Has Iran answered Netanyahu on nuclear deal?

Israel and Iran may have just broached a new rapprochement, and it shouldn't matter if each side has ulterior motives.

It would be hard for anyone to know all the reasons and ramifications regarding Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon's decision to remain in the hall when Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif delivered his presentation. But there's certainly room to calculate the stakes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and most of his cabinet maintain that Secretary of State John Kerry's current negotiations with Iran are a "historic mistake". Staying to listen during the annual Munich Security Conference - which tends to be more about military cooperation than political grandstanding - seems like a good place to push the envelope and show some nuance. 

For Ya'alon, who rather publicly dismissed Kerry's framework for Israeli-Palestinian peace, this was also an opportunity to show that 1) he is not averse to all diplomacy; 2) he doesn't need any American prodding to act like an adult; 3) even one of Israel's most forceful opponents of diplomacy may be ready to play for the right price; 4) Israel faces more pressing existential threats than the Palestinians, namely Iran. 

R.I.P., Ariel Sharon - Israel's last visionary leader?

Ariel Sharon's passing is opening a flood of memories back to 1973, including a time when it seemed Israel had options, because its leaders were willing to think big and take risks - and not just for peace. That spirit, which Sharon embodied, still abounds among Israelis, but it seems to me (granted, from a distance) that it's been a while (say, eight years) since the leaders have channeled it. Sharon was the last of that breed.

(Israeli President Shimon Peres is a master visionary, but he serves in a figurehead capacity and will be retiring at the end of his current term.)

I remember, over a span of mere months, from July 1976 to early 1977, Israel liberated the Entebbe hostages and Maccabi Tel-Aviv defeated the Soviet Red Army basketball team, on its way to winning the European cup - a defining moment. 

Menachem Begin's 1981 attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor was a bold stroke, and even the ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon was audacious. As Defense Minister, Sharon had sought to decapitate the PLO in exile, in the hope that local West Bank leaders would somehow emerge to negotiate Palestinian acquiescence to permanent Israeli control.

There were subsequent moments as well, including Anwar Sadat's dramatic 1978 visit to Jerusalem, at the behest of Menachem Begin which culminated in the Camp David talks and the 1979 peace treaty, and of course Oslo in 1993 and the peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, led by Yitzhak Rabin. For anyone who remembers 1973, it's still difficult to absorb how much changed in just five years' time.

Sharon, like Rabin before him, was a general whose strategic vision eventually applied itself to securing Israel's survival off the battlefield and far into the future.

Improbably, especially in light of 1982, Sharon reclaimed the activist's mantle just a decade ago, as Prime Minister. He saw that Gaza was lost as an Israeli stronghold, a small piece of beach with well over one million Palestinians. Back then, the half-hearted U.S. peace efforts were actually lagging behind the Israelis and Palestinians, and besides, Sharon didn't see Mahmoud Abbas being able to deliver his side of a bilateral agreement. As Rabin did before him, Sharon realized that - if Israelis and Palestinians can't live together peacefully, then it's better to live separately, beginning with Gaza.

Around Sharon's funeral, numerous and interlocking calculations were being made. The official statements from the White House and State Department seemed careful not to underplay Sharon's significance, as a positive message to Israel's current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, nor to shower so much praise that Netanyahu feels slighted by contrast. In his eulogy at the funeral, Netanyahu replayed his own mantras about the Holocaust and Iran. U.S. Vice President Biden, leading the U.S. delegation, extolled Sharon's bravery in evacuating Gaza and reiterated President Obama's unwavering commitment to the U.S.-Israel alliance.

In itself, the fact that Biden was there, eight years after Sharon left the scene under a massive stroke, underscored the abiding value and honor Washington attaches to Israeli leaders who are willing to take control of their destiny. At the end, it was Sharon's private secretary and a war buddy who evoked his personal tenderness and devotion in a way that truly transcended official protocol and convention. 

My biggest regret today was the ring of truth to Biden's closing quote from Shakespeare: We "shall not look upon his like again."

How political can Hillel be and still fulfill its mission?

Hillel’s warning that its Swarthmore College chapter must enforce a pro-Israel standard for speakers and events threatens to undermine its 90-year-old mission of cultivating Jewish life on campus.

Last year's Pew study on American Jews was just the latest snooze alarm on what has been obvious for decades. To highlight one perennial finding, we have failed to translate program spending into a sustainable sense of community among those Jews who would now be old enough to be full participants. Too many young adult Jews feel either negative or indifferent about their Jewish heritage and the community which seeks to represent and minister to them.

Hillel has long been the established vehicle for nurturing Jewish souls on campus, and - despite various newcomers, and a vibrant Chabad presence - so it remains. But the strength Hillel derives from its conformity with the priorities of the mainstream American Jewish community is also in danger of limiting and even undermining its core mission.
Israel advocacy is a proven tool to boost Jewish identity, Hillel's Israel on Campus Coalition has been competing and collaborating with AIPAC on campus. But in decades past, we alienated those who were critical or concerned about Israel's actions, and by alienating them from Hillel we probably undermined their Jewish affinity overall. A larger group of Jewish students was just oblivious to the whole pro-Israel tempest, and these unaffiliated Jews might have been reached by shifting funds back to traditional Jewish content and programming.

Between Israel advocacy and birthright-style "non-political" programs, the campus community has seen a substantive and symbolic emphasis on Israel as the premise and fulcrum for Jewish identity.

Out in Philadephia's liberal Main Line suburbs, where Swarthmore holds court, establishing a Hillel presence has been a long-running challenge, and not just because of dissonance over Israeli politics and policies. Israel has been as much a hindrance as a silver bullet for broader Jewish participation, and this is likely the case in other progressive enclaves across America. Are these really the young Jews we're prepared to alienate or miss entirely?

Scaremongering for dollars? 'Tis the season...

Just to remind me the end of the tax year is nigh, my Facebook feed just produced a new report titled, "Europe Turns Blind Eye to Anti-Semitism". The content doesn't even back up that outrageous claim.

In the waning weeks of summer, before the Jewish High Holidays, numerous Jewish organizations send out "the sky is falling" alerts, with a donation card so we can avert yet another second Holocaust.

Now, we're just days away from the end of 2013, so this is our last chance to save the Jewish people and the State of Israel from imminent destruction and claim a juicy tax deduction. 

A win-win? No.

In this particular case, there may be no fundraising tie-in, just a byproduct of the general climate of sensationalism left behind.

These appeals and alerts not only trivialize and undermine the very real challenges and real successes of real people, including Jews. They not only eliminate all sense of proportion by crying wolf on cue. They insult our intelligence at best, and help turn otherwise well-meaning Jews into human echo chambers of fear and resentment at worst. 

Non-profits that need to resort to such outrageous and reckless messaging, just to fulfill their budget benchmarks, should consider whether their actual mission is worthy to begin with. 

ASA vote dooms a generation of Jewish students

The latest decision by the American Studies Association to "boycott" Israel and its institutions unleashes much negative energy, and my personal experience leads me to regret its long-term impact on a generation of students.

Many of my pro-Israel friends regularly bemoan the amount of attention the mainstream media devotes to Israel's foibles, and to sympathetic portrayals of Israel's adversaries and detractors. This complaint has some basis in fact, though it's also true that Israelis and American Jews invite coverage, and that much of the coverage is positive. As well, many of the problem stories originate in Israel's own mainstream media.

Meanwhile, many thousands of Jewish students have been deployed as "shock troops" against a "sophisticated campaign to discredit Israel on the college campus." That was in the 1980s, and one of many slogans drilled into my head at the time. I took my mission seriously, and devoted untold hours -- often working through the night -- to assure that the evil anti-Israel students were held off at the ramparts. 

No doubt, thousands of impressionable minds were spared as a result of my brave sacrifice. 

After the Cold War ended and while Oslo still held promise, I asked one big-name Hillel colleague how the less contentious atmosphere was affecting turnout to his programs. He told me numbers were up, and for the first time in years most students were coming in just because they wanted to be Jewish, and they were learning about... being Jewish.

Fast-forward to today, when another defiant Prime Minister of Israel is making waves, dovetailing with the legacy of another arrogant U.S. former President, and the Jewish (sorry, "pro-Israel") community is again issuing general calls for mobilizing brigades of students for early warning and propaganda response.

With various studies like the recent Pew report reporting the obvious decline in American Jewish affinity, giving Jewish college students a compelling sense of duty is a good way to keep them engaged (and, maybe, to get engaged to fellow Jews). But it's a little like the mismatched couple who stay together "for our children's sake". 

Only later, I realized how many educational and social opportunities I missed, in order to be a tuition-paying activist for Israel, along with a few other nice Jewish causes. Only later, I realized I might have learned something from all those disagreeable anti-Israel speeches, had I listened to their substance rather than red-flagging them for the Q&A and long reports back to HQ.

Yes, the American Studies Association has disgraced itself, and so many American studies scholars who have better things to do than wasting their time on ideological conferences and sloganeering. And yes, some Israeli academics will be unjustly inconvenienced and be denied proper recognition.

What I will lose sleep over is how this decision will generate ever more momentum for young Jews to forgo the campus experience, to shut their perceptive faculties, as they hunker down for full-fledged pitched battles in lecture halls, campus media, and student senates. Along the way, they may strengthen their identity as defensive, combative and doubt-free supporters of Israel. They will be encouraged and funded by our major organizations and lauded back home in their parents' congregations. 

Many will outgrow that phase, and many will not. Still more will only watch all this from the sidelines, later recalling Judaism as a pro-Israel answer to a potent but marginal group of academics. And then, 25 years from now, the Pew Center will call them up and ask whether they feel attached to the Jewish people. Spoiler alert...

Netanyahu's new rogue state is Israel

Hours after the five Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council (the "P-5") announced an interim deal that pulls Iran back from the threshold of nuclear weapons capacity, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done more than denounce the agreement. By reasserting Israel's right to attack Iran at its own discretion, even following this international accord, Netanyahu has effectively set Israel as the Middle East's new rogue state - even without actually attacking Iran.

With Iran formally committed to the agreement, Israel is now the nation standing defiantly against world opinion and the international community. None of those countries party to the agreement - including France and the United States - can now abide an Israeli attack. 

Israel is routinely criticized and condemned, with or without justification, for all manner of violations of international law. Yet it enjoys positive relations with dozens of countries and is seamlessly integrated into the global economy, and it has never directly defied the Security Council. Though the Council as an entity has not formalized the agreement, the P-5 and the European Union are all officially signed on. Agree or disagree (as I did elsewhere) with Netanyahu's assessment of the negotiations and the deal, he is now declaring Israel to be above the Security Council.

The inconvenient Beilis centennial

One hundred years ago this week, a jury in Kiev acquitted Mendel Beilis of ritual murder in the death of a Christian child. Half the jurors were literally card-carrying anti-Semites, members of the infamous Black Hundreds, and still they could find no plausible evidence to convict this Jewish man. The trial was followed around the world, and 20 years later, 4,000 people attended Beilis' funeral in New York.

Jay Beilis addressing diplomats and Ukrainian officials

Last month in Kyiv (note the Ukrainian spelling), we commemorated the Beilis centennial within the context of fighting anti-Semitism, with full participation by the Government of Ukraine and many other countries. As a consultant to the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, I had the opportunity to help facilitate. As Jay Beilis pointed out to us, countless thousands of Jews are alive today because his grandfather refused to confess to a crime he didn't commit, and the highly publicized trial inspired a new mass emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe years before the Holocaust, and before the mass-murder at Babi Yar, which occurred just the other side of town from our conference.

I believe the fact that neither Israel nor the United States is hosting any major event for this centennial reflects our own politics and mythology. In Israel, they already have the earlier Dreyfus Affair and Theodor Herzl narrative. In the States, the Jewish community is largely defined (and self-identified) as a post-Holocaust community -- even though most of us are descended from pre-War arrivals. And if there's a centennial to mark here, it will be the Leo Frank trial, which ended in the lynching of an Atlanta Jewish community leader and is popularly linked to the founding of the legendary Anti-Defamation League (which was also among the cosponsors of the Kyiv conference).

Ironically, U.S. officials were precluded from participating in the Kyiv conference due to the federal government shutdown. Even The Forward, whose Yiddish-language forerunner The Forverts at the time promoted Beilis as the trial of the century, was unavailable to participate in or report on the Kyiv commemoration. 

As a culture, we choose our heroes or they are chosen for us, and then we choose or invent new heroes when it's convenient. This may be something America and Israel have in common, as new (or renewed) societies.

At least the record has been honored where it was set.