Progress & eLationships

A-minus: 10 months, 3 days

I’ve got 10 months to my Aliyah target date, so it’s time to stop daydreaming and start the process. The first step was to get a new passport since I lost my old one. Next, I’m going to open a “Tik Aliyah” (Aliyah folder) with the Israeli consulate.

To become an Israeli citizen, the Israeli “Law of Return” requires that the prospective immigrant prove his Jewishness. The Jewish definition of “Who is a Jew” states that one must either have a Jewish mother or have converted to Judaism. However, the founding fathers of Israel decided that in order to fulfill Israel’s mission as a Jewish refuge, anyone who would have been persecuted as a Jew is entitled to Israeli citizenship. Since the Nazis decreed that anyone who had one Jewish grandparent was Jewish enough to kill, the Israeli government adopted this definition. To obtain Israeli citizenship, one needs to present the Israeli consulate with two letters from prominent community members or a certificate of conversion as proof of Jewishness. I’m now in the process of preparing my paperwork.

Interestingly, post-war Germany also decided to open its borders to Jews in order to rebuild its local Jewish population, so anyone who has a Jewish mother can also immigrate to Germany. This results in the strange situation where the Jewish State uses the Nazi definition of “Who is a Jew”, and the descendants of the Nazis use the Jewish definition.

In the mean time I’ve been corresponding with a few potential Shidduchim (matches) via internet and telephone. I refer to these electronic relationships as eLationships. For those who don’t know, in the Frum (Orthodox Jewish) world, dating for marriage-minded singles works something like this:
1. Compile a list of character traits you are looking for in a prospective bride.
2. Go to local Rabbi, Rebbetzin (Rabbi’s wife) or trusted friend and tell them you’re “on the market” and what you’re looking for.
3. Someone recommends a Shidduch.
4. Give and check Shidduch’s references.
5. Initiate contact via phone or email.
6. Arrange and go on dates.
7. Get serious or split up.

Some of these steps may be skipped. For instance, if I bumped into someone I liked at shul (synagogue) and thought she was appropriate, I might start asking around about her without waiting for someone else to have the idea. Sometimes people don’t ask for references. In some very religious communities the couple meets once before getting married, although that is strongly advised against for people who grew up in western society.

So far I’ve made it up to steps 5 and 6, but no further. I’ve been involved in several eLationships recently, but I’ve been finding them extremely difficult since most of the girls I talk to live far, far away. I can have a few phone conversations, but if I want to get to know the girl, I have to buy an airline ticket and fly cross-country. The amount of money I would lose would set my Aliyah plans back by at least a month, maybe two, so it’s already a serious investment.

All these failed eLationships and financial issues sometimes trigger me to fall into the blues. Most mornings I wake up ready to go, to bring myself one more day, one more hour, one more minute closer to my goal. I can daven (pray) with kavannah (intent), and I get to work with a spring in my step. But about once every six months to a year, something happens that causes me to lose my footing. I won’t sleep all night, but in the morning I just want to lay there. I go to work but am really just an empty desk. My last episode happened around Lag B’Omer last May.

Since these “Blues Episodes” have happened a few times, I’ve been learning how to deal with and control them. The Jewish concept of Emunah is not really blind faith, but faithfulness, i.e. sticking to what you know even in times of challenge. I find that if I can just focus on the memory that, yes, there was a time when I woke up and had that powerful sense of direction, and that yes, I am still working towards a goal, even though I may be a bit confused now and it seems out of sight. I use the memory of having direction to gather enough strength to sustain the effort. Gradually, over a course of two or three weeks, I slowly regain my footing and begin again to have that burning fire in my belly of purpose and direction. I always come out of “Blues Episodes” stronger than I was when I fell in.

Well, I’ve got no blues for the time being and am making some serious progress. I put in another 10-hour workday today, I’m putting together my paperwork, and gearing up to begin the Aliyah process!

A-Minus: One Year

Well, this is it, I'm in the home stretch. My aliyah target date is June 1st, 2006. I realize that I may not be leaving on exactly that day, but I want to at least have my Professional Engineering License, to have my debts squared away, and to have all my possessions packed, shipped, sold, or burned by then. It feels good to be moving forward.

On the down side, my dear, precious 1992 Ford Tempo, which I've driven since I was in high school, is now in its death throes. The bearings on the AC compressor are failing, so the car makes these horrible banging and clicking sounds when I drive it. The repairs will cost significantly more than the value of the car. I've been riding my bike as much as possible, hoping beyond hope that I could stretch the car's life out for just one more year, but I don't think it's going to pull through.

Fortunately, a car was just donated to our Chabad, so the Rabbi said I can take it. The deal is that I pay for registration, the smog check, etc., and he'll let me use it for the year.

So my new car is a two-seater 1988 Honda CRX hatchback with 150,000 miles on it. I was ten years old when this baby was born. The hood ornament is missing, the front left end is slightly crunched from some sort of collision, the sunroof looks a bit leaky, the air conditioning and power steering are long gone, the upholstery is shredded, and the body has numerous metastasizing colonies of blood rust. That aside, the old girl really runs smoothly and handles like a missile. I have dubbed her the "Rust Rocket."

The main disadvantage is that it's a manual transmission, and I only know how to drive an automatic. Not to worry! My buddy Art from Chabad has been taking me on lessons after work and on weekends. So far I've managed to go from a standstill to a start without screeching a total of four times out of roughly two hundred attempts. Usually we practice until either we can smell the clutch burning or Art starts experiencing whiplash. I'm only hoping I can get the hang of it before my Tempo breathes its last.

At work, we've hired a new Mechanical Engineer whom I interviewed a few months ago, and I am now in charge of training him. Boy, talk about starting from scratch. This young whipper-snapper came out of school and knows a lot of theoretical engineering stuff, but he's really pretty much a baby when it comes to practical applications and construction. I was never like that, was I? Still, he asks lots of questions and clearly knows that he doesn't know anything, which is a very good sign.

Otherwise things are okay. Life can sometimes get lonely here in Walnut Creek, as there aren't any girls of my age and religious persuasion around. I also haven't been studying Hebrew as much as I should lately, as I have been feeling a bit burned out on it. Still, I've got some good friends to go riding and hiking with. I'm also keeping in shape, working hard, learning a lot, and counting down the days.

A Freilecha Purim!

In shul this morning the Rabbi was passing out miniature bottles of vodka, so it must be PURIM TIME! Happy Purim to everyone!

Things have been moving along nicely here in Walnut Creek. First off, I found out that I passed the EIT exam. What a load off my shoulders! A few weeks later, I got a 3.88% raise, which felt even better. It would appear that Environmental Engineers (Environmental is the latest euphemism for sewage treatment) are in great demand these days. About 15% of the engineers at my company have left over the last two months, recruited mostly by our clients, the local municipalities. I think passing the EIT exam demonstrated my seriousness about advancement to my bosses, and they want to keep me, hence the raise.

When I was studying for the EIT exam, I would usually go to the library for two or three hours every night and spend all day Sunday studying at the coffee shop. I think that the brain is like a muscle, and once you start pushing it, you build up your strength. In order to better understand this process, I invented a new engineering unit. I figure that one fully-functional brain operating at full capacity for a standard hour is one "brain-hour." By long hours of studying, I increased my daily brain-hour capacity by about 40% from 8 hours per day to 11 hours per day. Once I finished the exam, I suddenly found that I had leisure time, something unknown in Israel, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I would finish work, come home, and just vegetate on video games or movies. Like a well-honed endurance runner suddenly sidelined, I found myself going crazy, so I decided to do something about it.

There are many hobbies that I've wanted to do. I've always been embarrassed about being a mechanical engineer and not being able to fix my car, so I could enroll in auto mechanic's courses at the local community college. I also wanted to improve my Hebrew, grow a vegetable garden, and maybe even learn an instrument. Well, I think that one of the reasons that the KBH (Kadosh Baruch Hu, a.k.a. God) sent me out here was to learn about focus. I really have to focus myself to get out of debt and stay on track. So I eliminated three and decided that the most important thing by far is to improve my Hebrew. I figure if I can learn Hebrew well enough, then I'll be able to get a better job after Aliyah, so I can hire someone else to fix my car and I'll be able to haggle with the mechanic better. I will also be able to afford vegetables instead of growing them, and I could buy a nice stereo instead of learning piano.

Thanks to friends in Israel I have some Ulpan (intensive Hebrew) workbooks, so I started with those. I've been going to the library for two hours every night, slowly working through the problems. I have several Israeli expatriate friends from Chabad and one in particular has spent many hours helping me. I fill out about five pages of grammar and vocabulary exercises per night and then fax them to him. He usually returns them, corrected, the next day at morning davening. He's been an amazing help.
Also, I really hit the jackpot when an older friend of mine, Meshullam got married. His wife moved into town and is a total Chabad-style Yiddishe Mame, who happens to have lived in Israel for twenty years. I have been going over to their house every night of the week for a sumptuous and highly kosher meal. After the meal, I have to earn my keep by reading from a Hebrew book of stories about the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I usually read for an hour or more, with her gently correcting and translating the parts I don't understand. It's a fantastic arrangement, and it's a relief to interact with non-engineers from time to time.

Halfway There

I'll start with the good news. My recent collision and the resulting damage to my 12-year-old Tempo caused $1,629.83 worth of damage to the car, which, after some haggling, my insurance company agreed to pay. I then made a near 100% repair with two wood screws and some rubbing compound, costing a total of $0.15, and promptly paid the balance to my student loans, which brings me to my next positive development.

Last year on January 1st, I made a vow to myself that within one year I would finish paying off my parents' portion of my student loans, an amount of $20,000 which we had agreed before my going to college that I was to pay myself. Today, I can proudly announce that, thank God, I reached my goal with 19 hours to spare. Now all I have left is the $20,000 that is in my name. I had decided to finish with my parents' portion first since, if God forbid I get fired or laid off, at least all of the debt would be in my own name, so the government can't go after my family. For the first time in my life I am completely financially independent, as all of my debt is in my own name.

I can now project that I should be able to finish with the second $20,000 by the end of this secular year, January 1st, 2006. I plan on taking the PE exam in April, 2006. This gives me some time to save up a bit extra, and I can at long last set myself a target date for aliyah: June, 2006.

Having a target date changes my outlook on life. I feel like I've been running up a mountain this whole time, and now that I'm halfway, I've come over the crest and am on my way back down. It's just as grueling and just as far as the way I've come, but now I know the terrain and I can finally see the finish line. I know I can make it.

Explosions, Collisions, Exams

Well, it's been quite a week or two.As some may know, I have been working hard towards getting my P.E. (Professional Engineer) license. This license allows the engineer to legally sign on drawings confirming that a design is correct, testify in a court of law, and show that he or she is generally capable of making competent engineering design decisions where human lives, health, or property is at risk. In order to get a P.E. license, one must first pass the E.I.T. (Engineer In Training) exam, accumulate three years of industry experience, and then pass the P.E. exam.

I've been studying for almost six months for the E.I.T. I have also been working long overtime hours (about 60 hours per week) until recently. Fortunately, the design project I've been working on so hard finally went out to the client. I suddenly found myself on a normal working schedule on October 1st, so I decided to really put the pedal to the metal studying. For a solid month (minus, of course, Sukkot) I was studying for three hours per day on weekdays and all day Sunday.

Two Fridays ago, I left work early to try to get in some studying before Shabbes started. There I was sitting at the intersection minding my own business when I heard some popping noises and looked in my rearview mirror to see flying glass and pieces of car. Before I could think, I was rear-ended and my car was thrown into a busy intersection. My car still ran, and I managed to pull to the side of the road with pieces of my car falling off. I really consider myself fortunate, since the person to the left of me had her car totaled and was hauled off in an ambulance, and the person to the left of her and to the right of me were both smashed up in the accident, but I walked away with only rear damage but a running car.

My car managed to limp home. On the way I was consoled upon hearing that Arafat died. I made a temporary repair by duct taping my bumper back onto my car, which has held up very well even in the rain. My insurance broker keeps calling me with tips to weasel money out of the insurance company.

The E.I.T. exam is always given on Saturday, but I received an exemption for religious reasons, which the exam proctor referred to as a "social handicap" and I was allowed to take it a different day. The exam covers everything you learn as an undergraduate, including calculus, thermodynamics, statics, dynamics, electric circuitry, fluid mechanics, physics, chemistry, and computer programming. The test is eight hours long, broken up into a four hour morning section on general engineering and four hour discipline-specific afternoon section, in my case mechanical engineering. I feel pretty good about the morning section, but I’m not so sure about the afternoon section. It was a tough exam, and the effort of studying, taking time off from work, and actually taking the exam was so exhausting that I really don’t want to have to take it again. On my way home, I heard that, his recent death notwithstanding, Arafat was awake and eating cornflakes. A bad omen.

So I came home to the election, which leads me to a confession… I was so wrapped up in my studies that I missed the registration deadline. For the last week I’ve been sulking about my failure as an American. Thank heavens, the Prez-EE-dent was re-elected without my help. Unfortunately, Bush lost California, and all because of me. Still, it was quite a relief. I could say more on why I think it was right for Jews to vote Republican in this election, but then I might never be able to stop. To top off the good news, it was announced that Arafat died again. Two hours later, Arafat issued his congratulations for President Bush’s victory.

So, for the last week, I’ve been working overtime making up the hours I missed for taking the E.I.T. exam. Last night I had finally finished working off the hours, and it was to be the first time I came straight home at 5 P.M. since July. I thought that I was through the woods, but…
…three miles away from where I was working, about 200 feet behind my apartment, the utility company has been digging a pipeline to divert a local creek under the road for flood control. Construction workers managed to expose a pipeline carrying jet fuel from the refinery in Martinez down to the San Jose Airport. For whatever reason, they happened to be doing some welding work in the same trench. The contractor then decided to use a backhoe to drop sections of pipe into the trench instead of the standard and safer procedure of lowering pipe sections by crane. You can see where this is headed.

At around 2 P.M., the resulting explosion shook all of Walnut Creek, sending a ball of flaming jet fuel careening into the sky. At my work, ambulances and fire trucks raced by, but there was little they could do at that point. The blast killed three workers instantly. Two more workers are still missing (i.e. completely vaporized.) Because the fuel pipeline was under pressure, fuel shot out at high velocity and acted as a giant blowtorch, incinerating a house across the street and causing fires at three apartment buildings. One square mile of Walnut Creek, including my apartment, were evacuated completely. Firefighters put out the blaze but it kept shooting back up until late last night, when the rain mercifully started falling. Upon further investigation, I found out that the design was done by Carollo Engineers (my company.) This is the worst tragedy that our company has ever been involved in and the first where someone died. I was able to go home at 9 P.M. to find my apartment still in one piece, but the whole neighborhood stank from the fire. I checked the news before going to bed. It looks like the Arabs have finally confessed that, no, Yassir Arafat is not dead, and he will be buried in Ramallah on Friday.
Well, other than the road carnage, 60 hour weeks, tectonic political shifts, grueling exams, and catastrophic explosions of jet fuel, it’s been a quiet week here in Walnut Creek.

Shanah Tovah!

Well, I haven't been very communicative lately, so I thought I'd just write to say hi.

Things here have been okay but not great. On January first of this year, I still hadn't paid off a dime's worth of debt, which is the whole reason I had to re-enter diaspora living. Various expenses, my car repeatedly breaking down, dental work, old credit card debt, and other problems had taken up all the money I was hoping to put towards my school debt. I had always assumed that my experiences with poverty in Israel, lving for weeks at a time on a bag of potatoes and ketchup packets from Burger King and "securing" my toilet paper from the university would have taught me to be careful with my money, and I was careful, but somehow living on my own in California has just been incredibly expensive. So on Rosh Hashanah last year, I resolved to start clamping down. I cut way way back on luxury expenses and started watching every penny. I like to challenge myself with a game called "streak", where I go as many days as possible without spending any money at all. My current record is six days. Also, my weight loss program really cut back on grocery bills (yes, I'm still maintaining my weight loss of 50 lbs.) Since January every spare cent I have has gone towards the loans.

I can't say that it's been a picnick though. Walnut Creek can be a very lonely place, as it's very hard to find religious girls around here. I've looked on all of the Frum dating websites, and there are some really nice girls out there on the east coast, but they're all too far away and, because of my clamp-down on expenses it's been very difficult to travel. The more local types seem to be more on the liberal end of things, as in, "My name is Sarah and I want to have a family but I also want to be a full-time trauma surgeon," which wouldn't work for what I want in a family. I've been in contact with shidduch potentials in Israel via email, but it's so expensive that I can't afford to meet them in person, and it gradually fizzles, which is harder than having never started communicating in the first place. About a month ago, I became very depressed, to the point that I couldn't eat or sleep for three days (it was right around Tisha B'Av.) Fortunately, I have some good friends here who helped me through it, and I'm feeling a lot happier now. I've always despised depression, assuming it a form of self-pity, but when it hits you it hits hard.
I find that I'm happiest when I feel that I'm making progress towards my goal of Aliyah. The Tanya (the founding mystical text of Chabad Lubavitch) says that if one is depressed the best course of action is to make ones self busy with mitzvot, and work is a mitzvah (six days of the week you shall work and on the seventh day don't do any work at all,) so I decided to throw myself into my work. The main project I've been working on over the last year is due on Erev Rosh Hashanah (September 15th), so there's tons of work to do to get it out the door. I've been working an average of ten hours per day, six days a week. After work, I like to come home, lay down on my bed, and listen to a lesson or two on Aish Hatorah audio (www.aishaudio.com) In the last five weeks I've ammassed over 100 hours of comp time, which I will eventually cash out and put toward my loans.

The good news is that I've been rewarded for my hard work with my very own office. Yes, I am no longer cubicled. I can even close the door and talk over the speaker phone with clients and vendors, or just sit at my desk and look important. Ever since they put me in the office, people stopped treating me like a trainee and started regarding me as an real life engineer. I am now managing construction of the power plant I designed for Seattle last year, meeting with clients, and coordinating our designs with subcontractors. Sometimes, people even ask me questions! The down side is that I'm now held responsible for every mistake I make. It's frustrating when someone comes back to me with a mistake I made in a design I completed a year ago that wasn't noticed until construction, and which is glaringly obvious to me now.

Well, there's lots of other stuff going on here. I have a potential roommate, so I could be moving soon. I have to study for the EIT exam which I'm taking in November. And, of course, the holidays are coming up in just two weeks!

Published - Enough Holocaust Museums

I was published in JWeekly, the San Francisco Bay Area's Jewish weekly magazine. The following editorial appears in this weekend's edition:


Enough Holocaust museums

A quick Google search will reveal no less than 26 Holocaust museums in the United States alone. Scan the headlines and you can’t miss it: a new Holocaust museum recently opened in Hungary; the groundbreaking for a Holocaust museum in Skopje, Macedonia is scheduled to begin soon. In these times, when intermarriage is skyrocketing and assimilation is following close behind, is it really appropriate to pour million after million into museums?

If the goal of these museums is to foster the memory of the Holocaust, they are failing. Polls consistently show a worldwide decrease in Holocaust awareness. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that 35 percent of Europeans think the Jews should "stop playing the victim" and 15 percent think that the Holocaust was exaggerated. The German newspaper Die Zeit found that 65 percent of German teenagers do not even know what the word "holocaust" means. Even in America, 22 percent polled by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum thought it was possible the Holocaust never took place.

Holocaust museums are equally ineffective at fostering Jewish identity. For Jewish children in the public school system, a field trip to the Holocaust museum may be the only contact with the Jewish world they have growing up. Barbed wire sculptures and photographs of emaciated corpses send a clear message to these children: "Stay away!" It sometimes seems that Yiddishkeit (Jewish feeling or content) has been replaced by Holocaustkeit.

So how can we make the memory of the Holocaust permanent, strengthen Jewish identity and boldly proclaim, "Never Again!"? Our history shows and the statistics prove that the only way to strengthen Jewish identity and prevent assimilation is through education. There are Jews walking around today, descended from survivors, who have never heard of Passover, never seen Israel,and never said the Sh’ma.

This "silent Holocaust" is made worse by the fact that it alienates the younger generation from exactly those whom it is supposed to remember. The Yiddishkeit of the six million seems foreign and strange to the Jew who has never learned. Education, outreach and personal involvement are the only way to bridge this gap, make the Holocaust more real, and ensure that there will be a next generation to remember the survivors.

A Holocaust museum can be an important memorial to the fallen, but in a generation facing the existential threats of Jewish ignorance and assimilation, we have to ask ourselves where we can most effectively direct our energy. The next time you walk into a Holocaust museum, look around and think what could have been done with all that energy and money. When you are given the guided tour of the exhibits, instead imagine that the tour guide is a Jewish-school instructor teaching about the holidays. When you are in the auditorium watching movies of bodies being piled up like cordwood, imagine that the room is a classroom full of eager students learning the aleph-bet. Try to imagine yourself as one of the victims of the gas chambers looking down on us today and ask yourself what you would rather see: a thriving Jewish school, or an expensive tomb.

Women of the Wall

Dear friends and family,

Disclaimer: This email contains material which may be somewhat upsetting to those of my friends and family who are Reform and Conservative. Please read what I say carefully, and note that I am making a legal and logical argument, and nowhere do I state that a Reform or Conservative Jew is not a Jew, or that I am somehow "better" for being Orthodox.
A couple of weeks ago I read a piece in Findlaw disparaging the ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court to disallow a group known as "Women of the Wall" from praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest site to which Jews have access. The piece is written by a lawyer named Sheryl Colb (http://writ.news.findlaw.com/colb/), who is a Professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark. Upon seeing the piece, I felt the need to respond, which began a short-lived dialogue.
Before I begin, for those who don't know, the Women of the Wall is a group of non-Orthodox women who pray at the Western Wall every Rosh Chodesh (the first day of each Jewish month) wearing the traditional masculine garments of Tefillin and Talit, praying and singing very loudly, praying as a minyan (quorum,) and reading from the Torah, all of which are the traditional role of men and not women in an Orthodox synagogue.

While this may all sound very technical, it is important to understand that when women pray in this manner, it makes it impossible for the men to pray according to halachah (Jewish Law.) Legal arguments aside, the real fight here is by the non-Orthodox movements for recognition, not by the Israeli state, which already recognizes their religion as Jewish, but by Orthodox Jews who do not. The goal is to make a media spectacle which will attract attention and bring down scorn upon we obstinate Orthodox Jews who refuse to modify our beliefs and practices to make room for the "moral flavor of the month." It is important to make clear that while Orthodox Jews do not believe that the religion that the women are practicing is true to Torah, we still believe that they are Jews and are commanded to love them as sisters regardless of our disagreements.

To get their perspective, go to http://www.womenofthewall.org/ . Two interesting observations on their web page: while the English section is very thorough and well done, and has been up for three and a half years, the Hebrew section still says "Under Construction," indicating that this movement is not integral to Israeli society, in which something like 0.1% of Jews are Reform and Conservative, but imposed by English-speaking American Jews, in which the Refom and Conservative movements attract the majority of Jews. Also, it is noteworthy that while they claim to be acting within Halachah, glaringly absent from the section on their website labeled "Halachah" is any Halachic justification or backing for their actions.

Please bear with me, as the exchange was quite long. If you fall asleep while reading, I won't blame you.

The original article written by Sheryl Colb is as follows:

The Israeli Supreme Court Denies Women The Right to Pray at the Western Wall:A Misguided Decision Parallels the U.S. "Fighting Words" Doctrine

Wednesday, Apr. 23, 2003

Earlier this month, the Israeli Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, refused to permit women to pray out loud at the Western Wall ("the Wall") in Jerusalem. Known in Hebrew as the "Kotel Ha'Maaravi," the Wall is all that remains of the second Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans almost 2000 years ago. It is one of the holiest sites in existence for Jews around the world.
The plaintiffs in the case called themselves the "Women of the Wall." They asked the Israeli Court to recognize their right to pray out loud at the Kotel, after they had repeatedly encountered physical and verbal abuse from the Ultra-Orthodox each time they tried to do so on their own.The women had hoped and expected the Court to agree that they, as a matter of equality, should be able to assemble and pray just like men have done for as long as the Wall has stood. Besides formalizing the legal equality of women, such a ruling could help fortify the resolve of police who must invariably come to the women's aid and repel acts of aggression.
On April 6, the women's hopes were dashed. The Israeli High Court concluded that because of the violence that plaintiffs' religious practice provokes on the part of Ultra-Orthodox spectators, the Women of the Wall would have to conduct their services elsewhere. In the estimation of the Court, female assembly and vocal prayer at the Wall could endanger public order and lead to rioting by Ultra-Orthodox Jews.


Fighting Words: An American Counterpart to the Israeli Concern

American Law has an analogue to the Israeli Court's public order concern: the "fighting words" doctrine. The First Amendment ordinarily protects people's right to speak or assemble in a public forum, without censorship by the government. Under such cases as Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, however, an exception exists for "fighting words," defined to include "those personally abusive epithets which, when addressed to the ordinary citizen, are, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke violent reaction."

To assess whether particular speech qualifies as "fighting words," courts must determine when the likely response will be an assault. Words that predictably provoke immediate violence do not enjoy constitutional protection. Like the Women of the Wall, the speaker in such cases is classified as disruptive of public order.Implicit Gender Bias in the Fighting Words Doctrine
Feminist authors have argued persuasively that the fighting words doctrine focuses on the wrong party in attributing responsibility for outbreaks of violence. To attach the label "fighting words" is, at least to some extent, to mitigate the seriousness of the violence that may follow such speech, on the theory that the speaker "asked for" or provoked the aggression.

Such labeling literally "blames the victim" for violence that is directed against him. It permits the government to punish his speech in addition to (or even instead of) punishing the person who would use his fists in response to words.

On top of unfairly attributing blame, moreover, the fighting words doctrine could conceivably turn on the gender of an audience to offending speech. When a woman, for example, listens to abusive remarks, the odds are relatively slim that she will physically assault the speaker. However hurtful the words that she hears, a woman ordinarily will not lash out in physical violence, even in situations in which men predictably would.


At best, this reality suggests that the fighting words doctrine is built around a masculine conception of speakers and listeners that disregards female modes of interaction and accommodates a stereotypically male way of responding to provocation.

At worst, as some authors have suggested, the doctrine provides that a person speaking abusively to a woman may enjoy greater First Amendment protection than a person speaking abusively to a man, by virtue of the likelihood that each respective listener will respond with violence.

Another way of putting this is that, as a matter of First Amendment doctrine, the worse the listener's temper, the more limited the speaker's freedom.


Explicit Gender Bias

The gender bias implicit in the American fighting words doctrine becomes explicit and pronounced in the decision handed down by the Israeli Supreme Court. The provocative speech (and worship) in that case is the prayer of women at a holy site. It is precisely the speakers' gender that triggers violent disorder on the part of onlookers.

By taking the abusive conduct of Ultra-Orthodox Jews as inevitable and silencing the praying women to restore order, the Court effectively condones violence as a strategy for imposing one's religious dogma on others. In the particular case, it does so at the expense of equality.

A Lesson from U.S. Constitutional Law

As noted above, U.S. courts have adopted a troubling fighting words doctrine. In addition, they have in other contexts often failed to resist oppressive private behavior. Yet in the area of race relations, they have embraced a salutary policy that could be instructive for the Israeli Supreme Court.

In Palmore v. Sidoti, decided in 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court confronted a custody battle between a man and woman who had formerly been married and had a daughter together. Both parties and their child were Caucasian.

The mother in the case, Linda Palmore, had originally been awarded custody of the couple's daughter. The father - Anthony Sidoti - later sought a modification of the custody award due to changed circumstances. Since the divorce was finalized, the mother had begun cohabiting with an African-American man (whom she went on to marry), and the child's father believed that this development called for a change in his child's living situation.

The Florida courts agreed with Sidoti and held that his daughter should not have to suffer the social stigmatization that would likely accompany life in a multiracial household. It accordingly awarded custody to the girl's father.

On appeal, the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Florida courts. It held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from making custody decisions on the basis of race, even if the government's motive is to protect innocent people from exposure to the racial prejudice of society. The Court's decision wisely refused to allow bigots to dictate the structure of society.

The Israeli Supreme Court should have ruled likewise. The fact that some Ultra-Orthodox Jews may become violent and abusive in response to women praying out loud at the Wall is shameful and should be addressed as the hate crime that it is. As the U.S. Court said in Palmore, "[p]rivate biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect." The decision against the Women of the Wall did exactly that: it gave effect to the wishes of the Ultra Orthodox, as expressed through violence.

The Larger Implications of the Ruling for Israeli Policy

The Israeli government should be especially sensitive to the perversity of the argument that prevailed in this case. Terrorists regularly visit death and injury on the people of Israel. They do so, they claim, in response to what they describe as Israel's provocative behavior - including settlement of the West Bank.Rather than alter its settlement policy, however, Israel has chosen to react to suicide bombings by indicating that it will not bow to terrorists, even if it might - in the absence of the violence - have begun the process of dismantling the settlements.

Whatever one thinks of Israeli settlements, the value of standing up to terrorists and resisting such extortion is clear. For both practical and moral reasons, Israel must not be perceived as conducting its decision-making at the point of a Palestinian gun.

Women of the Wall: Their Right to Worship

A group of Jewish women has sought to worship at a holy place at which men have worshipped for centuries. The women wish to pray and sing aloud - as the men do - despite the religious opposition of Ultra-Orthodox Jews who contend that the sound of a woman's voice is too sexually alluring to be heard by men.Onlookers - apparently inflamed with desire - have repeatedly set upon the "provocative" women by spitting, shoving, and hurling stones and other heavy objects, causing injuries that have, on occasion, required hospitalization. The Israeli Supreme Court attributes this "public disorder" to the peaceful prayers of the women rather than to the illegal and disgraceful behavior of their assailants.

One could justifiably characterize this decision as representing one step along to road to appeasing terrorists. It is a grave mistake that ought to be recognized as such and overruled.

Ephraim Aryeh's Response of 4/25/03

Dear Ms. Colb,I read your article on the Israeli Supreme Court case in FindLaw, and had a few problems with it. I couldn't figure out how to post this to the message board so I decided to email it to you directly.

First off, I'm not a lawyer.

I agree with your argument that the ruling that the presence of non-Orthodox women praying provokes the Orthodox men and women around them to violence is "blaming the victim," and the court should not have barred the "Women of the Wall" for that particular reason. However, as an Orthodox Jew, I would object to the presence of the women's prayer group not for that reason but because it is imposing a separate religion. The religion to which the women adhere, which calls itself Conservative Judaism, has been in existence for approximately 150 years. The religion to which the Orthodox men and women adhere, which calls itself Traditional or Orthodox Judaism, has been in existence for about 4,000 years. The Temple Mount, and later the Western Wall, has been a holy place for Orthodox Jews for nearly that entire time. Essentially, what the "Women of the Wall" amounts to is the imposition of a foreign religion upon Orthodox Jews in our holiest place. A parallel situation would be if a group of Muslims called itself "Muslims of the Church" and walked into a Catholic Church screaming "Alla Hu Achbar!" on Sunday mornings. Like the women of the wall, the Muslims could fairly make the claim that they were not interfering with the worship of Catholics because the Catholics were free to continue worshipping in their own way. However, realistically there is no way that the Catholics could be expected to reasonably tolerate such a disturbance in their holiest of places.

One could, of course argue, that the "Women of the Wall" are not trying to impose their religion on the Orthodox Jews but pray in their own way, and any offence is unintentional. However, the fact is that the Israeli Supreme Court offered "Women of the Wall" a separate location on the Western Wall to pray in their own way. This section of the wall, unearthed recently, is, in fact, closer to the original location of the Jewish Temple and therefore considered even holier than the current location where the Orthodox Jews pray. Their outright rejection of this solution indicates that their intent is not the practice of their religion but the imposition of their religion on Orthodox Jews.

As a side note, I also object to the following quote, "Terrorists regularly visit death and injury on the people of Israel. They do so, they claim, in response to what they describe as Israel's provocative behavior - including settlement of the West Bank. Rather than alter its settlement policy, however, Israel has chosen to react to suicide bombings by indicating that it will not bow to terrorists, even if it might - in the absence of the violence - have begun the process of dismantling the settlements."

This comment is somewhat disingenuous. While certain English-speaking pundits and European intellectuals use this argument, the terrorists do not. Virtually every terrorist group, from Hamas to Yassir Arafat's Fatach faction, do not claim that they conduct their attacks because of Jewish settlements but because of the existence of a Jewish state.

I would appreciate your input on these comments.

Sheryl Colb's Response of 4/25/03

Dear Mr. Aryeh:

Thank you for your thoughtful e-mail. I think you make a number of interesting points. The notion that the women in this case are practicing a different religion altogether puts the case of the Orthodox in a very different light, and I appreciate you're clarifying the issues in this way. Ultimately, though, I am not sure that I agree with the characterization. The analogy between "Muslims of the Church" and "Women of the Wall" strikes me as flawed, in part because the "Women of the Wall" group includes Orthodox Jews as well as Conservative and Reform Jews. Perhaps the Orthodox among them are modern Orthodox, however, and therefore, by your lights, not that different from Conservative. Still, I don't think the belief that women should be able to worship out loud is really enough of a departure from traditional Judaism to make the women's practice of Judaism an entirely different religion (just as a Sephardic Jew's eating peanuts on Passover does not convert the Sephardic Jew into an adherent of another religion from the Ashkenazim, or, to take a closer analogy, an Orthodox rabbi who shakes hands with women is not distinct enough from an Orthodox rabbi who refuses to shake hands (on the grounds that to do so would be "negiyah") to be a leader of different religion. The reason the women wish to worship at the Wall is not, I think, a desire to force a different religion on the Orthodox (as, for example, I would suggest about "Jews for Jesus"). Instead, women -- like men -- are drawn to the traditional association of that Wall with the Jewish religion. My suspicion, for example, is that even though the newly unearthed part of the Wall may be holier in some respects, as you suggest, the Orthodox men who currently pray at the Wall would probably be displeased if they were told by the Israeli Supreme Court that from now on, only women will be permitted to pray at the Kotel but that men (and only men) can pray at the alternative, holier portion of the wall. The women's not being satisfied with the alternative, in other words, is not necessarily proof that they just want to impose a religion on the Orthodox. Neither men nor women would wish to have their worship relegated to an "alternative" forum, even if that location may be "objectively" just as good as or better than the desired one. On the separate question of what gives rise to terrorism, you are right about what various terrorist groups say when claiming "credit" for their murders of Jews. Nonetheless, I think that the question is actually quite complex. While leaders of terrorist groups (and many terrorists themselves) say and believe that the existence of a Jewish State is what provokes them to violence, the reality is that the settlements may contribute to the ability of terrorist groups to recruit followers (each of whom presumably does what he does for his own reasons). If that is so, as I think it is, then a cessation of settlement and progress toward dismantling them could, in fact, reduce the amount of terrorism. Nonetheless, if Israel were to change its settlement policy in an obvious reaction to bus bombings, then the result could be very destructive and the message would be to reward violence (in fact, some Israeli academics in my circle of friends have indicated that pulling out of the Sinai when Israel did was strategically a mistake for that very reason, even though every one of them believes that pulling out of the Sinai was the right thing to do). In any event, I very much appreciate your sharing your thoughts with me, and I hope I have helped clarify my views for you. SFC

Ephraim Aryeh's Response of 5/2/03

(Note: I decided to ignore Ms. Colb's non sequitur stab at the settlements and argue only the merits of the religious arguments)

Dear Ms. Colb,

I have been thinking about the email you sent me and wanted to reply.

First, the supposition that the difference between Conservative/Reform (which I will call "Heterodox" for the sake of argument) and Orthodox is the same as the difference between Sephardi and Ashkenazi does not accurately reflect the basis of the disagreement. The specific example of a Sephardi eating peanuts on Passover while the Ashkenazi does not, is, like all differences between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, a matter of specific interpretation of an ordinance which is universally accepted among Orthodox Jews. Specifically, an Orthodox Jew is forbidden from eating leaven on Passover. In the world of Ashkenazi Jewry, there was a danger of peanuts being carried in the same sack as leaven, and therefore a ruling was made that Peanuts must be treated as leaven lest one inadvertently ingest leaven while enjoying a peanut. In the Sephardi world, leaven was not typically carried in the same sack with Peanuts, and therefore the Sephardi Rabbis ruled that there is no need to avoid peanuts. If the Torah is considered as the Jewish Constitution, then the Ashkenazi and Sephardi rabbis may be thought of as the state legislature and supreme court. While Florida and California may pass different laws and rulings relating to the local implementation of their laws, the United States Constitution will always be the basis of that law.

The thirteen principles of faith, as laid out by Maimonides in the 10th century, have been accepted as the litmus test by Judaism (for the last 200 years, Orthodox Judaism) to determine whether a religion or system of beliefs which claims to be Jewish has drifted far enough that it will be considered a different religion. Heterodox Judaism is in violation of many of these principles, more, in fact, than Christianity. For example, the ninth principle, "…that this Torah will not be changed, and that there will never be another given by G-d," clearly tells us that, for an Orthodox Jew, Torah is immutable. However, a Conservative Rabbi may pass a ruling that one may drive to his temple on the Sabbath, in spite of the fact that this will inevitably lead to the lighting of a fire on the Sabbath, which is expressly forbidden by Torah. An Orthodox Rabbi simply doesn’t have the power to make such a ruling. Because they are operating from the same set of basic principles, the Ashkenazi recognizes the Sephardi who eats peanuts on Passover as legitimate, even though he would never do so himself, and the Sephardi recognizes Ashkenazi leniencies likewise, but neither would dream of recognizing the Heterodox Rabbi’s rulings. Due to the vast chasm in both basic belief and practice which separates Heterodox from Orthodox Judaism, it is difficult to see what grounds there are to say that the two are of the same religion.Indeed a similar situation exists in the Christian world. Mormons will continuously affirm that they are Christians, and indeed they do share many of the same beliefs, but Christian theologians would never agree that Mormons are Christians.

As to the argument that some of the Women of the Wall are modern Orthodox, well, it seems beside the point. While they may claim to be of the Orthodox persuasion, their actions are clearly in violation of the beliefs and norms of Orthodox Judaism. To use the "Muslims of the Church" argument, it would be as if some of the Catholics decided to join in with the Muslims. This would not necessarily imply that the Muslims were practicing Catholicism.

As to the final argument, that the Western Wall holds a special place in the hearts of the Women of the Wall because of its traditional association with the Jewish religion, one can only take their word for it. And yes, the Orthodox men and women would be quite put out if they were asked to move from the Kotel to an alternate location, but it really comes down to a question of who was there first. Because prayers have been carried out at this location by Orthodox Jews for virtually all of recorded history, they take precedence over Heterodox Judaism. And because Heterodox and Orthodox forms of prayer are mutually exclusive and can’t be done in the same place, the Orthodox Jews have priority. Likewise, there are many Orthodox Jews who would much prefer to pray on the Temple Mount itself because if its traditional association with the Jewish religion, but because that location is currently in use by Muslims, the Israeli Supreme Court has determined that, for the Orthodox Jews, it’s just too bad.

Sheryl Colb's Response of 5/8/03
Dear Mr. Aryeh:

I have enjoyed our exchanges, but unfortunately, time is such that I cannot continue it indefinitely, even though it has been very interesting. I leave you the last word if you want it, but I do want to say a few things in parting.

Our discussion began with your suggestion that Women of the Wall represents a different religion from Orthodox Judaism, and the women's unwillingness to go to an alternative forum is evidence of their bad faith. I responded that the Orthodox men would almost certainly reject the suggestion that *they* go to an alternative forum (even if the forum were just as "holy" as the Western Wall, by many accounts). My point was not that the women should be able to go to the Western Wall and the Orthodox should go elsewhere. I was simply addressing your claim about bad faith by indicating that all Jews, including Women of the Wall, have reason to want to pray at the Western Wall, and that their wish to do so is therefore not proof of a desire to impose their vision of Judaism upon others, but is simply a product of the Wall's status as an important traditional place for Jewish worship. Just as Orthodox would not want to go elsewhere, so the Women of the Wall do not want to go elsewhere, and neither should have to.

Everyone, in other words, can be acting in good faith and nonetheless wish to pray at the Western Wall. If the Women of the Wall were to insist, however, that the Orthodox should be excluded from praying at the Wall, because their prayers and their modes of behavior offend the women and construct women's status in a manner that is profoundly wrong, I would think that such insistence should not be accepted as a basis for excluding the Orthodox. Jews of all different stripes come to the Wall for different reasons, and none should be excluded just because their approach is inconsistent with another's. If they work together, for example, the Ultra-Orthodox can come to an understanding through which particular times will be available to people who prefer not to pray in the presence of women praying aloud or ultra-Orthodox. For you to suggest that the Women of the Wall should not be allowed to pray out loud at what they (and their detractors) view as a holy place for Jews, because their views of Judaism are "heterodox" or otherwise presumptively inferior to that of the Orthodox, shows a lack of humility that all Jews, and indeed all human beings, ought to have in this world of uncertainty.

No one can know exactly what God wants from Jews (or from non-Jews). Everyone religious does his or her best to understand the commandments in a light that coheres with deep impulses about good and evil. Many, perhaps most, Hasidim, for example, believe that the Torah forbids the existence of Israel as a State until the Moshiach comes. For them, the very power of an Israeli Supreme Court or an Israeli prime minister who can make decisions about settlements or anything else is as good as treif. If you think that all Orthodox are united on the important things about halacha, you are thus very much mistaken. Finally, on the matter of who was at the Wall first, I would be very cautious about relying on an argument like that, when Jews have been shunned and worse by outsiders precisely because we weren't there first.

Though I could say more, other responsibilities call, and I know that whatever I say, you will believe what you believe, and I will believe what I believe. I nonetheless hope that our exchange will prove enlightening as we encounter people unlike ourselves in the future. SFC--End of email

Ephraim Aryeh's Final Response 5/8/03

Clearly, Professor Colb did not want me to respond, so I am forced to reply on my own. Her statement, "I leave you the last word if you want it, but I do want to say a few things in parting," seems to be something of an oxymoron, but I’ll leave it be.The most interesting observation one could make of Professor Colb’s response is that she really doesn’t address the legal or logical arguments I was making. Indeed, from reading her final email, it is not even clear if she read my email of 5/2/03. When she begins railing against my supposed superiority complex, which is a stereotype she seems to have about Orthodox Jews in general and is applying to me in this case, one can’t help but laugh.To go point by point:"Our discussion began with your suggestion that Women of the Wall represents a different religion from Orthodox Judaism, and the women's unwillingness to go to an alternative forum is evidence of their bad faith."

I believe that I conceded the point in my second email of 5/2 that we don’t know whether their motivation for wanting to pray at the more crowded section of the Western Wall is political or religious. "We can only take their word for it," were the words I used.

The legal argument I made was that I can not pray as an Orthodox Jew at the Western Wall in the presence of a Heterodox minyan without violating my own religion, which commands me not to listen to a quorum of lovely young women singing while I’m praying lest I be distracted from talking to my creator and start thinking about Women. Orthodox Judaism makes the honest distinction that men are the weaker gender when it comes to impulse control, concentration, and sexual restraint. For me to pray in the presence of such a minyan is to violate my religion. Whether intentional or unintentional, the actions of Women of the Wall constitute religious coercion, forcing me to either become a non-Orthodox Jew myself or no longer visit the wall. Professor Colb did not address this point.

"For you to suggest that the Women of the Wall should not be allowed to pray out loud at what they (and their detractors) view as a holy place for Jews, because their views of Judaism are "heterodox" or otherwise presumptively inferior to that of the Orthodox, shows a lack of humility that all Jews, and indeed all human beings, ought to have in this world of uncertainty."
The term "Heterodox" does not presume inferiority. The term "Orthodox" is a label which was assigned to people who had always thought of themselves simply as "Jews" by the Reform in the early days of their movement. The term "Ortho" meaning one, "dox" meaning way. It is defined as "Adhering to the accepted or traditional and established faith, especially in religion," by Webster’s dictionary. Therefore "Heterodox" seems appropriate, "Hetero" meaning different or, more specifically, differentiated (like heterogeneous,) since within Reform and Conservative there is no unifying moral code. A careful reread of my emails will show that I was not arguing the merits of one belief system against another (which I would be happy to do,) and I was not stating that one group is somehow superior to another.

"If you think that all Orthodox are united on the important things about halacha, you are thus very much mistaken."

No argument there. Orthodox Judaism is probably the most pluralistic religion in the world. There are Jews who say Tachanun (the prayer of mourning) on Israeli Independence Day, which they see as a disaster, and there are those who say Hallel (the prayer of thanksgiving and praise) on the same day, for what they see as a miracle. Yet all abide by the thirteen principles of faith and regard each other’s beliefs as Jewish. Professor Colb did not address this issue which I brought up in my email of 5/2.

"Finally, on the matter of who was at the Wall first, I would be very cautious about relying on an argument like that, when Jews have been shunned and worse by outsiders precisely because we weren't there first."

The Women of the Wall are still allowed to pray at the Western Wall. This is the unassailable right of every Jew. Provided, of course, that they pray in the traditional manner. At issue is not the right of the individual but the right of the movement. Suppose Jews for Jesus decided to erect a giant cross at the Western Wall. Technically, they are all Jewish, they simply believe that Jesus is the Moshiach. Therefore, by Reform standards, they are just as Jewish as Reform. Would this not be considered religious coercion? Would any court which values tolerance allow such a thing?

To close, I want to make it clear that I do not dislike "Heterodox" Jews. Indeed, I still feel a very strong closeness with all of my Jewish brothers and sisters. I simply do not believe that they have the right to force their religion upon me.

Shabbat Shalom,
Ephraim

Perspectives on Zionism

The current war being fought in Israel is causing deep soul-searching in every corner of the political spectrum. The fact that 54 years after the establishment of their state, the Jews are still fighting tooth and nail for their national survival is bringing many to ask if Zionism can really be considered a success.

By every physical standard, Zionism is an unparalleled success. Over the last hundred years the land of Israel has increased its capacity to support a population from a few hundred thousand to 5.3 million Jews and almost as many Arabs. Israeli universities churn out scientific achievements at a rate far greater than most other western nations. The Israeli military is a modern and fearsome fighting machine with the demonstrated ability to repeatedly vanquish a vastly numerically superior enemy. So why is there an increasing sense of despair on the streets of Tel Aviv these days?

Despite their differences, the one thing that the early Zionists had in common with each other was that they were secular. This lack of belief in a higher power convinced them that it was up to them to solve the problems facing the Jewish world by their own power. The secular Zionists interpreted the anti-Semitism which culminated in the Holocaust as proof that life in the Diaspora is untenable. Therefore, the clearest solution to the anti-Semitism and torture that the Jews of Europe were facing was to set up a state of their own. They could then stand tall and face their European neighbors as equals. The state would have a strong military to prevent raging Cossacks and boot-clicking Nazis from wiping them out. After becoming free of the chains of Europe, the Jews would be able to speak their own language, Hebrew, and pursue their own national destiny as a people.

If judged by these goals, secular Zionism is an abject failure. Israel’s right to exist is routinely denied by the Arabs, and even the Europeans frequently question it. Israelis are being booted out of European universities, Israeli sports teams are no longer welcome in Europe, and European nations frequently tax or boycott Israeli products. Israel is the Jew of the nations. For all of its tanks and planes and hydrogen bombs, Israel is still unable (or unwilling) to use its military to defend its citizens. Today’s descendants of the Nazis and Cossacks are funding terrorist attacks by siphoning European Union funds to the Palestinian Authority. “Israeli Culture” today seems to be more American culture translated into Hebrew. The cultural characteristics of America from Coca Cola to Viagra to road rage are popping up all over the Israel. The Israeli state, which was supposed to be a refuge, is probably the least secure place for a Jew to live in the world.

But by religious standards, Israel is an unparalleled success. Traditionally religious Judaism (orthodoxy) views history as moving in a specific direction. The end goal of history is to reach a state of world peace with all of the Jewish people living in the land of Israel and living their lives by the Torah. The State of Israel is viewed by most as an important step on that path. The traditional Jew does not see the end of anti-Semitism as a realistic goal. G-d uses anti-Semitism to correct the course of the Jewish people when they go too far astray. Because the world has not arrived at the final messianic age, then obviously the Jewish people do not yet merit it, and therefore Anti-Semitism must be expected. Since Orthodox Jews believe that G-d created the Universe and everything in it, then no amount of military might or financial prowess is going to make these troubles go away. Only more careful religious observance and strengthening of the bonds between Jewish brethren can mitigate anti-Semitism.

When the Secular Jew looks at America, the ultimate golden Diaspora, he sees all of the physical and financial security Jews enjoy here. He finds a tolerant atmosphere and Jews reaching unparalleled prosperity and levels of acceptance. The original goals of secular Zionism; security, equality, and cultural freedom, can be more easily attained here in America.
But to the Orthodox Jew, life in America, however sweet, is transitory. The fact that Jews have become Federal Reserve Chairmen and movie producers and Vice Presidential candidates does not change the fact that history has a goal for us, and it is not going to be fulfilled here. The accomplishments of Diaspora Jewry are impermanent, and some day we will be called upon to fold our tents, pack our bags, and catch the next flight to Jerusalem. The only indelible edifice that there will be to our ever having existed will be the effect we have on the souls of the people who live around us. This explains the planeloads of secular Israelis who are leaving Israel for America, and the planeloads of American Orthodox Jews who pass them in the air on their way to Israel.

All-Out War

Sunday, March 10, 2002 6:51 AM



As I pack my bags, store away my silverware and dishes, scrub down the kitchen, repaint my room, and repair some of the damages I did to my apartment, it strikes me how much things have changed over the last twenty months I’ve spent in Israel. They say that one month in Israel is like one year in chul (outside of Israel,) so I’ve watched the equivalent of two decades race by.
Israel, and the entire world, are very different places than they were in August, 2000. When I arrived, Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon, Clinton, Barak, and Arafat claimed to be inches away from hammering out some sort of arrangement, the economy was racing ahead, and there was a very brief taste of peace. Of course by this time I, and the majority of my friends in Israel, had a deep sense of foreboding. I remember, during this time of peace and tranquility, my friend Gil pulling me aside and telling me that, "There’s going to be a war soon, a big one, and not just with the Palestinians but with all the Arabs." Why? "When I was here ten years ago, I used to go to the Arab shuk. We Jews went about our business and they went about theirs. Today when I go, I’ve got Arabs following me around, threatening me, sizing me up, staring me down. They aren’t going to settle for just giving me the evil eye much longer." When discussing declaring Israeli citizenship with friends, and considering the mandatory two-year army stint, everybody told me, "Wait until after the next war."
In the West, every war is supposed to be the last. Wasn’t World War I the "War to end all wars?" War is seen as an occasional, necessary evil which must be avoided if possible and finished quickly and painlessly if not. In Israel, war is a lifestyle. Nobody in America really thinks ahead to the next war because there aren’t supposed to be any more. In Israel, the "Next War" is an inevitability. "In The Next War, there’s going to be a lot of anti-population warfare," Itzig tells me. When Zehava is trying to remember the word "Can" in English, she asks, "How do you say it? The thing you buy lots of whenever there’s a war?" Each war is seen as just one more battle in Israel’s endless struggle for survival.
Today, Israel is at war, and is in imminent danger of falling into a much larger conflict. In my last two weeks in Israel, the conflict began burning out of control. At the beginning of the Peace Process, upon a terrorist murder, the government would cut off ties with the Palestinian Authority with the understanding that they might never be restored. By the time Barak was negotiating away all of Yesha in March of 2001, the government would cut off ties for two hours after each attack, and the Palestinian negotiators would scream that Israel was "wasting time!" Attacks which killed ten or more people, attacks which happened once every year or two before the Peace Process, are now happening every single day, one after the next after the next. On Friday night, a bomb blast killed ten in Jerusalem, on Monday, a sniper killed ten more people, on Monday night, two terrorists with machine guns entered a restaurant in Tel Aviv and started mowing people down, killing three. Israelis go about their business, go to work, eat three square meals a day, and constantly hear about the scores of Israelis being murdered daily. This leads to a feeling of despair and impotence, which breeds rage. People are walking around, shaking with anger.
In response, Israel is moving in hitting back with less and less restraint. On Monday, a tank shell meant for a Hamas leader ripped through his car and killed his wife and children instead. Is there a difference between the two? According to western values, there is, but according to eastern values, there is not. Western civilization recognizes the concept of "intent." We recognize that there is a difference between mugging and murdering an elderly woman and accidentally hitting someone with a car. In the first case, it’s called murder, in the second, unintentional manslaughter. When Israel tries to hit a Palestinian terrorist warlord and misses, Westerners view this as unfortunate but unavoidable civilian casualties, Arabs view it as being identical to terrorism.
It is widely argued that the Palestinians have to use terrorism because they "have no other way." This is, indeed, an accurate statement. The Palestinians have no army which can fight Israel, "no tanks, no air force, no helicopters!" as Saib Erekat and Yassir love to bark out over and over. However, it must be said that they have no real means of pursuing their goals because their goals are unjust. Hitler had no way of legally exterminating the Jewish people, so he had to violate the Geneva convention to do so, Sadaam Hussein had no way of legally taking over Kuwait, so he did it illegally. Likewise, the annihilation of Israel is not a just cause, as Israel is a legitimate, democratic, and recognized country, and therefore there simply is no way for the Palestinians to achieve their goals legally.
In order for there to be a peace process, the Palestinians first had to be humanized. The image of the Arab in Israel had always been that of a savage with a knife clenched in his teeth, stalking his next victim. Gradually, Israelis came to see the real suffering of the Palestinians, self-inflicted though it may be, as a source of great frustration which had to be redressed if there were ever to be peace. Israelis began to see a distinction between "radicals" and the average Arab who just wanted peace and a little plot of land. This was essentially a projection of Israeli society onto Palestinian society. It was a model which was easy for most Israelis to understand because they viewed right wingers as their own "radicals" who were getting in the way of the average Israeli who also just wanted peace and a little plot of land.
In watching the situation unfold, however, this "humanization" has reversed. Israelis see suicide bombers blowing the heads off of infants, sadistically mutilating and torturing children, wiping out whole families, and intentionally killing non-combatants, grandmothers and grandfathers. Then, they turn on the television and see Palestinian women and children passing out sweets on the streets of Gaza and reveling the heroic slaughter of innocents. Are these those same average Arabs who wanted peace and a plot of land? They see Palestinian rallies, orgies of wild, animalistic violence, screaming, and shooting in the air. They see the Palestinian worship of death and killing, both of the suicide bombers and of Israeli babies and grandparents. Israelis see things in Arab society which are totally unimaginable in Israeli society. Israelis are coming to realize that they do not have so much in common with the average Palestinian as they once thought.
Jerusalem Post radio gave an interview about a year ago with a Jewish man who worked in Talpiot, a Jerusalem suburb. He had hired several Arab workers, and the whole business got along quite well. He decided, as a special gift, to give his best worker a bonus and a free cellular phone out of appreciation. He handed the gifts to the Arab man, walked inside, and heard a huge explosion. It turned out the Arab had taken the gifts and then turned right around and tried to plant a bomb in his boss’s car when it accidentally detonated. Last week, an Israeli in Efrat noticed a man from a neighboring Arab village walking through town. The Arab man had very friendly relations with many residents in the town, and was on a first-name basis with some. When he walked straight past many of his friends and acquaintances without saying hello, they called security. It turned out he had a bomb strapped to him, which was defused after security shot him dead. Last week in Jerusalem, an Arab walked into the office of his business partner, a close friend of three years, and shot him dead. Not because of a quarrel between them, just plain old terrorism. Who are the average Arabs who wand peace? How do you know that the Arab who you thought was your friend isn’t about to kill you?
"They aren’t humans," is an expression which I hear more and more on the Israeli street. "I refuse to believe that a real human being is capable of doing such things. They are animals." This dehumanization is very dangerous, especially for the Palestinians. Before a war, the enemy has to be dehumanized. In world World War I, the Germans became Huns, and in later wars, the Japanese became Japs, the Germans were Krauts, the Viet Cong were Gooks, and the Iraqis were Ragheads and Camel Jockeys.

The Palestinian Intifadah has formed a little bubble of anger in the Israeli mind. Every attack makes the bubble just a little bit bigger, each murder makes the anger rise just a little bit higher. With the latest series of gruesome attacks, the bubble is in danger of popping. Walking around on the street, you can now see the anger breaking through the surface. It breaks through when two people having a conversation start screaming at each other over nothing. You can see it in the way that people in their cars are on the horn in a split second, the way parents are overly anxious about their children. Everybody is living on the front lines, whether they like it or not. People are walking around shaking with rage and fear.

This is not a good state of mind in which to make balanced judgments, but people no longer want balanced judgment. As one cousin eloquently put it, "They keep saying that we’re about to blow up, so let’s blow the *&-* up already! How many people have to die?" The inaction of the government can be just as frustrating as the terror itself. It’s one thing to be killed by your enemies, it’s another when the government doesn’t seem to care. When former Prime Minister Netanyahu gave away Hebron to the Palestinian Authority, the Jewish community asked what would happen if the Palestinians started firing on their exposed section of the city. "We’ll send in tanks," said Netanyahu. Today, the Arabs are picking off the Hebron Jews like flies, but there are no tanks. During the first days of the violence, Barak threatened to abrogate the Oslo Agreements if the violence did not stop in two days. Two days later, he backed down. When Hizbullah kidnapped three soldiers, Barak threatened to bomb Beirut if they were not returned in 48 hours. 48 hours later, nothing happened. When Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi was assassinated, Sharon announced, "What was will no longer be." But what was, small-scale strikes targeting individual terrorists while talking to other terrorists, and blowing up empty buildings, still is. Sharon threatened to bring the conflict to a "whole new level" if the Palestinians fired Kassam-2 rockets on Israel’s population centers, but now that they are indeed firing their missiles nothing seems to have changed. The government keeps saying that it isn’t at war one minute, and that the Palestinians have, "Declared war on us," the next.

Even more frustrating than the government’s inaction is the fact that the Intifadah has not brought real national unity. Yes, there is a national unity government including Labor, but the only people within the Labor party who are supportive of remaining in the government are those with cabinet ministries. Meanwhile, those in the Labor party who were not awarded ministries are constantly doing everything within their power to undermine the government. At the same time, a group of about two hundred fifty Israeli reserve soldiers, many of them officers, are refusing to serve in the settlements. While this movement has not snowballed into any sort of mass popular movement, and about 10,000 soldiers have signed a counter-petition decrying the move, it is still yet another visible split. One group of citizens who live in "Pre-1967" Israel have now declared that those citizens living in the post-1967 territories are no longer deserving of government protection and are challenging the sovereignty of the Israeli government. Can one imagine a group of soldiers who live in Jerusalem refusing to defend Tel Aviv because they don’t agree with the political ideology of the people living there?
Among the religious, there is also a feeling of despair. It is clear from the bible that attacks on the nation are signs of spiritual weakness and disunity. When the religious stray from "the path," G-d uses Israel’s enemies as tools to force the people to come together and become more religious. It’s known as the "No atheists in a foxhole" phenomenon. Yet there has not yet been any great awakening. As one friend put it, "I still say my morning prayers, I eat breakfast, I go to work, I come home, and I go to sleep. I keep hearing that these people are being killed, but I don’t know what to do about it. I honestly want to be woken up but I don’t know how to do it myself and I don’t know where to turn. We need a great leader."
If there’s one quote I’ve heard from both the right and left, the secular and religious, "We need a leader."
As I try to think out possible scenarios for where this is headed, they all lead in the same direction. It’s like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels I used to read as a kid, where you turn from page to page, and at the bottom of every page is a new decision. "You come to a cave. If you want to go into the cave, turn to page 87. If you don’t want to go into the cave, turn to page 16." Except in this case, while the decisions are different, the story has the same ending no matter what decisions are made: all-out war. It feels like being lost in a dark tunnel, and the only light you can see is the oncoming train.
If Israel follows the new campaign of the left and goes for a full withdrawal to the Green Line, terrorism will become much more horrible. There is no case in history between two warring parties in which one party retreated and the other party then decided to magnanimously stop attacking, and the Arabs aren’t about to set any new precedents. A full retreat will be a total validation of terrorism as a means of achieving political ends. It will be a pure, unadulterated Palestinian victory, and when you have a victory, you keep going. Arafat has repeatedly, clearly, unabashedly declared in Arabic that he is pushing for the complete destruction of the state of Israel. If he is winning, why would he stop?
A full withdrawal will also cause a huge rift within Israeli society. Either the Israeli government will destroy the West Bank and Gaza settlements, a rash act which will possibly result in a civil war, or the government will simply abandon the settlers to be murdered by the Palestinian Authority, which will also cause a huge split. Both left and right wing governments are responsible for placing these settlements in Yesha, and if the government refuses to protect them, the vast numbers of settlement supporters inside Israel are not going to sit calmly by and allow them to be killed.
If Israel were to make this hypothetical withdrawal, the 1.2 million Israeli Arabs would immediately rise up in full revolt. Already, Israeli Arabs (or Israeli Palestinians as they are now called) are carrying out terror and suicide attacks and assisting terrorist groups acting within the territories. Asmi Bishara, one of the major Arab members of Parliament, had his Parliamentary immunity stripped and is now on trial for incitement because he appeared before a wild rally arm in arm with Israel’s Sheik Nasrallah of Hizbullah, and called upon the Arab world to unite in holy war against Israel. The Israeli perception is that the Israeli Arabs view democracy as just another means of destroying Israel. If a revolt breaks out among the Israeli Arabs, Israel would have to either crush this revolt or retreat from further areas in pre-1967 Israel, mostly in the Galilee, which have a substantial Arab population. If Israel would retreat from further territory, it is difficult to see how the country could last five years.
This course is, for the time being, unlikely. The left has no charismatic politicians, no clear plan, and is in no danger of winning an election any time soon. More likely, the government will continue its current policy of inaction for as long as possible. Israel is under enormous international pressure to allow its citizens to be killed. "The world loves dead Jews," one relative tells me, "Look at the Europeans, they have all these holocaust monuments and memorial services, they always come to visit Yad Vashem (the holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem,) they feel so badly during terrorist attacks, but when we fight back, when we don’t die, they hate us." At a certain point, however, Israelis are going to start fighting back on their own because nobody wants to die as part of some public relations ploy to keep the British and the French satisfied. Israelis are not going to give up their lives just to quiet the slander of British Foreign Secretary Cook.
If the government refuses to do what is necessary to protect the people, then the people are going to at on their own. The first acts of this are already being seen, as a Jewish terrorist group calling itself the "Committee for Road Safety" has started killing Palestinians at random, and a bomb was set off by the "Avengers of the Infants" at an Arab school in East Jerusalem yesterday. If it became more widespread, it could take the form of riots in Arab neighborhoods and loss of government control.
Israel is in a completely impossible position because it is trying to play two ballgames on the same field. Israel is desperately trying to remain an enlightened democracy with free elections and free speech, and is trying to maintain civilized society and to be a part of the free world. Unfortunately, Israel happens to be located in what is undoubtedly the single most inhospitable environment on the planet. The Middle East has the unfortunate combination of a stone-age tribal order combined with vast oil wealth. The mentality of the tribes is the same as African tribes involved in a blood feud, except the Arabs can afford tanks, fighters, and nerve gas to unleash on their subjects at will. In order to be able to call itself a democracy, Israel has to follow the Geneva Conventions and all the rules of the civilized world. The Arabs have never even heard of such things. Israel is trying to play touch football while its enemies are engaged in no holds barred street fighting.
However, Israel must remain a democracy if it is to survive. Modern wars are won or lost by technology, and the technological advantage requires a free and open society. In a dictatorial society, order is maintained at gunpoint, and the free exchange of ideas, so critical to technological advancement, is absent. If Israel were to become a totalitarian state today, it would lose its technological edge and be destroyed tomorrow. Israel must also remain democratic in order to maintain what little support it has in the free world. However, because Israel is surrounded by people who only understand the rules of the feud, that there are no rules, it must make it clear that it will do whatever it takes, using street fighter rules, to survive.
This is easier said than done. The Arabs, for their part, have no problems with such rules. One soldier in Gaza who served in the border town of Rafiah, which is half in Israel and half in Egypt, described how the Egyptians quelled the rioting that broke out on their side of the border in support of the Palestinian Intifadah, "A few Egyptian soldiers walked into the crowd and just opened fire with their machine guns, mowing people down. They killed a few dozen and that was the end of it." Where Israelis use rubber bullets and aim for the legs, Arabs use steel bullets and aim for the head. Where Israel uses tear gas, the Arabs use nerve gas.
When I ask one old-timer, now a "Peace Now" supporter, what he thinks Israel has to do to calm the situation, he has no illusions, leftist views not withstanding, "We just have to go in and wipe out a few villages." Speaking to one friend, a descendent of immigrants from Morocco, "If I had a button that I could push to do a holocaust on the Arabs, I would push it."
These types of decisions are not easy to make. It’s easy to say, "Go wipe out some villages," quite another to drive through the village, tell everybody to get out of their houses, and then send in the bulldozers. A friend who manned a checkpoint told me simply, "I hate doing it, but I have to do it. At the checkpoint, you go up to every car and get the people out at gunpoint, force them to stick their hands over their heads, and search them. Even to grandfathers and old ladies. I hate doing it, I don’t like being mean to people, but if I don’t then somebody is going to pull a gun and shoot me dead, and if the checkpoint isn’t there, than a suicide bomber is going to get through and kill twenty people."
The only option worse than taking these draconian measures is not taking them. The Arabs can always afford to lose a war. The only thing that happens to an Arab country when it loses a war is that it gets a new despot, and maybe loses some prestige. Lebanon today is dominated by Syria, which occupies most of the country, but Beirut still exists, and some day Lebanon will be strong enough to force the Syrians out. The only difference for the Lebanese people is that they are now being tortured and slaughtered by Syrian Bashar Al-Assad instead of Bashir Gemayel, Yassir Arafat, and the other warlords who controlled the country during the early 80s. Iraq can take over Kuwait and replace the Emirs with Sadaam, but what difference does that make to the average Kuwaiti? None.
Israel, on the other hand, can never afford to lose even one war. Israel’s total security paranoia is justified by the fact that if the Arabs ever defeat Israel, every Jew living in Israel will die. This is accepted common knowledge, and one need only read the speeches of every Arab dictator from Arafat to Hussein to see it. Everybody knows where the nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction being constructed by Iraq and Iran are pointed: Tel Aviv.
Israel today is running out of reasons not to go to war. The Palestinians speak only of driving the Jews into the sea, Europe is presenting a stone wall of hate, the Arabs are increasingly threatening to attack, and scores of Israelis are being killed in the streets every day. By constantly attacking Israel, condemning even the weakest non-lethal defensive measures, the world’s "opinion makers," being the media, foreign ministers, Colin Powell and the U.S. State Department, and the elite academia have totally discredited themselves. If all they can do is attack, slander, and malign Israelis, if all they only undermine and deny Israel’s right to exist regardless of Israel’s actions on the ground, then what does Israel have to lose by going to war? It may seem crazy, but the Israeli people are ready for war. The slogans put up by foreign peace groups all over Israel read, "Better the pains of peace than the agony of war." What they fail to mention is, "Better the agony of war than the peace of death." Israel is facing national death by allowing terrorism to continue torturing the nation and killing its citizens, causing many more to seek life elsewhere. Terrorism is shaking the foundations of national existence and life itself. For the average Israeli, at a certain point it becomes much better to pick up a gun and defend himself, giving him a greater measure of control over his fate, rather than wait for death to come and take him in the form of Palestinian terrorists.
If Israel withdraws from the territories, terrorism will become unbelievably worse, and Israel will eventually have to go to full war. If Israel refuses to act, the Israeli people themselves may decide to take "vigilante" actions, convinced that their own government refuses to protect them, which will force the government’s hand to all-out war. In the end it may be unavoidable. But what would all-out war look like? In the worst case, it wouldn’t be pretty or clean. The first step would be to wipe out the Palestinian leadership. Israel has, until now, avoided hitting political targets and only hit purely military or terrorist targets. This despite the fact that the Palestinians make no differentiation between political and military targets, having assassinated Israel’s cabinet minister. This discretionary method has proved ineffective. Because the political leadership, including Yassir Arafat, Muhammed Dahlan, Marwan Barghouti, and Abbed Rabbo, in addition to planning and directing terrorist attacks, also hold political power, they have been deemed immune from assassination. This would have to change. Next would be ordering the military to enter into Palestinian areas and begin large-scale destruction of civilian areas, "erasing villages" as one cousin described it, in actions modeled on the American and British method of rooting out terrorists in Afghanistan. Essentially, any villages or structures used to launch murderous attacks on Israelis or fire at Israeli soldiers or civilians would have to be destroyed. This could result in a partial or full expulsion of the Palestinians to one of the neighboring Arab countries. By violently rejecting all peace offers, and by dehumanizing themselves, the Palestinians may cause another "Nabka", another catastrophe for themselves. The remnant of the Palestinians may very well wake up one day to find themselves on the other side of the river.
This would, of course, involve major violations of International Law and human rights, much like what America and Britain are doing in Afghanistan, but because is has very little international clout, Israel will pay a heavy price. Israel could become an international pariah, possibly earning the dubious title of "rogue state." The United Nations would almost certainly enact economic sanctions against Israel, which would further crush the economy. Yassir Arafat’s goal has always been to provoke an Israeli response so severe that the international community would have to intervene. The question is whether the United Nations or NATO are prepared to intervene militarily, and I do not believe they will for several reasons. First of all, any NATO bombing would require enthusiastic American support. Israel’s decision to get "down and dirty" with the terrorists may cause a major rift in Israel’s alliance with America, and possibly even a temporary policy shift, but America will not support military action against Israel. The European Union, which seems to be trying to use good old fashion Jew-hating talk to find common ground and bring its member nation states together on foreign policy, will never act alone against Israel militarily because they simply lack the ability. Israel is not a third-world country like Iraq or Serbia, but an ultra high-tech nation whose army is totally committed to defending their homes. Unless Europe is prepared to lose hundreds, if not thousands of soldiers and pilots going up against the most modern and accurate military hardware the world has ever seen, it will not get involved. Likewise, if Europeans have made the decision to fully support the Palestinians in their quest to drive Israel into the sea, than they face losing a few of their major cities like Paris and London, as Israel is a nuclear power with the ability to carry ordinance over very long distances. Lastly, the Afghanistan war has proved that European armies do not even have the capability of operating outside of their own countries without hitching a ride from the Americans. The United Nations may send troops as well, but if they get anywhere near combat, they will simply be caught in the cross fire and die. One can’t reasonably expect a bunch of UN conscripts from India and Fiji to put their lives on the line for a Palestinian state.
The world may try to passively strangle Israel, but it is doubtful that they will become directly involved. Israel must execute and finish such a war as quickly as possible to mitigate the ill effects. As my cousin Rafi puts it, "We will lose the Americans, there will be sanctions, we will be hungry, but we’ll still be alive, and that’s better than what we’ve got now." After the war, the United States will sponsor some sort of Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy, and after a few decades left-wing poets wracked with guilt and self-loathing will write about the horrors we inflicted upon the guiltless Palestinian people, but Israel will live.
An all-out war is a horrible, sickening thought, and it makes me cringe to even imagine such a thing. War is really a roll of the dice. Who can name a single war in history which turned out exactly as planned? Israel needs peace worse now than ever before, but Israel’s existence is threatened, and Israel has to exist before it can coexist. The Jews have always flocked to compassionate causes. Jews are always vastly over represented in charitable organizations such as the Peace Corps, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. Our people flock to liberal and left-wing political parties throughout the world. However, misplaced compassion can be as evil as cruelty. The Talmud teaches us that "He who is kind the cruel will become cruel to the kind." By deciding to create the State of Israel, the Jewish people left the theoretical world of civilized, parliamentary debate and entered into the dirty world of international politics. Like every decision in real life, this was not a pure decision; there is no absolute right. The Jewish national undertaking was based on the fact that the Jews in the Diaspora, while enjoying the luxury of being a pure, powerless and blameless minority, also face repeated attempts at physical annihilation by Nazis, Cossaks, Poles, Catholics, Romans, etc. However, the decision to enter into nationhood is also wrought with difficult decisions. Today Israel faces a choice: do we maintain ideological purity and innocence by allowing ourselves to be annihilated, or do we decide to get our hands dirty and do what is necessary to survive against an enemy who does not share our morals and does not follow our rules. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in the Middle East, it’s that no decision is pure, and there is no absolute "Right Thing to Do." The best that can be done is to take all the facts and possible outcomes of a decision into account, balance the good and evil on both sides, make a decision, and pray to G-d that you did the right thing.

War and Peace

Batala, a “refugee camp” suburb of Nablus, has been the source of several terrorist attacks on Israel, including the Sbarro Pizzeria bombing which killed 15 and the attack on a Bat Mitzvah in Hadera in which a Palestinian gunman entered and began mowing down guests at a family celebration. It is currently under the control of at least five Palestinian warlords. The Palestinian Authority actually attempted to enter the camp in 1999 and assert some control and was immediately expelled. The town is constructed in the haphazard fashion typical of these shanty towns with very narrow, crooked streets. Last week, an Israeli Merkava tank was destroyed when it went over an enormous mine, and it is assumed that the streets of these neighborhoods are similarly mined.

There has also been a great deal of nail-biting on sending foot soldiers into these areas because they will be exposed, easy targets in this sort of urban environment. On Wednesday, the Israeli Defense Forces began seizing tall Buildings around Balata, a Palestinian Suburb of Nablus. These buildings were to be used as observation posts and sniper nests for the operation that began on Thursday. The Army avoided the hazards of using the streets by entering the first house, and then blowing a hole in the wall to move to the next house, and then blowing a hole in the wall to move to the third house, etc. Occasionally, they have simply driven tanks straight through the walls. This is one of the first instances in which the various warlords have actually stood and fought instead of run away, so 15 terrorist gunmen were killed on Thursday, five on Friday, along with one Israeli soldier. The operation is continuing and will probably last into next week, as the army is still uncovering rocket, bomb, and mortar factories.

Meanwhile, Palestinian Authority gunmen opened fire on Gilo again, wounding four Israelis, and a suicide bomber just blew himself up a few hours ago amongst a group of Jews leaving synagogue, killing at least five, including a one year old baby.

As one of the strange consequences of Israel’s backward parliamentary system and national unity government, while reality moves closer to all-out war, the “political solution” rhetoric is moving full speed ahead. Arafat’s demands seem to be closely obeying Moore’s Law, i.e. they double every eighteen months. Eighteen months ago, Arafat was demanding 100,000 Arabs be allowed to settle in Israel as part of a final deal. He is now demanding that, “Only 200,000 refugees,” will “return.” The more moderate Sari Nussebiah, who is now being touted as the most reasonable Palestinian alive, is now making territorial demands inside pre-1967 Israel. Peres continues abasing himself and accepting any and every offer made by the Palestinians and their European Allies, so they keep making more and more demands.

Then, out of the blue, like a bolt of lightning from the heavens, the “Saudi Plan” appeared. New York Times Editorialist Tom Friedman was on a visit to Saudi Arabia and was discussing the violence with crown Prince Abdullah, the second in command but really de-facto dictator of his country. Friedman suggested that Abdullah and the Arabs should offer to call of their Jihad against Israel in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal to the holy “Green Line” and a voluntary self-ethnic-cleansing of all Jewish communities on the other side of that Green Line. “Why, funny you should mention it,” said Abdullah, “because I have the text of exactly that speech sitting in my desk drawer.” He then told Friedman that he was just about to give the speech, but then Sharon ruined it by his brutal oppression of Palestinian stone-throwers. It’s like some western tourist walking into the bazaar and pointing to a five-dollar tin pot and asking, “Is this an exotic, ancient relic?” to which the storekeeper responds, “Oh, why, yes it is, and I will give it to you for the paltry sum of $1,000,” at which point the naive tourist races off to the nearest ATM machine before someone else gets a hold of his “find.” In this case Friedman, playing the naive tourist, immediately ran off and printed and editorial in the New York Times to publicize the plan.

Friedman has been around the block a couple of times, he covered the civil war in Beirut, the first Intifada in Israel, so it’s nearly unbelievable that he could be so incredibly stupid as to believe such a thing, given the history of the region. Arab governments aligned with the United States have, for the last quarter century, been trying to keep the Middle East in slow-burn. It’s all part of a delicate balance, in which the dictators, needing an external enemy to justify their oppression, try to keep themselves at war with Israel, but in order not to incur the political wrath of the United States or, worse, the military wrath of Israel, they act to cool things down whenever events begin to move too close to peace. During Camp David II, in which Arafat was offered a viable Palestinian State, it was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak who clearly told Arafat he would lose Arab support if he made any compromises on Jerusalem, but it was also Hosni Mubarak who later drafted a potential cease-fire, essentially a rehash of the American Tenet agreement, along with Jordan, to try to cool things down. Throughout the Intifada, there have been several totally unrealistic offers made to Israel, including an offer by Syria to “enter into negotiations” if Israel first gave away the entire Golan Heights and now the Saudi offer. Sharon simply called Abdullah’s bluff by saying, “Sure, so let’s get together and talk about it.” It’s a perfectly reasonable request to which Abdullah must say no. Meeting Sharon at this point would be as unhealthy for an Arab despot as drinking a gallon of bleach because his own people would immediately kill him.

This plan will fail like every other plan so far because successful treaties, plans, and arrangements do not alter history or end wars, they only formalize reality. Egypt and Jordan did not sign peace with Israel until they determined that it was absolutely impossible for them to defeat Israel militarily. Germany and Japan did not surrender to the Allies until after they had been militarily defeated. In order for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 cease-fire lines, which is clearly not enough to appease the Palestinians in any case, Israel would have to be first militarily defeated, which it is not. In order for the Palestinians to stop attacking Israel, they first have to be militarily defeated, which has not yet happened. All of these plans and cease-fire arrangements are utterly meaningless until there is a basic shift in the Arab mindset, or a total surrender of the nationalist ideal on the part of the Israelis. Since the Arabs, and later the Palestinians have been on the losing side of every war since 1948, it’s better than even odds that the Palestinians will crack before Israel does.