Since taking office this past January, President Obama has pressed for renewed peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. While he has exhorted both sides to make concessions, the bulk of his effort, at least publicly, has been to pressure Israel to respect his demand to immediately freeze all construction in its settlements. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected the demand saying that freezing construction in Israeli settlements when new apartments, schools, roads, etc. were needed, was tantamount to "freezing life" in those settlements, and therefore "unreasonable."

Ask average, albeit somewhat informed Americans what feelings or images they associate with Israel, and you’re likely to receive responses that range from the extreme positive to the extreme negative but are mostly somewhere in between. Ask the same group about Israeli settlers, however, and you’re likely to elicit an overwhelmingly negative response. The word "settler" has become a pejorative term. It is, for many people, including those who are not anti-Israel, synonymous with violent fanatic.

One would have to write a book to adequately address the issue of Israeli settlements, which is much more complicated than most news sources would have us believe. Suffice it to say, we should be troubled that the media use the same word, "settler," to describe, on the one hand, an ideologue committed to a "Greater Israel" and, on the other, a regular citizen of any political persuasion who is motivated by economic concerns. I’d venture to guess that when most people hear the word "settler," they think of the former. But in reality, as David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy notes in his article Beyond Settlements: US Policy Options Going Forward, "80% of [the 285,000] Israeli settlers live in less than 5% of the West Bank — largely, but not completely, adjacent to the pre-1967 boundaries." Thus, one could argue that 57,000 settlers, the other 20%, stand in the way of a future Palestinian state. But, Makovsky continues, "an equal amount of land within Israel could be swapped in exchange [for the 5% of the West Bank where 80% of settlers currently live], allowing [both Israeli and Palestinian leadership] to claim victory." In other words, 228,000 settlers, the 80% majority, can be absorbed into Israel without any sacrifice by the Palestinians, and therefore cannot be considered an obstacle to the peace process.

It is also worth noting that all settlers live on land that was captured in the ’67 War, a defensive war that Israel fought for its survival and won. Against the backdrop of that war, the Arab aggression that led to it, and the Khartoum Resolution of 1967 that followed in its wake in which the Arab World established the three Nos—"no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it"—it is hard to blame Israel for allowing its citizens to settle captured land. Furthermore, I think one would be hard pressed to cite another example in all of history where it was presumed that the victor would return land that it had captured in a defensive war against the vanquished.

But leaving aside the issue of whether the settlements can be morally justified, one can’t help but wonder how they are at the top of Obama’s agenda given all that’s transpired in the Middle East over the last decade. To briefly recap some of the highlights, in 2000-2001, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former President Clinton came up with a peace offer that the late Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestinan Authority, couldn’t refuse: A Palestinian state on about 97% of the occupied territories, the Old City of Jerusalem (with the exception ofthe Jewish and Armenian quarters), and $30 billion in compensation for Palestinian refugees. Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who was facilitating negotiations, called the offer "remarkable" and said that if Arafat refused it, "it is not going to be a tragedy, it’s going to be a crime." Arafat refused it. According to top negotiator Dennis Ross, for Arafat, "to end the conflict is to end himself" ("Powell Should Tell Arafat: ‘It’s Now or Never,’" M. Kondracke"). The Arafat-led Second Intifada began in late September of 2000.

In August through September of 2005, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza settlements and four West Bank settlements. The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which is internationally recognized as a terrorist organization and had bombarded Israel from Gaza with Qassam rockets for five years, repaid Israel’s concession by increasing its attacks on Israeli civilians. As for Arafat, the end of conflict would be the end of Hamas.

Finally, before stepping down last year, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came up with Israel’s most generous (some would say fool hardy) offer yet: 100% of the West Bank (composed of 93 to 94% of West Bank land and the rest made up by territory from pre-1967 Israel), the return of more than a thousand Palestinian Refugees to Israel’s final borders, and the internationalization of Jerusalem under Israeli, Palestinian, American, Jordanian and Saudi Arabian governments. The current chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, refused. Can anyone detect a pattern here? Palestinian leaders have consistently rejected their opportunities to provide for their people and forgo belligerence. This is not an issue of settlements. It’s an issue of Palestinian refusal to accept a Jewish state.

If Obama is going to turn a blind eye to history, at least he could consider the current state of Palestinian affairs. Hamas rules over all of Gaza, roughly 38% of the Palestinian population. Hamas refuses to engage a peace process with Israel, a country it has sworn to destroy. Fatah, which in contrast to Hamas is Western-backed and internationally recognized, governs the other portion of the Palestinan population. Fatah heads the Palestinian Authority and is based in the West Bank (Hamas routed Fatah from Gaza in a bloody coup in 2006 and 2007). Its "moderate" leader, Mahmoud Abbas, does engage the peace process (not all elements of Fatah do), but refuses to refer to Israel as a Jewish state. It shouldn’t take much common sense to conclude that a Palestinian population divided between two governments, one whose charter is to destroy all of Israel and another whose most moderate elements have principled objections to referring to Israel as a Jewish state, is not a legitimate peace partner.

But the consequences of Obama’s misguided efforts do not end here. In fact, Obama should be credited with establishing a new obstacle to the peace process: Abbas’ refusal to restart negotiations. Abbas, who has enjoyed great support in the West, learned the hard way that appearing too friendly to Western diplomats and politicians was a sure way to earn the enmity of the Arab street. Already under fire for policies that many in the Arab world viewed as conciliatory, he was roundly criticized as a traitor when he shook hands with former prime minister Ariel Sharon at a the Red Sea Summit in 2003. Since then, Abbas has become acutely aware of his public image. He has realized that if he is to enjoy the support of the Arab world, he must burnish his credentials as tough negotiator. Given that the U.S. is widely seen as Israel’s only reliable ally, Abbas is loath to appear any less tough on Israel than an American administration—to do so would be the end of his political career. Therefore, it shouldn’t be too hard to predict what happened once Obama went public with his demand for a settlement freeze. Without missing a beat, Abbas stated that not only was a settlement freeze necessary, it was a pre-condition to negotiations. And thus, Obama’s attempt to restart the peace process did exactly the opposite.

More recently, reality, in the form of a 4% Israeli approval rating, has begun to set in for Obama. He has spoken out against the Palestinian demand he helped to create, asserting that a freeze in settlement construction cannot be a pre-condition to negotiations, as Abbas would like. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s approval rating has soared to a whopping 65%, a ringing endorsement by the standards of Israel’s political system, according to UPenn Ph.D. candidate Eric Trager. No doubt, Netanyahu, who barely won Israel’s last election, has benefited mightily from Obama’s clumsiness. Unfortunately, Middle East peace has not.

The post Obama’s Irrational Preoccupation with the Settlements appeared first on Jewcy.

As a Jew who is proud of his Jewish heritage, I’ve always been wary of the tendency of many Jews to focus on the Holocaust to the exclusion of other aspects of Jewish history.  After all, we were around for several thousand years before the Holocaust.  Judaism is the first Religion of the Book; hell, we came up with the Book, the Book out of which Christianity and Islam were born.  We invented monotheism, the concept of an omnipotent and omniscient God who resides in heaven.  And did I mention the foundation of Western morality, aka the Ten Commandments?  That was our contribution too.  In sum, there is more to our heritage than our slaughter by the Nazis.     Unfortunately, Holocaust deniers ensure that the issue of the Holocaust, about which there really isn’t much to discuss, remains in the fore.  Holocaust denial is a rallying cry for anti-Semitism because it allows Jew-haters to deny us our claim to suffering, to effectively shut off the capacity to feel any sort of empathy for us.  Needless to say, it’s difficult to have constructive dialogue with an adversary who denies you your humanity.

Enter Facebook. "The mere statement of denying the Holocaust does not constitute a violation of our policies," says Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.  As you might imagine, Facebook, which prohibits pornography, or speech that is "threatening" or "hateful," has come under fire for this policy.  As well it should.  While Facebook might argue that Holocaust denial groups are not inherently "threatening"-these groups don’t necessarily speak of inflicting physical harm on Jews-it cannot with any kind of integrity argue that Holocaust denial groups are not inherently hateful.  Theoretically, perhaps, one could deny the Holocaust’s existence and not have an agenda against the Jewish people.  But the theoretical here is insignificant.  As attorney Brian Cuban points out in his open letter to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, common sense dictates that in practice, "The Holocaust denial movement is nothing more than a pretext to allow the preaching of hatred against Jews and to recruit other like-minded individuals to do the same."   So what if Holocaust denial is hateful?  In the United States we are free to hold hateful, bigoted views, as long as we don’t threaten or harm anyone.  That was Columbia University’s president Lee Bollinger’s argument for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak on his campus.  Bollinger felt that by granting that monster an international stage, he was championing the cause of freedom of speech.

His reasoning always made me cringe.  Even if Holocaust denial can and should be legal here in the U.S., why should our desire to uphold the First Amendment prompt us to make a mockery of it by granting such a prestigious forum to Holocaust denial or any other disgusting view?  There can be no purposeful discourse with a Holocaust denier or any other bigot committed to hate, so why engage his vitriol?  Holocaust denial and the like should be relegated to the fringe.  It belongs as far away as possible from acceptable conversation.               

There is a difference, however, between Facebook’s situation and Bollinger’s empowerment of a hate-monger.  Facebook doesn’t invite hate groups to form on its pages.  It simply provides a platform, and the bulk of the groups it houses are perfectly legitimate.  If I worked for Facebook, I would respond to Cuban’s point by noting that within the realm of legality, it is not up to Facebook to draw red lines about morality or what is and is not appropriately controversial.  If Facebook were to determine that five of ten Holocaust denial groups were not kosher for its pages, and it were to delete these five, would the remaining five be somehow Facebook-sanctioned?   Facebook maintains that its decision to allow Holocaust denial and other hate groups is a principled one. "We have a lot of internal debate and we bring in experts to talk about it," Schnitt said in a CNN interview.  "Just being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook. We want it [the site] to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones." Call me a cynic, but I’m skeptical of that explanation.  Facebook’s stated desire to be a hub for controversial ideas seems awfully convenient given that it can’t possibly have the resources to monitor every single group that’s established on its pages.  According to a survey released on May 13th by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the number of Web pages and shared online documents promoting racism or other forms of hatred has surged to 10,000, a 25% increase from last year.  Given that Facebook houses the highest percentage, 30% of these instances of hate, that’s 3,000 (and growing) hate groups for it to identify, let alone contend with.  I can’t prove it, but I imagine that there’s a certain type of "hateful" and "threatening" speech that gets a group tossed from Facebook’s pages every time: Speech that is illegal and speech that is actionable.  It is illegal to threaten someone with physical harm.   Therefore, any Facebook pages that do so are removed as they’re discovered.  Defamation of character and other grievances frequently result in lawsuits and hefty fees for the defendants.  If I’m the CEO of Facebook, or any other corporation for that matter, my service terms are dictated by nothing loftier than what I can get away with and what will get me sued.    Facebook ended up removing two of the groups that Cuban identified as offensive when users posted comments on those pages that did violate service terms.  So what does that say about the other "controversial" groups?  Until Facebook defines exactly what it means by speech that is "hateful" and "threatening," we won’t know for sure.   

The post Holocaust Denial on Facebook appeared first on Jewcy.

People often comment that the average Israeli looks about 10 years older than the average American of the same age. Granted the anti-smoking campaign hasn’t caught on in Israel and people drive as if they’re annoyed that the government would dare to inconvenience them with traffic laws, but these can’t be the only reasons for the disparity. Israelis look so much older than they should because their country is surrounded by governments and terror-organizations-in the case of Hamas and Hizbollah these are one and the same-hell bent on, "driving the Jews into the sea" or to quote the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "wiping Israel off the map." To the south west and north, respectively, are Hamas and Hizbollah, both trained and funded by Iran. To the North-East is hostile Syria, which also backs Hizbollah and hosts Hamas’ current leader, the exiled Khaled Meshal. The West Bank, on Israel’s eastern front, is run by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, whose leader Mahmoud Abbas made a speech on Tuesday expressly refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state: "A Jewish state, what is that supposed to mean?" asked Abbas. "…I don’t accept it and I say so publicly." Abbas, who at one point denied the existence of the Holocaust, is considered "a moderate." No, it doesn’t take a pessimistic outlook on life to conclude that for Israel-the one Jewish country in the world-the prospect of peace is pretty bleak.

And yet given where Israel was 61 years ago, we might also conclude that things could be a whole lot bleaker. It had just emerged victorious from a War of Independence, but was (and is) vastly outnumbered by its enemies, and was not, in these early days, backed by any major powers. Many felt Israel would not be able to withstand the odds against it. Four high impact wars and countless skirmishes later, Israel is not only still standing, but remains the most powerful country in the Middle East. For Jews, this alone should be reason to celebrate. But for some reason, many Jews across the world did not feel the need to celebrate. A short article entitled, Independence Day Around the World, in yesterday’s Israeli daily Ha’aretz notes that, "Yom Ha’atzmaut must be the only holiday that the Jewish World doesn’t feel the need to celebrate together." This observation, which is troubling, is not surprising when we consider that the Jews of the diaspora are as indifferent as ever to the plight of Israel according to recent poles conducted by the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish organizations. I can’t speak for Jews of other nationalities, but perhaps it’s difficult for the average American Jew, who grows up uninhibited by anti-Semitism in a relatively secular and prosperous community, to fully appreciate what an independent Jewish state means to the Jewish people. How can we American Jews wrap our minds around the fact less than 70 years ago, the Jews of Europe were almost completely annihilated by a genocidal maniac? The violence and harassment that is regularly perpetrated against the Jews of Israel, Venezuela, France, Britain, and Denmark – where a public school principal recently told Jewish parents to keep their kids home because he and his staff could not guarantee their safety– is so foreign that it’s difficult for us to accept. How can it be that the anti-Semitism that our grandparents and great-grandparents worked so hard to outrun is alive and well and threatens even the world’s one Jewish state? Consider the following, a brief biography of my Israeli friend: Maayan Gutfeld is almost 23 years old. Her warm and upbeat manner belie the fact that in her short time on this earth, she has endured plenty of tragedy. Four of her childhood friends have died of unnatural causes. Her father suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder thanks to time spent in Egypt as a P.O.W. during the Yom Kippur War. Many of her closest friends, including her boyfriend and roommate, also show signs of PTSD. War, terror attacks, and military service have taken their tole on her life and the lives of those around her. She is a typical Israeli. It’s hard to imagine how different American Jewish attitudes towards Israel would be if a significant percentage of American Jews were living something resembling Maayan’s life. We can only be grateful that we don’t have to, and appreciative of those who live that life on our behalf.

The post Happy Belated 61st, Israel appeared first on Jewcy.