Heavenly appeals

'Incitement" and "a call for genocide" were the labels used by Palestinian politicians to describe the supplications of Shas mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in his latest Saturday night sermon.

While outlining customs during Rosh Hashana dinner - such as dipping an apple in honey - to petition God for a sweet, successful new year, the nonagenarian halachic authority added a personal prayer: "May our enemies and hate-mongers vanish, Abu Mazen [PA President Mahmoud Abbas] and all those evildoers be lost from the world, may God smite them with the plague, them and the Palestinians, evildoers and Israel-haters."

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's chief negotiator, said in response, "Is this how the Israeli people are preparing for peace with the Palestinians?"

It was glaringly disingenuous of Erekat to attempt to transform the intemperate public plea for divine intervention - not a call to action - by an elderly spiritual leader who represents a fraction of public opinion into the definitive stand of the Israeli people, not to mention a call for genocide.

However, Erekat did hit on an important point: How is the Israeli leadership preparing its people for peace with the Palestinians? And by the same token, how is the PA laying the groundwork for peace with Israel?



PRIME MINISTER Binyamin Netanyahu, who rightly distanced himself Sunday from Yosef's comments, made a major step toward peace back in June 2009 when he broke with Likud's platform and publicly advocated a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Seen as the only way to keep Israel both Jewish and democratic, a two-state arrangement enjoys broad-based support among Israelis.

While Netanyahu has yet to articulate his vision of final status, he has repeatedly shown a willingness to engage in direct negotiations with the PA without preconditions. He even took the confidence-building step last November of imposing an unprecedented 10-month construction freeze on new Jewish homes in the West Bank, despite the unpopularity of the move within part of his coalition.

By contrast, Abbas is barely able to justify his consent to participate this week in US-sponsored direct talks with Israel before his public, which is still being fed a relentless diet of Israeli delegitimation in the PA media he controls. Just last Wednesday in Ramallah, PA security authorities violently stifled a demonstration organized by the National Conference Against Direct Talks, a coalition consisting of hundreds of political factions, organizations, institutions and figures from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The PA president has lost his people's confidence for the "crime" of caving in to US and Israeli demands to launch direct negotiations without preconditions, after having held out for months for a complete building freeze in both the West Bank and east Jerusalem as a prerequisite for talks. To save face and to assure his people that he would not sell them out, Abbas announced on Sunday that the Palestinians would be entering the talks based on a declaration made in March by the Mideast Quartet calling for a complete building freeze as a first step toward dismantling "occupation."

A US-funded campaign on PA-controlled TV, radio and billboards to garner support for talks, which ideally should be preparing the Palestinians to recognize Israel as the national state of the Jewish people that has the right to live in peace alongside an autonomous Palestinian state, will instead attempt to justify the PA's highly unpopular willingness to enter direct negotiations at all.



A BELLWETHER of Palestinian political sentiment was provided on August 19, in a PA-sponsored funeral attended by Abbas and his Prime Minister Salam Fayyad that glorified Amin al-Hindi, one of the masterminds of the September 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the official PA daily, noted that Hindi was "one of the stars who sparkled... at the sports stadium in Munich," according to Palestinian Media Watch.

At the end of the ceremony, the paper reported, Abbas and others present read the opening sura of the Koran for the "elevation" of Hindi's "pure soul."

This prayer for Hindi's soul, delivered by the political leader of the Palestinians, failed to receive the media coverage enjoyed by Rabbi Yosef's supplication. Whether it was heartfelt or a necessary bow to the public opinion he has failed to encourage sufficiently toward moderation, the implications of Abbas's heavenly appeal are almost certainly far more central than that delivered by the Shas leader to the prospects of success in the direct talks.

Boycotts and legitimacy

Ever since the 1970 Cameri Theater debut of Hanoch Levin's Queen of the Bathtub, a scathing satire of prime minister Golda Meir's policies in the territories, Israeli theater has been on the cutting edge of left-wing political activism. It came as no great surprise, therefore, that over the weekend at least 50 actors, playwrights and theater directors publicly announced they would boycott a new theater house in Ariel, the largest settlement in Samaria.

They were organizing in the wake of media reports last week that Ariel's cultural center, slated to be finished in November, would be included on Israeli theater's circuit of repertory venues.

The managements of Habima, the Cameri, Beit Lessin, Beersheba and Khan theaters, which all receive state funding, have vowed to ignore the boycott and bring "the best of Israeli theater to Ariel." But they also said they would "respect the political opinions of their actors."

In response, the former director-general of the Education Ministry, MK Ronit Tirosh (Kadima), and the Chairman of the Knesset House Committee, MK Yariv Levin (Likud), have initiated legislation that would deny taxpayers' funding for artists who refuse to perform beyond the Green Line, and they claim to have the support of nearly 40 lawmakers. Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat has also noted that state-supported theaters have a special obligation to perform wherever taxpaying Israeli citizens live.

But manipulating government funding to influence artistic expression is a slippery slope. Who determines which political opinions are legitimate and which are not? Better to allow artists full freedom of expression, including the right to boycott a particular venue, than to centralize control in the hands of politicians with clear political agendas. Long gone are the days of David Ben-Gurion when Israeli artists were "enlisted" or "mobilized" to promote what were perceived as the interests of the Jewish state.

In fact, a relatively large percentage of Israeli theater budgets come from private donations and ticket sales. In 2009, only 26 percent of the Cameri's annual budget and 20% of Beit Lessin's were from state and municipal funding, including subsidizing of senior citizens' tickets. This means theater productions are highly dependent on market forces and popular opinion.

Actors, playwrights and directors who have joined the boycott might be applauded by left-wing activists here and abroad who advocate boycotts to coerce Israel into potentially irresponsible "peace" agreements with the highly problematic Palestinian leadership (rather than leaving the complexities of peacemaking to the duly elected government). But they stand to lose popularity among many, probably most, of their fellow Israelis who have a better grasp of local political realities - including the fact that Israel anticipates extending sovereignty to Ariel under any peace accord - and who may wish to punish them at the box office.



SOME WOULD argue - as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did at the opening of Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting - that Israel's position is especially sensitive.

"The State of Israel is facing a delegitimization campaign from various sources across the globe," he noted. "The last thing we need is a boycott attempt from within Israel."

Though Netanyahu ruled out infringing artistic expression, he did hint that state funds should be denied to those who boycott the settlements.

However, by providing funding to all forms of artistic expression, including kinds that are hypercritical of its policies, Israel sends out a strong message to its detractors. Israeli democracy is self-assured enough not only to permit freedom of expression, but even to help fund the salaries of artists who choose to use their freedom to criticize Israeli policies - to criticize within the limits that democratic societies impose for their own protection, and that the current protest does not cross.

The danger to Israeli democracy as a result of stifling opinions deemed to be illegitimate is much greater than the possible negative ramifications of allowing divergent opinions to compete for legitimacy on the free market of ideas. Those with true intellectual honesty will recognize this. Those who don't will be prejudiced against Israel no matter what we do.

By boycotting Ariel, actors, directors and playwrights are forfeiting the opportunity to enter into dialogue with their fellow Israelis through the medium of art. They are also - as is their right as citizens of a Jewish and democratic state -conveying an utter lack of sympathy for a group of people who share with them a common destiny, despite all the politics that divides them.

Ahmadinejad's miscalculation

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad purports to know: Israel, he reiterated for the umpteenth time last week, is "too weak" to strike militarily at Iran, and "lacks the courage" to intervene decisively to thwart Teheran's steady progress toward the nuclear bomb.

The Iranian president is mistaken. Neither weak nor lacking in courage, Israel is, rather, temperate, humane and pragmatic. It is also, above all, resolute on the matter of its survival.

In 1981 it struck, reluctantly, at Iraq's reactor at Osirak because it determined that Saddam Hussein, if allowed to achieve the means, was capable of getting out of bed one morning and deciding, in defiance of any rational analysis of costs and benefits, to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. In 2007, it hit Syria's nascent reactor, again without hubris, clinically preempting a dire threat from a ruthless enemy.

Israel has thus far chosen not to militarily challenge the mullahs' march to the bomb - chosen, that is, not to follow its proven doctrine of preventing enemies from attaining the means to achieve its demise - because, quite simply, it has not felt the imperative to do so.

Leaders and the public alike here have been horrified by years of apparent international indifference to the escalating threat posed to the free world by the Iranian program. Iran, after all, has made no secret of its determination to remake the world order in its fundamentalist, religiously skewed, brutal, misogynistic image. A nuclear weapons capability would help nicely. Ahmadinejad himself will soon be setting off on his scandalously permitted annual journey to the UN General Assembly, there to advise the great powers, led by the United States, to repent or be damned.

Of late, the US and Europe have led a slightly more robust campaign of economic sanction, and Israel, with one eye on the Iranian nuclear clock, has quietly seethed at the wastage of time while publicly applauding efforts at pressure that it fears may be too little, too late, But, to date, Israel has not felt that the moment of truth had arrived.



THE LAST few days, however, have seen a flurry of reports suggesting that Israel has either now made up its mind that it will have to strike at Iran, or that it is on the point of reaching such a decision. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The Atlantic recently and basing himself on what he said were interviews with some 40 current and past Israeli decision-makers, asserted "a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July."

Goldberg went so far as to claim that the Pentagon has already ordered US commanders in this region not to shoot down Iran-bound Israeli aircraft they may encounter in their airspace.

The selection of Yoav Galant to succeed Gabi Ashkenazi as chief of the General Staff has also been widely ascribed, at least in part, to the relevance of Galant's ostensibly bold and confident persona in the Iranian context. "Considering that the coming year is expected to be a year of decisions," our own military correspondent Yaakov Katz wrote on Tuesday, "Defense Minister Ehud Barak felt that he needed someone who would be able to make the decision to use the IDF if the government were to decide to give the green light for such an operation."

Iran is not an easy read for intelligence analysts. Would it strike at Israel if it got the bomb? Would it seek to avoid an Israeli response by supplying the capacity to a non-state actor, that would strike in its stead? Or would it "merely" use a nuclear capability to remake the regional balance of power to Israel's drastic detriment?

There are no simple answers to these questions. And at the same time, the consequences of Israeli military intervention in Iran are close to unthinkable. For a start, in contrast to Saddam, Iran could both rebuild and retaliate.

Nevertheless, Ahmadinejad is showing an acutely dangerous potential for miscalculation. And since this newspaper's coverage (which featured at Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's rambling Beirut press conference earlier this month) is doubtless brought to his attention, let us make this clear:

If Israel were to determine that sanctions had failed, that Iran was about to acquire the capacity to carry out its declared goal of Israel's demise, and that only Israeli military intervention could prevent a second Holocaust, our leaders would have no choice, however reluctantly, but to act. We did not gather the majority of the Jewish nation here, in a sovereign entity that was revived tragically too late to save our millions from the Nazis, in order to sit helplessly by as a new genocidal enemy closed in on our destruction.

Foreign children, flawed comparisons

Defense Minister Ehud Barak's call for the cabinet to reconsider the expulsion of about 400 children of foreign workers has once again aroused debate which touches on the very foundations of the Jewish state.

However, it is not questions of ultimate meaning that seem to bother the defense minister. He is not challenging the morality of the expulsion from a Jewish perspective, nor is he attempting to grapple with claims that Jewish continuity is at risk if foreign workers are permitted to stay in Israel and intermarry. Barak appears to be more concerned with impressions.

"The sight of police raiding the homes of the workers and forcibly removing children, of prison cells full of families, and of Interior Ministry inspectors forcing Hebrew-speaking children onto planes would cause irrevocable damage to all of us, both domestically and abroad," he said Wednesday

Impressions are important. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is acutely aware of this. He has recently come under fire for ordering the deportation of 700 Roma, or Gypsies, to their original homes in Romania and Bulgaria.

Critics concerned with impressions have likened Sarkozy's deportations to the "roundups" - Les rafles - perpetrated by Vichy France during World War II as part of the systematic destruction of French Jewry. The Nazis killed 200,000 Roma during the war, according to US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates.

In Israel as well, the Holocaust has featured prominently in the debate over deportation. Noah Flug and Alex Orly, who head an umbrella organization of Holocaust survivors, said that the cabinet decision to deport the 400 children and their families was liable to conjure up memories of "selection," the process used at Nazi camps to decide who would live and who would die.

"We who experienced the Holocaust, were witnesses to the death camp selection and the separation between children and their parents... cannot bear to see pictures of miserable children who are not responsible for their situation and remain indifferent," wrote Flug and Orly in a recent letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.



YET THE "impression" that Israel's and France's deportations are in any way comparable to the Holocaust is utterly baseless. France's Roma and Israel's foreign workers are not being sent to concentration camps, heaven forbid, or even to a war zone or to abject poverty. They are simply being required to return to their relatively stable, peaceful countries of origin.

This explains why both in France and Israel the expulsions are so popular. A poll conducted for the daily Le Figaro on August 6 found that 79 percent of French favored the crackdown. A Ynet-Gesher survey found that 67% responded positively to the government decision to deport 400 of 1,200 children of foreign workers.

The French should feel shame for collaborating with the Nazis in carrying out the destruction of French Jewry along with thousands of gypsies. But comparing the present controversies over immigration policies to the Holocaust not only muddles the debate, it also cheapens the memory of the Shoah.



DEPORTING THE 400 children is wrong, but not because of the negative "impression" it would give - as if Israel were xenophobic or racist. It is wrong because these children have fully integrated themselves into Israeli society. If allowed to stay, these children will serve in the IDF, join the workforce and become productive, patriotic Israelis. In a sense they will have undergone an Israeli "conversion." Maybe, they will even choose to undergo a conversion to Judaism as well, to feel fully a part of the Jewish state.

In parallel, clear immigration directives need to be adopted to ensure that Jewish continuity is protected - to ensure that, henceforth, Israeli policy is clear and is efficiently and fairly implemented at both points of entry and points of exit.

President Shimon Peres put it nicely when he called Thursday to let the children stay.

"[They] were born in Israel, speak Hebrew, and feel Israeli. Deporting them is out of the question," he said.

Ultimately, it is as simple as that.

Haredi prurience off the tracks

Jerusalem's residents might soon find road relief. The endless roadwork, the tedious traffic jams, the unremitting cacophony, dust and inconveniences that have plagued the capital in recent years appear to be drawing to a close. The city's perennially postponed light rail system successfully made its first full trial run Monday. By April of next year, God willing, it will be up and running.      However, the excitement of this historic event, the fruition of two decades of planning and eight years of building, was dampened somewhat by comments made by Yair Naveh, CEO of CityPass, the transportation consortium that built and will operate the light rail. Responding to a reporter's question, Naveh acknowledged that his company was considering the option of gender-segregated mehadrin cars, in which women - through a combination of social pressure, explicit prodding and even occasional physical violence - are compelled to sit at the back.      "The train was built to serve everyone... to create alternatives for everyone," noted Naveh. "It would not be a problem to declare every third or fourth car a mehadrin car."      Sources in the joint state-municipal body overseeing the project suggested in response that CityPass concentrate on relieving Jerusalem residents' suffering by finishing the light rail once and for all, rather than busying itself with what they termed irrelevancies.      In fact, CityPass's position on mehadrin cars is immensely relevant - from a financial perspective. Naveh, a businessman, is acutely aware that the economic success of the light rail depends on the support of the capital's growing haredi community.      Jerusalem is Israel's most populous city, with 774,000 residents, according to data released in June by the Central Bureau of Statistics. Almost 150,000 people, or 30 percent of the Jewish population, are haredim aged 20 or older. In the city's Jewish elementary schools, 64% of those enrolled are haredi. And since they tend to use public transportation more than any other segment of the Jewish population, a haredi boycott of the light rail would be a devastating, perhaps lethal, blow to the economic feasibility of the light rail.      The question is whether haredi prurience, disguised as meticulous adherence to the dictates of Judaism, should be allowed to dominate Jerusalem's public spaces even when this prurience has the backing of market forces.          MUCH HAS changed since Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (1895-1986), the most important halachic authority of America, permitted men to commute to work on subways and buses because "unavoidable and unintentional physical contact is devoid of sexual connotations." Feinstein memorably noted that "it is idleness that makes a man prone to lascivious thoughts" (Even Ha'ezer 2:14).      In recent years, the haredi community has adopted increasingly zealous and extremist positions, especially with regard to questions of female modesty - tzniut. Women's physical proximity, no matter how perfunctory, has been transformed by the sex-fixated, and apparently idle, minds of some haredi men into an insurmountable spiritual stumbling block.      The inner dynamics of the haredi community allow these men to leverage their influence. One cannot be too righteous, while moderation is viewed with disdain as a weakness. The result has been an unrivaled push for the radical revamping of the public domain.      Meanwhile, haredi women, duped into a false consciousness, are convinced that the "right" forced upon them by men to sit at the back of the bus is a type of empowerment. In this post-modern feminist narrative, the haredi woman becomes a "partner and beneficiary" to "family integrity" by creating "temptation-free" comfort zones, as though a man's fidelity can in some way be compromised by riding on a bus. Should the onus be on women to banish themselves from man's sight, and not on men to look away?          HUNDREDS OF thousands of Jerusalem's residents who are not party to this collective madness should not have to suffer when they board the light rail.      Feinstein's ruling was presumably based on his high regard for the integration of men and women into the workforce as productive members of society, which, he understood, entailed normative social contact, such as boarding a light rail car that contains members of both sexes. Feinstein also knew that religious extremism, instead of fostering modesty and chasteness, could lead to an obsessive preoccupation with sex and that this preoccupation is a function of too much free time.      The cure, according to Feinstein, was not to force women out of sight, but to go out and get an honest, productive job. How right he was.

Frittering away the freeze

Talks between Israel and the Palestinians have not yet begun, and already Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is threatening to stop them.      In a letter sent Sunday to the Quartet - the US, the EU, the UN and Russia - Abbas warned that if construction continues anywhere beyond the Green Line, he will pull out of negotiations. "Settlements and peace are parallels that don't meet," Abbas wrote. "If Israel continues with settlement construction, we will withdraw from talks."      The PA president's letter is clearly a response to the severe criticism directed at him by Palestinian political and organizational figures for agreeing to return to direct talks without preconditions. But it also highlights a major political dilemma that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will be forced to face very soon.      It would be political suicide for Netanyahu to agree to maintain the "once-only" 10-month new-construction freeze he instituted throughout Judea and Samaria last November, not to mention extending it to Jewish neighborhoods in parts of east Jerusalem annexed after the Six Day War, as the Palestinians demand. It would also send out the false message that Israel might be ready to evacuate all Jewish settlements beyond the 1949 Armistice lines.      Deputy Premier Dan Meridor's suggestion to limit the freeze to areas located outside Jerusalem and outside the major settlement blocs Israel intends to retain via land swaps under a permanent accord - Ariel, Ma'aleh Adumim and the Etzion settlements - has a much better chance of receiving broad support, and is much more realistic.      Except Abbas has now made clear that it won't be sufficient.            THE PRESENT building freeze has hit settlers hard. Most of the 492 housing unit "violations" of the freeze, as documented by Peace Now, were in consensus cities such as the haredi Modi'in Illit, which had 180 such violations. This town of 45,000, which has the highest fertility rate in the country, is located just across the Green Line.      Additional violations were in the Jerusalem suburb of Givat Ze'ev (40), and in Ariel (22), Ma'aleh Adumim (21) and Kfar Etzion (20), which are all expected to be annexed under any future two-state solution.      These exceptions have done little to alleviate the major "natural growth" housing shortage at many settlements. At the beginning of the year 301,200 Jews lived in Judea and Samaria, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, about two-thirds of them in the large settlement blocs. And population growth there is running at a brisk annual rate of 5 percent, over double Israel's general population growth rate of 1.8%.      Young families living in cramped conditions are anxiously waiting for the freeze to end so they can build homes, while veteran settlers want to expand existing homes to accommodate their growing families. And this is happening at a time when Israel proper, within the Green Line, is experiencing a major housing shortage of its own.      Ruling throughout the West Bank, which is populated by well over two million Palestinians, is not an Israeli interest. The demographic threat to a Jewish majority is obvious. And Israel has no desire to police a population that bitterly views itself as occupied.      Over four decades have transpired since Israel, pre-empting an attack by the combined armies of the Arab world in the Six Day War, ended up controlling territory, previously held by Jordan, that had enormous Jewish historical significance. During this time, certain "facts on the ground" have been created in Jerusalem and the large settlement blocs, while the Palestinian strategic response to Israel's presence has ranged from stubborn intransigence to murderous resistance.      Now, after 18 months of energetic US diplomacy, the Palestinian leader who claimed prime minister Ehud Olmert's generous peace offer left gaps that were "too wide," is finally being dragged back to talks aimed at the ostensibly shared goal of a peaceful two-state solution.            ABBAS PURPORTS to be ready for the kind of territorial swaps that would help facilitate an accord by formalizing the integration of the settlement blocs into Israel, along with the Jewish east Jerusalem neighborhoods where Israel already claims sovereignty. Yet the PA president's demand for a blanket building moratorium that makes no distinctions between such territories and other, isolated settlements indicates ongoing intransigence.      Abbas has already frittered away nine months of the building freeze - an unprecedentedly encouraging context for a genuine attempt at peacemaking. Now he is vowing to walk away if the freeze is not merely maintained, but expanded - to the very areas Israel reasonably insists on retaining.      It's hardly an optimistic harbinger for the talks ahead.