fight back, knowing that any blow you launch will be criticized almost immediately by the world community?

Finally, there is another, often-ignored way to look at what’s going on in the Middle East, and it comes from the celebrated Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz.  A few days after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, Oz told the Washington Post that “the real battle in the Middle East [is] no longer between Arabs and Jews but between fanatics of both faiths and the rest of the people in the Middle East who want to find some reasonable compromise."

With that in mind, I will “lobby” you not by “demonizing the Palestinian community in general,” as you say in your letter, because I feel that most Palestinians have long been poor pawns in a bigger game and deserve something much better than they have been dealt over the last half century. The demons are the fanatics, the extremists who have held the average Palestinian hostage with thuggery, violence and nihilism and who have by extension held many others hostage – not just the Israelis, but also the Europeans, the Muslims and Arabs around the world (the vast majority of whom I believe are reasonable and want nothing of this murder and mayhem) and Americans.

Many observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict have, either deliberately or unwittingly, given support to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or governments like Syria’s or Iran’s, with language that makes Israel the great bogeyman (the purveyor of  “systematic oppression”), with words that paint its supporters, particularly in the United States, as political manipulators and with silence when morally bankrupt regimes and terrorist groups carry out unconscionable actions that should offend anyone who claims to care about peace and justice. Whenever this happens they gain ever more legitimacy, operating falsely under the mantle of “freedom fighter” or “humanitarian,” and the struggle to defeat them slips further away.

Each of us needs to be clear about this and ask ourselves, to borrow the title of the old labor movement song, which side are we on? I think the lines are pretty clear and that the fight is against the forces of chaos and destruction, which groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas embody. Israel is fighting virtually alone against them and on everyone else’s behalf. It is a fight that neither Israel, nor the rest of the civilized world can afford to lose.

So I ask: Which side of this struggle are you on, Rev. Thomas?

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Weintraub

Playing Chess with People Who Throw Knives

IN HIS COLUMN IN THE WASHINGTON POST THIS MORNING, David Ignatius outlines the terms of a what could be a negotiated settlement to stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

"Negotiated settlements are always messy," Ignatius writes, "but this package has one great advantage: It would provide a framework for the chronically weak Lebanese state, backed by an international force, to begin to assert control over all its territory... The challenge in Lebanon is identical to the one in Iraq: how to help weak Arab democracies control sectarian militias and build sovereignty and security."

What makes Ignatius one of my favorite foreign policy columnists is not just his excellent, clear-eyed analysis, but also his great reporting. This is a guy who does his research and cultivates great sources. His sources tell him that the negotiated settlement will look something like this:

"...Hezbollah would agree to withdraw its armed fighters from south Lebanon and accept an international force there that would accompany the Lebanese army. Israel, for its part, would agree to halt its attacks and lift its air and sea blockade. The United States would call for negotiations over the return of a disputed territory known as Shebaa Farms, claimed by Lebanon even though the United Nations ruled in 2000 that it was Syrian.

"Within 24 hours after a cease-fire, there would be an exchange of prisoners as part of this package: Hezbollah would give up the two Israeli soldiers it captured in the July 12 border raid that started the crisis; Israel would release Lebanese prisoners it holds. The package also includes some minor provisions, including an Israeli agreement to provide maps of land mines placed just north of the Lebanon-Israel border."

Ignatius seems to have some hope that this formula can succeed, though even he too much a realist  to assume it will take care of all the problems of that conflict.

I hope he's right. But with all due respect to Ignatius, I think this plan has one major flaw. Hezbollah has no track record of going along with quaint institutions such as internationally agreed-upon peace agreements. This whole mess started because Hezbollah continued to ignore the provisions of U.N. Resolution 1559. Does anyone honestly have any confidence that Hezbollah will play along this time? The trouble with terrorist groups is that they don't play by the same rules that most sovereign nations do (and even many of them don't do that all the time), and that's why Israel has no choice but to destroy it militarily.

If Israel goes along with this deal, as it has with others in the past, will it find itself once again paying dearly for its own willingness to play a civil game of chess with an adversary that only wants to throw knives?

Jeff

Walking a Very Narrow Bridge

A NUMBER OF PEOPLE CAME TO SHABBAT SERVICES yesterday morning at my synagogue specifically to draw some collective comfort for the confusion and concern they were feeling about the newest battles this week in Israel’s longstanding conflict with the Arab world.

Before the service began, people were saying (and I paraphrase), ‘I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about what’s going on.’ ‘I’m very upset by it, and not sure what to do about that feeling.’ ‘I’ve been waiting for days for the chance to be with fellow Jews to sort this out.’

I was co-leading the service with another lay member (the clergy were on a well-deserved break), and we had decided ahead of time that we would recite (as we do every Shabbat, even at less turbulent times, which seem so rare) the prayer for the State of Israel. In addition, we would sing “Lo Yisa Goy,” Isaiah’s famous exhortation that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation or practice war anymore,” and “Gesher Tsar Meod,” an evocative song based on the words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav that tells us that “the entire world is a narrow bridge. The main thing is not to fear.” 

I tend to favor “Gesher Tsar Meod” as the proper anthem of this particular moment. Israel -– and, I would argue, the entire peace-and-freedom-loving part of the world -– is walking a narrow and precarious bridge, tiptoeing carefully between two bad and dangerous choices.

On the one side, there is the option of restraint, of “not lifting up sword,” as Isaiah might say, which could expose its people and, indeed, its very existence as a state, to maiming and killing.

On the other side is the knowledge that any military action it launches – certainly anything of the scale that it has deployed in Gaza and Lebanon in recent weeks and days – will subject Israel to criticism, to smears that it is a genocidal oppressor. And it delays the possibility by yet another generation that its enemies will finally realize that the Israelis just want to live in peace. Let me quote again, as I did earlier in this blog, the famous utterance by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who said in 1969: "When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons."

As Rabbi Nachman suggests, given such options, the only thing left for Israel -- and, again, the rest of the world -– is not to fear. That’s the hard part. If the Jews who gathered in Bethesda, Maryland, yesterday morning were feeling fear –- not for themselves, but for relatives and for fate of a land that they love and pray for – imagine how the Israelis themselves feel about it. From what little I can tell from blogs and newspaper reports from Israel, there is fear, yes, but Israelis have lived with fear for a very long time. This time, though, I detect a new (and, for Israel, unusual) consensus.

First, there seems to be a sense that this is The Big One – or the precursor to The Big One – that Israeli analysts have been predicting: the showdown of a generation between Israel and its committed enemies. One of the better developments from this current episode is that there seems to be a growing recognition I have not seen much evidence of before, at least in the U.S. press, that this is not a parochial cross-border spat, but a regional confrontation aching to become a conflagration.

Unfortunately, the poor victims of the shelling and shooting in Israeli and Lebanese towns are innocent bystanders to this battle royale, and, of course, many who can’t (or don’t care to) see past the horrible violence perpetrated by both sides will tend to blame the one who appears (and I say appears) to be more powerful here: Israel.

Second, though I’m reading tea leaves here from a long distance, there seems to be a rare consensus emerging in Israel about the Israeli government’s response to Hamas and Hezbolleh. There’s a strong sense among Israelis and its supporters around the world that they cannot afford to lose this one.

As Shmuel Rosner, the chief U.S. correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote two days ago while he was back in Israel: "It's very  hard to define the exact moment in which a nuisance turns into something you just can't live with anymore. It's not just the kidnapped soldiers on the border -- that has happened before. Just months after the withdrawal, in October 2000, three IDF soldiers were abducted from the Har Dov area. Ehud Barak, prime minister at the time, decided to let it pass - and his approach was repeated many times by his successor, Ariel Sharon, who carried many scars from his previous involvement with Lebanon and preferred not to open a ‘second front’ in addition to the one in the Palestinian territories. But where Barak and Sharon chose restraint over action, the current prime minister chose to go the other way and for many good reasons." 

"You can hear them on every street corner, in every cafe, and in almost every living room: people of the right and the left, young and old, from north and south -- frustrated, toughened, disillusioned."

"Frustration is the most visible motive for the current Israeli mood…. But this cry for the military to act -- to react -- is now more vocal and more desperate than it was 15 years ago. After all, it was a military failure that led to the abduction and escalation in Gaza, and yet another failure on the Lebanese border that led to the kidnapping of another two soldiers and the further deterioration on the northern front.

“In this atmosphere, no military officer and no civilian decision-maker can even think about restraint,” Rosner adds. “Reaching at least one of the two goals they set for this current operation in Lebanon -- bringing the soldiers back home and "changing to rules of the game," meaning no more Hezbollah militias on the Israeli border -- will decide not only the future of the northern front but also the political future of Israel's leaders.”

In another blog entry from a couple of days ago, Rosner said that during this visit in Israel he was taken aback when some hardcore Israeli peacenik friends uniformly endorsed a policy of striking back fiercely to Hamas’s and Hezbolleh’s recent attacks on Israel. Even these people, who typically would be on the barricades protesting such Israeli government actions, he said, wanted to send a message of “don’t mess with Israel," but the second word they really used begins, at least in English, with the letter “f.”

This comes not with the kind of cowboy swagger and faux patriotism we see from many of the more macho leaders and their followers in the U.S. To hear Israelis say it is to hear a doctor say with resignation, "We have no other choice but to amputate."

That, of course, doesn’t mean there isn’t some second guessing in Israel and elsewhere in the Jewish world. It is, after all, a narrow bridge they’re traversing, and Jews can’t let a consensus just sit there. I found it amusing that next to Rosner’s column about this newly formed consensus, the Haaretz Web page featured one of those quicky surveys that Web sites like to offer in the interest of interactivity: “Israel’s response in the north is (vote for one): Weak and insufficent; Reasonable and balanced; Unjustified and irrational.”

You’ve got to wonder: Are the Palestinians offering similar polls on their Web sites? Or are they, like many Syrians profiled in this morning’s New York Times, giddy about the hits Israel has taken? 

At my synagogue, which is made up mostly of members whose views tend to range from left-of-center to even further left, there has been some of that second guessing of Israel's response. But now it is mixed with the frustration that there is no peace movement on the Arab side of the conflict willing to join Israel in turning swords into plowshares. Even after we recited the prayer for Israel and sang “Lo Yisa Goy” and “Gesher Tsar Meod,” people wanted still more. (Our members don’t have much use for quaint institutions like The Suggestion Box; rather, they just spout out what’s on their minds –- mostly on our e-mail listserv and sometimes right there in services.)

Someone started singing an Israeli song of peace (I don’t remember the name) that symbolically includes  Hebrew and Arabic lyrics. Another congregant stood up after that and, very respectfully, emotionally and with real regret and distress, said she could not sing this song, not when there are no similar songs being sung in mosques around the world and when the wrath of the Muslim and Arab world focuses on the eventual destruction of Israel, if not the entire Jewish people.

Sensing that a debate about Middle East policy could overtake Shabbat services and that we may never get out of there (though we were, for perhaps the only time in 4,000 years of Jewish history, running ahead of schedule), my co-leader and I asked the group to stand, and we led them in the singing of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. Everyone sang. In unison. With feeling.

One or maybe both of our synagogue co-presidents quickly made an executive decision: we would set aside some tables during the oneg lunch after services for people to talk about Israel. I wasn’t there but heard that 48 people showed up, which is a lot when you consider that there were maybe 80 people at the service, a small crowd of people for us on Saturday morning, but typical for summer. 

That was the right way to handle it. First of all, people -– Jews especially –- cannot debate such serious, emotional issues without a little food in their stomachs. And they need the sustenance of a full portion of prayer before they can contemplate the fate of the world.

Jeff