Rejewvenate!

Since the ill-fated Camp David negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yassir Arafat collapsed into an orgy of blood and violence we now call the Second Intifada, many on the Israeli side have abandoned the principle of land for peace. This principle, which became official US policy after Russia hastily agreed to a UN-brokered ceasefire to the June War of 1967 that did not require a withdrawal to pre-war lines, remains the official policy of Israel, the US, the Quartet, the UN, the Arab League, the PA, Fatah; pretty much everyone except Hamas. So why have forty years gone by with no resolution to this conflict?

Along comes Bueno de Mesquita (no, it’s not a name for a delicious new Tex-Mex barbecue sauce, it’s a real person, and he’s a lot smarter than either of us) with an answer for not only that question, but also for the question of how to resolve the conflict.

“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

(Good Magazine via Marginal Revolution)

Not bad, huh?

Yes, the newest Persian threat to all of Judaism came to New York and spoke at Columbia University. My rabbi actually spoke about it right before Mussaf on Yom Kippur, and urged the congregation to attend the rally at the UN.

I’m not a member of the Achmadinejad fan club, of course. I think that his statements about Holocaust denial are unacceptable, but they are far less extreme and offensive, in many ways, than the opinion, commonly held throughout the Muslim world, that 9/11 was a Zionist plot. After all, 9/11 happened only six years ago, and was perhaps the most-covered event in human history to date.

I’m not an expert on Iran, but it strikes me as obvious that Iran has not a single thing to gain from accepting the Holocaust narrative as it is told in the West. Moreover, whatever Antisemitism you may wish to impute to Iran, there is no question or doubt that it, almost alone among its neighbors, is accepting of the Jewish faithful within its borders. There aren’t any Jews in Saudi Arabia. Though some have cast Achmadinejad as Hitler II, or perhaps Haman II, Jews have lived peaceably in Iran for generations.

Not only does Iran have little to gain from accepting the Holocaust, and implicitly then, the modern basis for the State of Israel, Iran has no incentive for getting along with the US. Unlike Egypt or Jordan, Iran doesn’t need money. With Iraq gone, Iran has no significant conventional military threat facing it. With its long-range missiles, Iran has a fair deterrent power and relatively long arm, and while I do not have confirmation that Iran possesses chemical weapons, I find it hard to believe that it could not get its hands on them.

What can the US offer Iran other than cultural hegemony? Iran doesn’t want our Wal-Marts and our McDonalds, our Vogue magazine and our MTV. And they want recognition as one of the great empires and cultures of history. And of course, with nuclear-armed neighbors all around them, including Pakistan, India, Russia, and, of course, Israel, Iran’s wondering on what grounds it is to be fairly restrained from acquiring those weapons.

As many of us know, Achmadinejad is himself a figurehead, who stands in for the Ayatollah, who is the real power in Iran. And unlike Achashverosh or old, or Hitler, the Ayatollah is not motivated by an obsessive hatred of Jews. I think that we need to acknowledge that the Ayatollah has a love for Islam and for Persian identity. We need not paint Iran and its leaders in black and white. Iran is powerful, and potentially dangerous, but not necessarily so. Neither the US, nor Israel, nor the Jewish community, should paint themselves into an untenable corner. Iran is certainly funding terrorists and engaging in a sort of Cold-War conflict with the US and Israel, but let’s not forget that the threats Iran faces, whether from the US troops across its border, or the Israeli planes and missiles parked not very far away, are much greater than those it presents.

The federal government is willing to give it a go.

The New York Times reports that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been purging prison libraries of religious books. Why would the government seek to restrict prisoners’ access to religious books? Apparently, the Justice Department (yes, the same Justice Department headed up first by John Ashcroft and then by since-disgraced Alberto Gonzalez) decided in 2004 that this was a good way to prevent prisoners from becoming terrorists.

The plan, in brief, works like this. First, you select a secret, undisclosed panel of religious experts. Next, you divide the vast religious spectrum into twenty religions or religious categories, and you then dictate that for each category, only 150 books and 150 multimedia resources can be made available. The shadowy panelists make those determinations, with no process for review or appeal of their decisions. Give the whole thing a chilling name like the “Standardized Chapel Library Project”, and walk off saying that you seek to limit prisoners from getting at material that could “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence, or radicalize.”

Needless to say, the government is being sued over this, though experts say that the case is not as clear-cut as outraged progressive liberals like myself may perceive it to be.

Notably, the panel of experts may not be fully representative of the various religions. Of the 120 Jewish books, fully 80 are published by the same Orthodox publisher (the Times doesn’t report which publisher, but I’m sure we can all guess…) I wonder if the Judaism ‘expert’ was a Aish guy.

To me though, the most offensive thing about this is the assumption that lies at the core of the plan: that exposure to religious material breeds terrorism. It’s like the recent drivel by CNN’s resident Antisemite, Christiane Amanpour - a series called God’s Warriors, which profiled terrorists by religious affiliation, including an episode each on Jews, Christians and Muslims. There’s no evidence for the claim, as best as I can tell, that religion drives people to terrorism, any more than there is evidence for the claim that atheism is linked to depression and suicide. But saying something closer to the truth, namely, that Muslim teachers, writings, and role models abound for the would-be terrorist (which is not true of Judaism or Christianity on any similar scale), is a little too judgy for our society. Instead, we have to cloak our desire to limit prisoners’ exposure to a corrosive, ahteful, and dangerous ideology in a more general ban on religious ideas - as though the religion is the common denominator.

Shouldn’t we just limit access to all inciting material in prisons? What precisely is the added benefit of grouping these materials based on a religious dimension?

I’ve always been a fan of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of Shas, and a major halachic figure in the Sephardic community, where he is known as Chacham Ovadiah, or more simply, Maran. Aside from the sunglasses and terrific outfits, Rabbi Yosef has been a modernizing force in the Sepherdic world, bringing them singlehandedly forward into the 17th century, or thereabouts.Plus, he’s always good for a laugh, when he says outrageous things that leave us all shaking our heads. Unfortunately, he sometimes goes a bit too far, like in his sermon on the 2nd anniversary of the 2nd Lebanon War. In it, he commented that it was no surprise that soldiers were killed in the war, as they did not observe Shabbat, or the Torah, or pray every day or put on tefillin.

Rabbi Yosef, Ynetnews

Recently, we’ve all been talking about the idea of mishum eivha - the notion that we do certain things that are not entirely required by law so as to avoid the hatred of non-Jews. How much more so then are we to be careful to avoid inspiring hatred among other Jews, whom we are commanded to love as ourselves! Though R. Ovdiah clearly was not saying that observance guarantees survival in war, as he is certainly well-aware of observant soldiers who have died, his statement is sure to result in another wave of hatred for the religious and scorn for the Torah. A man of R. Yosef’s stature in Torah needs to be more careful of the consequences of his words.

I’ve never posted a video before, but here goes nothing! It’s about Islam and liberal democracy. Edit: I can’t seem to embed it… stupid wordpress. Here’s the URL

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=418_1176494781

His arguments are not new, but he sure does deliver. His name is Pat Condell, by the way, and here’s the tagline from his website:

Hi, I’m Pat Condell.

I don’t respect your beliefs

and I don’t care if you’re offended.

Cheers.

Recently, Wikipedia’s been getting some decent press, including an article in the New York Times magazine. I’ve never been much into Wikipedia. Like everyone else, I’ll take a look at it for an overview of a topic or to nail down a specific fact, but on religious or controversial topics, Wikipedia is a hopeless morass of bias. I guess it’s no surprise - who would willingly spend time, uncompensated, to produce and edit these kinds of articles. You’d have to have a strong ideological motivation on a given topic to do this kind of work for free.

It came to me though that perhaps Wikipedia does have a better use. I’ve been reading up on Iran recently, trying to understand a nation whose relevance to American and Israeli politics cannot be understated. Getting a Western perspective is easy enough, but to see the country through the eyes of its loyalists, I turned to Wikipedia.

As I read, my assumptions about what the Wikipedia article would look like were largely confirmed. The tone of the article conveys a great sense of pride in Iranian history and culture, even as it whitewashes or even ignores ignominious events. For example, though much is made of Iranian pride in Islam, the actual Islamic conquest of Iran, a 14-year period whose consequences are still felt today, is disposed of in two sentences.

As an American Jew born in Israel, I realized that I was bringing my own bias to the project, and I wondered if I was merely seeing my own biases reflected back, but then I realized a startling omission. The Wikipedia article about Iran has no mention of Hezbollah! The word appears only once, at the very of a very long article, linking to the main Wikipedia article about Hezbollah. See for yourself:

Iran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What’s the lesson? Clearly, Wikipedia remains a poor source for unbiased information, but I did find it to be a great window into how Iranian sympathizers see the country. I should probably read the article about Israel next.

I remember a many years back, real-estate brokers tried to sell people on moving to the fictitious neighborhood of West Lawrence. The neighborhood, more commonly known as Far Rockaway, sits just west of the Five Towns village of Lawrence, and has many Orthodox residents and synagogues, and is accessible to the Five Towns shopping districts. It is also a far more affordable neighborhood, located on the Queens side of the Queens/Nassau border. As teenagers, my friends and I would refer unkindly to the area as Black Lawrence, a play on the name of the ultra-wealthy Back Lawrence section of Lawrence, as well as a not-so-sensitive reference to both the Yeshivish Jewish enclave, and the black and Hispanic residents who predominated.

For many, the decision to move to Far Rockaway was a financial one. Though the Five Towns offered some significant advantages over Far Rockaway, not least being lower crime and cleaner streets, Far Rockaway offered lower prices for housing and significantly lower property taxes. Living in a sea of impoverished immigrants and other minorities may have discouraged some, but others were content to ignore the problem by living within the “Jewish” areas. The trend I saw at home continues abroad, as I read in the Forward:

“Suburbia Sells Settlers on the West Bank - Forward.com”

The article indicates that many olim are replicating their American lifestyles by taking advantage of some absurd incentives. My wife and I have long joked about our friends who moved to what we call the Bet Shemesh section of Teaneck, with all its Anglos, minivans,  and wood flooring. Still, living in Israel is a great mitzvah, and while we scoffed at the desire to continue living an American lifestyle even while in Israel, we accepted that those who chose to afford this life were within their rights and were not harming anyone else.

Can the same be said for settlements in the West Bank? As with everything else, generalizations are dangerous. Living in Hebron is different from living in Ariel, which is in turn quite different from living in Gush Etzion. Nevertheless, some strange economic incentive are operating here.

According to the article, Americans are strongly attracted to the gated religious communities of the West Bank. In these modern suburban ghettos (in the Jewish state, no less!) religious families feel safe and comfortable, surrounded by people who share their beliefs, lifestyle and political orientation. Unlike their American counterparts, however, these gated communities are not designed to create a sense of exclusivity or to keep out robbers and other criminals. Rather, they are to keep out Palestinians. And in case the gate wasn’t enough, the communities have application exams, to ensure that all undesirables are kept out.

Security, ironically, becomes an attractive feature of these communities. The IDF serves as both a security guard and a local police force, and military law governs developments. The net effect of this arrangement is that it is much cheaper to develop land in the West Bank than in Israel proper, and those savings are passed along to the consumers. Town residents do not pay municipal taxes for their security and policing, since the army does it for them. The army has thus become a free private security provider to West Bank residents. The costs of providing this attractive level of security are not passed to customers, and unsurprisingly, consumers flock to take advantage of the bonanza.

Once upon a time, Zionists dreamed of a Greater Israel based on geography. Today, we are building a Lesser Israel, importing the crass materialism of American culture and clearly demoting the ideas of social justice and religious dedication that inspired the religious Zionists of a bygone era. I was particularly struck by this statement:

“Before we found Neve Daniel, my husband told me, ‘I love you and I want to live in Israel, but I’m very materialistic and if I don’t have a nice house, we’re not moving,’” said Lara Kwalbrun, a peppy mother of six, as she gave a tour of her luxurious new home while toting a baby in her arms.

I can understand the desire for a nice house, and it’s difficult to censure individuals for taking advantage of a bounty that will surely be claimed by others in any case. Still, there’s something grotesque about the whole thing. A few miles down the road, Palestinians live in abject poverty - a multi-generational misery that has lasted for sixty years. In the other direction, Hareidi Jews live penurious lives at the behest of their religious leaders, content to eke out a life on the increasingly miserly largess of the State. Political and military battles rage over the West Bank settlements, with thousands of casualties implicated in the conflict. And in this raging sea of destitution and desperation lies an oasis of Americans, rich from booming Northeastern real-estate markets, living their American lives in their American homes, secure in the IDF’s protection, and benefiting from a land-development strategy that gives incentives for developing lands in occupied territories over land in Israel proper.

And yet, I can’t help myself. A 2-bedroom co-op in Riverdale goes for $250,000 or more. I can get a 5-bedroom house with separate kitchens in Neve Daniel  for under $300,000! That’s a powerful financial incentive! I can’t even imagine how Palestinians feel about this. I know that it doesn’t seem right to me, that’s for sure.

Shimon Peres, the elder statesman of Israeli politics and an architect of the ill-fated Oslo Accords, has finally won an election, and will serve as Israel’s ninth president. Peres has been at the forefront of Israeli politics for decades, having served as prime minister three times since the 1970s, and in various other leading cabinet roles. Ironically, Peres was never elected Prime Minister. In the 70s he served briefly as a caretaker PM, in the 80s he reached the top post as part of a power-sharing agreement with Yitzhak Shamir, and finally, he last became PM in 1995, after the tragic assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

Peres had been widely expected to win the presidency, a largely ceremonial but diplomatically important position, in 2000, when he ran against relative unknown Moshe Katsav. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, leader of Israel’s Sephardic community, supported Katsav, who pulled off the upset. Katsav has since left the presidency under duress, disgraced by allegations of rape and sexual misconduct. In what we can only hope was an embarrassing reversal, R. Yosef had backed Peres in the recent election, hoping, along with Israel, that Peres’ distinguished career, international respect, and reassuring familiarity will restore the dignity of the office.

Personally, I’ve always felt that Peres was too far left, but I have great respect for him and his devotion to the Jewish State. It is unfortunate that this new office, which should have been a great honor to Peres, has come to him at its lowest moment, but Peres, whatever his other flaws, has always been a team player who put the needs and duties of his country ahead of his personal pride. Yishar Koach, Shimon!

Tuition at Jewish schools is probably the most significant expense that Orthodox parents face in raising a large religious family, and prices are only climbing higher. For a family with five or six children, total tuition bills can easily top $100,000 per year!

Sometimes I wonder why the shidduch crisis, a largely undocumented, understudied, and anecdotal problem gets so much community attention and resources, when the easily-quantified, often-studied, and broadly-felt problem of tuition costs stares us in the face, still unsolved.

The OU has been advocating support for a bill that will ease the yeshiva tuition problem in New York State by making tuition costs tax-deductible for middle class families, and providing a tuition credit to poor families. Without getting into the details of the bill, my questions is how is this a good idea? Why should New York State taxpayers pay to send Yossi to yeshiva? Do we want to pay to send Katherine to Catholic school, or Mahmoud to madrassa?

Some will argue that we are merely getting a refund because we don’t use the public school system. But of course, many people don’t use the public school system. Should people without children get the refunds as well? It’s not like we don’t benefit from public schools - the existence of an educated American population is a bedrock on which our national prosperity is built. We expect that most everyone we deal with has a high school diploma, and can read, write, do basic math, and have a shared cultural currency. We would be much poorer and far far less well if we were surrounded by ignorant, illiterate brutes (as we once were in Europe).

We do have a problem with tuition in our communities. It’s a problem we made for ourselves, and it’s one we will have to solve for ourselves. Let’s not go looking in the public till. The OU urges you to call Governor Spiter at (800) 319-3403. I say call him, and express your opposition to the Lopez-Goldin Tuition Tax Deduction Bill.

As my loyal readers know (and I assume that means all of you), I don’t talk much about politics, domestic or Israeli on this blog. It just seems like in real life, political arguments can lead to new knowledge, a change in viewpoints - all the normal benefits of the free exchange of trusted information. Online, these debates lead nowhere, no matter how well-intentioned the participants.

Recent comments by Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, have forced my hand, if only because I believe that it is the responsibility of every person of moral conscience to repudiate the horrors contemplated by R. Eliyahu.

As reported by the Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu wrote a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert indicating that the correct response to rocket attacks on the border town of Sderot is the collective punishment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. An excerpt:

Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

<snip>

According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.

Putting aside the dubious claim that nobody in the entire Gaza Strip has taken action to stop rocket attacks or foster peace between Israel and the Palestinians, I’m somewhat concerned by the careless conflation of all the population centers of the Gaza Strip into one ‘city’ whose entire populace is collectively responsible. Their is an aspect of dehumanization to lumping separate people together into one general, hated group. We saw it after 9/11, where Americans, filled with anger and a desire for vengeance, could barely distinguish a Sikh from a Muslim, much less an Afghan from an Iraqi, or a Sunni from a Shiite. We’ve seen it from many right-wing Israelis, who claim that “they” don’t want peace, or that “the Arabs all hate us” - not even realizing how offensively boorish they sound when they cite the Iranian president’s vicious comments as proof (Iranians are ethnically Persians, not Arabs, and are heirs to an ancient, powerful, and proud culture that has often clashed with Arab culture).

What’s worse was R. Eliyahu’s son’s clarifying comments after his father declined to be interviewed:

Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” said Shmuel Eliyahu. “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

What would be the consequences of this evil choice? Would Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank be cowed after a few tens of thousands of their fellows were exterminated? What about the regional damage? My guess is that Jordan would be torn by strife and revolt, as the Palestinians who makeup the majority of the population react to the tragedy. I imagine that Hezbollah and Syria would also respond violently, with Iran right behind them. Around the world, Israel would face condemnation, sanctions, and utter isolation. Even America could not back such a slaughter, and not even Aipac could stop the cutbacks in Israeli aid or the barring of sale of hi-tech weaponry to Israel, already endangered by cluster-bombing in Lebanon. I think that this action would result in the greatest Chillul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) in perhaps all of Jewish history.

I’ve gone on the record with my opinion because I feel it is my responsibility to do so, and to reject Rabbi Eliyahu. I would support any effort to remove him from his position within the government, and from within the religious leadership, and I call upon Jewish and Israeli leaders worldwide to condemn him and distance themselves from his remarks. (Surprisingly, my calls to world leaders usually go unanswered… I though bloggers had power!) What about you folks out there? How do you feel about R. Eliyahu’s comments?