Thursday, December 02, 2004

  • Thursday, December 02, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
Eye of the Storm: What if it's not Israel they loathe?
By AMIR TAHERI

In his recent foray into Ramallah, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw identified the Palestine-Israel conflict as the most important issue between the West and the Muslim world. Straw was echoing the conventional wisdom according to which a solution to that problem would transform relations between Islam and the West from what is almost a clash of civilizations to one of cuddly camaraderie.

But what if conventional wisdom got it wrong?

I have just spent the whole fasting month of Ramadan in several Arab countries, where long nights are spent eating, drinking coffee and, of course, discussing politics.

There are no free elections or reliable opinion polls in the Arab world. So no one knows what the silent majority really thinks. The best one can do is rely on anecdotal evidence. On that basis, I came to believe that the Palestine-Israel issue was low down on the list of priorities for the man in the street but something approaching an obsession for the political, business, and intellectual elites.

When it came to ordinary people, almost no one ever mentioned the Palestine issue, even on days when Yasser Arafat's death dominated the headlines. When I asked them about issues that most preoccupied them, farmers, shopkeepers, taxi drivers and office workers never mentioned Palestine.

But when I talked to princes and princesses, business tycoons, high officials, and the glitterati of Arab academia, Palestine was the ur-issue.

The reason why the elites fake passion about this issue is that it is the only one on which they agree. In many cases, it is also the only political issue that people can discuss without running into trouble with the secret services.

More importantly, perhaps, it is the one issue on which the elites feel they have the sympathy of the outside world. For example, I found almost no one who, speaking in private, had any esteem for Arafat. But all felt obliged to hide their thoughts because Arafat had been honored by French President Jacques Chirac.

When some Arab newspapers ran articles on Arafat's alleged corruption and despotism, other Arab media attacked them for being disrespectful to a man who had been treated like "a hero of humanity" by Chirac.

Conventional wisdom also insists that the US is hated by Muslims because it is pro-Israel. That view is shared by most American officials posted to the Arab capitals. But is it not possible that the reverse is true – that Israel is hated because it is pro-American?

When I raised that possibility in Ramadan-night debates, I was at first greeted with deafening silence. Soon, however, some interlocutors admitted that my suggestion was, perhaps, not quite fanciful.

Let us consider some facts.

If Muslims hate the US because it backs Israel which, in turn, is oppressing Muslims in Palestine, then why don't other oppressed Muslims benefit from the same degree of solidarity from their co-religionists?

During Ramadan, news came that more than 500 Muslims had been killed in clashes with the police in southern Thailand. At least 80 were suffocated to death in police buses under suspicious circumstances.

The Arab and the Iranian press, however, either ignored the event or relegated it to inside pages. To my knowledge, only one Muslim newspaper devoted an editorial to it. And only two newspapers mentioned that Thailand was building a wall to cordon off almost two million Muslims in southern Thailand – a wall higher and longer than the controversial "security fence" Israel is building.

Muslim states have never supported Pakistan on Kashmir because most were close to India in the so-called nonaligned movement while Pakistan was a US ally in CENTO and SEATO.

When Hindu nationalists demolished the Ayodhya Mosque, no one thought it necessary to inflame Muslim passions.

Nor has a single Muslim nation recognized the republic set up by Muslim Turks in northern Cyprus. The reason? Greece has always sided with the Arabs on Palestine and plays occasional anti-American music while Turkey is a US ally.

When the Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica 10 years ago, not a ripple disturbed the serene calm of Muslim opinion. At that time, the mullahs of Teheran and Col. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya were in cahoots with Slobodan Milosevic, supplying him with oil and money because Yugoslavia held the presidency of the so-called nonaligned movement. Belgrade was the only European capital to be graced with a state visit by Ali Khamenehi, the mullah who is now the Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic.

And what about Chechnya which is, by any standard, the Muslim nation that has most suffered in the past two centuries? Last October the Muslim summit in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, gave a hero's welcome to Vladimir Putin, the man who has presided over the massacre of more Chechens than anyone in any other period in Russian history.

Right now there are 22 active conflicts across the globe in which Muslims are involved. Most Muslims have not even heard of most of them because those conflicts do not provide excuses for fomenting hatred against the United States.

Next time you hear someone say the US was in trouble in the Muslim world because of Israel, remember that things may not be that simple.
  • Thursday, December 02, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
UNITED NATIONS — UN Ambassador Allan Rock Tuesday delivered a scathing denunciation of the General Assembly's resolutions isolating and attacking Israel, confirming a shift in Canada's approach to the Middle East.

During an annual debate on the question of Palestine, Mr. Rock said Canada will vote Wednesday against two key resolutions on which it has abstained in the past, lining up with the United States, often the only major power to defend Israel at the United Nations.

"We believe that the time has come, especially given the renewed hope for the peace process, to evaluate the efforts that all of us make at the United Nations to determine if they could be redirected towards more constructive outcomes," Mr. Rock said.

He said the General Assembly and the much more powerful Security Council should do more to foster respect and trust between Israelis and Palestinians in order to help bring peace to the region.

Canada has typically abstained on resolutions that condemn Israel's occupation of and settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Only the United States and a few others have been left to support the embattled Jewish state.

Mr. Rock's speech Tuesday confirmed a shift in approach to UN questions involving the Middle East that has been evident since last summer. Then, Canada abstained on a widely supported resolution that noted the International Court of Justice's finding that Israel's security fence violated international law.

Critics in the Canadian-Arab community suggest the Martin government is in danger of abandoning Canada's long-standing evenhandedness toward the region, while Jewish lobbyists insist the government is merely adjusting its UN positions to reflect its overall approach.

Mr. Rock said General Assembly resolutions on the Middle East are "often divisive and lack in balance" because they condemn Israeli violence but play down attacks against Israeli civilians.

"References to Israeli security needs are often overlooked in the General Assembly. Repeatedly emphasizing Israel's responsibility under international law obscures equally important responsibilities of other parties to the conflict."

He added that the UN often fails to adequately condemn the Palestinians for their failure to rein in terrorists who target civilians or to reform their own governing bodies.

In an effort to be evenhanded, Canada will support a resolution on which it has abstained in the past: It calls for a nuclear-free Middle East and singles out Israel, which is widely suspected (but has never admitted it) to have nuclear capability.

Mr. Rock said the government's fundamental policy toward the Middle East remains unchanged.

It supports Israel's right to exist with secure borders, and its right to defend its citizens from terrorist attacks, in accordance with standards of international law and human rights.

It also supports the creation of a Palestinian state, and opposes the establishment of settlements in the territories, unilateral moves by Israel to annex East Jerusalem and the construction of the security fence inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Mazen Chouaib, executive director of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations, said the shift at the UN sends a troubling signal to Arabs in Canada and around the world.

"It can be read as a message that Canada is abandoning its position as far as the Palestinians are concerned, if this pattern continues," he said. "Canada will start to be seen in a different light; this could send the signal that Canada is abandoning its honest broker's role."

But Shimon Fogel, chief executive of the Canada-Israel Committee, said the UN General Assembly has long been a venue for one-sided, anti-Israeli rhetoric from the Islamic world.

Changing Canada's policy toward votes at the UN has been a cause célèbre for the pro-Israel lobby.

"The concerns about the abuses in the General Assembly, as well as the other institutions of the UN system like the Commission on Human Rights, have been a concern to Canada for a long time," he said.

Mr. Fogel said Canada's more aggressive stand at the UN provides moral support for Israel, rather than having any practical effect.

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

  • Wednesday, December 01, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
Jerusalem Newswire November 30, 2004

JERUSALEM - Nearly two-thirds of Israelis believe the post-Arafat Palestinian Authority should be given one last chance to honor its peace obligations, or face a full-scale Israeli military effort to eliminate the scourge of Palestinian Arab terror.

Asked what Israel should do if the new PA leadership continues to espouse Yasser Arafats policy of anti-Jewish terrorism by this time next year, 60 percent of respondents in a new public opinion poll voted for abandoning peace efforts and dealing with the situation militarily.

Nineteen percent believed Israel should continue to seek a diplomatic settlement with the PA, despite its refusal to curb the ongoing Islamic terror.

Showing public disapproval for Prime Minister Ariel Sharons policies, only one-third of Israelis backed the idea of conducting a unilateral withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and Gaza in the face of persistent Palestinian non-compliance.

An overwhelming 80 percent of respondents felt a sovereign Palestinian Arab state ruled by known terrorists would pose an existential or very grave threat to Israel.

The poll was conducted by telephone from November 18-22 among a random sampling of 528 adult Israelis. It was carried out by Maagar Mohot Interdisciplinary Research and Consulting Institute Ltd.
  • Wednesday, December 01, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
EGYPT SAID TO AID PALESTINIAN STRIKES

TEL AVIV [MENL] -- Israel's military has determined that Egypt seeks to weaken Israel through attacks by Palestinian insurgency groups.

Israeli military sources said the assessment was contained in Military Intelligence reports relayed to the General Staff and the Cabinet over the last two months. The sources said MI has determined that Egypt has facilitated the smuggling of weapons and insurgents from the Sinai Peninsula to the Gaza Strip for attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.

'We are not only talking about weapons,' a senior military source said. 'We are talking about the infiltration of Egyptian and other trainers to help improve the capability of Palestinian terrorist groups and the Palestinian Authority.'

The MI assessment comes amid Israel's effort to launch security cooperation with Egypt. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abu Al Gheit and intelligence chief Gen. Omar Suleiman were scheduled to visit Israel and the Palestinian Authority on Dec. 1.
  • Wednesday, December 01, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
Ramallah, West Bank, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- A Palestinian Information Ministry official denied Tuesday the Palestinian Authority ordered its mass media to stop inciting violence against Israel.

'The news on that subject published by certain Arab and foreign media are completely untrue,' Ahmed Sobh told a local radio in Ramallah.

'The aim of such wrong news is to give the impression to the public in the Arab world that the Palestinian Authority heeds the instructions of Israel instead of achieving the aspirations and ambitions of the Palestinian people,' Sobh said.

Official sources told UPI Monday Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Mahmoud Abbas recently visited PA media and television operations in Ramallah and Gaza and asked them to stop publishing and airing anti-Israel material.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on the PA to end incitement and change anti-Israel school curriculums as a condition for resuming peace talks. However, the sources said the PA insisted any action on incitement must be reciprocal.

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

  • Tuesday, November 30, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
OSLO (AFP) - Former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjoern Jagland called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital as a first step towards stabilizing the region.

'A Palestinian state must be created, with east Jerusalem as its capital... This would be the first and the best of steps to establish a dialogue with Muslims and Arabs,' said Jagland, currently the head of the Norwegian parliament's foreign affairs committee and one of the leading members of the Labour opposition.

Giving in to suicide bombers is the first step? I guess dismantling Israel is step 2, converting all of Europe to Islam is step 3 and giving Iran nukes is step 4, according to this clown. - EoZ
  • Tuesday, November 30, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
Aviation Week & Space Technology reports in its November 29 issue that U. S. intelligence analysts are concerned about the planned launch from Iran, by early 2005, of an Iranian built satellite on an upgraded version of Tehran's largest ballistic missile, the Shahab-3.

The preparations for and launch of one or more Iranian satellite 'is something that needs to be watched closely,' a U. S. government missile analyst familiar with Iranian capabilities told AW&ST.

Such an 'Iranian Sputnik' would elevate the stature of the Iran in the Middle East.

Tehran's satellite launch plans could also be a 'Trojan Horse' to further advance ballistic missile or nuclear warhead related technologies, sources told the magazine. Some of the materials and micro-electronic technologies necessary for Iranian satellite design could also be important for the development of tiny high quality components needed to produce small nuclear weapons, AW&ST reports.

The U. S. intelligence community was taken by surprise in 1998 when a North Korean satellite launch attempt unexpectedly demonstrated a long range North Korean missile capability. U. S. intelligence officials said they do not want to be surprised again, this time by Iran.

Even if they fail initially, Iranian satellite launch attempts would help Iran develop both range and warhead improvements to the Shahab-3 missile under the cover of a civilian space program, AW&ST reports.

If the Iranians are successful with the space launch program, it will have political and technological ramifications in both the U. S. and Middle East. 'It would move the Iranians from the junior varsity into the big leagues,' an analyst told the magazine.

And as previous experience with North Korea shows, such a space launch demonstration can have significant impact in a weapons context. 'Something like that from Iran would certainly have a similar effect in the Middle East,' sources told AW&ST.
  • Tuesday, November 30, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
A United Nations committee condemned suicide bombings in Israel.

The resolution from the committee on decolonization, concerning Israeli practices affecting Palestinian human rights, included an oral amendment expressing “grave concern at the use of suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians, resulting in extensive loss of life and injury.”

Israeli officials said the language was included at European nations’ behest. “We said that every time the resolutions include condemning Israel for its acts, there’s no mention of the suicide bombers,” an Israeli spokeswoman said. “We’re glad that the Europeans made sure” to condemn suicide bombings in Israel this time. The resolution passed by a vote of 142 to 6, with 15 abstentions.

"Oral amendment"? SOunds like it is not worth the paper it it written on. -EoZ
  • Tuesday, November 30, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
Company commanders and division commanders will be able to, as of next year view at the appropriate time intelligence photographs from pilotless aircraft, on a small screen worn on their hands. The micro receivers will replace verbal reports that commanders have received daily via the communicator from the Home Front Headquarters. The Ground Forces Command is expected to soon purchase dozens of these programs, priced at 10,000 dollars each.

The inventor of the program will produce an even larger receiver which will connect to the command's vehicle.

'The commander will be able to view the field at the appropriate time and to direct his forces without needing to rely on verbal reports that can become sometimes problematic', explains Head of the Field Intelligence Department of the weapons unit at the Ground Forces Headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel Yoni."
  • Tuesday, November 30, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Authorities pursuing traffickers in nuclear weapons technology recently uncovered an audacious scheme to deliver a complete uranium enrichment plant to Libya, documents and interviews show.

The discovery provides fresh evidence of the reach and sophistication of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's global black market in nuclear know-how and equipment. It also exposes a previously undetected South African branch of the Khan network.

Monday, November 29, 2004

  • Monday, November 29, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
Summary:

When the IDF updated its military doctrine in 2003, Prof. Asa Kasher, Professor of Professional Ethics at Tel Aviv University, joined me on an ethics committee to craft principles on how to make moral and ethical decisions in Israel's operational campaign against terror.

As we sought to formulate how to fight terror, we understood that the main asymmetry is in the values of the two societies involved in the conflict - in the rules they obey. We are fighting with a people that have totally different values and rules of engagement.


How do we differentiate between terrorists and non-terrorists? Everyone who is directly involved in terror is a legitimate target. Those who are indirectly involved in terror are not a legitimate target.
#

Some asked if the collateral damage was producing future terrorists. We found that because of the level of incitement, the collateral damage only raised public support for terror from 95 to 96 percent.
#

In August 2002 we had all the leadership of Hamas in one room and we knew we needed a 2,000-pound bomb to eliminate all of them. Think about having Osama bin Laden and all the top leadership of al-Qaeda in one house. However, use of a 2,000-pound bomb was not approved - we used a much smaller bomb - and they all got up and ran away.
#

We should do the job at the checkpoints ethically, professionally, and as fast as we can because we have to care about the many times the ambulance is really carrying somebody who needs help.
#

The bottom line is that Israel has to fight terror because terror declared war on us. In the current war Israel has lost over 1,000 people - equivalent to the U.S. suffering 45,000 dead and 300,000 wounded. We can win, but we must do it ethically as the Jewish people, as a democratic state, and as IDF officers who respect our ethical profession."
  • Monday, November 29, 2004
  • Elder of Ziyon
Julie Burchill
Unreservedly pro-Israel, our correspondent reveals how her first visit to the country fulfilled a long emotional and political love affair

WHEN I TOLD people that I was going to Israel this autumn, I noticed that a lot of them had the same reaction. They’d look dubious, then worried, then say: “Ooo. Is it a story?” The implication being that only professional interests could take one to such a hellhole. They also expressed fear for my safety, going as far on the part of one friend (Gentile, never been there) to actually weep, and on the part of my beloved former mother-in-law (Jewish, never been there) to write to me that she would pray every night for my intact return, even though she is an atheist!

I had had it coming, the Big Jew Thing; ever since as a nine-year-old girl in a working-class West Country Stalinist family, I learnt about the Shoah and the Six-Day War at the same time. It must have been that collision, that schism; death, life, struggle, NEVER AGAIN! — how could I ever not believe? Then I learnt the word for what I was; philo-Semite. That so few people have heard of philo-Semitism, whereas everyone has heard of anti-Semitism, says it all, really.

And the puzzle comes back to this — why do these people, above all others, inspire such ludicrous, ceaseless, surreal loathing? Why is it that one of my sweetest, youngest, most educated friends said to me one night, not even drunk: “Come on babe, admit it — don’t you ever EVER think that if the Jews had never existed how much easier life would be?”

Over the years I have pursued the Jewish Enigma and, it must be said, often got it wrong. My marriage to a non-observing Jew in the 1980s ended after a decade, most of which was spent either having very good sex (yay!) or rowing about the Palestinian question (oy!), with the shiksa on the side of the Jews and the Jew having a good old kvetch on behalf of the Palestinians. It was during such rows with my Jewish husband and his Jewish family, for the first time, that I wondered whether it was actually the Jews I really liked most . . . or the Israelis, those SuperJews, on whose behalf I seemed increasingly to be going into battle.

It didn’t take a genius to see that the more Jews stood up for themselves, the less the world liked it, whereas other races were cheered on and drooled over as “freedom fighters”, no matter how bloody their hands got, I reflected. Could it be that anti-Semitism in England in particular was based on the fact that we had gone in the opposite direction to the Jews — from powerful to powerless — and felt great resentment about this fact? After all, they’d had a good deal more than loss of empire to deal with in the 20th century — the loss of one third of world Jewry, for instance.

And Israel is a country the size of Wales, which within the first 25 years of its re-establishment (remember, the Jews were in the countries of the Middle East some seven centuries before the Muslims even existed) — from the Declaration of Independence in 1948 to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 — single-handedly fought off murderous attacks from such neighbouring dictatorships as Egypt, Jordan and Syria. (The US, surprisingly, did not begin to aid Israel in any major way until the mid-1970s; the country was founded with arms from the Communist bloc, and the first Government comprised a coalition of the majority Socialist Mapai Party with the Stalinist Mapam Party to the Left and religious and liberal groups to the Right. Beat that for pluralism!)

During the same period, it’s worth noting, the might of the British Armed Forces couldn’t even keep the oddballs and bishop-bashers of the IRA under control, so tied were the hands of our soldiers. It became common in working-class English households during the Seventies to hear Dad, never a great fan of the Jews (“sneaky”, “arrogant”, “cliquey”), say grimly as the latest atrocity from Ulster made itself felt through the medium of the Six O’Clock News: “The Israelis would have that lot sorted out in no time!” In 30 years, the image of the archetype Jew had gone from that of a frail, bullied scholar walking meekly to his doom to that of a big blond brute in a tank bulldozing across the desert, scattering tyrannies before him, STANDING UP FOR HIMSELF!

If the English working class were seeing the Jews in a new and favourable light due to Israel’s military triumphs — small and scrappy, innee, yer Israeli? Bit like us! — it’s fair to say that both the right-wing ruling class and the liberal middle class were shocked senseless by developments. You could see the bafflement on the faces of the most well-meaning of liberals as the mild-mannered, ever-scapegoated People Of The Book morphed into the creators of the Uzi machine gun and the proud owners of a nuclear capacity. (Interestingly, when the Jews put their scientific brilliance to the service of the European powers, no one ever complained, as I remembered. No one ever said: “Ooo, Albert Einstein, don’t do that!”)

What the Jews had done, unique of all the oppressed races of the world, was to come back better than ever.

This was a country founded on socialist principles, by idealists and intellectuals, which could shape-shift at the merest whiff of cordite into a lean, mean, fighting machine that did not allow soldiers to salute their “superiors” yet was deadly effective. It was the only Jewish country in the world, yet surrounded as it was by hate-filled theocracies who had wan-ted Hitler to kill the lot of them, it held secularism to be the most precious cornerstone of its democracy; only in Israel do you find that the most religious Jews, the Haredim, are the most opposed to the existence of the Jewish state — the most extreme of these, the Neturei Karta, even supported the PLO’s charter calling for its destruction. Ultra-religious Jews are not generally drafted into the Israeli Army, and those who are end up in the “Rabbinical Corps”, checking that the kitchens are kosher.

Secular Israel regards them with its characteristic, ceaseless tolerance; but for their part, the men in their side-curls and suits walk alongside young Israeli hotties wearing less on the street than other girls wear on the beach with never a sneer or slur, let alone a stoning. Surrounded on all sides by countries where religion and politics are one, to the point that democracy is considered ungodly, and where the chosen religion spends so much time acting as a tireless curtain-twitching Mrs Grundy, determined above all to curtail the freedom of women, that it has no time to tackle the subjugation and impoverishment of its faithful by their filthy rich rulers, Israel’s cool, clear-eyed take on matters of faith and secularism is a lesson to all of us. Imagine — a country in which the MOST religious are the LEAST nationalistic!

Anti-semitism can be as in-your-face as smashing up synagogues. But it can also be sly, sneaky, subtle and sometimes surreal. It must, in my opinion, go some way to explaining why Israeli human rights issues are so obsessively concentrated on, while many Arab and African countries are allowed to treat their citizens with as much subhuman sadism as they wish — the pregnant, raped women so frequently sentenced to death by stoning under Islamic regimes come immediately to mind, but the list is never-ending.

In having one human rights rule for democratic Israel — which can be summed up as “Be perfect or we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks” — and another for the dictatorships which surround it — “Do what you like to your people, it’s your culture!” — Whitey displays an interestingly sly bit of anti-Semitism which is also rather insulting to the said dictatorships and the people they lord it over. The Jews are seen to be the one ethnic group who “pass” as white; their insistence on making their state a democracy is also seen as a sign of their stubborn refusal to act the savage to Whitey’s civilising influence. In short, the Lord forbid that any ethnic group should ignore the all-important world dominance hierarchy and dare to turn from victim into victor — and that is Israel’s ultimate crime. So why did it never occur to me to actually go to Israel before? After all, since I broke my self-imposed travel embargo a decade ago (didn’t want to have sex with my various husbands, if you’re interested) I’ve been a veritable globetrotter, nipping off to places as far away as the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean at the drop of a luggage tab. Why I would choose to make 12-hour flights to places I had absolutely no interest in while Israel is a mere four hours away, has a climate which makes the Bahamas look like Bradford and everything about it fascinates me, is a mystery to me, but a lot of it probably has to do with inertia, fear and a long-held belief that one should never meet one’s heroes. This was the first time a whole country had been my hero — millions of the f******, all ready to let me down! — so naturally I held back.

Finally, the turn of events led me there. An avalanche of congratulatory e-mail from Jews around the world led to lunch with beautiful Michelle from the Israeli Tourist Board, which led to me and my best friend Nadia Petrovic — the only person I know whose philo-Semitism leaves mine in the shade — boarding an aircraft to Tel Aviv this October.

Even before your baggage goes through airport X-ray machines so huge that it would be possible for a standing adult, barely stooping, to walk through one, everything about going to Israel is larger than life, which is strange considering that it’s a country the size of Wales. Everything from the clothes you need to pack — not many, nothing warm, because it’s always hot and always informal unless you plan to hang around some neurotic, misogynistic Muslim/Catholic “ Holy Place”, in which case, COVER YOURSELF YOU FILTHY DAUGHTER OF A WHORE! — to the reaction you get from your friends — OH NO, YOU'RE GOING TO DIEEEEEE! — is Not Normal.

But that feeling ended, for me, the minute I was settled on the El Al aircraft. Looking around at my fellow passengers, in their various skullcaps, side-curls and crop-tops, I felt an eerie sense of calm, so different from the irritation, nerves and boredom that air travel usually provokes. My favourite bit of the Bible, verse 16, Chapter 1 of The Book of Ruth, came back to me, triumphantly this time after a lifetime of aloneness: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

To be among them, but not of them; to “pass”, of all the outrageous things, when one of the stewardesses (minimal make-up, stern slacks; Israeli girls make the rest of us, even Oriental women, look like inappropriate drag queens, but somehow you can’t hate them because they’re beautiful as they don’t mean to be) speaks to me in Hebrew! I can’t get over this — it’s what I’ve been waiting for since I was nine years old! — but my face falls a little when snub-nosed, baby-blonde Nadia is similarly spoken to; no one could mistake her for one. Bitch. And this is the first of many sad lessons I learn in Israel — that because of the terrible fall-off in tourism since the intifada, Israelis presume that they have no friends abroad any more. They simply presume that every person on an Israeli plane, or in an Israeli hotel, is an Israeli. That was the first thing that broke my heart, there.

But it healed the moment we stepped out of the plane into the sunshine. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s self-loathing hero remarks of his first visit to Israel something like: “Look! — Jews — Jews everywhere — walking around as if they own the place! WHICH THEY DO!” What was striking to me, though, all through Israel, was the very absence of weight being thrown around.

“Shalom.” They say it, them Jews, every time. It’s their hello, their goodbye, their have-a-nice-day, and they mean it. You hear them say it, you see them do it, and sometimes, just a little bit, got to say it, it makes you hate them — makes you hate their endless belief in the goodness of Mankind, the very Mankind that came so very near to destroying them.

You see it in Jerusalem, where the mosques and churches gleam free. You see it in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, where the Avenue of the Righteous comes before everything else — the Righteous being un-Jews, that is. You see it from the car, being driven from Jerusalem to Eilat, when you ask your Israeli tour guide what is that place over there that looks . . . different? Oh, that’s the Bedouins. That’s the Palestinians. That’s where they cut off people ’s hands and stone women to death, because it’s their culture, and that’s what so much of the “civilised” world wants even more of Israel to be sacrificed unto.

You see it in Ariel Sharon, that alleged hawk of hawks, sending in the Israeli Defence Force to violently evict 8,000 Jews from the Gaza in order to go ONE STEP CLOSER towards peace with a people who want his own people dead. You see it in the beautiful English Jewish journalist Charlotte Halle from Haaretz, the “Tel Aviv Guardian”, married to an Israeli, with a three-year-old son, who only comes near to losing her temper once with me — when I express too much antipathy towards the Palestinians who already want her baby son dead, because he will grow up to be a Jew, and she is prepared to go, as her ceaseless, blameless, shameless people are always prepared to go, for ever a bridge too far.

You see it in Nadia’s eyes when she says, so serenely, in the car after Yad Vashem: “I always knew that lots of people had suffered. But if ever, EVER, anyone says that anyone has ever suffered like the Jews did, you know now that they’re either one of two things. One, they're silly. Or two, they’re just a little bit WICKED.”

You see it in Tel Aviv, on your balcony, your last night in Israel, with Nadia crying back in the room, and you really want to go home and see your husband and she does her son . . . but you really wonder how you will live now, back at home, beyond the wild blue yonder where these people, these F****** PEOPLE, did the thing they did — where they literally created the modern world.

Where they turned a place the size of Wales, which was just another regular barren Arab desert, into a Garden of Eden overnight, or at least over a decade. Where they came straight off the ships from Auschwitz and Belsen and Drancy and simply rolled up their sleeves and shook their heads and said, “Oyyyy . . .”

Where they created Tel Aviv — the first Jewish city in 2,000 years — by simply saying it was so, a few dozen ragged-ass Hebrew re-settlers, standing on some sand in 1909.

Where they don’t even WANT your help, the obdurate, stubborn, stiff-necked f****** —

All seven million of them —
Seven million . . .
So we won, then . . .

Back in the room, Nadia is singing now as she packs.

I’ve been back from Israel less than a week as I start writing this, and my suntan is already fading as my mind and soul shrink back to the size they were before — the size that fits so snugly around The X Factor and Brit Art and Whither the Novel Now and all those cultural Hula Hoops we keep up so frantically to distract ourselves from the big hole in the middle that is us.

Don’t get me wrong — I love my life. This isn’t a cheesy old I-was-lost-and-now-I’m-found snow job — I find that such woe-is-me eulogies tend to come from your basic dust-in-the-wind types anyway, who have neither the guts nor the inclination to change their lives but can’t pass up the chance of a little extra whine-time. No, like I said — I love my life. I love my God, my husband, my son Jack, my job, my friends and reality TV. I’m a happy bunny with such a high level of optimism that I frequently wake up in the morning, at the age of 45, feeling almost excited about washing my face and drinking my coffee — a sure sign, according to my shrink friend, of a person in A Happy Place. (Or a cretin.)

And yet, and yet . . . while all other parts of my heart beat properly, I feel that, increasingly, I have a country-sized hole in it. I have always loved my country with a fierce cool pride, knowing our faults, and still thinking “Yeah, we may well be stiff-upper-lipped/stuffed-shirts/sex-maniacs/drunks/po-faced/frivolous/whatever — but what’s the option? Being French — BEING GERMAN? I don’t think so!” No country is perfect, but relatively, I have always felt blessed to be British; generally, when prejudiced push comes to murderous shove, we have always tended to be on the side of the angels.

But increasingly, I don’t feel this. Because, in the face of all the evidence of history, and thus in the face of logic, Britain is slowly but surely ceasing to be Britain and becoming little more than an outpost of the “European Union” — the very name, I feel, echoes the join-us-in-friendship-or-else! promise/threat of an earlier European Unity dream-turned-nightmare. I have many minor gripes against the EU, such as its monstrous levels of corruption and waste.

But mainly I loathe the EU as I believe it to be a massive threat to what remains of the world Jewry which its leader, Germany, did so much to destroy. I cannot trust an organisation which has a belligerent Germany, aided and abetted by his vicious short sidekick, France, at its head — especially when that Germany is increasingly painting itself as the real “victim” of the Second World War. And it’s not just them, it’s us — in 2003 an EU survey claimed that six out of ten Britons believed Israel to be a threat to “world peace”, whatever that is.

Israel is not without its problems — but they are problems which are a result of other countries’ ignorant and destructive instincts and actions rather than its own. Because of this, they will be easier to solve — and, crucially, they make “war-torn” Israel a far better place to be in than peaceful Britain. Israelis can at least see the bombs that go off in their country — whereas ours go off in our minds and hearts, day after day, destroying everything which was once precious to us. I’m bad at languages, but I do have a heartful of soul and pretty soon I’ll have a Hebrew teacher — a female teacher, thankyouverymuch! — who I’ll see once a week. And eventually, I’ll get there.

Once I couldn’t imagine not living — or dying — in England, but as I get older the more I feel the need to walk in the sun; in the blatant, blameless light of confidence, of communal effort, of a cause greater than keeping the European gravy train/hate machine on track. It’s not exactly next year in Jerusalem — but, God willing, five years from now in Tel Aviv will do me just fine.

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Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 14 years and 30,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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