Love of the Land: [Security:Sovereignty balance] Rahm Emanuel: Now is not the time for a new Mideast peace plan

[Security:Sovereignty balance] Rahm Emanuel: Now is not the time for a new Mideast peace plan

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
21 April '10

[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:

Here it is. Read it carefully:

"start to make the hard decisions to bring a balance between the aspirations of the Israelis for security and make that blend with the aspirations of the Palestinian people for their sovereignty"

Here is what one suspects Emanuel meant: You Israelis are correct that a sovereign Palestinian state will compromise the security of the Jewish State. So I am not going to debate you on this issue. I am not going to argue that jumping off the roof may kill you. But you have to "blend" your desire not to die as you slam into the pavement and the need to create a sovereign Palestinian state. By the way - our bond is unbreakable but youdamn well better jump off the roof.

But since Emanuel introduced the idea that there is a need for balance then here is an Israeli interpretation: a sovereign Palestinian state is a step towards the destruction of Israel. This isn't the view of some small minority. The polls shows that both in Israel and among American Jews the overwhelming majority recognize that the Palestinians see the "two state solution" as no more than a step towards the "final solution" - Israel destroyed.

The "hard decision" is for the Palestinians to back down for sovereign state and switch gears to "autonomous state", with Israel making more "hard decisions" to maximize the ability of such an "autonomous state" to thrive. This can mean spending, for example, more money on security technology to further expedite Palestinian commerce.

Interestingly, a good part of the "nation building" activity in the current two year PA program jibes with "autonomous sate" building as much as "sovereign state" building.]

========================================================

Rahm Emanuel: Now is not the time for a new Mideast peace plan
By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz Correspondent Last update - 18:57 20/04/2010
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1164182.html

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said in an interview on Monday that the time has not come yet for a new U.S. Mideast peace proposal.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: [Security:Sovereignty balance] Rahm Emanuel: Now is not the time for a new Mideast peace plan

Love of the Land: For the Real Meaning of Israel Independence Day

For the Real Meaning of Israel Independence Day

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
19 April '10

Jews all over the world will celebrate by the Jewish calendar the 62nd anniversary of Israel's independence this year on April 19. It has become traditional on such occasions to focus almost entirely on the events of May 1948, when a nascent Jewish state, authorized by a U.N. two-state partition vote the year before, faced half a dozen Arab armies intent on destroying it. In the ensuing battles, that Jewish state managed to survive and lay the foundation for a return of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land.

This year, however, I would argue that while reminiscing about the events of 1948, it would behoove us to focus more on 1967, when Israel again was under siege and marked for extinction by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

Why 1967 more than 1948? Because an exclusive focus on 1948 tends to abet a misleading impression that the events of that year permanently guaranteed Israel's independence. They did not.

Instead, Israel has had to fight for its independence without much respite for the last 62 years -- and at least three times has faced imminent threats of extinction. Such threats, while not imminent today, nevertheless continue into the present , as Iran with its surrogates (Hamas and Hezbollah) now seeks to pick up the mantle of Egyptian President Nasser.

To get a full sense of Israel's repeated and continuing challenges to confront enemies bent on extinguishing its independence, the Six-Day War of 1967 offers a perfect paradigm, if fully and properly recalled. It's all too easy and misleading, when examining 1967, to concentrate only on the totally unexpected and lightning-fast speed of Israel's victory. That's just the triumphant finale. What also needs to be recalled is what Israel actually faced in June 1967, in the days leading up to the Six-Day War.

(Read full article)

Please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.

Love of the Land: For the Real Meaning of Israel Independence Day

Love of the Land: Not quite free

Not quite free

European democracies are spending tens of millions of euros to manipulate Israeli society and politics


Gerald Steinberg
Op-Ed/JPost
13 April '10

The writer is president of NGO Monitor and professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University.

Sixty-two years after the rebirth of sovereignty following 2,000 years of exile and powerlessness, the Jewish state is still struggling for real independence. Beyond the genocidal threats from the Iranian leadership and its proxies, European democracies are spending tens of millions of euros, pounds and krona to manipulate Israeli society and politics. This largely hidden European money that funds so-called “civil society” organizations, like B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Ir Amim, the Public Committee Against Torture, Peace Now and dozens more, is undermining Jewish sovereignty and the right to determine our own future.

With such large sums at their disposal, self-appointed leaders of these foreign government-funded nongovernmental organizations (appropriately known as GONGOs) often have greater influence than elected officials. They often set the political agenda, promote their goals in the Knesset and UN and dominate media discussions on Israel.

For example, under the civil society façade, and using European taxpayer money, as well as donations from the New Israel Fund, B’Tselem’s offices in London and Washington lobby intensely in support of the blood libels in the Goldstone Report. In parallel, the self-styled Coalition of Women for Peace promotes boycotts, divestment and sanctions and to hurt Israeli firms. And a handful of individuals in Breaking the Silence (BTS), were invited to travel (all expenses paid) throughout Europe to tell the journalists, “intellectuals” and left-wing politicians that Israel, and not Hamas or Hizbullah, is the real “war criminal.” BTS films were also shown as part of Israel Apartheid Week activities across campuses last month.

IN THIS form of European neocolonialism, these groups push the policies selected by their patrons, while central topics for Israelis are given short shrift. As a result, few reports by “human rights” groups deal with Gilad Schalit, women victims of Arab honor killings or other issues missing from Europe’s agenda.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Not quite free

Love of the Land: Lessons of the Holocaust

Lessons of the Holocaust

Moshe Feiglin
Manhigut Yehudit
27 Nissan, 5770
11 April '10

Translated from the NRG website

I am very ashamed of the Holocaust. How my people were taken, stripped, humiliated, tortured and led to their deaths - before the eyes of the joyous Poles, Ukrainians, French and other offspring of Christian enlightenment; how newborn babies were impaled on pitchforks on the way to the death pits; how millions were led to the factories of death, and suffocated and burned, fertilizing the fields of Poland and Europe with our people’s ashes - with almost no resistance.

I am very proud of the Holocaust. If the German Asmodeus - the most explicit essence of absolute evil ever revealed in history - sees me, the Jew, as its ultimate enemy, then that means that I am on the other end of the scale. In other words, there is something very good about my people. If the German Asmodeus represents absolute evil, then it is very afraid of the absolute good - G-d - that I represent.

There is no way to explain the Holocaust. I know survivors who are not on speaking terms with G-d. I know many who are the opposite. I have no right to go there – and I have neither the ability nor the desire to do so. But irrespective of the theological questions surrounding the Holocaust, one thing clearly occurred in its wake: Jewish history stopped being written in exile and started to be written in the Land of Israel.

Very soon, for the first time since the First Temple period (!), the majority of the Jewish People will be living in the Holy Land. This fact constitutes a spiritual critical mass. Jewish law changes in several realms by virtue of the demographic fact that “most of its sons are on [the land].” The absolute number that we are approaching in the Land of Israel is chilling. Six million.

G-d, Who chose us to be His eternal people and to attest to His existence, has made us a target for extermination by every evil in the world. It is certainly understandable why there are Jews who constantly try to escape this fate. As individuals, this may be possible – an individual may be able to assimilate and rid him/herself of this trouble. But as a people, we cannot escape our destiny. We cannot exist without it.

When the time of national awakening comes, when the gates of the Land open before us but we insist on remaining merely the bearers of religion in exile - the ground burns under our feet. And when we flee to the other extreme, create an alternative Israeli nationalism and shun Judaism and the Torah, then even if we have decided that we are no longer Jews, but only normal Israelis, even if we have established a modern state and hold 200 atom bombs in our nuclear arsenal - we are still six million Jews under the mounting danger of annihilation.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Lessons of the Holocaust

Love of the Land: The myth and reality of Jerusalem (guest post)

The myth and reality of Jerusalem (guest post)

Elder of Ziyon
25 March '10

From Zvi, in reaction to my post:

Jerusalem, like the Jewish people and the Jewish state, is the subject of vast and sweeping myths and legends that deeply color how people view it.

Many of the common myths about the Jewish people are monster stories (though some are "positive" myths about business acumen or high intelligence), and when you read opinion pieces, you can often see the myths poking up like rocks at low tide from the sea of opinion - if the opinion pieces are not simply parroting or inventing more lies. There are an awful lot of people out there who find it almost impossible to see us for who we really are; they see, instead, creatures composed of the myths they have learned and the fear, hatred or rivalry that they feel. They are so trapped in their prejudices that it is very difficult for them to escape. It takes a personal, conscious effort, and most people who have deeply bought into the myths have too much invested to make that effort.

Jerusalem, too, is shrouded in veils of mythology. Many people simply do not see it as a living place. They see it as a Beacon or a Cause or a Goal or - for many world leaders - a Problem - not as a place in the real world where 760000 people live their lives. In Jerusalem today, people were born. Kids went to school and played in the streets. People eat lunch together. People worked out. People blogged. They took showers. They met the love of their life. They got drunk and had a fight with their landlords. They proposed. They got divorced. They slept and will wake up in the morning with a hangover. They are raising kids. They will watch the sunset tomorrow. They will drop their laptop by accident this week. They are survivors of suicide bombings and survivors of Auschwitz and survivors of Israel's war of independence and survivors of stroke. They watch television, they paint pictures, they order pizzas, they fix the bathroom plumbing and ultimately, they die.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: The myth and reality of Jerusalem (guest post)

Love of the Land: Obama and Israel: Making the Same Mistake Again and Again

Obama and Israel: Making the Same Mistake Again and Again

Jeffrey Dunetz
American Thinker
20 March '10

The Bible says that the Jews are descended from twelve brothers, and they have always acted that way. Throughout recorded history, Jews have spent almost as much time fighting each other as they have fighting their enemies. Yet each time they are attacked from the outside, they coalesce and support their brothers like a close-knit family. And that pattern goes double for the multi-party world of Israeli politics.

Last time I checked, there were twelve different political parties that received enough votes to be part of the Knesset, and many of those parties are part of the governing coalition. The different parties, though they may be serving in the same government, remain very partisan. When you add to that the fact that cabinet ministers have a lot more independent authority than what you would see in an American president's cabinet, you can see how the results become very wild at times. But when their nation is under attack, either militarily or simply via international political pressure, the various parties in an Israeli cabinet coalesce to fight off the threat.

If Barack Obama bothered to take the time to understand the "soul" of the Israelis, he might be much closer to restarting talks between Israel and the Palestinians than he is today. His own arrogance, however, and his refusal to believe that anybody would not see the world as he does, prevents him from achieving progress in the region. Obama's arrogance is so strong that last week, he made the exact same mistake on the settlement issue as he made just four months ago.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Obama and Israel: Making the Same Mistake Again and Again

Love of the Land: Ouch! It's my Jewish Identity

Ouch! It's my Jewish Identity!

Moshe Feiglin
Jewish Leadership Movement
28 Adar, 5770 (3 March)

Translated from the NRG website

"Israel's problem is its public relations," people reason as they attempt to explain how it is that Israel is always at the receiving end of the world's criticism and hatred. "Israel simply doesn't know how to highlight all of its positive points."

But the problem is not simply lack of budget for public relations, as the Foreign Ministry would like us to believe. There is also no dearth of eloquent Israelis and fluent English speakers who could take Israel's case to the world. The problem is that instead of explaining its own position, Israel explains the position of its enemies.

When is the last time that you heard an official Israeli representative simply state that this is our Land – without ifs, ands and buts? Simply, "The Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish Nation, period." Has the prime minister made such a statement? Any minister? Perhaps an ambassador?

All the torrents of claims against Israel can be distilled to this one simple question: Whose land is this, anyway? But here's the caveat: It is impossible to say that this is our Land without falling back on our Jewish foundations. To avoid that unthinkable eventuality, Israel trades it ultimate playing card for paltry claims that its soldiers are the most humane in the world – and endangers their lives to prove it - and that it is the most democratic regime in the region.

The world, though, doesn't really care if Israel's armed forces are humane. What determines if you are right or wrong is if the ground under their feet belongs to you or not. The most courteous intruder is still an intruder who belongs in jail.

The refusal to admit that this is our Land - or in broader terms, to re-connect as a state to our Jewish identity - has brought Israel to its diplomatic knees. Netanyahu's senior ministers have arrest warrants waiting for them in Israel's capitals and the assassins of arch-terrorist Mabhouh are wanted all over the world while mass-murderer Ahmadinijad is invited to lecture at Columbia University. The modern-day Amalek does not tell the world that he is humane. He explains that he is right. The world accepts this as fact because Israel's leadership plays straight into his hands.

Just like the first Amalek, who attacked Israel when the entire world was afraid to initiate a fight with the nation that had just defeated the Egyptian empire, so Ahmadinijad publicly declares his intention to destroy Israel and proceeds with his technical preparations basically unhindered.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Ouch! It's my Jewish Identity!

Love of the Land: AIPAC Blasts Obama Administration

AIPAC Blasts Obama Administration

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
15 March '10

As unusual as it is for the ADL to weigh in on a controversial foreign-policy matter and blast an American administration, it is nearly unprecedented for AIPAC to do so. (Well, come to think of it, AIPAC blasted the Obami when they bestowed the Medal of Freedom on Mary Robinson, so perhaps we’ve reached a watershed with this administration, which seems bent on thumbing its nose at allies both domestic and international.) In a remarkable statement, AIPAC declared:

The Obama Administration’s recent statements regarding the U.S. relationship with Israel are a matter of serious concern. AIPAC calls on the Administration to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State. Israel is America’s closest ally in the Middle East. The foundation of the U.S-Israel relationship is rooted in America’s fundamental strategic interest, shared democratic values, and a long-time commitment to peace in the region. Those strategic interests, which we share with Israel, extend to every facet of American life and our relationship with the Jewish State, which enjoys vast bipartisan support in Congress and among the American people.

The Administration should make a conscious effort to move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines directed at Israel, with whom the United States shares basic, fundamental, and strategic interests. The escalated rhetoric of recent days only serves as a distraction from the substantive work that needs to be done with regard to the urgent issue of Iran’s rapid pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the pursuit of peace between Israel and all her Arab neighbors.

We strongly urge the Administration to work closely and privately with our partner Israel, in a manner befitting strategic allies, to address any issues between the two governments.

As Vice President Biden said last week in Israel, “Progress in the Middle East occurs when there is no daylight between the United States and Israel.”

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: AIPAC Blasts Obama Administration

Love of the Land: An Answer to the Question of "Vastly Different Approaches"

An Answer to the Question of "Vastly Different Approaches"

GI
CAMERA/Snapshots
11 March '10

As we noted in an early Snapshots blog post, Danny Seaman wonders "why ... the media adopt such vastly different approaches" when reporting on Israel, as compared to the rest of the conflict-filled world.

Walter Russell Mead has similar questions about the world's treatment of Israel. In his blog at The American Interest Online, Mead writes that he is "genuinely puzzled why people who in other contexts have quite interesting things to say manage to trip up in such foolish and self-defeating ways when the I-word comes up."

But he seems to have some theories.

I am always nervous around people who stridently insist that racism has disappeared in mainstream American life and only lingers on in weirdo subcultures; I feel the same way about people who say that anti-Semitism is no longer a significant feature of western culture. I am especially leery when people who loudly and implausibly assert that anti-Semitism isn’t a problem anymore make harsh and unbalanced criticisms about the world’s only Jewish state.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: An Answer to the Question of "Vastly Different Approaches"

Love of the Land: Jewish Time for the Jewish State

Jewish Time for the Jewish State

Michael Fuah
Manhigut Yehudit
25 Adar 5770

How many times have you asserted that "everything is under control?" Is that really true? We live in a world that is time-oriented. Everything is scheduled and anticipated and as we perceive it - under control. But do we control our time or does time control us?

The Western approach that plans and controls everything finds its expression is its solar calendar. In the Western calendar, everything works on a precise schedule. Every month has a pre-determined amount of days, there is one day added to February every four years and the sun remains a source of constancy. It makes us feel in control and easy to forget about G-d, Who created the sun and all the rules of nature.

The Moslem calendar is lunar - shorter than the solar calendar. It does not use extra days to balance the seasons. Thus, it is a calendar that travels around the seasons; a Moslem holiday will occur in different seasons in different years. The Moslem calendar expresses a reality in which man is out of control, dependant on outside factors such as "fate."

The Jewish calendar, about which we read this Shabbat, (Parshat Hachodesh) creates the proper synthesis between a calendar that preserves the basis of the seasons like the solar calendar, while remaining in synch with the waxing and waning of the moon. It gives order to our lives, while reminding us that G-d controls the world.

Today, the Jewish calendar is in exile. It has been pre-determined and no longer depends upon the sighting of the new moon and the Sanhedrin's decree of the new month. As we emerge from our long exile and return to our Jewish heritage, we must also return to our Jewish calendar.

"This month is the head of all months for you. It is the first for you of the months of the year." (This week's Torah maftir reading, Exodus 12:2). G-d gives the Jewish People control over the year. It is their wise men who determine when the months will start and when to insert a leap year. The Jewish People control time; time does not control them.

It is time to begin our return to the Jewish calendar. The best place to start is the school system, which can easily schedule its summer vacation and return to school according to Jewish dates. If we would decide that the first day of school would coincide with the first day of the month of Elul, the two months of summer vacation would necessarily be the Hebrew months of Tamuz and Av. When the kids are on vacation, their parents prefer to be on vacation and slowly but surely, Israeli society will return to its Jewish calendar. This will be one more step in transforming Israel from the State of the Jews to a Jewish State that illuminates the world with its message of true freedom for all.

Shabbat Shalom,

Michael Fuah

Love of the Land: Jewish Time for the Jewish State

Love of the Land: Israel's 'paranoia'

Israel's 'paranoia'

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
07 March '10

The British Sunday paper The Observer devoted one of its recent editorials to an ostensibly well-meaning lecture about what really, truly was in Israel's best interest. The title counseled that "Israel can accelerate peace by exercising restraint," and the sub-header elaborated: "The diplomatic challenge is to help Israel grasp how its failure even to engage with international opinion risks an isolation which will make the country much less secure."

The piece was open for comments by readers for just 12 hours, but attracted more than 300 responses in this time, and if the thrust of these comments reflected "international opinion", they provided a good example of the futility of any Israeli efforts to "engage" with this kind of utterly misinformed and deeply hostile audience.

The analysis offered in the editorial suggested that:

Israeli policy is driven by two fears. The first, quite justified, is that the country is mostly surrounded by hostile states, some of which host terrorist attacks against its civilians. The second, unjustified, is that criticism from any quarter includes an implicit question of the legitimacy of the Jewish state. That paranoia leads to constant reliance on isolationist militarism which, as well as creating terrible injustice for the Palestinians, has consistently failed to provide the security that Israelis crave."

The assessment that efforts to provide Israelis the security they "crave" have " consistently failed" is most peculiar given that the relevant Israeli authorities reported at the end of last year that in 2009, there was "a marked decrease in the volume of terrorist attacks compared to previous years."

Any editorial writers who would like to dispense free advice on how best to achieve the "security that Israelis crave" could also benefit from contemplating the graphic that accompanies the quoted report, because it vividly illustrates that Israeli efforts to achieve peace in Camp David and Taba from summer 2000 to January 2001 were followed by the violence of the so-called "Al Aqsa intifada."

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Israel's 'paranoia'

Love of the Land: Coming home to Zion

Coming home to Zion

Michael Freund
Israelnationalnews.com
26 February '10

(Beautifully written, captures the feeling. Plus a bit of music for accompaniment. Y.)

Fifteen years ago this week, my wife and I, together with our young son, embarked on a fateful journey. Leaving behind friends and family in New York, we boarded a flight and fulfilled our dream, along with that of our ancestors, by making aliyah and settling in the Land of Israel.

I still remember the heady feeling that I had, walking through the streets of Jerusalem in the initial days after our arrival. As much as I had enjoyed visiting the country as a tourist over the years and seeing the sites, there was nothing quite like the emotion that gripped me as I took in my surroundings as a proud new resident of the reborn Jewish state.



From waking up to the sounds of Hebrew on the radio, to catching a glimpse of the walls of the Old City at sunset, I could sense my soul stir in a way I had never experienced before. Yes, I thought to myself, I have indeed truly come home.

(Read full story)

Love of the Land: Coming home to Zion

Love of the Land: "Israeli Apartheid" Week

"Israeli Apartheid" Week

CAMERA

"Israeli Apartheid" A Campaign Against Human Rights

Every March, extremists converge on campuses across the country. For a week or two, they strive to sow divisions, encourage prejudice, and incite hostility.

They come as part of "Israeli Apartheid Week," a series of lectures, exhibits and events that single out Israel for fierce attack. Students are told the Jewish state is, by nature, a racist, colonial and oppressive state. They are told Israel should be boycotted, and even destroyed. They are told this by ideologues who distort facts about country while ignoring genuine oppression in the Middle East and across the world.

One need look no further than the event's title to understand its malignant nature. The canard that Israel is an apartheid state is an assault on the country's very legitimacy. South Africa's racist, apartheid regime was rightfully dismantled, and this campaign seeks absurdly to cast Israel — the Middle East's most progressive state and only liberal democracy — as being guilty of similar policies and equally deserving to be dismantled.

Apartheid Week is an affront to Palestinian and Israeli moderates who seek to reach peace through compromise and mutual recognition. It opposes equality and tolerance by seeking to do away with the Jewish people's right to self-determination. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that Israel, which he described as "one of great outposts of democracy in the world", has an "incontestable" right to exist. Apartheid Week's push against King's truth can only impede the dream of peace and justice in the Middle East.

Read through this site to learn more...

Love of the Land: "Israeli Apartheid" Week

Love of the Land: How Does Israel Survive?

How Does Israel Survive?

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
22 February '10

When others, from the safety of distant shores, contemplate what risks Israel should incur on behalf of innocents, or when others tut-tut the assassination of a terrorist, there is a tendency to dance around the central dilemma for the Jewish state—namely, that it is fighting against a “cult of death”:

How are the citizens of the Jewish State—for whom, as for all Jews, the essential (if difficult to fulfill) demand from God is Choose Life And Be Grateful For It; who’d desperately love to be sending their children off to grapple with literature, or physics, or even macramé after high school, but must send them off to grapple instead with an adversary that hides in hospitals and mosques and uses women and children as shields; who mourn as a nation every child of Israel killed in action; who cherish every drop of shed Jewish blood as if it were the living breathing person; whose enemies slosh through the blood of their own fallen brothers as if it were so much rain water—how are Israelis ever going to make peace with people whose death-worship is so wide and so deep that they’ve turned mothers—who’ve felt unborn life fluttering, hiccuping, kicking; and later the indescribable pleasure of the scent and feel of their babies heavy with sleep in their arms; the first enthralling toothless smiles; the first glorious infant belly laughs; heard the أمي, “Ommy!” for the first thrilling time; wiped away the first tears of hurt—into zombies who seek and celebrate the deaths of their own children?

When that asymmetry is resolved, there will be plenty of peace to process. Not before.

Love of the Land: How Does Israel Survive?

Love of the Land: Hanukkah's Scrooge

Hanukkah's Scrooge

Robert M. Goldberg
American Spectator
14 December 09

Based upon his recent article in the Financial Times ("Israel must unpick its ethnic myth"), I know what Tony Judt wants for Hanukkah: The evaporation of a collective Jewish existence and the elimination of the Zionist entity -- the state of Israel -- which is essential to that dream.

In the FT article, Judt complains that when he was a lad in Israel his Zionist teachers told him a fairy tale that only a Jewish state could be an "alternative to persecution, assimilation or cultural dilution…. The Israel they wished me to join was therefore grounded, and could only be grounded, in an ethnically rigid view of Jews and Jewishness."

For this reason, Judt, a University Professor at New York University, regards the establishment and existence of Jewish state as a dangerous aberration and the major source of many of the world's ills. In fact, he hates being reminded he is Jewish and has concocted an ideology around that pathology unrelated to both history and fact.

So, for instance, Judt ignores the creation of Pakistan as Muslim state in 1947, a year before Israel was founded, or that many of the European states he regards a examples post-ethnic enlightenment have a "right of return" for ethnic Germans, French, Spanish, etc. or that their treatment of immigrants is more restrictive and selective than Israel or America.

Judt supported American intervention in the Bosnian conflict and the creation of the predominantly Muslim state of Bosnia-Herzegovina on humanitarian grounds. In 1999, " in defending the U.S.-led NATO effort, he wrote: "the extermination of minorities within national frontiers has many recent European precedents." There is precedent in the Middle East too where, as Victor Davis Hanson observed, "over half-million or so Jews… have been ethnically cleansed from (and sometimes murdered in) Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and almost every Jewish community in the Arab Middle East."

But to Judt the creation of the Jewish state is something unique to nature and politics; particularly in the idealized global village Judt's brain seems to wander. He has decided that its perpetuation depends largely on too many Jews around the world believing in the "fiction" that Israel is the restoration of a people to their ancient nationhood and that such a nation must play a transformative and positive role in human affairs.

(Continue article)

Love of the Land: Hanukkah's Scrooge