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Adar 21, 5767, 3/11/2007
Turning Israel Aroundby Dr. Yitzhak Klein
Turning Israel Around
By Yitzhak Klein
Even bad situations have opportunities. In order to identify and exploit them one needs a little toughness of mind and spirit.
The editors of Israel National News have kindly invited me to blog for you. My object in this venture is to share with you my sense of Israeli society “from the inside”—domestic politics, culture, morals and morale, where the country is going and what its chances are of surviving the trip, and most important—What Is To Be Done.
I’ve had many conversations with dedicated people in Israel and abroad who fear for Israel after disengagement and a lost war in Lebanon. I’ve heard a lot of fatalism, a lot of quiet despair: “Nothing we try is going to work, they’ll never let us change anything.”
Things are indeed pretty bad, and most Israelis realize it, including the people who get their opinions from Ha’aretz. But neither fatalism nor despair are warranted. Any objective survey of matters is bound to be less black than the counsels of despair. Even bad situations have opportunities. In order to identify and exploit them one needs a little toughness of mind and spirit.
So let’s take a survey. Israel has dedicated terrorist groups on its borders in Gaza and Lebanon, against whom, for various insufficient reasons, its government is afraid to fight. Behind the terrorists is Syria, which is trying to rebuild an army worthy of the name. Behind them are the Iranians, who are building a bomb and will acquire one unless someone stops them. Beyond them are the growing numbers of antisemites worldwide who think the Jews have another holocaust coming. None of that constitutes an unmanageable threat to Israel’s survival, not even the bomb. The real threat to Israel, the only thing that can permit any of those external threats to succeed, is—Israel. The country’s political institutions don’t work. Its statesmen and opinion leaders are demoralized; they harbor wild and unfounded hopes that Israel’s enemies will someday decide they really like her, which they make the basis of their policy, coupled with profound fear of acknowledging and countering what those enemies are actually doing, which is plotting to destroy her. They hate, fear and discriminate against those of their countrymen who think differently, and fear and hatred have driven them to do things that undermine the very legitimacy of Israel’s regime. Many of the leaders are corrupt. The country seems to have come to a dead end, ethically, ideologically, institutionally, politically. This moral and spiritual dead end, which threatens to stymie anything constructive Israel might do on its own behalf, is the real threat to the country’s survival.
And it’s also an opportunity, actually, the biggest we’ve had so far.
This moral and spiritual dead end, which threatens to stymie anything constructive Israel might do on its own behalf, is the real threat to the country’s survival.
And it’s also an opportunity, actually, the biggest we’ve had so far.
The people who have brought Israel to this pass, the politicians, petty manipulators, and opinion leaders, the “they” who control (for now) the levers of power in the country, used to be sure they knew what was best. Anyone who thought differently was smothered in a wave of ridicule laced with acid. A lot of that self-confidence has evaporated. Many of these people are acutely aware that ordinary Israelis have lost confidence in them. Israelis know they’re at a dead end, which is an improvement on the past, when they didn’t even know it. Now they need someone to show them how to turn around.
There are two main challenges. The first is to show ordinary Israelis and people in the Jewish communities abroad just what the institutions currently leading Israel and the ideas that animate the people who occupy them are worth. We should encourage them to compare where their leaders promised to take them with where Israel’s actually ended up.
The second is to articulate an alternative vision of how Israel should act, in foreign and domestic policy both, and indeed of what kind of society Israel should be: A society committed to the values and the interests of the Jewish people, just, fair and honest within, offering no harm to those abroad willing to keep the peace, decisive and unforgiving toward those who won’t. In fact, a Jewish society, since all those things are founded in Jewish ethics.
“The rest is interpretation, go and learn,” said Rabbi Akiva to the fellow who wanted to learn the entire Torah on one foot. I cannot pretend I know more about this vast subject than the next guy, though I may be advantageously placed to pick some pertinent information. Join me in the weeks ahead in following how these two challenges fare in Israeli society today. Your comments are welcome, though I can’t promise to respond to every one, or to respond onsite. Dr Yitzhak Klein is Director of the Israel Policy Center, a public-policy institute in Jerusalem. He can be reached at yklein@merkazmedini.org .
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Adar 19, 5767, 3/9/2007
Tikkun Business Opportunitiesby Steven Plaut
Malcolm X Lax for Geriatric Marxists
 It has occurred to me that many of the members of the editorial board of Tikkun magazine, not to mention most of their readership, must be pushing 70 years old.
Think about that! Well I have, and I think that there are a number of fine business opportunities, selling products to the geriatric hippies and menopausal Marxists of this fine magazine. I am now looking for some partners to go in with me in these ventures, developing products to sell to the Tikkun readership, advertising in the magazine. Anyone with some idle capital, give me a buzz. Here are the projects I have thought of so far:
1. A book of recipes for preparing hashish brownies laced with Metamucil, just the thing to keep you a regular revolutionary. They will also be sold at the new progressive bistro we will open, to be called Chez Che.
2. Bob Dylan bunion cream, so that you will not need a weatherman to know which way the wind breaks or blows.
3. Macrobiotic Grey Poupon, to be passed back and forth from designer VW vans of psychedelic yuppies, and - Oh, The Colors, The Colors.
4. Jerry Garcia Geratol Tablets.
5. Ho Che Minh Hernia Halters.
6. Huey Newton Shuffleboard Set.
7. Jimi Hendrix Hearing Aid, with special microcassette that plays The Wind Cries Dentures.
8. Special Revolutionary Remake VCR tape of Leave it To Beaver, with a progressive Cleaver family. In this special tape, Ward and June drop out, turn on, and then go to Cuba to cut cane in the Venceremos Brigade with their boys, Beaver, Wally, and Eldridge.
9. Malcolm X Lax.
10. Preparation Ho. (Short for Preparation Ho Chi Minh) This is the perfect treatment for progressives and hippies at the ends of their trails, who need to reduce painful swelling and itching at the ends of their trails. For those whose Mekong Delta is backed up, see previous product.
11. Bumper stickers and progressive lapel buttons that say: "Flower and Flatulence Power" !!
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Adar 17, 5767, 3/7/2007
Building Homes for Arabs in Israel - A Mitzvah?by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
As we reported this week, several left-wing organizations, led by Rabbis for Human Rights, have launched a campaign to rebuild demolished illegal homes for Arabs on state-owned lands in the southern Hevron Hills.
Might they be unwittingly fulfilling the mitzvah of settling the Land?
It occurred to me that some of those builders are assuredly Jews. And they will definitely be carrying out construction in the Land of Israel. So, might they be unwittingly fulfilling the mitzvah of settling the Land of Israel?
And if they are, is it obligatory upon us religious Zionists to assist them? And what if the police and army attempt to stop them? Is it obligatory to refuse orders to demolish homes constructed by Jews, even if they are to be turned over to Arabs afterwards?
OK, so the foregoing questions are a bit of leftover Purim Torah, but the rest of this entry is not.
One of the groups operating in tandem with the esteemed rabbis mentioned above is Machsom Watch, a collective of (primarily) women who make it their business to interfere with the work of IDF soldiers at security checkpoints throughout Israel. Their interference includes encouraging Arabs to complain about the checkpoints, making sure that the Arabs at the checkpoints don't have to wait too long as others are given thorough security checks, and the like. During my recent reserve duty, I witnessed some of these ladies in operation. They were very cordial to the soldiers to their faces, asking if they are not too cold and the like. But off to the side, they commented among themselves how certain measures employed at the checkpoint were "just to frighten" the Arabs passing through.
If only. Unfortunately, a certain randomness is necessary to keep the actual terrorists off balance and guessing.
At one point, a minor dispute broke out among the soldiers at a checkpoint I was sent to. A man drove up with his elderly, overweight mother in the passenger seat. A senior officer decided that the car was to be checked, which meant requesting that the older lady get out and submit to a very minimal body search. The soldiers at the checkpoint recognized the two of them, because they came through every day together.
A certain randomness is necessary to keep the actual terrorists off balance.
Some soldiers said that the fact that they come through every day was a reason to be friendly and not force them to get out of the car. Others said that precisely the opposite was true: if they learned that their regular appearances at the checkpoint exempted them from security searches, then the next bomb belt would be hidden under the old lady's seat. Another IDF soldier commented that a 40-year-old Arab women tried to stab the soldiers at a different checkpoint not long ago - and an Arab grandmother had recently blown herself up in a suicide bombing.
Interestingly, the disputants were divided according to how much time they had spent at checkpoints until that point. The tough combat soldiers, who had been assigned for a brief time to the checkpoint, wanted to be "forgiving;" whereas, the soldiers who spent most of their service at the checkpoints were insistent that the security checks be unpredictable - not cruel, but unpredictable. The latter soldiers' view prevailed, of course.
Now, how does a Machsom Watch activist or a Rabbi for Human Rights see this scene? A heavy Arab woman, who finds it difficult to move, is cruelly forced out of her son's car to submit to a search by heartless soldiers as she stands in the cold evening air.
And I see it this way: the IDF soldiers are risking their lives to try and prevent Arab terrorists from using their own people as mules for explosives aimed at Jewish families in Israel.
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