Sunday, October 09, 2022
From Ian:
Amb. Dore Gold: Why a Two-State Solution Won’t Work
Amb. Dore Gold: Why a Two-State Solution Won’t Work
There is a school of thought among historians that each of the Arab states, back then, had its own particularistic aims for attacking Israel: Damascus was looking to establish a Greater Syria in the Levant, Amman hoped to reinforce its hold on the holy sites of Jerusalem after the Hashemites lost the holy sites of Islam that they once held in the Hijaz, and Cairo was looking to connect itself with the Mashreq – that portion of the Middle East that was located in West Asia – and by doing so avert becoming isolated in North Africa.The silence that screams
If the considerations of the Palestinian Arabs were paramount for the Arab world, then why wasn’t a Palestinian state established in Judea and Samaria during those years, when the Arab world had the chance because it already held those areas?
True, the Palestinian Arabs tried briefly to set up a mini-state in the Gaza Strip, known as the All-Palestine Government, but it never acquired wider backing through international recognition.
Its association with the Jerusalem mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader most visibly connected with Nazi Germany during the war, undermined the chances of the All-Palestine Government succeeding. Gaza remained an area under Egyptian military occupation until the Six-Day War.
Today, Israel needs to design an approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that keeps in mind the true dimensions of the wider conflict. The Arab-Israel conflict has resembled an accordion that can expand or contract according to international circumstances. In 1967, there was an Iraqi expeditionary force that sought to cross into Israel by cutting through Jordan. The conflict had grown.
By 2022, Iraq was no longer the same strategic factor. And it was Iran that was recruiting Shi’ite militias from all over the Middle East and sending them mostly to Syria.
Today there is a risk that if the two-state solution becomes popularized again, without justification, then Israel will come under rising international pressures to adhere to its terms, even if they do not apply. It risks stripping Israel of its right to secure boundaries which is an integral part of Resolution 242.
What recent events have demonstrated is that a very different Middle East has arisen. Diplomacy remains vital in this new period, but it will only yield results if it addresses the vital interests of the parties which engage in it. That is the lesson of the Abraham Accords, which produced four normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states.
But right now, the two-state solution is just a nice-sounding mantra that will lead diplomats off course. This should be the message of the State of Israel the next time an Israeli prime minister addresses the UN General Assembly.
Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022 is the 40th anniversary of the 1982 Palestinian terror attack on the Great Synagogue of Rome, in which a two-year-old child, Stefano Tache, was killed and 37 others wounded. Stefano’s brother Gadiel, also wounded in the attack, has just published his memoir, The Shouting Silence, in which he deals with the Italian government’s complicity with the terrorists.Melanie Phillips: Welcome, Sir Tom. It's been too long My 2020 review of "Leopoldstadt"
The whole of Italy must thank Gadiel for his strength and determination, and for telling the story of his suffering and that of his whole family, especially his courageous mother Daniela and his father Joseph. His story is a personal one of universal value. It teaches us that victims of terrorism face an emotional tsunami from which they can never completely recover. Their psychological and physical pain is unacknowledged and still far from being fully understood, defined and addressed.
In recent months, Israel has faced a wave of terror attacks and attempted attacks. Only the victims know the trauma they must endure, the family heartache, the legacy of physical wounds. During the second intifada, I saw the streets of Jerusalem literally covered in the blood of over 1,000 dead. Yet the aggressors were absolved and even exalted as princes of the world’s oppressed. The victims, however, were erased, and Israel and Jews libeled as oppressors.
Gadiel Tache’s account of his personal experience and the horrific political scandal that allowed the attack sheds light on the true nature of anti-Semitic terrorism and the suffering it causes. In his book, Gadiel makes it clear that anti-Semitic terrorism is simply the latest historical iteration of genocidal anti-Semitic violence, which culminated in the Holocaust. Anti-Semitic terror today uses political viciousness, media defamation, campus and social media hate and outright physical attacks on Jews around the world.
This terror is at its worst in Israel, where anyone, anywhere can fall prey to shooting, knife and car-ramming attacks. There is no family that does not have a relative or friend who has been a victim of terror. But there is also no place in the world that has not known anti-Semitic terrorism, from the 1972 Munich Olympics to Paris, Madrid, London, Toulouse, the Netherlands, New York and many American cities, as well as Mumbai, Kenya and, of course, Rome.
The analogy with today could hardly be more obvious. Diaspora Jews will always view their position and prestige in society as proof not only that they have assimilated into the host culture but that the host culture has assimilated them. And on that latter point, they will always be wrong.
Those who think that, with Jeremy Corbyn on his way out, Britain’s antisemitism crisis has passed, have their heads stuck firmly in the sand— even if the “moderate” Keir Starmer becomes Labour leader.
The crisis is far broader and deeper. For some of us, Jew-hatred made Britain unbearable years before Corbyn became party leader. We concluded we’d been living in a fools’ paradise, that after Auschwitz there had been merely a 50-year moratorium on antisemitism which had now ended.
Under the fig-leaf of anti-Zionism and Israel-bashing, it was clear that Jews would only be accepted as fully British on condition that they didn’t identify as a people, and certainly not with Israel’s fate.
For some British Jews, therefore, anything that dwells upon the myopia of that doomed pre-war Jewish community may exacerbate the disquiet they already feel.
It’s important, though, for British people to be made more aware not just of the liquidation of the Jews of Europe but also the nature of the culture that was thus destroyed. Many in the wider society have no idea about the significance to Jews of brit milah, for example, or the Passover seder.
Maybe Stoppard himself now wonders how different his life would have been had he been brought up inside Jewish family life.
Except that the specific culture to which he is drawn here is one that no longer exists.
Among Jews who feel the pull of their Jewish identity after years of having ignored or suppressed it, it’s not uncommon for them to identify not with Jewish religious rites and practices, nor with the State of Israel, but with a Jewish culture that is no more.
Sometimes this is a disreputable impulse, identifying with those murdered in the Shoah in order to cloak themselves falsely in reflected victimhood and moral impunity.
For others, though, it’s a Jewish epiphany no less genuine for being so tenuous.
Often, such stirrings of identity occur through discovering the fate of family members who were murdered. Recreating their culture in literary form creates a line of continuity with a people to which no other link is desired.
Indeed, what other link can there be? Often implacably agnostic or atheist, viewing the world through the Christian or secular prism of the society in which they were raised and educated, and indifferent or even hostile to Zionism and Israel, the only way such people can realistically connect to their Jewishness is through the ghosts of their family’s past.
With Leopldstatdt, Stoppard is saying “hineini” — here I am, Jewish people, I am one of you and I am declaring it to the world. Welcome, Sir Tom; it’s been too long.
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