The picture you've been waiting for:

J Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami has an op-ed in The Forward: For Israel's Sake, Moderate American Jews Must Find Their Voice (and a similar one in the ‘International Herald Tribune’ of April 10, under the headline: “Tel-Aviv, Then and Now” (which is a reprint from the New York Times.

Its essence:

For the sake of Israel, the United States and the world, it is time for American political discourse to re-engage with reality. Voices of reason need to reclaim what it means to be pro-Israel and to establish in American political discourse that Israel’s core security interest is to achieve a negotiated two-state solution and to define once and for all permanent, internationally recognized borders...In early 21st-century America, the rules of politics are being rewritten, and conventional political orthodoxy is clearly open to once-inconceivable challenges.

It is time for the broad, sensible mainstream of pro-Israel American Jews and their allies to challenge those on the extreme right who claim to speak for all American Jews in the national debate about Israel and the Middle East — and who, through the use of fear and intimidation, have cut off reasonable debate on the topic.

Why should this silly approach be adopted?

Well, Jeremy asserts:

By and large, we are a progressive community, among the most liberal in the United States.

and what really bothers him is:

In the name of protecting Israel, some of our community’s leaders became linked with neoconservatives...Some of our leaders have struck up fast friendships with far-right Christian Zionists...many of these are people with whom we disagree profoundly on values and beliefs that our community holds dear...

In Washington today, these voices are seen to speak for the entire American Jewish community. But they don’t speak for me. And I don’t believe they speak for the majority of the American Jews with whom I have lived and worked.

So, Jeremy's personal beliefs and what he perceives personally to be the majority of American Jewish beliefs is what counts. And if the majority of Jew were arch-conservatives, would Jeremy be quiet? Of course not.  He's not a true democrat.

By the by, if it is true that Jews are overwhelmingly progressive (further left than "liberal"), how come for over 60 years the vast majority of America's Jews support stands and positions that are what Jeremy would consider "extreme right views"?

Well, simple, really. Because American Jews are not totally stupid and they know that in the Middle East, there is no balance nor logic nor rationality on the Arab side and you can't compare all that happens in the Middle East to the political atmosphere in democratic America. To apply "Washington rules" of the Constitution and Bill of Rights to the Arab-Israel conflict is not only wrong but dumb. Jeremy, though, would blame the "Jewish establishment" at all costs for this attitude of American Jewry, foremost AIPAC, as if he were an antisemite, which he isn't.

At that Forward op-ed, some people left comments that they presumed to know what Jeremy's grandparents and parents would be doing in their graves - rolling over. I don't know for sure that is the case, but since Jeremy does invoke his ancestry ("I support Israel. My family history ingrains in me the belief that the Jewish people need and deserve a home. I know that that nation must be strong and secure and that a deep bond between Israel and America is essential to its survival."), I am going to take a guess.

And my guess is that with his current policies, if Jeremy had been his grandfather, Tel Aviv would not have been purchased and established. It would have been considered Arab land, Jewish expansion and needlessly causing friction with the neighbors. Sometimes, chronology does work - Jeremy is not his grandfather, although I am sure his proud display of genealogy is as empty as his political aptitude and I am not even going to guess what his father, Irgunist Yitshaq Ben-Ami would be thinking.

On April 17, next week, the descendants of the founders will gather in Tel Aviv at the ‘old’ Manshia Train Station (border Neve-Tsedek/Jaffa) on April 17th, at 10:30 to reenact the famous photograph of the plot purchasers on the sand dunes together with descendants of the city builders and prominent figures alongside thousands of residents.

Jeremy Ben-Ami will be there.

I wonder, will anyone be there holding up a placard reading:

First of all, I apologize to my readers.  I have had technical problems with my blog - all my own fault, I hope.

And now, on to my subject.

Camp David 1978 is back in the news.  With a new administration, everyone and his mother's uncle are advising President B. H. Obama what to do regarding Israel and especially, those "obstacles to peace", the Jewish communities located in areas of the Jewish national home that was to be reconstituted by international law and where revenant Jews reside legally.

One historian, Arthur Herman, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of Camp David and attacks Jimmy Carter.  Here's a portion of what he wrote:

Yet for all their bluster and intransigence in public, Begin and Sadat were more than ready for a deal once they understood that the U.S. would do whatever was necessary to stop the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, such as the PLO, from derailing a peace. An agreement was hammered out for an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, coupled with vague language about Palestinian "autonomy." The item Mr. Carter had really wanted on the agenda -- a Palestinian state -- was kept at arm's length.

Camp David worked because it avoided all of Mr. Carter's usual foreign policy mistakes, particularly his insistence on a comprehensive solution. Instead, Sadat and Begin pursued limited goals...

Above all and most significantly, Camp David sought peace instead of "justice." Liberals say there can be no peace without justice. But to many justice means the end of Israel or the creation of a separate Palestinian state. Sadat and Begin, in the teeth of Mr.Carter's own instincts both then and now, established at Camp David a sounder principle for negotiating peace. The chaos and violence in today's Gaza proves just how fatal trying to advance other formulations can be.

This is fine reading of what happened.  But then he goes a bit further than the facts would support:

The true story of Camp David is one of two ironies...The second irony is that if any one man deserves credit for Camp David, it is not Jimmy Carter but Anwar Sadat. It was Sadat who managed to save Mr. Carter from himself and revealed the true secret about forging peace in the Middle East: The Palestinian issue is the doom, not the starting point, for lasting stability in the region.

And earlier in the article, Herman implies that Sadat, seeking peace, supposedly, after 1973, sought allies with Nixon and Kissinger. That, I would suggest is revisionism.  Sadat?  All by himself? 

Should we not be asking what happened between 1973 and 1977?  Why was there not peace?  Could it have been that it was only with Menachem Begin coming upon the scene as Israel's Prime Minister in 1977, that the peace agreement became a possibility?  Perhaps it was Sadat's fault there was no peace? Or, could it be that it was really Menachem Begin that deserves the major credit for the success of Camp David, to the extent it was a success?

That peace agreement was achieved by Israel surrendering physical things and Egypt awarding intangibles, easily withdrawn.  Who gave up the Sinai despite the 1967 Egyptian aggression? Who gave up the oil fields developed by Israel?  What did Sadat yield? Who agreed to an autonomy plan for the Arabs of the Land of Israel? Who only permitted a cold peace to develop?

Whether one agreed with that peace agreement, and I didn't, or not, history should not be permitted to be toyed with and rewritten.

To his credit, Begin managed to keep the Jerusalem issue out of the main body of the agreement, relegating it to an "exchange of letters" on "positions".  Sadat, unlike what Herman writes, at least on this issue actually did pursue a "justice" path and, in doing so, almost sabotaged Camp David.  Sadat sought to pursue an "Islamic comprehensive peace" but, it seems, Herman doesn't know his own material.

Another item on this subject is provided to us by Gershom Gorenberg, an almost rabid opponent of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.  He has reviewed, naturally for the New York Times, Jimmy Carter's newly published book, We Can Have Peace In The Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work.

Here's my comment on what he wrote:

A beginning student of the Middle East should not learn diplomatic history from this text. In Carter’s telling, the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem at his prodding. More objective accounts portray Sadat as making an end run around Carter’s stubborn intent to reconvene the Geneva peace conference.

...The agreement with Egypt arguably improved Israel’s security as much as any other single event in its history. Yet a portion of American Jewry has never forgiven Carter for his success. This hints at a key lacuna in Carter’s agenda: though he got into the peacemaking business as a politician, he gives too little attention to the need for building political support for a diplomatic initiative — among voters at home as much as among Israelis and ­Palestinians.

Indirectly, Carter’s title also hints at a second lacuna. Looking for a neutral name for the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, he chooses “Holy Land,” a phrase from Christian tradition. Carter’s perspective is explicitly religious. Though that can irritate secular observers, it has served him well. His faith helped him build personal connections both to Sadat and to the Israeli ­leader Menachem Begin, despite Begin’s intransigence. Yet when he finally presents his outline of a peace agreement here, he makes no new, creative proposal for the future of the holy place claimed by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as Haram al-Sharif. Given Carter’s sensitivity to religious issues, this is surprising and disappointing.

My comments:

a) "arguably". That's an understatement. True, no war has broken out but there have been terror attacks and most of the Hamas arms are coming in through Egypt, stored there in Sinai and transported to Rafah.  Terror agents and their Beduin supporters are quite active.

b) "a portion of American Jewry". That's a snide swipe at Jews who support the legitimate right of Jews to live in their homeland, who care for Israel's security and who campaign for US support for those policies as America, unlike Gorenberg it might seem, is democratic. The old "ost-juden"* complaint: it's them you should be angry at, implicate Gorenberg, not me who is grovelling to be accepted by liberal and progressive forces.

c) "'Holy Land', a phrase from Christian tradition". Of course, the Land of Israel is refered to in Jewish tradition as אדמת הקודש - the Holy Land.  Since the Land of Israel is where the Divine Presence is, which must be treated with several unique mitzvot (מצוות התלויות בארץ), then Eretz-Yisrael became the Holy Land. As the Prophet Zechariah 2:16 wrote ונחל יה-ה את-יהודה חלקו, על אדמת הקודש; ובחר עוד, בירושלים (in English: And the LORD shall inherit Judah as His portion in the holy land, and shall choose Jerusalem again) and this verse in Isaiah 14:2, וְהִתְנַחֲלוּם בֵּית-יִשְׂרָאֵל עַל אַדְמַת יְה-ה (and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the LORD). The exact term Eretz-Yisrael is in I Samuel 13:19.

Yes, there is an element of religion in the term but it is Jewish primarily.

Of course, if Carter had used "Judea and Samaria" (it does appear in Acts 8:1), Gorenberg would have gone ballistic.

d) "the Temple Mount".  Gershom, leave the Temple Mount to us.  We know what to do.

And so, if Obama and Hillary and Mitchell take these two men's advice and opinion into consideration, they will fail.

But, will they?

-------------
* a derogatory term of German Jews for their brethren from Poland and the East who were considered by them to be uncultured for acceptance into modern society and that they cast shame on these German Jews.

Don't you just love the way our lefties, especially Peace Now, portray themselves has the paragon of public virtue and morality?

Well, I spotted this this morning at Emeq Refaim:

That's a National Union elections poster covered up by a Peace Now sticker which 'warns' the voters that Israel seems to be "breaking right" and there's a danger of "connecting with racism".  Another sticker had the slogan "we're disconnecting from the world".  Many more Peace Now stickers were around.

The irony is that the Emeq Refaim neighborhood of Bak'a and German Colony and Old Katamon are mostly former Arab homes that were abandoned in 1948 and now are demographically liberal, trendy lefty and bohemian Jewish, all of whom preach evacuating "conquered territories" that have been "settled" under an "occupation".

Little do they realize that the joke is on them.

Many are upset and concerned over the state of relations between Israel and Turkey and that a crisis has started.  But it didn't begin when Erdogan walked off the Davos podium, angry at (of all people) Shimon Peres.

How short memories people have.

It started two years ago and it was over the Temple Mount.

Here, reread this:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has agreed to a Turkish inspection of the construction work at disputed holy site in Jerusalem, the Turkish prime minister said Thursday. Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Olmert had shown him photographs of the construction work, but had failed to convince him that it would not harm the holy sites there.

The Israeli premier agreed to a Turkish suggestion for a technical team from Turkey to inspect the site, Erdogan said. "Israel should respect the holy places rather than increase tensions," Erdogan said Thursday ahead of his meeting with Olmert.

So, our Prime Minister sought, I guess, to revive the Ottoman Empire.  Who needed an "outsider", and a Muslim one to boot?

And then, we discovered an attempt, by Turkey, to sneak in Hamas (here):

The Deputy to the Turkish ambassador to Israel said Friday that no decision had been made about the members of the delegation set to arrive in Israel early next week to examine the construction work at the Mughrabi Gate in Jerusalem. The official was responding to earlier reports that Turkey was considering sending its senior foreign affairs advisor, Ahmet Davutoglu, to lead the delegation.

...Army Radio had reported that Davutoglu, was close to the Hamas leadership in Damascus and had initiated the visit of Hamas leader-in-exile Khaled Mashaal to Ankara following the movement's election victory in January 2006...the Turkish Embassy official told the Post, "Davutoglu is one of the official advisors to the Turkish prime minister and has always expressed a neutral and constructive attitude towards Israel."

Well, looking at things this way, this current flare-up was an explosion waiting to happen, and one we ourselves, well, Olmert, at least, set in motion.

Diplomacy is not for the unimformed, the forgetful, the pooh-poohers.