Tuesday, October 20, 2020
From Ian:
Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Wonder of the Abraham Accords
How Israel Helped Win the Cold War
Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Wonder of the Abraham Accords
The Abraham Accords is a moment to be remembered in Jewish history and an achievement in American diplomacy that, no matter what occurs in the election, deserves to be studied and celebrated. It ought to inspire us to ask what else “experts” might have been missing. What other aspects of the Arab–Israeli divide, once thought unbridgeable, can now be contemplated? Most interesting is a question raised by several Israeli writers: Is it now time to take a new approach to the Temple Mount? If parts of the Arab world can at least come to terms with a Jewish Jerusalem, is there a possibility that not only Muslims but also Jews can pray at Judaism’s most sacred site?
Three days after we sat on the South Lawn of the White House, I stood in the synagogue overseeing Rosh Hashanah services unlike any other. What was usually a packed sanctuary was this year marked by masked worshippers socially distanced from one another. We prayed, of course, for a return to health and normalcy, but we knew the pandemic would continue to impact our lives for months to come. In Jerusalem, a resurgence of the virus would lead to a shutdown of synagogues and a Western Wall largely devoid of worshippers. But in the midst of the depressing nature of that moment, I read from the Torah, to the congregation, of Ishmael, of God’s concern for Abraham’s eldest son.
For the first time, its text to me embodied not an abstract aspiration, but something that, in a very small way, seemed directed to us in our time. And then, as the Torah was returned, a millennia-old verse was suddenly sung, sanctified by the dreams of Jewish generations yet in the moment endowed with renewed relevance: Adonai oz le’amo yiten; Adonai yevarekh et-amo va’shalom.
It was a reminder that even amid our caustic politics and trials, we still live in an age of wonder of which our ancestors could only have dreamed, and that in such an age it was not unreasonable to have hope in the year to come—perhaps even more wondrous things than Passover programs in the United Arab Emirates will happen next year in Jerusalem.
How Israel Helped Win the Cold War
Truman’s motive in supporting the Zionists has been ascribed variously to high principle, electoral expediency, and close Jewish friends. Neither he nor the advocates for a Jewish state framed it in terms of geopolitics. But Israel turned out to be a major strategic asset.Mordechai Kedar: No Longer United Against Israel: The New Arab World
U.S. diplomats and brass were not alone in failing to foresee this. Moscow did not anticipate it either. Hoping to drive Britain from the region, it was arguably even more helpful than Washington in facilitating Israel’s birth. This moment, however, was short-lived, ending abruptly on Rosh Hashanah of 1948.
That day, Golda Meir, Israel’s first ambassador to the USSR, attended services at Moscow’s Great Synagogue, one of the very few left open. Despite a pointed warning in Pravda that “the state of Israel has nothing to do with the Soviet Union, where there is no Jewish problem and therefore no need for Israel,” a crowd estimated at 50,000—25 times the usual attendance—was waiting to see and touch her. In her autobiography, Meir records how deeply she was affected by this display of identity with the Jewish state. But Stalin, who brooked no loyalty to anyone or anything other than himself or his regime, was affected, too, in a quite different way. Within a month, Jewish cultural institutions were closed, and soon various Yiddish actors and poets were murdered or dispatched to the Gulag. An anti-Jewish campaign in the name of anti-Zionism raged until the dictator’s death in 1953.
Israel, thus driven from its original stance of neutrality, got its first stroke of revenge in 1956 when a Pole who went by the non-Jewish name of Viktor Grayevsky managed to get his hands on a copy of the secret speech that Premier Nikita Khrushchev had delivered at the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th congress. It denounced Stalin for having created a “cult” of himself and for choosing “the path of repression and physical annihilation” against whomever raised his ire. Grayevski, quietly a Zionist, daringly brought the document to the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw where intelligence officers made a duplicate. Ben-Gurion ordered it passed to the CIA, which leaked it to the New York Times, which ran it on page 1.
The impact on the world Communist movement was shattering. The one-time Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman captured the import sardonically: “Stalin…has been officially demoted from the office of greatest, wisest and most adored leader in recorded history to the lesser office of maniacal mass-murderer.” For three decades, Communists worldwide had parroted hymns to Stalin’s glories, deriding what they saw as calumnies against him from anti-Communists of all stripes (as well as Trotskyists). Now Stalin’s successor, the new leader of world Communism, was saying plainly that the anti-Communists had been right all along and that the Communists had been dupes and fools. The American and other Communist parties never recovered from this blow.
Meanwhile, deep processes are at work. The younger generation of Arabs did not experience the “Palestinian nakba” and it is not part of their historical memory. The “Arab Spring,” which precipitated the collapse of regimes and economies and the rise of the Islamic State, threw millions of Arabs into great distress and mass emigration for a life of refugee status, poverty, and suffering far from home. The Palestinians’ belief that those Arabs should fight for the “liberation of Palestine” is not uppermost among their concerns.
As for Palestinian conduct, here is an interesting case. One of Israel’s harshest critics is Jamal Rian, the brain behind Al Jazeera and its main newscaster. He was born in Tulkarem, moved to Jordan, and became a prominent activist in the Muslim Brotherhood. It was recently revealed that Rian’s father was a land dealer who, before Israel’s establishment, sold sizable tracts of land to the Jews. What Arab wants to be a “sucker” and fight Israel to liberate for Jamal Rian the lands his father sold to Jews, a transaction that did not exactly harm his son financially?
Another factor that works against the Palestinian ethos is the huge increase in the use of social media. Today, any Arab can see the truth about Israel without needing to rely exclusively on his government’s propaganda outlets for information. Automatic translation allows him or her to “read” Hebrew websites even if he does not understand a word of Hebrew. This makes it much harder for the Palestinians to keep selling “the problem” the way it used to. Indeed, many Arabs now intentionally misspell “the problem” in a way that expresses contempt for it.
The Arab world of 2020 differs from that of 2000 in many ways. It is not the delusional “new Middle East” envisaged by Shimon Peres but its complete opposite: a region that is violent, fractured, rife with failed states, and afflicted with mass killing. But these unfortunate developments work in Israel’s favor. True, there is still hatred among Arabs for Jews and the Jewish state that must be acknowledged and contended with, and there are still hundreds of thousands of rockets surrounding and threatening Israel. Nevertheless, the trend is clear.
The peace and normalization between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain signifies the collapse of the old theories, enabling the Jewish state to be accepted as a member, not an enemy, in the “right” coalition.
