All was in place for an impressive ceremony that would have shown the world that Jews and Muslims could rejoice in harmony over a site dedicated to a man held in veneration by both. Maimonides had been the personal physician to Saladin, and for centuries Jews, Muslims and Copts had come to his yeshiva in search of healing. As work was nearing completion, it was agreed with the Egyptian authorities that the small Jewish community of Cairo would organize a dedication ceremony on March 7.

And then the Egyptians had a change of heart. The head of the Antiquities Department stated that it was an Egyptian site. Let Jews hold a religious ceremony discreetly and among themselves; the official inauguration by the Egyptian authorities would take place a week later. That the decision was both ludicrous and impractical did not occur to them until it was too late.

People living there were ordered to close their shops, their doors and their windows and not set foot outside. Security personnel checked invitations and barred journalists from entering. A reporter from a popular daily who tried to interview me was driven away none too gently. A similar fate met a New York Times correspondent. The event was to be kept strictly private – or so hoped the Egyptian authorities. They presumably had not heard of cellphones and other sophisticated recording and transmitting equipment.

(After the jump, Egypt doesn’t miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Also video of the dedication of the beautiful synagogue and yeshiva.)

Meanwhile, the Egyptians who had hoped that the ceremony could be held under wraps were in for a rude awakening. Some of the guests had given interviews to various media in the course of the event. Not many hours lapsed before a video was aired on CNN, and later on the news on Israel’s Channel 2; the Chabad Web site published dozens of photos.

The press in Cairo reacted angrily. Articles and editorials found fault with the presence of the Israeli ambassador, simultaneously bemoaning the amount of money squandered on restoring a Jewish site and declaring the fact that it was a purely Egyptian monument.

Zaki Hawas, head of the Antiquities Department, waded into the fray and declared that “‘Ben Maimon’ would not be handed over to the Jews” and that special measures would be taken to prevent Israelis from visiting in order not to offend Egyptian feelings, in view of the Israeli government’s position on the “Ibrahimi Mosque,” the name given by the Muslim to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. He added that he had been surprised by the large scale of the event, the participation of the Israeli ambassador and the fact that alcoholic drinks had been imbibed. Therefore, he said, he had taken the decision to cancel the grand opening planned for March 14.

So it goes.

Still, if modern politics don’t take away anything of the awe and wonder at the thought of seeing Maimonides’ actual synagogue and study, here’s a video from the dedication.

Related posts:

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2. Extra! Extra! A Jewish story leads YNet!
3. Iran's new minister of media: Holocaust denier

Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

Don’t believe it. Siegman’s vision suffers from a disparity between the real Israel and the Israel he believes he knows.

For example, he argues that “it is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles–although denied by Israel’s government–that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.”

Really? When over 80% of settlers live on 5% of the West Bank, most of it adjacent to the Green Line, when the popular reaction to the Disengagement from Gaza was an overwhelming yawn – no Galilee bed-and-breakfast and no Tel Aviv beach was empty during those two ostensibly traumatic weeks in August 2005.

The settlements can be removed, and the vast centrist Israeli mainstream that has so far escaped the notice of an ignorant world media will implement this removal. But only when it knows that the Palestinians won’t use the withdrawal from the West Bank the way they used the one from Gaza.

In short, Siegman is not a serious observer of Israel.

In 2008, he wrote another piece in the Nation seeking to prove Israel’s dishonesty in peacemaking. His sole proof: the settlements. Always the settlements.

It would be one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain security concerns had been dealt with. But no government serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued, without letup, the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands, which even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.

I’m a big fan of American Jews taking Israel to the cleaners. I am genuinely mystified at their failure to protest the corrupt Israeli rabbinate’s efforts to define who is Jewish, or the complete absence of education about the Diaspora in all 12 years of an Israeli’s schooling, or the lack of Israeli support for Diaspora education while Israel joyfully drinks up American Jewish love and money with barely an acknowledging nod.

But the criticism on the peace process is not serious, and is repeatedly disproven by events. To insist on punishing Israel at this stage, Siegman must ignore the simple glaring fact that the Palestinians are refusing to prove the Israelis’ intransigence through, um, negotiating.

Yes, there are settlements. And yes, the settlement movement is a serious constituency with a resonant narrative. So it would be excruciatingly difficult for Netanyahu to take on the entire far-right unless he can show the mainstream that there is a reason to do so.

But it is also true that the settlers have lost every time they were challenged – in Sinai, Gaza and the current extra-Jerusalemite freeze. The broader culture war within Israel over the past two decades has left them marginalized politically. It is only Palestinian brutality that has left the majority of the settlements intact.

To seriously suggest further punishment of Israel without giving even casual consideration to the simple fact that the Palestinians have yet to concede anything in 17 years of negotiations – not even simple rhetorical gestures such as recognition of the Jews’ right to self-determination – is either stupid or willfully disingenuous.

You don’t trust Netanyahu? Fine. But right now, it isn’t Netanyahu that has to prove his good faith and capacity for peacemaking.

Pressure Israel all you want. As Obama has discovered in recent months, the Palestinians will only up their demands and push off the inevitable compromise.

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Emmanuel Navon

He expresses beautifully the consensus feeling among most Israelis. Shlomo Sand may be sexy in a certain foreign milieu, but he is so radically disconnected from the Israeli discourse and Israeli identity that no one even bothers to challenge him here. The Jewishness of the Israeli state is so obvious, and ethnic Jewish identification so universal that Sand is little more than a circus curiosity in this country. Only abroad, among those profoundly ignorant and exceedingly loud about Israel, can he find his groupies.

Navon’s latest captures the hypocrisy of the likes of Tony Judt and Sand, and should be read by, well, Judt and Sand. Unfortunately, their academic credentials don’t seem to drive them to self-critical reflection.

One wonders what happens when Navon and Sand pass each other in the hallways of Tel Aviv University.

Anyway, here’s Navon:

The understandable frustration with the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led some people to suggest that, for the conflict to abate, one of the two protagonists must give up. But what if both sides prove relentless forever? A Freudian answer to that question has recently been devised by (you guessed it) Jews: explain to the Jews (but not to the Palestinians, Heaven forbid), that they don’t actually exist, and they will stop fighting for their “imagined self.”

It is logically undisputable that there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict if there were no Israelis or no Palestinians (or both); that there would be no anti-Semitism if Jews didn’t exist (though even that is debatable); and that there would be no car accidents if cars hadn’t been invented….

This is the underlying argument that Shlomo Sand is promoting in his book The Invention of the Jewish People. A historian of modern French and European history at Tel-Aviv University, Sand is no expert in the Ancient Middle East and in Jewish history. His book has been dismissed and ridiculed by scholars of Jewish history as a cheap and embarrassing piece of falsifications and propaganda. Even Tony Judt (also an expert on modern European history, and also an anti-Zionist Jew), had to admit that Sand’s contribution to the knowledge of Jewish history “is at best redundant” (”Israel must unpick its ethnic myth,” Financial Times, 7 December 2009). Judt does not dispute that Sand’s book is academically sloppy, but he argues that this sloppiness is irrelevant (if not forgivable): What counts, according to Judt, is the point that Sand is trying to make.

For Judt, “the perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory … is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio.” In other words, one of the central tenets of Judaism is “perverse” and is “the single most important” reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So Jews must abandon one of their strongest beliefs –a belief that gave them hope and helped them survive throughout two millennia of exile. On the other hand, the fact that Islam holds that a land that was once ruled by Muslims must be “liberated” from “infidels” is not a problem. Nor is the fact that the Palestinians insist on invading Israel with millions of descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 refugees, or that they deny the very existence of the Jerusalem Temple. The problem is not Muslim theology or Palestinian myths. The problem is Jewish faith.

Related posts:

1. Is there nothing to Israel besides politics?
2. NYT politely calls Shlomo Sand a liar
3. On marriage and racism

First is Jimmy Carter’s extremely short apology “for any words or deeds of mine that may have” caused Israel to be “stigmatized.”

You know, like putting “apartheid” on his book cover (a book which, incidentally, sells alongside Ilan Pappe on Amazon), or accusing the Israel lobby of being something other than a legitimate expression of a particular American grassroots feeling, or willfully forgetting any Palestinian culpability for their condition, etc. ad infinitum.

Notice how Carter never actually admits to doing anything wrong, but merely apologizes in case his actions “may have” had immoral results. As any rabbi will tell you around Yom Kippur time (no worries, still nine months away), the first step of forgiveness is acknowledgment of culpability. Carter hasn’t done that yet.

In a letter released exclusively to JTA, the former U.S. president sent a seasonal message wishing for peace between Israel and its neighbors, and concluded: “We must recognize Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances, even as we strive in a positive way to help Israel continue to improve its relations with its Arab populations, but we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel. As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so.”

Related posts:

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2. Is there nothing to Israel besides politics?
3. Anti-Israel, with a dash of intellectual pretense

The latest “MAKOM Hot Topic” on Ha’aretz’s website:

If the Freakonomics guys liked it, then there really must be something behind the fascinating book Start-Up Nation. In the book, Senor and Singer explore reasons why Israel has more companies on NASDAQ than any country other than the US, and the highest number of start-ups per capita than anywhere else in the world.

To the liberal mind, the success of the book and its subject matter, ought to give cause for concern. First, it would seem to be an attempt to draw attention away from Israel’s political failings – in its very apolitical-ness, it is political. Second, it hints that business and hi-tech success is the pinnacle of Jewish endeavor. Third, it would seem to credit the Israeli army with much of this success. Fourth, and most importantly, the book draws attention to an Israeli and – dare we say it – Jewish exceptionalism.

This would then beg the question: Can we express pride about anything? Is any Israeli collective achievement – so long as it isn’t peace with the Palestinians – to be frowned upon?

Are these guys for real? The book “ought to give cause for concern” because, possibly, “any Israeli collective achievement” is bad if it doesn’t concern the Palestinians? So, for example, democracy? Or the rescue of the Muslim world’s expelled Jews or Europe’s tattered refugees? Or how about cures for some cancers? Or Yehudah Amichai’s poetry? Or simply surviving the 20th century, an achievement in no way guaranteed at the century’s start? Or being the only country in the Middle East that has more Christians, not less, than 60 years ago?

How about this question for a hot topic: What kind of obsessive advocacy leads someone to suggest that an entire society is nothing more than a single political process? Is MAKOM dangling dangerously off the edge of the Israeli discourse, about to fall off?

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Middle East expert Mordechai Kedar said Monday that Dr. Sari Nusaiba of Birzeit University, north of Ramallah, has had to go underground in the wake of an article that claims an historical connection between the Jews and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Interviewed on Arutz Sheva’s Hebrew news journal, Dr. Kedar said that Nusaiba would not be the first prominent Arab to publicize the link.

Dr. Kedar said that Haj Amin El-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, declared in 1929 that the site’s association with King Solomon’s Temple was beyond all doubt, even though he would become part of the Nazis’ efforts against the Jews.

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In his wonderful “History of Zionism,” Walter Laqueur chides the post-Zionist historians by saying that what is true in their work is not new, and what is new is not true. Shlomo Sand, former campus radical turned publicity-hound professor and wanna-be destroyer of Jewish nationhood, seems to have written his book precisely to fit that description.

Patricia Cohen of The New York Times explains:

Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts.

…

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.

…

Since Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory, he is keen to show that their ancestry lines do not lead back to ancient Palestine. He resurrects a theory first raised by 19th-century historians, that the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, to whom 90 percent of American Jews trace their roots, are descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who apparently converted to Judaism and created an empire in the Caucasus in the eighth century. This idea has long intrigued writers and historians. In 1976, Arthur Koestler wrote “The Thirteenth Tribe” in the hopes it would combat anti-Semitism; if contemporary Jews were descended from the Khazars, he argued, they could not be held responsible for Jesus’ Crucifixion.

By now, experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory, concluding that the shards of evidence are inconclusive or misleading, said Michael Terry, the chief librarian of the Jewish division of the New York Public Library. Dr. Ostrer said the genetics also did not support the Khazar theory.

See also the argument I had with Philip Weiss over Sand’s quixotic effort to destroy the basic narrative of Israeli identity: “Anti-Israel, with a dash of intellectual pretense.”

Related posts:

1. Thank you Tony Judt
2. On marriage and racism
3. On Sand and Israeli intermarriage

Aftonbladet's Donald Bostrom

Donald Bostrom cancelled a scheduled appearance at a conference in Beirut after a visit to Israel in which he participated in dialogue on the issue, according to Army Radio. Bostrom was in Israel last month for a media conference in Dimona.

The Beirut conference was set to be an anti-Israel hate fest, according to reports.

“The visit to Israel and the fact that I was part of a fair dialogue made me rethink the whole issue,” Bostrom reportedly told associates, according to Ha’aretz.

In an article published in August in the popular Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Bostrom reported that Israel seized young Palestinian men and returned them to their families with missing organs.

The story, which ran under the headline “They plunder the organs of our sons,” also cited the recent arrest of a New York rabbi accused of trafficking in human organs.

During the Dimona conference Bostrom admitted that his only proof of the organ stealing came from the allegations of the Palestinian families.

Check out what Ha’aretz military reporter Anshel Pfeffer recently did to Bostrom’s story.

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Donald Bostrom (Aftonbladet)

Asked at the conference why he had accused the IDF of killing Palestinians for their organs, he replied: “I never wrote that and didn’t claim that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians to harvest their organs. I wrote that Palestinian families are claiming that is the case.”

He accused the media of distorting his report and accusing him of antisemitism for political purposes.

“It is known that there is an international problem of organ trafficking and I mentioned many countries, including Israel. My report has one conclusion, that we should continue investigating the Palestinian allegations.”

But then Anshel, a smart left-leaning Ha’aretz military reporter and a friend, does something absolutely despicable. He quotes Bostrom’s original story:

Anshel Pfeffer

In Aftonbladet Bostrom wrote that while the Israeli government was running a campaign encouraging Israelis to sign organ donor cards, “young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days, Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open. Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumours of a dramatic increase in young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies. I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it.”

Bostrom wrote that he had interviewed “many” Palestinian families whose sons had been killed in this way but in the report he specifically mentions only one family.

Who me? Organ trafficking? I was just repeating what “the population of the occupied territories,” “UN staff,” “rumours of a dramatic increase in young men disappearing,” “many” Palestinian families, and “nightly funerals of autopsied bodies” were saying. I never claimed it was true!

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The Teheran Holocaust Denial Conference, December 2006, organized by Ramin (www.terrorism-info.org.il)

Not only did Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, today say that negotiating with the United States would be a “naive and perverted” thing to do (Khamenei revealed President Obama has approached him several times through oral and written messages which he has not replied to).

Not only did Israeli commandos today intercept a ship carrying hundreds of tons of Iranian weapons intended for Hezbollah in Lebanon – the biggest ever seizure of arms on their way from Iran to its client terrorist militia, Hezbollah, which Iran plans to use as one element in its attempt to wipe the Jewish state off the map (BBC story and video here).

Mohammad Ali Ramin

Not only did Iran brutalize pro-democracy demonstrators once again on the streets of major Iranian cities today (there are several videos if you scroll down here from France 24, and a report here by BBC Persian).

But in addition Iran has appointed as its new deputy culture minister, in charge of media and communications, Mohammad-Ali Ramin, who previously served as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s top advisor on Holocaust matters and is known as “the brain” behind the president’s strategy of Holocaust denial.

Incidentally, an interesting piece on the possible philosophical roots of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial ran in the Forward last month. You should read it.

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Rejecting Israel through humus

“Lebanon is trying to win a battle against Israel by registering this new Guinness World Record and telling the whole world that hummus is a Lebanese product, its part of our traditions,” said Fady Jreissati, vice president of operations at International Fairs and Promotions group, the event’s organizer.

The event is the cooking of the world’s largest humus bowl – 2,056 kilos of the stuff. According to organizers, the previous record was held by Israel, though “It was not clear what the former Israeli record was, and organizers gave conflicting reports on when it was made.”

About this time last year, the Lebanese Industrialists Association began preparing a lawsuit against Israel for “stealing” Lebanon’s most famous cuisine – not actual humus, mind you, but the Lebanese menu, the recipes.

The president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association, Fadi Abboud, accuses Israel of “stealing” its northern neighbor’s cuisine by marketing dishes such as humous – found across the Middle East – as its own.

Abboud says that while Lebanon is partly to blame because it has never registered its main food trademarks, Israel’s adoption of these dishes causes it major losses.

The Jerusalem Post quoted an Israeli Arab humus seller agreeing wholeheartedly with the Lebanese move:

Making the record-setting bowl of humus

“It is the right thing to do. The Israeli people are taking a product that does not officially belong to them. It originates among the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese people,” he said.

This isn’t about copyright law or marketing advantage – as it was with Greece’s legal battle in the EU over feta cheese. It’s about denying Israel’s legitimacy in the region.

And it’s a lie, because more than half of Israelis come from Muslim and Arab countries, with the largest groups from Iraq – which has excellent humus – and Morocco. What’s more, the Jews lived in Iraq longer than the Arabs, and in Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria since Roman times at least. The Yemenite sabih, a pita filled with humus, eggplant, eggs, salad and spices, is an originally Jewish dish. The name itself, SABIH, is a Hebrew acronym for “schug, beitza, hatzil” – pepper sauce, egg, eggplant.

So who owns humus? And why deny our Baghdad-born Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor Fuad Ben-Eliezer, or for that matter my half-Iraqi half-Turkish neighbor Roni, any ownership over the food they have eaten their entire lives, and that their great-grandparents had eaten in their day?

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I pointed out that Israel’s marriage laws, like its divorces, burials, etc., are not constructed against Muslims or Catholics, but in the old Ottoman confessionalist models, which are agreed upon by everybody.

Now he returns to accuse me of misrepresenting the essential evil of this system:

Well I’m reading Shlomo Sand’s great book now and Gur is I believe misrepresenting the reality. Sand makes it clear that a bar on intermarriage was no leftover accident of history. “In 1953 the political promise to bar civil marriage in Israel was given a legal basis. The law defining the legal status of the rabbinical courts determined that they would have exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel. By this means, the dominant socialist Zionism harnessed the principles of the traditional rabbinate as an alibi for its fearful imaginary [sic] that was terrified of assimilation and ‘mixed marriage.’”

It sometimes amazes me that someone can launch a years-long cultural attack against an entire society without knowing some really basic facts about it, such as the degree to which its “ethnic democracy” is a common phenomenon, or the mechanisms for marriage, or the fact that its marriage laws that effectively forbid intermarriage are supported by the minority religions more than by the Jews.

Of course, the problem is not with the singular fact of the year of the passage of the law, but with the thick layer of deconstruction slathered over it by Sand. The law formalized the already-existing Ottoman system, preventing the state from having to take away from the Muslim minority its generations-old sharia courts. The Muslims, Druse and Christians were not predisposed to give these up for a new Israeli jurisprudence. This wasn’t accomplished by Israeli racism – by and large the Druse are admired by Israeli Jews, but still demanded their own courts – but by a cultural commitment of Israel’s religious groups to maintain their traditional collectivist identities.

I neglected to note – and this is important for Weiss to consider – that I am no supporter of the rabbinate. I have done everything in my power, including Jerusalem Post editorials, interviews, etc., to advocate against Israel’s established rabbinate. My own father is a Reform rabbi. My wife’s father is an Orthodox rabbi. When we married in Israel in March 2008, it was in a wedding unrecognized by the state of Israel because neither of our fathers (who together officiated) were recognized rabbinate officials. We refused to invite a state rabbi to our wedding. Our legal standing is through a quickie civil marriage conducted in a Baltimore courthouse a few weeks earlier.

I don’t like this system. I think the “state church” of Israel has utterly politicized Israeli spirituality and collectivized Israeli religious identity. Without getting into the real suffering the haredi-controlled rabbinate is causing to agunot and would-be converts, the greatest tragedy is that the politicization of religiosity has had the effect of making Israel a spiritual wasteland. I yearn for the day – and I teach in a high school program and premilitary academy to bring it closer – when Israelis look to American Jews to discover how to construct authentic personal spiritual journeys.

But for all that, it’s simply not the reality to claim that the system was born primarily as a means of preserving Jews from religious intermarriage. That misunderstands the motivations of the early years of the state, and ignored some of the most basic identity structures of Middle Eastern religions – where religion is more akin to tribes than to the individualistic confessional faiths of the United States.

Consider: How much is the Sunni-Shi’ite split in Iraq to do with theological difference, and how much tribal? Are the Christians of Syria merely a confessional difference, or a collective tribal one? Or the Druse in Israel, who have an intermarriage rate estimated at 1% despite commonly dating Jews during our shared military service, and who live in their own villages apart from the Arabs or the Jews – are they primarily an American-style religion or a Middle Eastern tribe?

Weiss doesn’t prove anything by quoting the date of the passage of the law and then Sand’s ideological interpretation. He must show not that the Jews of Israel identify collectively like all other Middle Easterners, but that their personal status laws go beyond that and are motivated by a special prejudice against minorities. Since he can’t prove it, he interprets it.

I grew up with these attitudes in American Jewish life. They’ve faded a lot since I was a kid. But in Israel they were memorialized in law. Later Sand writes that even the liberal secular Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak said, “A Jewish state is one in which Hebrew Law plays an important part, and in which the laws of marriage and divorce of Jews are based on the Torah.”

Here is Weiss’ main mistake: believing that at their core Jews are the same in the US and Israel, and therefore the values of one can easily judge the other. American Jews have transformed into a Protestant-style individualistic faith. Israelis, perhaps 60% of whom hail from the Muslim world, have transformed the notion of Jewishness into a Middle Eastern religion-affiliated national collective that draws more from Muslim world identities than from Zionist ideology.

This is a vast gap in the basic structures of identity, and the two communities (which are together 80% of all Jews) will have to start learning about each other in order to begin to understand each other better. In the meanwhile, it’s not legitimate to offer cheap and easy indictments of the other community. Israelis are fond of saying that American Jews are either disappearing or living on “borrowed time.” Both are false, and come from an Israeli misunderstanding of what it means to live one’s Jewishness as Americans. Some Americans (still a small minority) believe Israeli Jewish nationhood is somehow a warping of the essentially religious nature of Jewishness. True, it’s a deep change, but no deeper than the American spiritualization of Jewish identity. After all, the shtetl Jew was not merely an autonomous citizen with a spiritual affiliation. He was part of a feudal corporate system that identified Jews as a distinct group with distinct living areas and separate legal obligations.

Jews have been many different things in different periods, and both Americans and Israelis are new kinds of Jews. Neither is “wrong.”

As for Aharon Barak, again, this is a twist of the truth. Some of the influence of Halacha in Israeli law includes, for example, viewing the prostitute as the victim, and the pimp and client as its perpetrators. That Israel draws from millenia of Jewish legal thought is not bad, as long as it is subject to oversight over the question of equality and the Basic Laws.

There are more responses to my claims in the comments on Weiss’ site, but I can’t respond to them because I’m awaiting approval as a commentor. These include the claim that what I wrote about “German ethnic origin” in article 116 of the German constitution isn’t there at all. This is a strange complaint. Google it. It’s there. (Search “right of return” on Wikipedia to find it easily.) It refers to East European German-speakers in the post-war period who had nowhere else to go – but had never been citizens of Germany.

Another comment responds to my statements about Israeli marriage law by bringing up the debate over Palestinian family reunification across the Green Line. This is an important question – the Supreme Court decided it on one vote – and I’m happy to get into it if that’s necessary. It continues to be debated to this day. But it has nothing to do with marriage law. Can we stick to one topic at a time?

Related posts:

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…the Associated Press just ran a story on how Israelis and Lebanese share a tradition of taking their vows to Cypus in order to circumvent confessionalist strictures.

Not only that, but in this neighborhood, the AP reports, Israel and Lebanon actually are progressive for recognizing the Cyprus marriages.

As Ron notes, this kind of cross-border reportage makes AP invaluable:

No one does across the border, collaborative stories better (see the pile of co-bylines at the end.) I remember the thrill of AP, about 1993, introducing IM technology into its content management system; and then, of instantly conversing with staffers in Beirut that until then had been little more than bylines to me.

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1. On marriage and racism
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3. Anti-Israel, with a dash of intellectual pretense

I called Sand “intellectually lazy” for claiming that Israel can not be both an “ethnocracy” and a democracy. After all, most of the world’s democracies are, in fact, nation-states with specific ethnic identifications, and many (such as Greece, Ireland and England) even have official state religions. Israel is the average, and non-ethnic universalist democracies like the US and France are the exception, I pointed out.

Weiss retorts:

You learn something new every day! But do those places not let you marry people of other ethnic backgrounds? I was shocked at the Sand lecture to learn– I’m always the last to know– that Jews and Palestinians can’t marry each other in Israel.

Once again, Sand is playing his listeners for fools.

The basic fact is true, but the social, historical and moral reality behind it is missing. There is no law against intermarriage.

Here’s what Sand failed to explain: Israel inherited Ottoman personal status law which places personal status – marriage, divorce, burial, etc. – in the hands of religious establishments. This means Jews can only marry in a rabbinic court, Muslims must marry in a sharia court, Catholics only within the auspices of the Catholic Church, Druse in their system, etc.

To my knowledge, Israel is the only Western democracy that grants its Muslim citizens their own government-funded sharia courts.

All these religious hierarchies are under the secular – and venerated – High Court of Justice, which makes certain that their rulings are in keeping with Knesset legislation.

It’s not that intermarriage was outlawed, but that all the communities want their own system for their own people. Is this weird? Yes. Is this profoundly Middle Eastern? Absolutely. But is it discrimination?

It also hurts the Jews. Conservative and Reform rabbis cannot officiate at an Israeli wedding, even between Jews, because they are not government-paid members of the state rabbinate.

Worse yet, all Protestants, not to mention 300,000 Russian-speaking non-Jews, can’t marry even among themselves because the legislation never got around to recognizing them as official religious groups with their own court system.

This isn’t because anyone cares whether two Protestants marry each other, but because Israel’s constitution is incomplete and its legal system is a hodge-podge of Anglo-Saxon precedent, Continental regulations, Ottoman sharia-inspired tradition and Israeli innovation since 1948.

It’s a mess, it badly needs reform, but it’s not founded on discrimination.

The good news – and the reason this legal structure still exists – is that it is ignored by both Israeli citizens and courts. Since official marriage is so difficult in this country, judicial precedent over the decades has come to recognize full marital rights for unofficial “common law” marriages. Just living together grants rights as comprehensive as alimony, adoption and inheritance.

In having the most medieval marriage law in the West, Israel’s judiciary has created the most post-modern. Gays who cohabitate owe each other alimony when they break apart. Indeed, Israeli judges in recent years have begun to scale back this process out of fear that they were judicially “marrying” people who only wanted to live together.

It’s thought that one-third of Israeli marriages, including intermarriages, are “common law” – in Hebrew, yeduim betzibur.

To cut to the chase, Israel is complex, strange, Mideastern and imperfect. And Shlomo Sand? He’s the worst kind of liar, the kind that specializes in half-truths.

Related posts:

1. Thank you Tony Judt
2. Yet another conversion disgrace by Israeli officials
3. On marriage and racism

Philip Weiss

Of all the events I’ve covered surrounding Jewish identity and Israel in the last year, none has given me so much pleasure as the lecture last night by Shlomo Sand at NYU on the Invention of the Jewish People.

Weiss’ joy surrounds Sand’s new history of the Jews – a history that rips away the old “Zionist” narratives and replaces them with a new story: the Jews are Khazars and Yemenites and Bergers. There’s no such thing as “Jewish peoplehood.” Israel is founded on a lie.

I’m all for intellectual stimulation, and I love new theories based on new historical evidence. Unfortunately, in Sand, I got neither. As Weiss points out:

Sand offered very little by way of evidence. You will find that in his “boring” book, he said. This was an aria not a chalktalk.

Will you? Or will you find more historical surmising based on partial records and incomplete theories? Elsewhere, Weiss reports Sand saying that:

…at the supposed time of the Exodus, the Egyptians also controlled Canaan. The kingdom of David and Solomon was not a kingdom at all, but a small settlement around Jerusalem.

I have a professor cousin who believes that King Solomon didn’t even exist. Sand isn’t radical in his historical reconstructions. In fact, his “discoveries” are really just run-of-the-mill and johnny-come-lately academic theories.

His error is not in the theories themselves, but in pretending to hold newly-obtained truths that spectacularly affirm his preexisting politics. It is this sleight-of-hand effort that transforms this project – like Weiss’ own pretense to scholarship – from honest critique to mere political hypocrisy.

How else to explain the confusion reflected in Weiss’ account. He quotes Sand:

“I don’t deny Jewish identity. I’m not fighting against someone’s identity. There is identity of homosexuals. They are not a people. We are composed of a lot of identities.”

Shlomo Sand

“I am anti-racist. And an anti-anti-semite,” he said. “But look at me, do you think I hate the Jewish?” More devil eyes flashing. “I don’t hate myself… I hate the Jewish people? But that doesn’t exist. How can I hate something that doesn’t exist?”

So the Jewish identity he is emphatically not fighting against – does not exist. Did you get that?

You can argue Jewish nationhood is antithetical to, oh, Jewish religiosity (as do some haredim) or universal liberal values (as do some on the radical left). But faced with millions of people that believe that they personally constitute a Jewish nation, does it make any kind of sense to say it doesn’t exist?

Identities are decided by the people who hold them, not by the politicized professors who oppose them.

Leaving identity behind, we then have another example of what I am beginning to call the anti-Israel “errors-by-labeling.” Here, Sand creates a definition of democracy which, well, removes much of the free world from the democratic camp.

When Sand said that Israel was not a democracy, and a Zionist called out, “It is a flawed democracy,” Sand bellowed. No: a democracy is founded on the idea that the people are the sovereign, that the people own the state. That is the first principle of a republic going back to Rousseau. Liberalism and civil rights are not the core. Yes, Israel is a liberal society. It tolerates Shlomo Sand’s heresy, for instance, and puts him on TV. But it is a liberal ethnocracy.

His theories on Ashkenazim carrying Khazar blood – interesting. His theories on Jewish roots of the Palestinians – fascinating. But this? This is just stupid.

Sand's book

Israel’s “ethnocracy” is the standard among democracies, not the exception. In fact, only two states share Sand’s view that the state belongs to the sum of its residents or citizens: the US and France.

A good example is in a survey of the “rights of return” of various democracies – a right granted to non-citizen “affinity Diasporas.” Such a “right of return” is not the province only of Zionists (or of the future Palestine). In fact, it is shared by these fine states:

There is Germany (link is PDF), whose constitution, in article 116, recognizes something called “German ethnic origin” as a grantor of automatic citizenship.

India allows “Indians by descent” easier access to full citizenship than other residents.

And Finland, which despite defining itself as a “state of all its citizens” still grants special naturalization rights to ethnic Finns who have lived for centuries in areas under Russian or Czarist sovereignty.

Lithuania’s constitution is explicit (article 32.4) that “Every Lithuanian person may settle in Lithuania” – a right granted not to absentee citizens (which would be obvious), but to non-citizen ethnic Lithuanians.

How about democratic Armenia? Article 14 of its Constitution states: “Individuals of Armenian origin shall acquire citizenship of the Republic of Armenia through a simplified procedure.”

Or Bulgaria, whose constitution (Article 25.2) states: “A person of Bulgarian origin shall acquire Bulgarian citizenship through a facilitated procedure.”

Or Greece, whose constitution (article 108) decrees that:

The State must take care for emigrant Greeks and for the maintenance of their ties with the Fatherland. The State shall also attend to the education, the social and professional advancement of Greeks working outside the State.

It was Greece that granted automatic citizenship to Ukrainians after the fall of the Iron Curtain merely because they belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Even Israel’s national religion – something I have written against often – is not unusual among the democracies. Both Greece and Ireland place a single national religion above others and give it constitutional status that has made it synonymous with national identity. Thus Greece’s constitution assures us that:

The prevailing religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ. The Orthodox Church of Greece, acknowledging our Lord Jesus Christ as its head, is inseparably united in doctrine with the Great Church of Christ in Constantinople and with every other Church of Christ of the same doctrine, observing unwaveringly, as they do, the holy apostolic and synodal canons and sacred traditions.

Similarly, the Preamble to Ireland’s constitution:

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,
We, the people of Éire,
Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial,
…
Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.

And on and on. If Israel’s “ethnocracy” is not democratic, we need a whole new set of words. Because then neither is India, Japan, all of Eastern Europe, Ireland, Germany or Mexico.

What do we learn from this latest example of intellectual laziness? Beware unfounded labels, and call out those who use them.

Related posts:

1. Thank you Tony Judt
2. NYT politely calls Shlomo Sand a liar
3. On marriage and racism

Judge Goldstone

Sixty-one percent of Jewish-Israeli respondents—compared to only 22% of the Arabs—answered that they know what the report’s main conclusion is. Among the Jewish interviewees who responded that they are aware of the report’s main conclusion, there was almost total unanimity (93.5%), that the report was biased against the IDF.

So do I:

Does it matter if his tribunal was not, strictly speaking, “judicial” if everyone everywhere believes that its judgments have judicial status? Does it matter that in acting upon ostensibly “objective” criteria for deciding the “lawfulness” of Israeli and Palestinian actions during Cast Lead, Judge Goldstone created a text that would only ever serve as ammunition against Israel?

Do judges have a responsibility to take into account the ramifications of their decisions and actions?

Goldstone is distraught over the UNHRC’s utterly biased final decision. Yet he himself could not take on the original HRC mandate for his commission until, as he says, it was changed from the original biased resolution.

“Are you in the habit, Judge Goldstone, of accepting commissions whose political agenda you must first expunge so that the mandate meets the most elementary standard of fairness?”

Related posts:

1. In defense of Judge Goldstone, sort of
2. Amnon Rubinstein on the humor in Goldstone
3. Landau: 'How Goldstone shut down debate within Israel'

At the end of the day, the many movements and ideals, sometimes contradictory, that together made up the Zionist movement in the last century constituted a profound shift in Jewish identity and communal organization. Obviously such a vast project would inspire opposition. In 1948, just after the murder of six million in Europe, only 600,000 Jews lived in Israel. Even factoring for the refugees stuck in British transit camps, Zionism had failed to convince the masses.

The remains. Old Jewish cemetery in the shtetl of Medzhybizh, Ukraine (Wikipedia)

Zionism’s “triumph” was caused by a horrific human tragedy, and stands as a devastating moral rebuke to 20th-century Europe and Islam. The Jews deserve their state whether or not they are being massacred. But it sure makes it tougher to argue against Israel’s legitimacy when this country harbors the last major civilization of Jews left alive in the Eastern Hemisphere.

(The exception to this Zionist experience, of course, is the English-speaking world. But that’s a whole ‘nother story beyond the purposes of this post.)

So it is with that caveat that I want, bechol zot, to note a well-written intellectual curiosity on the radical anti-Zionist Jewish Left – published Saturday on the Mondoweiss website. (Scroll down to “And one last obvious point” for the essence. Continue below for the fun argumentation.)

The framework of this critique of Zionism is, predictably, a glowing review of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People by Jack Ross.

It begins:

Last Spring, I asked my father over dinner why it was such an outrageous proposition, leaving aside whether or not true, that Judaism is solely a matter of confession, as opposed to an ethnonational identity.

What follows this pointed question are reflections on the allegedly anti-historical lunacy of seeing the Jews as anything but a religious faith. Sand is brought in as a man who, in Tony Judt’s words:

normalized Jewish history. In place of the implausible myth of a unique nation with a special destiny – expelled, isolated, wandering and finally restored to its rightful home – he has reconstructed the history of the Jews and convincingly reintegrated that history into the general story of humankind. The self-serving and mostly imaginary Jewish past that has done so much to provoke conflict in the present is revealed, like the past of so many other nations, to be largely an invention.

He did this by “discovering” that Jewish history is the history of the Khazars, who became Ashkenazic Jewry, and not that of a primordial Jewish people expelled from Judea into a two-millennia exile.

The Khazar Khaganate ca. 820 (Wikipedia)

Here ends the recap, and begins the exposition of The Problem. (Notice the dramatic capitalization.)

The Problem is that this entire discourse is essentially political, not academic, and thus disjointed. The pretext of academic rigor is intended to corroborate already-existing political views.

Taken on an academic level, this is appalling. It is one thing to do the wonderful work of tracing Ashkenazic Jewry to the Khazars – an unproven but fascinating hypothesis. It’s also nothing new. But it’s quite another thing to develop a theory of unproven historical events structured around contemporary political need. Yes, the Khazars may be antecedents to Ashkenazi Jewry. But does that theorizing prove, for example, that they are the only antecedents?

The need to disprove the Zionists leads Sand – or at least the public debate he has attempted to launch – to ignore the fact that the Exile is Ashkenazi Jewry’s own origin story. It was not invented by the Zionists. And there are good reasons (like this one and this one) to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In determining that Jewish nationhood is “invented” – which is a fancy way of saying the blindingly obvious truth that if all Jews everywhere stopped feeling like a nation they would stop being one – Sand’s allies are not pursuing intellectual truth, but trying to deny Jewish nationhood the authenticity it needs to stand up to the “natives” in Palestine.

Take, for example, this paragraph extolling the Khazars:

Lost to the Torah of Jewish nationalism then is the history of a great cosmopolitan and religiously pluralist empire the size of India or Brazil, which lasted four times longer than the Hasmonean Kingdom of less than a century (about as long as, on its present course, the State of Israel) – which thrived no less in the darkest of the dark ages and, as the nexus of trade between East and West for several centuries, came remarkably close to giving birth to capitalism almost a thousand years before the English and the Dutch.

Did you catch the jibe about Israel’s coming destruction? Is that really the lesson to be learned from the Khazar example, which in any case is here exalted far beyond any real historical knowledge? Is the professed Jewish identity of Israelis so utterly false it is destined to collapse faster than the House of Hashmonai?

The Palestinians sure think so, and it drives a lot of the impulses that have turned their national movement into such a tragedy.

But the anti-Zionists’ own question actually works against them. If identities are “invented” – as, of course, they are – can “Jewishness” be something other than what the Jews believe it to be? So if a majority of Israelis say they are Jews, and that their Jewishness is a nationality, are they wrong?

And is Palestinian identity also invented, or does the deconstruction of national identification apply only to Jews? After all, walk through Jenin and you’ll notice different skin colors. In Hebron half the population is still called “Yemenite.” The word Palestinian did not denote an Arab, but a Jew, when it was used in the New York Times circa 1948.

Sand, of course, wants to be considered not a member of the “Jewish” nation, but of the “Israeli” one. This is completely kosher, I suppose, and entirely his choice, but he does owe us the intellectual honesty of noting that this is an ideological project, an essentially political campaign which has yet to convince most Israelis. And after winning over all the Jews, Sand will have an even harder time convincing the Israeli Arabs that they share a “nation” with them.

And one last obvious point that still needs to be made, because it is on this score that this particular breed of anti-Zionist fails most profoundly (the haredim are much more serious, believe me): acknowledging the complexities of identity formation.

It isn’t at all clear what makes up Jewishness even in Judaism’s inner definitions. Some of the earliest halacha already envisioned a tribal collective that can be joined through religious conversion. Anybody got a name for that in English?

And things have changed a lot since Persia and Babylon. In Israel, with a majority of Jews hailing from the Muslim world (or, since they are all mixed now, a majority of their grandparents), Jewish identity has become structurally more tribal and, well, Arab. (Consider: the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite in Iraq is tribal first, theological a distant second. Now think about the gap between Israeli Jews and their neighbors.) In America, meanwhile, things became very American: individualistic, spiritual, obsessed with personal autonomy…Protestant.

And so we face a Jewish world today with radically different, but still collectively agreed-upon, structures of identification – two worlds with different historical experiences and fundamentally different ways of identifying. It hardly needs pointing out that these two kinds of Jews, Israelis and Americans, make up over 80% of all Jews currently living.

So to get back to Ross’ initial question to his father, a question his father was unfortunately unable to answer satisfactorily: what are the Jews? The answer, I’m afraid, is “Who knows? The Jews sure don’t.” Or better yet: “It’s complicated. The Jews are many things all at once, not always in agreement with themselves.”

And here comes the really damning question that the budding anti-Zionist must answer: Why does that complexity, the difficulty to pin down a single “truth” about something as deep and shifting as human identification, give someone the right to “discover” that the core identity of one of the major living Jewish civilizations is “untrue?”

Related posts:

1. Thank you Tony Judt
2. NYT politely calls Shlomo Sand a liar
3. On marriage and racism

“Israel’s position prompted me to challenge it on a series of issues in order to dwarf Israel vis-à-vis Egypt and its culture. [I am declaring] a culture war against [Israeli] tyranny, rather than against the culture itself.”

Yep, that’s Egypt’s Culture Minister for the past 22 years, Farouk Hosni – a man in charge as much over the censorship of culture as over its development in that autocratic state.

According to Hosni, America, Eastern European states, Japan, and “the Jews” undermined his candidacy. But a special place in his heart is reserved for Israel, it seems:

On Friday, United Arab Emirates newspaper al-Khalig published another interview with Hosni, where he stated that he is reverting to his traditional stance against normalization with Israel. The Egyptian minister softened his rhetoric ahead of the UN vote, ostensibly in a bid to boost his chances.

Poor UNESCO. How will it survive without him?

UPDATE: The New York Times quotes others who wonder what UNESCO was thinking even considering this guy:

“How can a 22-year minister of a country where culture, education, health and science have regressed to the Dark Ages become the head of Unesco?”

Related posts:

1. Go ahead, pressure Israel
2. Israelis have something against Goldstone
3. The Kurds love Israel, want their Jews back