Israel

Mossad Hits - The End of an Era?

Dina Kraft — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:21:33 +0000

Israel celebrated Purim this week, the Jewish version of Carnival or Halloween, and the streets have been full of young and old in masks and costumes. But of course the talk of the country is about the real masks of disguise in the form of wigs, chunky glasses, baseball hats and even tennis whites that alleged Mossad agents donned to dodge closed circuit cameras and other prying eyes in Dubai in order to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a top Hamas official.

A month after the successful hit which Israel is widely presumed to be behind (but which Israeli officials will neither confirm nor deny, maintaining a policy of purposeful vagueness when it comes to the world of cloak and dagger) the passport photos of a surprisingly large band of alleged operatives have been released. The Dubai police say as many as 27 agents were sent to their glittering city to kill off al-Mabhouh, a founder of Hamas’ military wing who was considered Hamas’ liaison with Iran in the weapons smuggling business into Gaza.

The storied Mossad (check out their website) is one of Israel’s last holy cows and most of the public here was not sorry to see someone like al-Mabhouh’s out of the picture. But what is being asked is whether such escapades (presuming again that it was a Mossad hit) are worth it - especially in a technological age which make getting a clean get-away a near mission impossible.

The alleged operatives in the al-Mabhouh assassination were taped by hotel closed circuit television cameras. And new passport technology such as those using biometric systems including retina scans to confirm a person’s identity will make such efforts even more of a challenge.

As Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv write in a piece on the website of The Atlantic:

“While these security measures were designed to foil terrorists and international criminals, they also serve to hamper counterterrorism agents-the good guys using undercover methods to chase the bad guys. And when it comes to the undercover method of assassination, no espionage agency has more expertise than Israel’s Mossad.”

And then there is also the diplomatic fall-out. The passports used were a mix of British, French, Irish, German and Australian, some forgeries, others perhaps stolen. Those governments are now demanding answers. Many of the passports belonged to duel citizens of those countries living in Israel, pulling back a bit of the curtain on how the Mossad operates abroad.

Such operations are obviously extremely risky but theoretically score points in the psychological warfare department and cause some operational damage as Hamas arming efforts will be slowed while it grooms someone new to replace al-Mabhouh.

But with arguably short-term results and a new level of risk for their agents being exposed by the latest technology, the Mossad and other intelligence agencies may have to reconsider the efficacy of such assassinations.

In the meantime, Israelis are being banished from Dubai. The UAE has no ties with Israel but Israelis who were duel citizens of other countries had previously been allowed in. No longer, announced Dubai’s police chief this week.

Officials will be able to sniff out Israelis without too much trouble boasted Gen. Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim:

“It is easy for us to identify [Israelis], through their face or when they speak any other language.”

I guess that means Zohan will not be dropping by.

Israel’s Undiplomatic Top Diplomat

Dina Kraft — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:16:51 +0000

Israel’s top diplomat is anything but, well, diplomatic. After almost a year in office Avidgor Lieberman appears to be in the habit of lighting fires in one of the world’s most flammable neighborhoods.

Last week he helped fuel a war of words with Syria that his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu worked quickly to quell.

And just two weeks before that his ministry’s efforts to humiliate the Turkish ambassador about a Turkish television show that depicted Mossad agents as child killers collapsed into an embarrassing row.

In the Syrian flap, Lieberman made his threats to the Syrian government personal, saying, “In the next war not only will you lose, you and your family will lose control of the government.”

Lieberman, leader of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party (literal translation, the “Israel is Our home” party) has made his name in Israeli politics as the resident tough guy. He immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet republic of Moldova as a teenager and he retains a thick Russian accent and Sovietesque sternness. His campaign in last year’s elections questioned the loyalty of Israel’s Arab citizens, he’s said Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak “can go to hell” and last spring he publicly clashed with the U.S. over Jewish settlement building during joint press conference with Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps most significantly Lieberman recently gathered all 150 Israeli ambassadors posted around the world in Jerusalem to give them a run-down on his new “national pride” foreign policy.

“The time of groveling is over … we will not turn the other cheek,” Lieberman was reported as telling the diplomatic corps. He said now was the time to restore Israel’s national honor by answering every criticism with a counter-attack. Diplomatic niceties should be secondary to standing up for Israel, he told the ambassadors.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu continues to send Defense Minister Ehud Barak abroad to represent Israel instead of the controversial Lieberman especially when it comes to talking about peace efforts. And back home in Jerusalem it’s Barak that does Israel’s talking with U.S. Mideast Envoy George Mitchell. The obvious snub is one in which Lieberman has been uncharacteristically — and diplomatically — mum.

[State Department photo by Matty Stern U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv / Public Domain]

The Big Chill: Obama and Israel

Dina Kraft — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:37:20 +0000

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a ten-month freeze of settlement building last week and promptly fell down a big fat rabbit’s hole of agitation with settlers and fellow members of the Israeli right-wing, including those in his own party. But the move was made not with an eye towards placating them. Rather it was Netanyahu’s version of an olive branch to the Obama White House which has made the call for a blanket settlement freeze a centerpiece of their Mideast policy.

The long back and forth on the issue has strained Israel-U.S. ties.

The Yesha Council, the umbrella body of the settler movement, is advertising its planned mass rally against the freeze next week with a symbolic ice pick breaking through the tundra. Underneath are various slogans including one calling the freeze “shameful capitulation to American demands.”

The Palestinians for their part are not impressed by the freeze. They blast it as a hollow posturing because it does not include a cessation of Jewish building in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem or a stop work order for some 3,000 construction projects in advanced stages of building.

But whether the freeze is a fig leaf gesture or a turning point in Netanyahu’s policy, Israelis seem to view Obama warily, fearing in this eternal game of “taking sides” in Mideast diplomacy land, that he favors Palestinian interests over those of Israel.

Last week Cabinet member Limor Livnat, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, was quoted as calling the Obama White House “a terrible administration”.

In the past there were unseemly whisperings reported that Netanyahu (frustrated at the time that the Americans did not give him more a fuzzy embrace for publically declaring is support for an eventual Palestinian state) had given to calling Obama’s senior Jewish aides Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod “self-hating Jews”.

A pair of surveys earlier this fall found that a mere 6 percent of Jewish Israelis polled viewed the Obama adminstation as “pro-Israeli”.

Meanwhile, Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. wrote this week in the daily Yisrael Hayom against overly harsh rhetoric from Israeli figures against Obama lest the focus on the “real” problem of Iran be lost.

“Our target audience at the moment is not Ramallah but, rather, Washington,” he wrote. “ We should also remember that the U.S., under Obama, and Israel under Netanyahu, have unprecedented cooperation on security matters. With the clock hands of the Iranian nuclear threat ticking quickly ahead, anyone who criticizes the prime minister’s latest decision (on a settlement freeze) and anyone who has harsh criticism, sometimes overly harsh, of the American administration-should also take this fact into account.”

(White House Photo)

Jerusalem’s Sabbath Wars

Dina Kraft — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:04:08 +0000

In Israel they are called “The Sabbath Wars”. Lately the battles have been back in full force. But this time the familiar scene of bearded black-cloaked ultra-Orthodox Jews facing off against police squads has transplanted itself from the downtown streets of Jerusalem to the parking lot of the city’s Intel factory.

This past weekend, for the second Saturday in a row, some 3,000 ultra-Orthodox did battle at the plant to protest the international computer chip giant’s employment of Jewish workers over the Sabbbath, saying such employment desecrates the holy day and violates Jewish law.

Ultra-Orthodox protesters chanted, “Shabbos, Shabbos” (Yiddish for the Sabbath) and called the policemen “Nazis” and - gasp - “Lefties”. The confrontations are being waged by an extreme sect within the ultra-Orthodox movement even after a deal was reportedly struck with more moderate religious elements not to employ Jews for Sabbath shifts at the plant.

Part of the irony of the protests (aside from the fact that a deal was already made that should answer the issue) is that most of those protesting do not work, living instead off government subsidies to study Torah. The presence of Intel in Jerusalem (it also has offices and a large chip-making factory in the country) is considered an important economic boon for the city which has seen its economy shrink and its secular population flee in recent years, partially in response to the rise in number and influence of the city’s most religious residents. Jerusalem, for all the talk of its political and historical importance by successive governments, now ranks as Israel’s poorest city.

Uri Regev, a reform rabbi who now heads Hiddush, an organization that promotes religious freedom and equality, told The Faster Times that one of the most disturbing factors of the protests is that “they threaten the continued operation of the Intel plant in Jerusalem, though it is one of the most important sources of employment and income for the city and the country.”

Writing yesterday in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest daily, senior columnist Nahum Barnea asks the question being asked by many secular Israeli Jews lately of the ultra-Orthodox about the series of confrontations they have been launching recently, of which the Intel plant is one example.

He suggests the answer is the larger battle over the very character of Jerusalem itself, “whether it will be a city that is friendly to its visitors, pluralistic, a city that offers residents work and leisure, or whether it will be Bnei Brak (an almost exclusively ultra-Orthodox city). Since this is the capital, the battle goes beyond the interests of the residents of the city. It belongs to Israeli society as a whole.”

“The Israeli government speaks in high-flown terms about Jerusalem, but does very little for it. In this, it is no different from previous governments. In 1977, when the Likud replaced the Labor Party in the leadership of the state, then-mayor Teddy Kollek said, “We have gone from hostile rule to foreign rule.” What would he have said about the silence of the current government? He would probably have said that we have gone from foreign rule to no rule at all,” Barnea continues.

And Rabbi Regev, whose NGO recently did a survey of Israeli public attitudes on such issues adds, “It is unfortunate for Judaism and for Israel, that the debate over the nature of Shabbat in the modern democratic and Jewish State of Israel is dominated by the Ultra Orthodox. We should all respect Shabbat, as a key contribution of Judaism to world, as a day of rest and nourishment of the soul. The discussion as to the desirable boundaries and accommodations should invole the labor unions, the trade and commerce associations, secular, Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews alike (and non-Jewish Israelis as well). Shabbat is far too important to be left to the extremist religious fundamentalists alone.”

His colleague, Shahar Ilan, argues in an op-ed in today’s Haaretz newspaper that the ultra-Orthodox must urgently be acculturated into Israel’s workforce and their children taught subjects other than Torah study and their sons and daughters drafted into the army like other young Israelis. Otherwise, he warns darkly, nothing less than Israel’s future is at stake.

Without such changes, he writes, the phenomenal growth of the ultra-Orthodox population, “is liable to bring down Israel’s economy and society in 20 years, turning Israel into a third-world country with an atrophied economy and increasing disrespect for human rights. In the most pessimistic scenarios it could lead to a partition of the state, or to civil war. It has happened in other places. It could happen here.”

Ilan’s words may sound a bit alarmist, but as the Sabbath Wars threaten to rage on, driving a further wedge in the ever growing secular-religious divide here, one is reminded that Israel’s fate is not just about its relations with the Palestinians and its neighbors but the relations between its own citizens whose worlds increasingly seem to spin in entirely different orbits.

The Israeli Terrorist from Miami: An Appetite for Palestinian and Jewish Victims

Dina Kraft — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:08:19 +0000

He is being called the “Jewish Terrorist” in the Israeli media, this brooding, dark-eyed, alleged killer who was known as Jack Teitel, who lived in Florida for most of his life before immigrating to Israel nine years ago. Here he went by his Hebrew name of Yaakov and is suspected of launching a murderous spree even before he formally made Israel his home (begging the question of how he was allowed to immigrate, but that’s another story …)

First hearing the news I thought: another American-born terrorist in Israel?

My immediate association was with Baruch Goldstein , the Brooklyn-born doctor who gunned down 29 Muslims worshippers in the middle of morning prayers in Hebron in 1994. I remember hearing first word of the attack while sitting in the dining hall of the kibbutz where I was then living and studying Hebrew. At first there was no word that Goldstein was American, but the crime seemed so out of place, even in this violence-soaked region. It seemed so, well, American, I thought to myself, in that “going postal” shooting up nameless, faceless strangers kind of way.

Teitel, 37, is suspected of two murders of Palestinians and string of other murder plots, including placing bombs near the homes of a prominent Jewish Israeli left-wing professor and a Jews for Jesus family. He allegedly carried out his first attack - the murder of a Palestinian taxi driver - during a visit to the country in 1997 , and now authorities suspect he may behind other unsolved crimes. Caught pasting leaflets praising the deadly shooting attack in August at a gay and lesbian center in Tel Aviv, he is being investigated for possible links to that crime as well, although he is not considered a prime suspect.

Living in a West Bank settlement, the father of four children, Yaakov has allegedly busied himself amassing an arms cache in his yard and creating a makeshift bomb-making facility inside his house.

Back to the American riddle — true, the sense that there are disproportionate amount of American-born Jews active in the most radical fringes of right-wing Israeli circles is hardly substantiated. But it was the arrival of the American rabbi Meir Kahane to Israel in 1971, an ultra-nationalist who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and whose political party was banned by the Knesset for being racist, who helped plant the ideological seeds of the extremism we see today.

Goldstein, for example, was a devout student of Kahane. And Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburgh, considered one of the more extreme ideologues in today’s ultra-nationalist scene, immigrated to Israel from St. Louis. (He even spent some time in jail after cheering on Goldstein’s murderous act in Hebron in an essay). He features in a series I wrote about Jewish extremism.

Granted, it’s only a hunch, but there is the feeling, speaking to some of the more hard-line American-born settlers one encounters in the West Bank, that they have possibly transferred some of their American-nurtured prejudices to the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. There is the sense that some have cut-and-pasted memories of tensions with African-Americans they may have experienced growing up in the streets of New York City, for example, with their newfound Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank. In Hebron I even remember seeing grafitti once on a stone wall that read, “Arabs = Blacks”.

Arriving to the isolated West Bank settlements amid terraced hills of olive groves and sweeping views, it is not only American-born Jews who get bitten with fever that they are part of some grand, historical and even mystical scheme. It’s a feeling shared by native-born Israelis too who move there too. But I cannot help but think that American born and raised Jews find especially appealing the image of the Messianic Marlboro Man, tsit-tsit (religious fringes) flapping under a flannel shirt, a gun slung over their backs. They feel empowered by the sense that they are no longer the pale-faced Jews of the Diaspora but are now something akin to the “Lords of the Land” (to borrow the title of a recent book on the settlers).

This Jack/Yaakov Teitel is being described as someone who acted alone in his attacks and planned attacks. But in an interview with Israel Radio yesterday, Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service (basically Israel’s FBI), said that even such loners need a spiritual or ideological base in order to thrive.

“The term ‘errant weed’ is very problematic because even errant weeds grow where they have water. They grow where the temperature and humidity help them grow,” he said, noting that Teitel lived in an ideological West Bank settlement where messianic ideas are embraced even if violence is not. “Terror grows in a place where ideologically it has a source of food.”

The Longest War: The U.N. Gaza Report and the P.R. Battle that Lingers

Dina Kraft — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:46:44 +0000

Last winter’s war in the Gaza Strip lasted just less than a month. But as the wording of a resolution approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council Friday only to condemn Israel while endorsing a report that says both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes shows, the real battle for public opinion has only just begun.

To date Israel has refused both international and domestic calls to investigate its army’s conduct in the war, saying it acted in self-defense in response to continued rocket-fire on its citizens by Hamas and did its best to avoid civilian casualties.

If both sides continue to refuse to investigate their own actions in the fighting the report says the U.N. Security Council should send the whole matter to the International Criminal Court. For Israel, this means the possible chilling new reality of its soldiers and top leaders brought up on war-crime charges.

Israelis have a long history of dismissing the United Nations as being inherently against them. (With that bright exception of affirming it’s existence in 1949). In Hebrew the acronym for the U.N. is pronounced “Oom” and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, famously dismissed the international body back in the 1950s as a pack of biased nonsense with the phrase, “Oom, Schmoom”. The refrain is often repeated here, perhaps no more than lately as Israeli officialdom has turned a stiff back to the report overseen by renowned South African jurist Richard Goldstone.

Interestingly, Goldstone himself criticized the wording of the resolution for only publically censuring Israel and not Hamas.

Israeli President Shimon Peres (the country’s elder statesman and perhaps the only Israeli figure with any real clout on the international stage) said yesterday of the report, “We do not need outside judges. We will not allow a majority that is hostile to Israel to judge us.”

But even as the Israeli government continues to say the report is one-sided and negates Israel’s right to self defense, there has been an internal debate brewing about how Israel might succumb and find a way to investigate the workings of the army’s actions and government policy in the war whose fighting left nearly 1,300 Palestinians dead, both militants and civilians in addition to 13 Israelis, nine of them soldiers and four civilians.

Nahum Barnea, a senior Israeli commentator wrote in Friday’s Yediot Achronot newspaper that the “lethal combination” of the report’s adoption in Geneva coupled with Israel’s current crisis with friend-turned-possible foe Turkey, “has led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the following conclusion: Israel can only permit itself to have short wars, very short ones. The longer the war, the tougher the battle on the day after: the battle for the long term, for public opinion around the world.”

Israelis Cheer on Tarantino’s “Basterds”

Dina Kraft — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:07:29 +0000

Quentin Tarantino winced as the young Israeli journalist took the microphone and asked what must rank as one of the heavier questions he’s ever encountered: “How do you relate to the Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust personally?”

“How do I answer that?” Tarantino replied, his eyes darting around the press conference at a seaside Tel Aviv hotel on the eve of the Israeli premiere of “Inglourious Bastereds”.

Referring briefly to his visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial the previous day, he answered tersely: “I think I respond to it as every human being should.”

In Israel, where Holocaust memory casts its longest shadow, the question was just one of many on the topic lobbed at Tarantino. The Holocaust-focused quizzing came in marked contrast to the absence of such questions at the press conference at Cannes Film Festival where he introduced the movie.

It is this ingrained Holocaust consciousness that colors Israelis’ alternating repulsion, delight, and fascination with the movie hailed abroad as “Kosher Porn,” a fantastical universe of Jewish revenge on the Nazis. It’s been playing to packed theatres and in some cities seats need to be ordered at least a day in advance. The audiences heartily cheer, clap and laugh through their cinematic ride with a band of Nazi-scalping U.S. Jewish soldiers alongside the accompanying parallel plot of a beautiful, blond Jewess plotting her final revenge.

Critics offered up both praise and bitter words: Maariv newspaper’s Meir Schnitzer went as far as comparing Tarantino to David Irving, the infamous Holocaust denier. A divide was also seen among the regular movie-going masses.

“It’s all the talk at the water cooler, and the differences of opinion are incredible,” said Omri Marcus, a senior comedy writer at an Israeli television show, describing the scene at his office.

For Marcus himself and many others it was ultimately the real history of the Holocaust that made the movie so difficult to digest.

It was a pale, shaken-looking Erez Makovy, 31, who emerged from a darkened 500-seat theatre, filled to capacity. The crowd had gone silent watching the carnage-filled climax in which the Nazi leadership is devoured by flames and automatic gunfire. But it broke into loud applause when Brad Pitt’s swash-buckling U.S. lieutenant character carved his trademark swastika into the forehead of the S.S. officer who serves as the film’s villain in chief.

“The movie left me with a bitter taste in my mouth,” said Makovy, a musician who was disturbed by the audiences’ cheers.

His friend, Itai Zangi, 27, a music producer, however, was among the laugh-out-loud, clapping masses. “It’s nice to be on the winning side, for once. I liked that he (Tarantino) turned things totally upside down.”

Nearby, also contemplating the experience, was Hila Schuman, a 32-year-old biologist. “It’s a bit too over-the-top. For Israelis, it’s hard to take a story out of the context we know so well. So we’re left asking: Is this a parody? Is it serious? … Or is this just what revenge would look like on LSD.”

Tarantino, in this, his first visit to Israel, said he had been anxious to see how an Israeli audience would react. His ”Kill Bill” movies have done poorly here, and his last film, “Death Proof,” vanished just a week after hitting the screens.

On stage at the premiere at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, the lanky Tarantino pumped up the audience waving his hands and shouting out, “So are you guys ready to kills some Nazis? Are you ready to f-ck up some Nazis? Let’s get this mother f–cker started.”

Leading the anti-cheering squad has been Schnitzer, the film critic for Maariv.

“It’s not that ‘Inglorious Basterds’ denies the Holocaust. It’s not that movies cannot make up history. It’s simply that Quentin Tarantino has created yet another slasher film devoid of any morality, and this time he does it while ignoring the Holocaust.”

Schnitzer, himself the son of Polish Holocaust survivors (and named after a half-brother killed by the Nazis), writes that the amoral universe the film inhabits allows for “the creation of a reality where a Nazi is a cultural, polite, graceful and royal figure, and the Jews are barbarians, scalping men of the jungle. It’s a ruse that [David] Irving could be proud of.”

In part for budgetary reasons almost all Israeli Holocaust-related films have focused on the stories of survivors after the war, not the real-time action and events of the war itself.

“Israelis have a very specific reaction to films dealing with the Holocaust … as in what is permissible and what isn’t,” said Shmulik Duvdevani, the film critic for the website Y-Net, noting the special sensitivities here surrounding the Holocaust and its portrayal.

“Jews are to be portrayed as victims and movies are to tell stories of extermination, not comic ones, but tragic ones and Tarantino does the opposite, taking everything to the most radical extreme,” said Duvdevani.

Uri Klein, the movie critic for Haaretz wrote that he preferred Tarantino’s approach, absurd and fictionalized as it was, to what he views as the sentimentality of Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.”

It’s a film Klein says he enjoyed for its vitality and even the problems it raises, explaining, “Tarantino is not Jewish, and I have a sense he does not know what it means to be a Jew. Maybe this is why it’s easier for me to accept what he does in the movie.”

Perhaps its also part of why the lines to see it are so long at Israeli movie theatres.

In Israel Anticipation, Prisoner Releases, and Video Tape

Dina Kraft — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:20:49 +0000

It’s been over three years since an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit was bundled across the border in a cross-border raid by Hamas and other militant groups. For all practical purposes it was as if the earth swallowed him up into the darkness of an underground Gaza cell. There had been no photos, no Red Cross visits and no signs of life except for two letters heavily dictated by his captors. But today, in the care of German mediators, a two-minute forty second video tape arrived in Jerusalem showing him looking healthy and lucid.

He read a brief statement with an uncontainable smile on his face.

In exchange for the video, Israel agreed to release twenty Palestinian women prisoners. The exchange could signal the beginning of a larger prisoner swap in which hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, who are currently in Israeli jails, would be swapped for Shalit.

Israelis, who like to think of themselves as part of one big family at times like this, were deeply anxious to see the video.

Shalit came alive again on their television screens. Wearing pressed dark green army fatigues, he sat on a white plastic chair and read from the written statement while holding the September 14 issue of a Palestinian newspaper.

“I read the paper in order to find information about myself and hope to find information of some kind that will tell me of my release and my return home soon. I have been hoping and waiting for a long time now, for the day I’ll be released,” he said. “I hope that the present government under Benjamin Netanyahu will not now miss the opportunity to close the deal and that, as a result, I shall be able to realize my dream at last - and be set free. I want to send my regards to my family and tell them that I love them and miss them very much and wish for the day that I see them again.”

As his voice slightly trembled, he said that he was being treated “excellently” by the military wing of Hamas.

Shalit and his quiet, mild-mannered family have become the stand-in for every Jewish-Israeli family in a country where all Jewish citizens face mandatory army service. It was Gilad Shalit who was captured on that June night in 2006, but for Israelis who are ever cognizant of their national vulnerability (some would argue obsessed by it), they know this could have easily been their son or daughter.

Much copy has been written since Shalit’s capture speculating on his state of mind and his physical well-being. His family and friends described Shalit as a shy, introverted young man (who recently celebrated his 23^rd birthday in captivity), and Israelis have now received their first small glimpse at him in captivity.

The prisoner issue is one that hits home for Palestinians, too. Many Palestinians have, or had in the past, a relative in an Israeli prison. A prisoner swap, which would most likely include the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit, would be considered a major victory. For Israelis, the price tag of such a deal which would see prisoners convicted of planning or carrying out deadly attacks against scores of Israelis spurs debate. Some argue that such deals only encourage further kidnappings. And indeed, shortly after the tape was released, Hamas vowed to capture more Israeli soldiers in the future.

Israeli television stations interrupted their usual Friday afternoon broadcasts to play and replay the video tape of Shalit, and a tight knot of friends, supporters and media surrounded the Shalit’s home in a small village near the Lebanon border.

As the radio plays John Lennon’s “Imagine” and other bittersweet songs, Palestinians and Israelis wait to see what will happen next.

Hope for Mideast Peace or Just Another Photo-Op?

Dina Kraft — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:59:06 +0000

Last week I was walking into a Tel Aviv mall and a security guard wearing wire-framed glasses and an Uzi strapped to his chest, pointed to my pregnant belly, smiled a perfectly pleasant smile and asked, “Male Soldier or Female Soldier?”

“Excuse me?” I said, thinking I had perhaps gotten my Hebrew mixed up and had misunderstood the customary question: “Boy or Girl?”

He repeated himself and I mumbled something about “hopefully neither” and walked off feeling numb, repeating the age-old hope parents living in this region tell themselves, “Peace will come by the time my children grow up.”

But, as the name of a panel in an upcoming conference hosted by Israeli President Shimon Peres sums up, “Will there ever be peace in the region?”

And so I join in the collective sigh with war-weary Israelis and Palestinians looking on across the world today to the posh surroundings of New York City’s Waldforf-Astoria Hotel where yet another attempt to jump-start peace talks will take place in the form of a tri-lateral U.S-Israeli-Palestinian summit.

We’ve seen it before: the flags, the blinding glare of television cameras, a smiling U.S. president, lots of talk of peace, and little hope for it on the horizon.

The glumness on this side of the pond is not just a case of sour grapes. It’s a feeling of “much ado about nothing” malaise that comes from over a decade of splashy starts with neither side feeling terribly convinced that this time, the “other” side will understand their needs, deadlocked in the political version of a miserable marriage.

The Palestinians insist this is no resumption of negotiations as long as Israel holds out on promises of a full-on settlement freeze in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the Palestinians to shout to the hilltops that yes, Israel is “the Jewish state” and to provide for what he terms the “natural growth” of the settlements.

Aluf Benn, editor-at-large at Haaretz writes that Israelis should lower their expectations and adopt the U.S. step-by-step approach to peace efforts.

And so we look on as Americans scramble to make today’s meeting more than just a photo-op. Different options to make that happen are being floated: an announcement from President Barack Obama that peace talks are officially being re-launched or perhaps that another international peace conference is in the work.

But neither side trusts each other.

And both Israelis and Palestinians remain at odds from within. The Palestinians remain divided both geographically and politically between Hamas rule in Gaza and Fatah control in the West Bank.

Israel’s peace camp tries to speak out but have been marginalized and Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition members play down any significance to any progress being made in the summit or talks in general, envisioning a long comfortable road ahead for themselves, absent of concessions or meaningful dialogue.

I think about the security guard at the mall, still chafing at his cheerful militarism and insensitivity. But I know then when it comes to the question of peace in our time, tragically he’s probably the realistic one.

(Photo by Grant Neufeld)

“Lost Jews”: The Campaign That Backfired

Dina Kraft — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:15:13 +0000

Who knew that young Jews who “marry out” would end up being depicted as missing persons, their faces and names splayed on Xeroxed fliers and posted on electrical poles and trees? Add some haunting flute music, a shot of train tracks with obvious Holocaust overtones and you have a shock and scare video brought to you by the Israeli government that was pulled this week after a critical hailstorm of “Oy Veys” from around the Jewish world.

The thirty-second video, broadcast in Hebrew and only in Israel, was yanked just six days after its release. It was meant as a promotional ad for the program Masa (Hebrew for journey) , a joint project of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental body and the Israeli government, designed to bring Diaspora Jews to Israel for extended trips to Israel of up to a year in a bid to boost their Jewish identity and connection to Israel.

“More than 50 percent of young Jews abroad assimilate and are then lost to us. Know a young Jew abroad? Call Masa and strengthen their connection to Israel so they won’t go missing. Masa, a year in Israel, a love that lasts a lifetime,” intones the somber voice-over.

In the early days of Zionism the very notion of a Diaspora was strongly negated. The only place and future for the Jewish people was to be the Land of Israel. This is where Jews would be able to thrive and live freely, at last masters of their own fate. Over the years that ideology, offensive to many Diaspora Jews has softened. That it found its modern-day resurgence in this ad campaign took many by unhappy surprise.

A letter of complaint to Natan Sharanksy, chairman of the Jewish Agency by Rabbi Gilad Kariv, chairman of the Israeli arm of the Reform movement and Paula Edelstein, the head of the Jewish Agency’s immigration department read: “It presents the Israel Journey program as a defensive measure against an existential threat to the future of the Jewish people - namely, assimilation. It uses harsh visual means that provoke some very hard associations, and implies a strong contrast between life in Israel and in the Diaspora. It presents the latter as illegitimate and as leading Jews to lose their identities.”

“We regret to say the campaign crudely sets back the effort to build up a dialogue between the State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora on principles like respect, openness and partnership. The campaign engenders harsh feelings among both leaders and ordinary Jews, as they feel that the same organization that should encourage openness and dialogue chooses to present its activity in a contemptuous and patronizing manner,” they wrote in the letter.

In announcing his decision to pull the plug on the campaign, Sharansky issued a statement that said while he still believed that a strong connection between Israel and the Diaspora helps fight assimilation, he was mindful of the sensitivities. “The PR campaign should bring the Jews of the Diaspora closer and not alienate them.”

“I have always believed that not only should Jews of the Diaspora be exposed to an Israel experience, but that Israeli Jews should be exposed to the Diaspora experience so as to understand better the meaning, depth, challenges and sensitivities that Jewish life in the Diaspora poses.”

But those who created the campaign defended it, saying it tapped into very real concerns that the Jewish world outside of Israel is vanishing due to intermarriage and assimilation.

The figures the video cites are probably drawn from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, sponsored by the Council of Jewish Federations, which found the intermarriage rate among American Jews was about 52% annually.

But in the United States and elsewhere, intermarriage does not necessarily spell the end of Jewish identification and affiliation. Benjamin Harman, the product of such a marriage, writes in the Israeli daily Haaretz : “Forget how the video implies that any mixed-marriage automatically leads to a completely gentile life for the couple and their children, it sends a clear message to the large, proud community of Diaspora Jews who came from mixed unions and see themselves as no less a part of the nation of Israel, that they are, by and large, missing persons floating adrift in a sea of gentiles.”

“The video is objectionable not only in its superficial and ignorant appraisal of the results of intermarriage or the fruits of a Jewish life lived outside Israel, but also because of what it says about how Israel views itself in regard to Judaism,” he continues. “In this perspective, Israel is the possessor and only true adjudicator of the religion, the owner and true realization of a Jewish life lived.”

Meanwhile the Jewish High Holidays approach. Where will a good number of Israeli Jews be spending Rosh Hashana and even Yom Kippur? At the beach.