Jerusalem
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| Gazan militants pass out desserts to celebrate the murder of 4 Jews in West Jerusalem |
I got home from the Seychelles last night; all was right
with the world, more or less. This
morning I woke up intending to finish a blog post I started several weeks ago
about my first true love, the NBA. I got
to the office, sat down for breakfast, and saw on television that 2
Palestinians had gone into a synagogue in West Jerusalem with knives, axes, and
a gun, and murdered 4 rabbis, before being themselves killed by security
forces. I was crestfallen; not because
violence in Israel is so unusual, but because the nature of the attack was so
heinous, and because I know that such incidents never have any impact on the
policies of the Israel-haters of Europe.
Perhaps more than anything else, today’s attack made me realize how
alone Israel is, and how it has lost the PR battle in most countries on Earth,
save America, Canada, and a few others.
In America itself, undoubtedly Israel’s most important ally,
the “unbreakable bond” between the two countries is frayed. Barack Obama, a bumbling,
incoherent mess of a commander in chief (at least as it pertains to foreign
policy—his domestic initiatives have been more courageous, more successful, and
more reasoned), has clashed ad nauseum with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s
prickly, arrogant, myopic prime minister.
Netanyahu thinks Obama is incredibly arrogant, naïve, and inexpert in
the art of Middle Eastern peacemaking/war making, while Obama thinks that he
can dictate to Netanyahu what Israel’s best interests are.
Whether Obama has Israel’s best interests at heart is up for
debate. On the one hand, he says the
right things; he speaks with reverence of the unbreakable (or is it
unshakeable? unfakeable?) bond between the two countries, he hosts Passover
Seders, he hosts Jewish American History Month receptions, he laid a wreath at
Herzl’s grave on a brief trip to Israel last year, etc. On the other hand, one gets the distinct
impression that he is doing these things because he is supposed to, not because
he has any particular inclination towards Israel. Of course, there is no requirement that
anyone have a fondness for Israel, but campaigning to be president of the
United States, it is understood that both candidates will support the Jewish
state, surrounded by fanatics, dictators, and terrorists. In recent years however, as the intellectually dishonest and anti-Semitic BDS (boycott, divestment, and
sanctions) movement has gained ground amongst naïve, dumb, overly empowered, ideological
college students (almost always very far left-leaning, except for Muslims and
white supremacists), and anti-Israel sentiment has trickled into mainstream
discourse thanks to Jon Stewart (both courageous and a shmuck for trying to
play the role of the “intellectually honest newsman who asks the tough
questions and fights for the underdog” (except when it comes to issues that his
left-leaning base feels uncomfortable discussing---uncomfortable statistics about Islam (see Maher, Bill), violent crime in America, Arab
anti-Semitism and calls for the destruction of Israel (which, logically, would
make the idea of Israel ceding territory to the Palestinian “Authority” seem
worthless, if the entire Arab world intends to destroy Israel even if a peace
deal were ever to be signed)), etc., Israel has gone from apolitical to an
issue on which Republicans can gain Jewish votes (Jews in America vote
overwhelmingly Democratic). Jews haven’t
forgotten how Obama had the Department of Defense halt ammunition shipments to
Israel during its most recent war with Hamas, nor the fact that Obama had one
of his aides call Netanyahu a chickenshit, nor the fact that Obama has snubbed Bibi on more than one
occasion. To be fair, Obama’s enmity for
Netanyahu is not undeserved; Bibi did everything short of waving a Mitt Romney
campaign posted in front of the Knesset last election, he constantly announces
new settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank (including embarrassing Joe
Biden by announcing such a plan while Biden was in Israel), and has
consistently tried to undermine and work around Obama by going directly to
Congress; one gets the sense that Bibi actually thinks he has a better
understanding of American politics than does Mr. Obama (and given the midterm
election results, maybe he is right).
Netanyahu’s continuous proclamations of the right of Israeli
Jews to build in East Jerusalem have triggered the hurling of invectives toward
the Jewish state by Obama and his cohorts, including statements which
inevitably draw responses from Netanyahu and friends. The Likudniks and those even further right
(like Naftali Bennett) bash the American president for not understanding the
Middle East, for being soft on Hamas, soft on Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas
and his incitement against Jews and Israel, etc. They have a point, just as Obama has a point
about settlement building being deleterious for the prospects of the two-state
solution (of course in a perfect world, the two states would be Israel up until
the Jordan River, and then Palestine on the other side of the Jordan River and
through so-called “Jordan”, a state which has no reason to exist and has a
Palestinian majority to boot, but I digress—such pragmatic discussions are not
allowed in liberal discourse, as they threaten the Arab view of what the Middle
East should look like, which of course includes as many hostile states on
Israel’s borders as possible, and the constant demand of Israel to give up
territory, with the eventual goal of one day invading Israel and finishing what
they failed to do in 1948, 1967, and 1973).
All this tit for tat inevitably reaches the topic of the Temple Mount/al
Aqsa Mosque.
Religiously speaking, the Temple Mount is the holiest site
in Judaism, surpassing even the Wailing Wall and Katz’s Delicatessen on 53rd
Street. The Temple Mount was the site where
Solomon built his first temple (which was destroyed) and Herod built his temple,
and upon whose ruins (after Rome sacked Jerusalem during the last period of
Italian military competence in 70 AD) the followers of Mohammed built a mosque. According
to rabbinical guidelines, Jews are not supposed to pray at the Temple Mount,
because it is too holy. This position
suits Muslims fine, because they are super sensitive when it comes to Jewish
history, sovereignty, and religious rights in Jerusalem (until the 1967 war and
the “occupation” of East Jerusalem by Israeli forces, “Jordan” had control over
the Western Wall and its plaza, and refused to let Jews pray there, instead
using the plaza in front of the Western Wall as a place for animals to graze
and defecate, in a sign of Islam’s tolerance towards Judaism).
Despite the rabbinical edicts against Jewish prayer on the
Temple Mount, many nationalist Israeli politicians view the “Muslim only”
prayer rules of the Temple Mount to be degrading, and vow to change the status
quo. This status quo should not be
understood as limited only to the Temple Mount, but rather represents a microcosm
of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Because of both the religious furor of many Palestinians, and because of
their nationalistic desire, Jewish prayer and Jewish politicians on the Temple
Mount represent both an insult and a serious encroachment. Such an encroachment has been met with
violence and renewed calls for a third intifada (with Hamas funding the young
men involved in rioting and stone throwing).
One does not need to spend much time searching online to
understand the kind of hateful language and homicidal desires that many
Palestinian media outlets spew towards Israel and Jews, nor is it hard to
understand how that hatred leads to violence.
Similarly, one does not need to live in the West Bank to understand how
settlers’ taking of water, land, and roads of Palestinians causes fear,
hopelessness, rage, and violence. The
constant arrests, police raids in the middle of the night, settler violence,
and Israeli army presence make Palestinians feel as though they are second-class
citizens at best in their own land. Such
a situation is not tenable.
Recently, prompted by Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas’
religious incitement, and Netanyahu’s moves to take more chunks of Arab
neighborhoods in East Jerusalem (therein hindering the aspirations of a contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital), Palestinians have started rioting and undertaking a grass-roots intifada, mainly in Jerusalem.
There have been several recent attacks in which Palestinians drove cars
into crowds of pedestrians; there have been random stabbings, a police shooting
of an Arab Israeli man who approached a police car with a knife, the disputed
suicide of a bus driver, and today, worst of all, there was a mass murder at a
synagogue in West Jerusalem. The fact
that the homicides today occurred in West Jerusalem rather than East Jerusalem
matters. If West Jerusalem is considered
a legitimate target, it reinforces the idea among cynical Jews that the
Palestinians do not want peace, period, as there is no international dispute as
to the status of West Jerusalem (it is part of Israel). The synagogue attack also creates a situation
in which the lives of Israeli Arabs will become more perilous. Just last week an Israeli Jewish man, driving
through an Arab Israeli town, was pulled out of his car and almost lynched
before being rescued by several Arab residents of the town. If Israeli Jews feel that Arab Israelis as a
whole are a tabuur alkhaamis (5th column), the entire country could
well end up in a sectarian civil war lite, with many Arab Israelis abandoning
their homes, as they did in 1948, and as Jewish Arabs did in the 1940s, 1950s,
and beyond, when 1 million Jewish Arabs fled their homelands to avoid death, harassment,
and fear. This would be a terrible
result, as Israel’s multiculturalism is one of the factors that makes it such a
vibrant place in which to live. Tel Aviv
is the only place I know of in which religious Jews, religious Muslims,
half-naked clubgoers, and three-quarters naked runners constantly bump
shoulders. Unless something is done soon
to curb the cycle of violence, settlements, incitement and hatred in Jerusalem,
Israel will be facing a third intifada, this one less predictable for all
actors involved.
