Democracy in peril

When I first stayed in Israel, almost 40 years ago, I observed the behaviours of Western verses Mizrahi sects of ultra orthodox Judaism as being synonymous with the conflicting visions of modernity and conservatism that divided the nation of secular and religious Jew.   Tainted by centuries of persecution and displaying a reactionary response to modernism much of the orthodox world ejected Judaism’s humanistic values and embraced the misogynistic narrative of the cultures from which they so scrupulously stood apart.  But not the Mizrahim (the Jews of Arab lands).

They, like their western cousins were discriminated against, occasionally they were persecuted and killed.  In Israel almost 40 years ago I observed two male Mizrahi ultra orthodox Jews seated next to each other on a bus. It was a long journey from Jerusalem in the South to Safed in the far north. A pregnant woman got onto the bus and one of the men immediately jumped up to let her sit down.

Today, on a bus filled with the ultra orthodox, that woman would remain standing for the entire journey.  Prejudice has triumphed over piety and we in our naivety and indifference excuse this behaviour and call it ‘respect’. We have allowed ignorance to flower.

Israel, as ‘light unto the nations,’ or at least as a light unto its immediate neighbours, is not doing a good job in Parliament.   Verbal violence and the compulsion to call ones rivals ‘Nazis’ and ‘traitors’ is neither congruent with moderation in speech nor demonstrably classifiable as restrained behavior. Our parliamentarians should lead by example. They do not.  Israel needs an independent Standards committee with powers of enforcement that is able to define Knesset ethics.  Provide them with the greater authority to examine standards for all bodies and individuals receiving public funds, and to determine standards of public discourse for everyone drawing on state monies. Calling MK and Science Minister Daniel Herskowitz a Nazi and threatening him, because he is a member of a right wing government that evacuated three illegal settlements, is a frightening development.

The conceit of some to propose legislation against left wing organizations that are in receipt of overseas donations while excluding donations received by the ‘right wing,’ is similarly alarming. I recall Amos Elon writing that four years after World War One had ended Germany had suffered 376 political murders; 22 by leftists (sentenced to a combined total of 248 years in prison) and 354 murders by rightists who between them received a total of 90 years in prison.  Terror begins with the variable application of the rule of law.

A national debate on standards is required if Israel is not going to end up as just one more sad Near Eastern dictatorship.  Left and Right are equally at fault in this failure of debate.

There are those that will argue against any self-control because in the interlude of passionately held belief it is wrong to conceal ones true feelings or fears. But when we call our adversaries ‘Nazis’ or dismiss them as ‘traitors’ we are expressing more than our beliefs, we are labelling our enemy and rejecting debate as without any value. The British parliamentary model of decorum may be an extreme but it has lasted for almost a thousand years.  It works.

Abuse encourages corruption.  The intent of David Ben-Gurion and his ruling party in enshrining the religious / secular status-quo in 1948, leaving religion to the religious instead of formally separating synagogue and state was that they assumed congruence between ethics and religiosity. The problem is that values are a set of beliefs by which you live your life and beliefs are no more than a structured system of values.  Notice the absence of universal ethical constraints.

When an unrepresentative group holds disproportionate political and economic power against the public interest it damages democracy and the best will flee. Israel cannot afford to encourage separation between religious and secular Israelis in education, housing, the military and the workplace.  Without equality resentment festers and violence grows. Secular Israelis must have a voice in their religious destiny because the multiple Jewish sects are too busy defending their own special interests to be morally responsible for our welfare, or the States.

Universal conscription should be without exception and I would excommunicate the Neturei Karta. You cannot live in a country and actively work against its survival. That they justify their actions on religious grounds does not cancel out the crime against the State or its people. MK’s must sign an oath of allegiance and that means they are Israeli and if they are not, they cannot be a member of parliament. They represent not only their constituents, they also represent the nation. If they do not, then they should find employment elsewhere.  This would create problems for some of the more racist Arab MK’s who stand shoulder to shoulder with their racist Arab brothers against the Jewish population of Israel.  But democracy cannot survive unless it has a core set of beliefs to which all are wholly committed.

To desegregate communities, students should be bussed in until populations cease to be islands of prejudiced uniformity or ghettos of ignorant bliss.

I recall the horrified look on the face of a Hasidic friend when I attempted to scribble down his telephone number on the back of my hand. He explained that it was wrong to do so because we are all human and to write on our bodies is to scribble on Gods work. This universalism did not apply to one people, one race, one religion or one orientation.  It is an extreme view but essentially it is an expression of humility before the creator. Now the ultra-orthodox burn down bus shelters that display what they have decided is inappropriate; they spit at women dressed ‘immodestly’ and they spit on people different to them. They have forgotten the teachings of the Torah and it is they who today defile the creator.  Humility has been replaced with intolerance and spite.

Israel with its imperfect and dysfunctional democracy is threatened by extremism and intolerance no less than its neighbours. A series of legislative efforts by the extreme right and orthodox measures accepted by local authorities are a threat to freedom. It is only right for foreign donors whether they are individuals, charities or nations to be registered and that the public should know who they are. Some of them work with the State; many of them are working against it. In the USA all foreign funding must be registered. That is fair. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in being a lobbyist for a foreign entity. But let it all be out in the open.  If it is not, it undermines the level playing field that is part of the fabric of a democratic nation’s strength.   Foreign financial intervention can have the intent to rend the fabric of national consensus or support an antagonist against the consensus.

But the extreme right demands that only “Left wing” donations be registered in its currently debated legislation. This is a grotesque attack on democracy.  A law that targets one group or another is not just a bad law; it is an anti-democratic law.

And to limit the presence of women in the public domain is to encourage the talibanisation of Israel and the Islamisation of Judaism. It is an obscene reaction by a community that is afflicted with an obsessive self worth bordering on idolatry. The oppression of women and their exclusion from society is symptomatic of a community that has lost its Jewish identity and sociopathically externalised its own neurotic fears.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that “an ideological battle must not be waged at the expense of someone who refuses to be sacrificed on its altar.”   The violence of language has not diminished and ideological exuberance remains a poor excuse for libel.

Israel desperately needs an independent public standards authority that is mandated by Parliament to oversee Parliament. Contempt must have its penalties.  To suspend without pay those people in public employment who are unable to control their speech is a good start. And impeachment should be the response we offer to those people who sail with our enemies or attempt to erase our history. It is time to rein in ‘Lashon ha ra’ – the evil tongue.

Know your enemies as you would know yourself

Israel has a problem. Free speech is never absolute. Throughout the free world violence against those who speak out against Islam is creating the effect its perpetrators desired.  Fear. Intellectual apartheid has arisen across the globe. To criticise Islam for its violence and its blood lust is made unacceptable by fear and by economics. Oil and 1,400 million potential customers make for a persuasive silence in choosing ones sleeping partners. Islam has made the UN its propaganda tool and its cash cow. To defame Jews and to demonise Israel is wholly acceptable. Aided and abetted by the fascist left a kind of intellectual autism informs debate. There can be no other explanation for the excessive doctrinal rigidity that permits Muslims, Arabs and their fellow travellers to commit every abuse against human rights but denies Israel the basic rights we in the West take for granted.

It is with this in mind that Israel, surrounded by hostility, is urged by the current US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta today (3rd December 2011) to address what he describes as ‘The Jewish States growing isolation in the Middle East’.

He suggested that Israel reach out and ‘mend fences’ with countries like Turkey, Egypt and Jordan which share an interest in regional stability. He also said that Israel and the Palestinians should ‘get back to the damned table’.

He acknowledged that “If the gestures are rebuked, the world will see those rebukes for what they are and that is exactly why Israel should pursue them."

It sounds fine. But nothing in the extreme anti-Zionist debate that has taken place over the last decade or two supports Leon Panetta’s view.

And Israel is as much to blame for this state of international affairs as its Western interlocutors.

Israel exists because it is a reaction to Islamic, Arab colonialism and prejudice.
Israel exists because Islam is incapable of peacefully co-existing with any minority in its midst except under conditions of Islamic institutionalised inequality.
Israel exists because Jewish Palestinians have a right to self-determination.
Israel exists because the Arab world is inherently racist.

Israel exists because the Jewish state could absorb and did absorb Jewish refugees from the Arab world. This is the same neighbourhood that discriminated against them, and ultimately, ethnically cleansed them from their ‘pure Arab’ lands. And today Israel absorbs black Christian and black Muslim refugees.  The Arab world rapes and kills its refugees. The Arab world has built concentration camps for its refugees and as the third generation of Palestinians are born in its Arab lands it continues to refuse to absorb even a single individual and illegally, denies them the choice of citizenship.

The Muslim nations of Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan – these nations have all been guilty of ethnic cleansing and at least one or two, of genocide.

Israel should be paying attention to the discrimination, religious bigotry and anti-Semitic propaganda of its neighbours because it is a fundamental construct of the war being waged against it and an inseparable trait of Islamic theological identity. It is a failure of Secular Israel that even without a constitution, Israel is more extreme in its anti-religious identity than any other nation at the UN and because of this it is incapable of seriously addressing any issue that has a religious basis to it.

Israel is isolated because the Islamic world smells blood and is excited by it. Israel is isolated because its diplomatic corps is its most dysfunctional government department. Finally, Israel is isolated because it is politically paralysed and ideologically adrift.

Defence Secretary Leon Panetta would be a little more reluctant to point out Israel’s diplomatic failures without first addressing Israel’s neighbours prejudices if Israel consistently stood up for itself and was diplomatically more assertive in the international field.  You cannot win a propaganda war if you do not participate in the debate.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am 'I'? And if not now, when?" Hillel, Sayings of the Fathers.

Israel Bibi Netanyahu and The USA

In all the debate around defence and security in Israel it appears that we too often forget the reason behind Israel’s need for security.

Even neutral nations must have national service and strong military establishments. Japan and Germany call theirs “Self Defence Services”.   The Swiss Armed Forces are viewed as being essential to the maintenance of Swiss neutrality. But an army and an air-force remain instruments of war even when they are labelled as being for self-defence. Pacifism only works when all nations are equally committed to adhering to its principles, otherwise sadly, to demonstrably persuade a potential enemy against interference and hostile intent one must possess deterrence and the stronger the force the greater that deterrence.

Israel is a country at war. It has been ‘at war’ for a longer period than England, which fought the War of the Roses (32 years) and perhaps for not quite as long as the Hundred Years War was fought (118 years).

Security trumps all other topics and for good reason.

But the security debate too often inoculates the political establishment against substantive examination of issues that normally bind politicians to a party and allegiances to a political ideology.  Differences between Parties become blurred by national life and death security issues.  A lack of opportunity means it is easier to leave Israel than it is to stay and neither ‘The Left’ nor ‘The Right’ has the courage to tackle this issue. I put these political terms in inverted commas because in the absence of peace, the differences between the two poles are often ill-defined. To exchange allegiances one simply relegates ideology to an indeterminate and distant future.

A democratic state exists by the principle that only it has the legal right to engage in organised violence. Only the state and its elected officials can adopt a hostile position towards a perceived enemy. When Society becomes polarised and politicians encourage violence the extremists act as proxies to the mainstream and create allegiances between the periphery and the centre. This works to undermine democracy.

Security issues help politicians such as Bibi Netanyahu to blind the people to their faults and Bibi’s biggest fault may well be that he is a fiscal conservative and a champion of the free market. He is convinced that ‘The American Way’ is right also for Israel. For a man of intelligence, his dedication to non-interference, whether it is in education or health, housing, religious affairs or energy is his greatest failure as a leader. In a country that is not America and never can be this is a failure of intellect.

Let me explain why.

The USA is a country rich in natural resources. It is 3.8 million square miles in area (9.8 million km2) and some 7% of its total area is waterways and lakes.  It has between 310 and 320 million inhabitants and is therefore a massive internal market in its own right. Israel has few natural resources. It is 8 thousand square miles in area (21 thousand km2), of which some 2% is water.  Israel has almost 8 million inhabitants. One could place some 500 States of the size of Israel into America.

Israel has a substantial minority that refuses to work (the Ultra-Orthodox), many of whom are financially supported by the State. It also has a substantial fifth column that refuses to recognise its right to exist. Israel is surrounded by enemies that are theologically hostile and intractable in denying the basic right to self-determination of any minority in their midst.

Equality is not just a basic right to life. It is also a right to live without fear of derision, ridicule or persecution. Fundamentalist Islam is predicated on discrimination as a witness to theological superiority. Israel lives in an unforgiving neighbourhood.

No other country on this Earth is denied its legitimacy or its right to self determination by a global community that creatively interprets and then writes its own imaginatively dissolute and disingenuous history of the conflict (between Israel and Palestine) based on a wholly prejudiced agenda and then demands that we trust the good intentions of that same prejudiced international community.

Israel is a country born in fear and threatened with annihilation even by those nations with which it has formally signed Treaties of Peace.

In the absence of a free market Israel has a large non-working population, the constant threat of war, and a hostile fifth column that is supported by nations that even within there own societies provide for unrelenting waves of hate against Israel and that spills over into a religiously inspired hatred of Jews in their own countries while they simultaneously demand that with undeserved faith we trust them implicitly.

So Israel is not the USA nor, can it ever be so.

All this in the absence of a free market because the economy is controlled by a few immensely wealthy families whose support for politicians of both the left and the right means they never have to say ‘sorry’ (but more about that later).

And so to return to Bibi who is not so different to any other Israeli political leaders in ignoring the issues that hurt most Israelis. He is a free market politician and that means he does not care to interfere in the ‘free’ market despite the damage it may cause to the majority of his electorate. His insularity towards those less well off than himself is supported by a belief that only those who succeed deserve his attention and the rest merit subservience.  It is as uncompromising as it is lacking in empathy but it is a basic conservative belief that is only tempered by the need to appear to be caring so that the party and therefore the leader remain electable.

The issues that have been much in the news of late are education, health and housing.

The university budget has been reducing for two decades while class sizes have been increasing at all levels of education excepting within the ultra-orthodox sector which rejects teaching the core subjects required by a modern nation but is left unsupervised.  Israel is living off the huge Russian immigration bonanza of the early 1990’s and has failed to reinforce the wealth of opportunity that came with it either culturally or educationally to create a better, more equal society. According to Professor Manuel Trachtenberg, some 25% of Israeli researchers work abroad and the average age of the faculty in Israel is 55 (compared to 43 in Britain). A ratio of 1:20 faculty to students characterizes those universities rated 50 and lower in the world. 1:10 is the ratio required to maintain the position of being in the top ten universities in the world. In Israel the ratio of faculty to students is 1:24 and it is becoming progressively worse.

In the early 1990’s there was not only more medical doctors than the State required, there was also talk (a fantasy perhaps) of constructing a medical ship manned by doctors and nurses that would sail the globe assisting countries where it was needed and offering emergency care as required. A fine ideal, it never happened. Israel squandered the opportunity to build on the talent it possessed. Instead, hospitals have reached a crisis point because its doctors work too long and compared to their European and American colleagues, are paid poorly. Some years ago in order to alleviate the worsening crisis it was mooted that Israel invest $4bil in a medical university to be located in the Galilee. Of course it also never happened. It seems that Bibi is happy as his predecessors before him to bully those who refuse to bow to government pressure not to strike while never offering a solution that provides anything  but a band-aid to a systemic problem.

Of course Israelis can take private health care, they can seek medical attention overseas but the issue is that most Israelis cannot nor should they have to contemplate either of these choices.

And housing; the struggle the young have, to try to bring down the choking prices of rent and mortgage opportunities makes Israel increasingly, a country to retire to but unaffordable for anyone else.

In Japan between the Meiji Restoration and the end of World War 2 the Zaibatsu exercised de facto control over the Japanese economy.  The Zaibatsu were large family controlled vertical monopolies. Israel has a similar network of controlling families. In competing overseas for market share there is no principled reason that they cannot continue to exist but a mechanism must be found to disempower them within the State.

Whether we learn the lessons of Japan or the ruling families of the Italian renaissance city states; both being examples of abusive economic control, ultimately, uncontrolled, unelected power destroys the society within which it moves.

Health and Education empower the people but they are expensive and a life long investment. The return on investment cannot easily be measured with comparative financial ratios nor do the rich receive an immediately quantifiable benefit.  Perhaps this is the best reason that societies fail their citizens.

A government for the people is a government by the people and not a coterie of super wealthy men and women dictating to the political leadership when to bark and when to bite and when to withdraw and when to make cosmetic concessions.  But it is the lack of an across the board, coherent political vision that squanders the human capital of the nation.

Lewis Carroll, the BBC, and the Business Secretary

On the 13th of November 2011 the BBC began its daily news roundup with a very important news story. The wife of the heir to the British throne (The Duchess of Cambridge) had been spotted wearing the same hat her mother (or sister) had recently worn.   There was no suggestion that any of the Middleton family was suffering from lice or some other socially disagreeable condition. It did however warrant five minutes in every half hour on the national news program.  OK, it was Haute couture, and some hats are more expensive than others, but please, a hat is a hat.  Was there nothing better happening in our world that this ‘national’ news item, with its subsequent analysis by a dedicated, publicly paid, BBC reporter, warranted a five minute slot in every thirty minutes on our national news? A court correspondent pointed out to every one of us that even the Royal Family were “doing their bit” during this period of national austerity (by sharing their hats).

And on the following day, the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary was heard to express the sentiment that “I feel your pain over recession”.  With the greatest of disrespect to the Honourable Mr Vince Cable, words are cheap and feelings meaningless unless they are followed through with action that ameliorates our plight. No government can ‘feel my pain or yours’.

Can you tell me when we fell down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit’s hole? Society does appear to have descended into a theatre of the absurd.

Greece and Apocalypse Now

Greece joined the Euro when it became a local currency in 2001. The immediate impact on the Greek economy according to ‘Stratfor’ (see http://www.stratfor.com/) was that the differential cost of borrowing between Germany and Greece fell by 18%, achieving parity on borrowing, between the two nations.

All nations are thankfully, not alike. It is the national character that defines a nation’s uniqueness; that enables us to celebrate diversity.

Many years ago, in response to the perception that heavy alcohol consumption was viewed as positive the Australian Government ran a nationwide advertising campaign whose intent it was to demonstrate the Neanderthal behaviour of those who drank to excess and thus, to discourage this worrying attitude. The campaign backfired. Australians are a relaxed lot, they like their leisure activities. Sans alcoholic overindulgence, it is not a fault but an enviable part of the Australian character.

To complete this comparison, America and Germany are nations for which making money is embraced with enthusiasm. At least in theory, everyone choosing to thrive has the opportunity to do so.  Their societies are driven by a work ethic that is different to that of Australia, or Greece.

The EC was created because the Americans were looking for a way to stop the European propensity for slaughtering one another and the negative impact this militant imperial provincialism had on the rest of humanity.

Greece, even with its 18% reduction in cost of borrowing can not, at this time in its history, compete with Germany. Although it has been a member of the European Community since 1981 perhaps it never will be as competitive as Germany is. Nor should it have to be. But any economic system that is not based on the ability of the participants to repay their loans within mutually acceptable periods of time is based on charity.

Charities grow for three reasons. The first is self-identification, the second legitimately occurs because of need.  Its end goal must be self-extinction or it becomes a self-perpetuating parasite, living off the living flesh of its victims.  To those people who will be offended by this analogy, some parasites exist within a symbiotic relationship with their host. Most do not.

No nation should be a charity case and those that are, are defined by their corruption, their greed and the excessive degree to which they victimise their own people.

Prime Minister George Papandreou has two choices.  He can lead Greece into default, in which case all its outstanding international loans become worthless to its owners; or it will have no choice other than acquiescence to decades of recovery.

Both Germany and France, as its two main creditors profited from their relationship with Greece. It is not the Global banking system that failed us all, this time.  If Greece does default the repercussions for Global growth will be significant.  For far too long the relentless drive to increased profitability has been achieved at the expense of society and its unrealisable expectations for unlimited Consumerism.

We may be entering a period of sustained economic stagnation.  Perhaps the volatility of markets with its cyclical boom and bust will finally be brought under unintentional control.

The greatest threat to Global stability is uncertainty. It leads to fear. Bad governments create crises to deflect criticism from them-selves. Military insecurity increases the possibility for war. Migration collapses and population transfers cease to occur except by ethnic cleansing and expulsion.  This in its turn accelerates the destabilisation of nations.  Societies are forced to cope with the finite resources at their immediate national disposal.

The clash of civilisations may be realised as isolationism, fear and extremism catapults the fundamentalists everywhere into positions that protect their own communities.

If the party is over, it is possible for a more equitable society to emerge from the debris. If nations can develop humility as a counterweight to ambition and greed it may be worth the hangover.

Musings on Peace, Israel & The Arab Spring

President Anwar Sadat told his Foreign Minister just prior to being the first Arab leader to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state that “we are dealing with the lowest and meanest of enemies. The Jews even tormented their prophet Moses and exasperated their God.” (The Camp David Accords, a testimony. P321 Muhammad Ibrahim Kamel 1986 Quoted from “Palestine Betrayed,” Ephraim Karsh).  Whether Sadat’s assent to Jerusalem and subsequent Peace Treaty with Israel would have ultimately lead to an entirely new paradigm for Jewish-Muslim and Arab-Israeli relationships we will never know.  Because war is more than just an absence of conflict, it is a state of mind.

And it is a state of mind that Sadats’ successor, Hosni Mubarak, never intended to encourage.   When Sadat started down the road to recognition and limited reconciliation with Israel, Vice President Hosni Mubarak was against it and he never changed his mind, or his conduct.  His contemptuous behaviour provided Egyptians with a role model whose negative attributes towards Israelis as Jews would be emulated throughout Egyptian and other Muslim societies from the moment that Mubarak became Egypt’s dictator.  To believe that the Arab Spring might provide hope for a better relationship with the Arab / Islamic world is at best naive and at worse, dangerously underestimating an implacable enemy whose historic baggage of ethnic conflict and theological hate can perhaps, never be sated.

Mubarak was vice-president of Egypt when Anwar Sadat responded to Menachem Begin’s invitation to speak at the Knesset thus precipitating the peace process that culminated in Egypt regaining everything it had lost in War, through Peace. And while, since the signing of that treaty in 1979 Israel has had 32 years of ‘peace’ it has been a peace of undiminished diplomatic confrontation and hate-drenched antisemitic propaganda. Mubarak the General was the implacable enemy of Jews as religious entity and Israeli's as national polity; he opposed Sadat but accepted the peace reluctantly and without a single act of friendship at any point in the intervening years.

I would suggest that this is because Islam views its minorities as no more than a sacrifice to the Islamic extremists within its own societies.  Full peace with Israel will not be realised as long as Egyptians can take pride in the Korans’ baser statements of ridicule, its bigotry, its perception of religious superiority for the Muslim world and its racial superiority for the Arab world.

The Torah, the Jewish Bible portrays acts of violence as time specific acts of necessity or outrageous deeds that violate human decency,  bringing shame to the Jewish people (such as the rape of Dinah and her brothers subsequent revenge against the Canaanites in Genesis 34).  Modern Orthodoxy theologically and therefore theoretically rejects violence and discrimination perpetrated in the name of God by the Hebrews. Most Jews apologetically find excuses for the unpalatable because as a faith, we have always recognised that not even the Decalogue is entirely sacrosanct. The inclination towards peaceful co-existence, cultural pluralism and universal justice are cornerstones of Judaic development even if the modern ultra-Orthodox fundamentalist reaction to persecution and power has created a frightened, reactionary and backward sectarianism that the more mainstream Jewish groups are horribly reluctant to challenge, thus alienating the secular community from their faith. 

But we need each other, because humility is not a natural state of human consciousness and secular belief without a limiting deity is as dangerous a faith as any form of fundamentalism.

Christianity was foundered by men who deliberately downplayed their Jewish roots so that they could conquer Roman society for their religion.  Nevertheless, the Christian Bible is, for the most part, a testament to peace and co-existence even while its leaders exploited its texts to conquer much of the globe and to this day find it easy to make excuses for collaboration and appeasement with Islam.

Only the Muslim Bible, the Koran, seeks to dominate, to annihilate, to control by conquest.  Violence as an act of religious fulfilment; slavery as an act of demonstrable subservience, these are an Islamic patrimony that precludes equality and co-existence. It is this issue that defines the Muslim relationship with Israel and with the rest of humanity.

Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Egypt as religious nations are incapable of respecting the treaties they have signed with their neighbours unless they deliver their neighbours into their respective spheres of controlling influence.  Peace is not a bi-product of adherence to a literary tradition bound in antiquity that is militantly biased towards its own kind with a preoccupation towards global conquest based on a self inflated worldview of its own religious predestination towards dominance.

Israel, like all nations, is a product of settlement and immigration. But it has been a renewed magnet for religious Jews for almost a thousand years.  While secular Jews began their journey to Israel mainly after the 1880’s, many Palestinian Arabs were attracted to Israel, not by history, but by the phenomenal success of renewed Jewish immigration.  Zionism as a mainstream movement has its extremists on the periphery of society, as all societies do. But Zionists from both the left and the right did not assume a land ethnically cleansed of Arabs or non-Jews, nor did they ever expect to expel the minority from its land.  Only the Arabs did this and continue to believe that this is an option. With the active collaboration of the British Government the Arabs restricted Jewish immigration while simultaneously encouraging Arab immigration to Israel. Its leaders manipulated violent confrontation in order to profit from its chaotic blood-drenched outcome.  And all of their atrocities were committed in the name of their god Allah and their prophet, Muhammad. That the Arab nation was and still is incapable of sharing the land is obvious by Arab pronouncements.  This intolerance of diversity is intrinsic to Islam and Islamic tradition.

It is for this reason alone that any accommodation that denies the Jewish identity of Israel is no more than a cynical deconstruction of Jewish nationhood.  In Islamic terms anything else is theologically redundant; the existence of a Jewish state is the denial of Islamic theological dominance but more important, in Arab terms a renunciation of Arab imperialism. It is therefore curious that the West’s political Left has wholeheartedly embraced the Arab (Palestinian) narrative.

Jewish literary traditions are bound up in antiquity but the difference is one that separates the two religions like night and day. Islam believes its traditions are inviolate, the word of Muhammad are God’s word and therefore unchangeable.  Islam has never permitted its prophets to be anything other than God’s thugs. Judaism interpreted and reinterpreted God’s word so often that the faith of 4,000 years past was unrecognisable with that of 3,000 ago and without much similarity to the faith of 2,000 years ago and certainly nothing like it is today.  But that is what Islam sees as Judaism’s greatest failure, whereas it is what Jews see as our faiths greatest strength.

For those who would assume American support for Israel, History is not always as it seems.  In 1948 as today the US State Department was dominated by Arabists, Pro-Arab establishment bureaucrats not unlike their European or British Foreign Office equivalents.  Israel has always been an irritant that interfered with the orderly process of accommodation and appeasement with nations predisposed towards dictatorship. In 1948 President Truman recognised Israel and not because he liked his ‘Jews’ and not because he sympathised with their plight in Europe. He recognised the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination; something Britain’s University and College Union even today does not. But that was not the reason he recognised the State of Israel in the United Nations vote on the partition plan on November 30, 1947.    On that day the USA and Russia voted, for the first time on the same side because The Jewish far Left in Israel controlled 12% of the vote in Palestine and a vote against partition would undoubtedly have pushed Israel into the arms of Communism, thus providing the Soviet Union with a base in the Middle East that was both reliable as an ally and not dependent on aid to survive (as the Arab countries were.)  Out of fear for its corrupting influence on US society, in the 1950’s the US still banned much of the ‘revolutionary’ music the Jews played on their radio stations in Israel despite that decision on recognition.

Nothing is quite as it seems. In 2011 the USA installs radar systems in Turkey that face Iran but can just as easily relay information on Israel to Israel’s enemies. Satellites can be just as effective but they need to have 24/7 over-flight of a country to ensure complete cover.

On the 7th of June 1967 Defence Minister, General Moshe Dayan, made a vow in the shadow of the Wailing Wall.  “We have returned here, never to part from this city of Old Jerusalem again,” speaking calmly as he addressed his battle weary troops, many of them sobbing with emotion, General Dayan added: “to our Arab neighbours we offer even now our hand in peace….we did not come here to Jerusalem to conquer the religious shrines of others or to interfere with those of other faiths, but to ensure peace and to live in fraternity with others.”   (Quoted from Press Cuttings of June 8, 1967).

Today, imagination is sadly lacking in Israeli political circles on how to engage its enemies on its own terms. Perhaps Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has less time than he thinks.

Gilad Shalit to be released from captivity

The whole nation welcomes home Gilad Shalit. Or it should. But there are prominent Israelis who have argued against the price to be paid for his return to Israel.  The price for swapping him is 1 Israeli for 1,027 Palestinians. People are right; it is an exorbitant price beyond all acceptable standards. And yes, there is a probable price yet to be paid in Israeli lives lost.  And it even sends a message to the Islamic world. After all, the morally corrupt President of Iran, Mahmoud Achmadinejad has unambiguously stated that Islam must defeat the corrupt West because “We (the Islamic world) love death and the West loves Life.”

In the Yom Kippur service there is a passage that refers to Pidyon Shevuyim (redeeming the captives). Islam theologically views the non Muslim as no better than cattle, to be bartered, stolen, abused and despatched to his or her death when no longer of service. As such, Islam is the true spiritual heir to the Roman Empire whose civilisation likewise produced great works of art and literature and, defined statecraft and ethics as the celebration of power and death, imaginatively delivered to lesser beings.

The one thing that has differentiated both the USA and Israel in their statecraft from the rest is the tension between foreign policy pragmatists (realists) and foreign policy idealists.  It is why the home of Capitalism boycotts its enemies and why the most significant opposition to war has always come from within our two societies not outside of them.   It is why Israel’s enemies fired almost 10,000 rockets and missiles at Israel’s citizens; nevertheless Israel permitted its enemies to escape with their families in the assault on Gaza that began on December 27, 2008.   And Israel has the most diligent military prosecution service in the Western world, to ensure that those forgetting the ‘rules of war’ do not escape scrutiny from an Israeli court.

It may not be much but it is what differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them’.

On November 30, 1947 the Arab Higher Committee issued its manifesto to rouse the population to a higher plane of consciousness – it wanted the Palestinian Arab populace to be prepared for the conflict with the Jews. It was titled “Kingdoms are established over dead bodies and skulls.” Rousing stuff.

In a not dissimilar vein, Neturei Karta, the fundamentalist Jewish worlds very own Jew haters may be correct about one thing only and that is that a people with a state will compromise on following God’s commandments.  They bleat that only a God created state is permissible therefore they ignore the state and often actively work to undermine it.  Their ethics are without Jewish foundation. In order to survive,a state will inevitably make compromises and God is in the struggle, not in full time study and disengagement from the life of the nation.

Those who would abandon a captive to his or her fate betray Jewish values.  That a senior Israeli Rabbi could publicly suggest this, is an indication of moral degeneration, not of piety.

Israel must not forget that the ethical foundation of the state of Israel is not Turkish, nor Arab, nor British; it is Jewish, and it is Israeli.  Ethnic cleansing is symbolic of Islam’s foundation mythology.  Pidyon Shevuyim is symbolic of Israel's founding ethic. Some of us appear to have forgotten that.

Pirkei Avot 2.6 (Hillel) "In a place where no one behaves like a human being, you must strive to be human.”