Jerusalem

Jerusalem

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 53^rd 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 (5^th 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.