BLOOMBERG: Why Israel Got Into a Dust-Up With Germany, By Daniel Gordis

Last Monday was Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel. It is a quiet, painful, introspective day, on which even highway traffic comes to a complete halt for two minutes. In his address opening the commemoration, a somewhat belligerent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu berated Europe for not doing enough to stem anti-Semitism. Then the next day, in an apparent breach of diplomatic protocol, Netanyahu snubbed Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, by canceling a scheduled meeting. What for? The German envoy had ignored Netanyahu’s demand that he cancel a meeting with Break the Silence, a group deeply critical of the Israeli army’s conduct in Palestinian territories.

Many people wondered why the prime minster chose to pick this fight with Germany. To be sure, his cabinet supported his decision, and he knew that he would earn points with his right flank, on which the future of his government depends. Breaking the Silence, an Israeli grass-roots organization, collects testimonies from soldiers about their military service, mostly in the territories, focusing particularly on alleged abuses by soldiers. The group is seen by many as irresponsible and treasonous. Many of the testimonies it publishes are uncorroborated; some critics say they are false. And because most of Breaking the Silence’s work is done outside Israel, they are seen as trying to sully the Israel Defense Forces in international settings, contributing to the possibility that Israeli soldiers could eventually be charged in the International Court of Justice. Particularly galling to Netanyahu is that most of the group’s funding comes from Europe, which he considers fundamentally hostile to Israel.

Michael Oren, a member of Knesset who was formerly Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., articulated Netanyahu’s position better than even the prime minister: “It’s unacceptable for European leaders to come here to help those who degrade our soldiers as war criminals, and that’s what Breaking the Silence does,” said Oren. Even some Europeans are now questioning the propriety of their support. In 2015, 10 members of the Swiss Parliament chastised their government for funding the group. “Disinformation and the political ideology of hatred are being directed against the Jewish state,” they said, adding with irony that “it is shameful that Switzerland, on whose soil the nucleus of peaceful political Zionism developed in Basel, is participating in such activities.”

Netanyahu’s snub of the German envoy, therefore, was a safe domestic bet. But was there any diplomatic gain to be had? While Gabriel insisted that the episode would not harm Germany’s “special relationship with Israel,” Chancellor Angela Merkel hinted that matters were a bit more complex than that. “The chancellor finds it regrettable that a meeting” did not take place, her spokesman, said. “It should not be problematic for foreign visitors to meet with critical representatives of civil society.”

That statement, while an oversimplification, may have been key to Netanyahu’s rage. Gabriel defended his position by saying, “You never get the full picture of any state in the world if you just meet with figures in government ministries,” but even Ha’aretz, Israel’s left-leaning daily, which rarely misses an opportunity to attack the prime minister, noted that foreign ministers generally do not meet with representative of NGOs in democratic countries. Was the visit an inadvertent indication that Israel is not a functioning democracy?

Netanyahu obviously values Israel’s relationship with Germany, which is Israel’s largest trading partner in Europe, and with which Israel enjoys significant military cooperation. But the prime minister has decided not to ignore what he sees as baseless attacks on Israel or Jews. When Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom accused Israel of extrajudicial killings of Palestinians in 2015, he called her remarks “outrageous, immoral, unjust and just wrong.” He then added “stupid.” When French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said recently that France was not responsible for the killing of Jews under Nazi rule, Netanyahu’s government minced no words and described her comments as “contradicting historical truth.” (Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Marine Le Pen’s just announced pick for prime minister, is a harsh critic of Israel who has compared Netanyahu to Hamas.) When U.S. President Donald Trump recently condemned anti-Semitism, Netanyahu used Trump’s remarks as an opportunity to challenge Europe to do the same.

It is in that context that Netanyahu’s snub must be seen. The dust-up with Germany was surely not his most elegant moment. Yet Gabriel made a series of probably unintentional gaffes. Around Holocaust Memorial Day, Israelis’ sensitivities about Germany are at their height. So is their fear of weakness. In his speech that day, Netanyahu reminded his country, “The simple truth is that in our world, the existence of the weak is in doubt. … The strong survive, the weak are erased.”

Most Israelis are keenly aware that without the IDF, they would not survive. Of all weeks of the year, this was certainly not the moment for a German to come to Israel to meet with an organization that most Israelis believe wants to make Jews vulnerable once again.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Daniel Gordis at danielgordis@outlook.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net

D.Gordis: Can we please stop talking about ‘hasbara’? The problem is not with how Israel tells the story, but with how the Western world has grown tired of Israel.

It’s almost invariably the first question during the Q&A session.

Whether I’m speaking in the US or Australia, Israel or Europe, at a JCC, a book fair, a synagogue or a federation – someone always asks it. At Limmud or a university, too. It makes no difference. Someone invariably asks, “Why does Israel consistently do such a terrible job of telling its own story? You people do so many things so well. Why can’t you do hasbara [public diplomacy]?” In fairness to Israel, I think the Foreign Ministry has, in fact, gotten a bit better at it. We’ve been represented in recent years by several ambassadors to the US, for example, who have done excellent work. During this summer’s war, the IDF was tweeting furiously – at times predictably and foolishly, but at times thoughtfully. At the very minimum, the IDF was at least giving Twitter users who wanted Israel’s side of the story some basic material to work with.

All the progress notwithstanding, though, I often sympathize with those people asking the question. We’re better, but not good enough; despite the justice of our cause, we do at times seem utterly incapable of telling our story compellingly.

Many wonder why. So, too, did I.

But the next time someone asks me that question, I’m going to change my answer. No longer am I going to recount the history of when Israel apparently stopped investing as heavily in hasbara, and no longer am I going to try to explain that our story is a complex one, not readily reduced to sound bites.

Instead, I’m going to remind the questioner of whats happening in Israel, and why, no matter what we do, hasbara is essentially useless and hopeless. It is so utterly useless, in fact, that I think we just ought to drop the concept and the term.

The notion behind hasbara is that if you only tell your story in a sufficiently compelling and powerful way, some people will “get it,” and Israel will no longer be tied to the proverbial whipping post of the international media.

But after what happened on October 22, does anyone still believe that? As is well-known, a Palestinian driver with a terrorist background (he had spent time in Israeli jail for terrorism, and was a family relation of a former head of Hamas’s military wing) plowed into a group of innocent pedestrians at a light rail stop, killing two people (a baby, Chaya Zissel Braun, who died just hours later, and 22-year-old Karen Yemima Mosquera, who succumbed to her wounds after several days) and wounding six others. When the driver tried to escape, he was shot and killed by police.

A horrible story, but a simple one.

Yet how did the international media report it? The initial AP headline, changed following an outcry, was “Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem.” Yes, you read that correctly. As far as the headline was concerned, the story was that Israeli police shot a guy. That he had tried to kill people, that he had intentionally run them over and wounded several of them grievously, that he was a known terrorist – all that was apparently irrelevant to the headline. All the initial AP headline chose to note was that “those Israelis” had shot another Palestinian.

Tell me – what good would hasbara have done? The AP eventually relented and revised their headline (amazingly, though, the URL of their post –news.yahoo.com/ israeli-police-shoot-man-east-jerusalem- 153643679.html – retained the original headline for a while, even after they revised the text), but Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch (so hostile to Israel that even its founder, Robert Bernstein, ended up repudiating the very organization he had founded), has not relented. Immediately after the attack, he tweeted: “Palestinian deadly crash into train stop. Israel calls it ‘terrorist attack... typical of Hamas.’” Note the implication behind Roth’s language: Was it a terrorist attack? Well, the Israelis say so.

Days later, when the second victim died, Roth continued in his stance: “Second fatality from Palestinian who drove car into Jerusalem train stop. Police treating it as ‘purposeful attack.’” Those Israelis, again... “treating it” as a “purposeful attack.” What would Mr.

Roth call it? Does anyone imagine that any hasbara would have influenced Roth’s poisonous hatred for Israel? When Karen Yemima Mosquera was buried, The Guardian headline read: “Jerusalem car crash funerals held.”

Car crash? And underlining the headline, The Guardian notes that she was killed “when a car driven by a Palestinian man veered onto a Jerusalem pavement crowded with pedestrians.”

What good would hasbara have done? A memo from the US Consulate in Jerusalem (the consulate has since removed the memo from its website) referred to the attack as a “traffic incident.”

Would hasbara have changed that? Let’s not kid ourselves. Israel makes plenty of mistakes and does many foolish things – just like any other country.

But it is also viciously pilloried in the international press, as the response to last week’s horrific events make clear.

The problem is not with how Israel tells the story, but with how the Western world has grown tired of Israel. There are many reasons for this, but hasbara is not the answer.

No one has explained this phenomenon better than award-winning Israeli journalist Matti Friedman.

“You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were – the pool into which the world spits.”

Precisely. And would hasbara – even the best we might imagine – have any impact on that? Obviously not. So can we please not talk about hasbara anymore? Let’s stop asking why the Israeli government is so incompetent at telling its story, and focus on the question that matters.

Let’s start asking instead: Why has the international community’s moral compass become so utterly dysfunctional?

Whatever Happened to Evil? A Jerusalem Post Column July 18, 2014 A world in which one refuses to call out evil is a world in which the meaning of goodness is also radically diminished. Daniel Gordis

Whatever Happened to Evil?

"Hear, O Israel, You are about to go into battle against your enemy. Let not your courage falter. Do not be in fear, or in panic, or in dread of them. May the Lord your God march with you to do battle for you against your enemy, to bring you victory." Deuteronomy 20:3-4 This column was obviously written before Israel's ground operation in Gaza began. Thousands of young Israeli men and women, our daughter and son-in-law among them, have been called up to service. We pray that they will be successful in their mission, and that they all return safely to their families.

When the dust finally settles, when we can finally breathe again and begin to learn the lessons of this war-of-sorts, we'll have more than our share of questions to ask. Are the residents of Israel any safer than they were before? Is it really possible that a power like Israel cannot rid Gaza of rockets? Will Israel, when it's all over, have sold out the residents of the South once again? Will we have created more cities like Sderot, in which the only people who live there are the ones who cannot afford to move away? Beyond the war, there will be deeper questions about our leadership and our society. To what extent did the government's (apparent) decision to lie about the fact that it knew from the very beginning that Gil-Ad Shaer, Eyal Yifrah and Naftali Fraenkel were almost certainly dead - thus unleashing three weeks of prayer, desperation, worry and unbridled emotion - foster an environment that contributed to the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir? And what is Israel going to do about that swathe of its society that sees nothing wrong with chanting "Death to Arabs" at football games and that, at heated moments a few weeks ago, spread across downtown Jerusalem looking for Arabs to beat up? We ignore these questions, and many others, at our own risk. At this moment, though, I find myself consumed by a different question altogether. It is, quite simply, this: Where has the word "evil" gone? Why are so many otherwise intelligent people so incapable of calling Hamas what it so obviously is? No matter what one thinks about the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestinian statehood or occupation, there is something perverse about the implicit critique that this was not a "fair fight." Ben Wedeman, reporting for CNN, remarked on the air more than once this week that Gaza was not protected by an Iron Dome system. That's true, of course, but hints at a perverse worldview. Why note that Gaza has no Iron Dome, unless you're really suggesting that this is a battle between two morally equivalent sides and thus ought to unfold on a level playing field? If only that perversity was limited to CNN, it would be less awful. But consider this, part of a letter sent by a rabbi who was (rightly) bemoaning the fact that the fighting was not nearly over.  What would the coming days bring, this rabbi asked in an open letter to the entire congregation? "More Hamas rockets landing in populated Israeli cities, not all of which will be thwarted by Israel's missile defense system. More Israeli air strikes in densely populated Gaza (which, by the way, has no Iron Dome and only few shelters), which means more Palestinian civilians, inevitably, caught in the crossfire." Note the balance. Israelis suffer. Palestinians suffer. But note also the complaint about the imbalance - for Israelis are protected by Iron Dome, and Palestinians are not. What's missing from this letter is the simple ability to call Israel's enemies "evil." What's missing is any recognition that Article XIII of Hamas's charter says, explicitly, that "[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions... are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad." What's missing is acknowledgment that Hamas will stop attacking Israel when Israel is no more. I don't expect Ben Wedeman to care about that. But rabbis?! Even when it comes to Hamas, we need balance? Here's more balance, from the very same letter. "So we stand, breathless, on the cusp of Shabbat - still grieving over Eyal, Gilad and Naftali, sick, ashamed and shocked by the vicious murder of Muhammad, awake, finally, to the inevitable outcome of years of hatred and racism, occupation and terror." The conflict with Hamas is the result of occupation? How about Article XXXII of their charter: "Leaving the circle of conflict with Israel is a major act of treason and it will bring curse on its perpetrators." Disney brings us the circle of life; Hamas is dedicated to the circle of conflict. But Jews, even rabbis, can't say that any longer. The murderers of Muhammad Abu Khdeir are pure evil (yes, actually, they are), but Hamas is not? What's happened to us? At a recent meeting with a group of progressive American rabbis, I offhandedly used the term "Amalek" to refer to Hamas. One of the rabbis asked, very respectfully, if I could help him think about a different vocabulary to use about Hamas, one that "reflects Jewish values." I was actually dumbstruck for a moment. I'd thought that in mentioning Amalek, I was referring to Jewish values. Have we gotten to the point that tikkum olam (whatever that means) and tzelem Elokim (being created in God's image) are Jewish values, but that eradicating evil is not? That's a bizarre bastardization of how Judaism has always seen the world. A world in which one refuses to call out evil is a world in which the meaning of goodness is also radically diminished.  Is the death of every Gazan child tragic? Of course it is. Is there something heartbreaking about watching Gazans flee the northern part of the Strip, sleeping in shelters further to the south, not knowing if their homes will be standing when they return? One would have to have a heart of stone not to be pained. Yet why were they fleeing? Because Hamas's leaders built shelters for themselves, not for simple Gazan citizens. They fled because Hamas took building materials that Israel sent into Gaza, and instead of building houses built kilometers of tunnels, deep underground, designed for future attacks on Israel. Do these genuinely pitiful, frightened people stop to note that Israel warned them to flee in order to save their lives, while Hamas demanded that they go home and not heed the Zionist warnings? I don't care that Ben Wedeman is never going to call Hamas "evil." And I understand that Gazans won't either, at least publicly, because they have an understandable aversion to being executed. But must we Jews, and our religious leaders, be complicit in the charade? When Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, the head of the yeshiva of Eilon Moreh (a settlement, some will note), remarked that the murderers of Muhammad Abu Khdeir should be executed, he quoted the verse "so that you may burn out evil from your midst" (Deut. 17:7). Rabbi Levanon is quite right. There is, in fact, very real evil in the world. But if the only evil to which progressive Jews can point is the evil in us, our moral compass has been badly damaged. If the only people we can call evil are Jews, then Hamas and its viciousness are the least of the threats to our long-term survival.  Comments and reactions can be posted here: http://danielgordis.org/2014/07/18/whatever-happened-evil/ The original Jerusalem Post column can be posted here: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/A-Dose-of-Nuance-Whatever-happened-to-evil-363186

D.Gordis: We’ve been here before

We’ve been here before. That’s the whole point of the Jewish calendar. None of this is new.

We’ve been here before. That’s what Shiva Asar Be-Tammuz, the 17^th day of Tammuz, which we will commemorate on Tuesday, seeks to remind us. The Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:6) lists five calamities that are said to have befallen us on this date. Among them, the Mishnah says, the walls of the city were breached and an idol was placed in the Temple.

Can anyone doubt that we’ve been here before?

Thanks to extraordinary Israeli ingenuity, we’ve built a wall in the sky. Missiles come streaking towards us, and usually, the “wall” stops them; the remnants of what had been a deathly threat seem to float slowly, harmlessly, down towards the earth. But not all the time, as we saw first in Ashdod. Our “wall” can be breached, and one can only assume that the breaches to follow will be much worse than what’s come thus far. The Babylonians breached the walls. So, too, did the Romans. So did the Syrians and the Egyptians in October 1973. So did Hezbollah in the Lebanon wars. So, too, can Hamas.

We’ve been here before.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, the Zionist narrative tells us. The story we tell about this country is one of utter triumph. It’s a story the early pioneers with their towers and stockades as they steadfastly spread across the land, of the desert being brought to bloom, of Tel Aviv rising out of the vacant sands just north of Jaffa, that of paratroopers firing their way into the Lions Gate, leaving the centuries-old stone pock-marked with bullets and radioing back, not long later, har ha-bayit be-yadeinu – “The Temple Mount is in our Hands.”

But that’s never been the entire story. Some of those beachheads established with towers and stockades were over-run. We lost part of Jerusalem in 1948. The Fedayeen crossed the border with impunity during the 1950’s and killed many Israelis. The war of 2000-2004 turned our restaurants and nightclubs, bus-stops and cafes into life-consuming infernos. Hezbollah made the northern third of the country uninhabitable. Never, ever have we been able to turn this place into an impregnable fortress.

To live here means to accept that our walls can be breached. To live here means to live with periods of fear, with loss, with the knowledge that as soon as it is over, the clock will start ticking until the next round. That is the way that things have always been, and it is the way that they will always be. Periodically, we or our children, or theirs, will retreat to safe-rooms, reinforced with steel and cement, hear the siren, hear the boom, wait the requisite time and exit, only to do it again down the road.

To live here means trying to make the walls as secure as we can, but knowing that whether they are walls of stone or domes of iron, they will never be impregnable. If we are to live here, it has to be not because we are safe, but because we believe it matters. Thus, if we are to live here, we have to make it matter.

Perhaps that is why the Mishnah notes both the breaching of the walls and the idol in the Temple, too. Perhaps the point is now, as our walls are being breached, we are meant to ask ourselves whether something central to us hasn’t also been defiled.

We know that it has. There is an idol in the Temple. We commuted the sentences of Jewish terrorists a quarter of a century ago, not twice, not three times, but four times. We watched as “Price Tag” operatives spray-painted “Death to Arabs,” but we said it was “just graffiti.” We watched as they uprooted olive trees, but we refused to acknowledge that there were really uprooting the very essence of who we are supposed to be. Had we forgotten that the Torah says “Even if you are at war with a city … you must not destroy its trees” (Deut. 20:19)?  Or did we just not care?

We’ve been here before, but we, unlike our tradition, have been silent. We watched as they burned mosques, but never admitted that those who start by burning mosques will one day burn a child. A year ago, Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon spoke out against Jewish terror, but we ignored him, or protested his “misguided” use of the word “terror.”

And then we burned a child. Yes, we.

Of course Bibi is right that we abhor the horror and they celebrate their murderers. Of course he’s right that we arrest the perpetrators and they name streets and city squares after them. Of course he’s right that we’re surrounded by an evil the world simply refuses to understand. Yes, that’s all true. But it’s also utterly irrelevant.

Moral equivalency makes a mockery of truth, but moral superiority makes a mockery of responsibility.

Being better than them is not good enough. “Not being revolting” is not a standard that will get our children to believe in this place. Either we build something the reflects the very best of what our tradition has stood for since those first walls were breached long ago, or we will exile ourselves – not because the walls were penetrated, but because the shame was simply too great to bear.

As I stood in the mourning tent of Mohammed Abu Khdair’s family, took his father’s hand in mine and looked straight into his father’s eyes, all I saw was horror. Emptiness. Hollowness. The devastating eyes of a man whose son had just been burned alive. Overcome with shame, sensing the chasm of his loss, horrified by what is becoming of some of us, I felt, at that moment, that Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, the Rosh Yeshiva in Elon Moreh, was right when he said that the perpetrators ought to be put to death, for we must “burn out the evil from amidst us” (Deut. 17:7).

For we have been here before, and we dare not go back.

Our walls are not impenetrable; we will forever have to go to war, we will forever endure periods of fear. So first, we must win this war (whatever that might actually mean). But then, when the dust settles and the clock begins to count down to the next conflagration, we must ask ourselves what has happened to us. And we must fix it – to its very core.

Our walls have been breached, but so, too, has our heart. Something about us has been defiled and polluted. So first we must prevail, and then we must be better.

For this time, our temple must not fall

Because They Were Jews A New York Daily News Column by Daniel Gordis

Between the Symphony and the Jungle

To observers across the world, Israelis' reaction to the abduction and murder of three teenagers may seem a bit overwrought. Of course, the deaths of any three children, anywhere, is horrific. And yes, a tightly knit country like Israel will invariably respond with greater emotion than might citizens of other countries.

But still, how does one explain the presence of thousands of weeping people at the funeral, most of whom did not know the families? Why did Israelis across this country light hundreds of candles on sidewalks, hold each other and cry softly? Why were Jews across the world, in France and in Australia, in the U.S. and in South America, so mesmerized for three weeks as thousands upon thousands of Israeli soldiers searched for them? Sad as it undoubtedly is, many people might understandably ask, "What am I missing here?"

It's a fair question, with a tragically simple answer. What has Israelis so shaken is the simple fact that the three boys were hunted, kidnapped and murdered simply because they were Jews. They were not soldiers. They had not strayed into Arab villages. They were but the latest victims in a long, painful history of millions who preceded them - killed because they were Jews.

Had they been Druze Israelis, they would not have been touched. Had they been Muslim Israelis, they would not have been kidnapped. Had they been Christian Israelis, they would not have been shot. A millennium after the Crusades, and almost three quarters of a century after the Holocaust, Jews are still dying simply because they are Jews. The quiet, dignified weeping throughout Israel is a response to our renewed awareness that this horror is simply never going to end.

We didn't always believe that. This would not happen anymore, Jews once told themselves, once we had a state. A century ago, when political Zionism was relatively young, some actually believed that if only the Jews had a country of their own, Jews would be seen as "normal," and anti-Semitism would end. And even if hatred of the Jew didn't end, we believed, we would at least be able to protect ourselves. "Give us a state," Jews said to one another, "and we will stop dying just because we are Jews."

But matters have not worked out that way. As Israeli author Amos Oz has noted, when his father grew up in Europe, the walls were covered with graffiti that said, "'Yids, go back to Palestine.' So we came back to Palestine, and now the world shouts at us, 'Yids, get out of Palestine.'"

Why the outpouring of grief? Because once again, we are reminded - the hatred follows us wherever we go, and Jewish children will continue to die, even in their homeland, simply because they are Jews.

And the agony is overflowing because of our impotence. We have a powerful army and a sophisticated security apparatus, but we simply cannot keep all our kids safe. Every now and then, the evil arrayed against us will succeed, and when it does, our children die. Pure, unmitigated evil really does exist. It is so persistent and so ineradicable that at times, all we can do is shed tears.

Yes, we can assassinate Hamas' leaders. We can bomb Gaza. We can infiltrate the terror cells on the West Bank. But it will make no substantive difference. We cannot put a stop to this. The evil will persist. So we weep, in agony and in frustration.

Yet let no one confuse grief with weakness, or emotion with fragility. Israelis have no intention of giving up. Unwittingly, the murderers unleashed not only great sadness, but a deep resilience as well. There was grief at the funerals, but also resolve.

We did not come home and build this state from scratch simply to accept defeat. Yes, we know that we are vulnerable, even in this little homeland of ours; but we are not nearly as vulnerable as we would be without it. So we will not budge.

There was a moment during the funerals when the tears that we had struggled to suppress finally flowed. It was when one of the mothers, eulogizing her murdered son, evoked our grief but also our hope, Israel's anguish but also its determination, and expressed better than any of us could have, the reason we'll always be here.

"Rest in peace, my child," she said, "we will learn to sing again without you."

Daniel Gordis on Menachem Begin in Conservative with Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik

For the sins we have committed ... BY DANIEL GORDIS..Grant us the capacity for unbounded pride coupled with the embrace of self-critique, satisfaction in what we've wrought coupled with a drive to do even better. And this year, in this time of uncertainty, in this region newly ablaze, enable us to keep what was always the primary promise that Zionism made to the Jewish people: Help us keep ourselves, and especially our children, safe.

For the sin we have committed by imagining that Jewish life as we know it could survive without a Jewish state, and for the sin we have committed by being certain that it could not.

For the sin we have committed in believing that every problem has a solution, and for the sin we have committed in failing to try harder to find solutions no matter how elusive.

For the sin we have committed in not loving the Jewish state with sufficient passion, and for the sin we have committed in not being sufficiently ashamed of its shortcomings.

For the sin we have committed in electing consecutive leaders who fail to communicate even a semblance of a vision of how Israel should be both Jewish and democratic, and for the sin we have committed in silencing or ignoring the few brave souls who have sought to share with us their own visions of what a Jewish state can and should be.

For the sin we have committed in believing that only an Israel at peace is worthy of our pride, and for the sin we have committed in failing to engender any semblance of a national conversation about what sort of peace has any genuine chance of taking root.

For the sin we have committed by failing to acknowledge the horrid costs that keeping ourselves safe often exacts from those living under us, and for the sin we have committed by failing to see the costs it exacts from our own children, no less.

For the sin we have committed in failing to recognize our own obligation to speak out in Israel's defense, and for the sin we have committed in allowing that defense to become mean-spirited and hurtful.

For the sin we have committed by forgetting that it is mostly thanks to secular Jews that we built and still have a state, and for the sin we have committed by ignoring the fact that, too often, those same Jews are struggling to pass on to their children a passionate commitment to Israel's future.

For the sin we committed in taking pride in Israel's social and economic equality protests without actually joining them on the streets, and for the sin we have committed by failing to honestly admit there was little Jewish content to those protests and that many of its leaders now live abroad.

For the sin we have committed by failing to work harder to stop Jewish violence against non-Jews in our midst, and for the sin we have committed by failing to remember that among the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria are some of the most decent human beings and passionate Zionists anywhere.

For the sin we have committed by pretending that there's anything innately Jewish about semiconductors, and for the sin we have all committed, wherever we live, by creating one of the most Jewishly illiterate generations of young people that our people has ever known.

For the sin we have committed by teaching our young people that a life lived in conversation with only Jewish sources is sufficient, and for the sin we have committed by teaching others that they could fashion meaningful Jewish lives without that conversation.

For the sin we have committed in electing as Israel's religious leaders men who are not Zionists, who have virtually no secular education and whose vision of Judaism speaks to almost no one in the Jewish state, and for the sin we have committed in picking precisely the wrong places to try to break that monopoly.

For the sin we have committed in creating a state out of the ashes of the Holocaust while allowing its survivors to languish in abject poverty, and for the sin we have committed in letting our state, a haven for those with nowhere else to go, become a haven for those who traffic in powerless women.

For the sin we have committed by the folly of far too porous borders, and for the sin we have committed in our treatment of those to whom we've allowed entry.

For the sin we have committed in refusing to hear the most powerful Jewish critiques of what Israel has become, and for the sin we have committed in denying that it is our enemies' self-destructive and hate-driven choices that consign them to the lives they live.

For the sin we have committed in belittling the Jewish or moral seriousness of those who have crafted Jewish lives different from our own, and for the sin we have committed in pretending that Jewish life without profound Jewish knowledge and a deep-seated sense of obligation pulsing through its core can prevail.

For the sin we have committed by not bewailing the moral corruption too prevalent in our society, and for the sin we have committed by not taking sufficient pride in Israel's deep-seated and abiding decency.

For the sin we have committed in not seeing the redemption of the Jewish people that is unfolding in the Jewish state, and for the sin we have committed by forgetting that we've only just begun.

For these, and for many more, may we find forgiveness, and may we grant forgiveness.

Grant us the capacity for unbounded pride coupled with the embrace of self-critique, satisfaction in what we've wrought coupled with a drive to do even better. And this year, in this time of uncertainty, in this region newly ablaze, enable us to keep what was always the primary promise that Zionism made to the Jewish people: Help us keep ourselves, and especially our children, safe. 

Gmar chatima tovah.

Menachem Begin's Legacy on his 100th Birhtday by Daniel Gordis

Begin's life had, at its core, an unwavering constant, a guiding principle that shaped everything. It was a life of selfless devotion to his people. That devotion fashioned a life in which determination eradicated fear, hope overcame despondency, love overcame hate, and devotion to both Jews and human beings everywhere coexisted with ease and grace. It was a life of great loyalty-to the people into which he was born, to the woman he loved from the moment he met her, and to the state that he helped create.

Menachem Begin, Israel's sixth Prime Minister, was born one hundred years ago today.  A century after his birth, and more than two decades after his death, it behooves us all, regardless of our political stripes, to take a moment and to reflect on the profundity of his contribution to the Jewish people. That claim will undoubtedly strike many as strange, since more than half a century after he helped rid Palestine of the British, Begin is still disparaged by many of the very same Jews who see in the American revolution a cause for genuine pride. Begin himself seemed to sense the irony, so he spoke time and again about the American revolution. In an article commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's death, he combined two passages from Thomas Jefferson's letters-one to James Madison and another to William Stephens Smith. "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical," Begin quoted Jefferson, adding the American revolutionary's sobering observation that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." It was natural that Begin thought about the Zionist revolution in light of what American revolutionary patriots had wrought 175 years earlier. After all, the American and Zionist revolutions shared much in common. Both were fueled by a people's desire for freedom after long periods of oppression in which religion had played a central role in their persecution. Both were designed to force the British to leave the territory in question so that they (the American colonialists and the Zionists) could establish their own, sovereign countries-in Israel's case on the very ground where a sovereign Jewish nation had stood centuries before. Both produced admirable democracies. And both were violent revolutions. Given those similarities, it is worth asking why many Jewish Americans bow their heads in respect to Nathan Hale, but wince in shame at the mention of the Hebrew freedom fighters who sought precisely what it was that Nathan Hale died for. Why is George Washington, who conducted a violent, fierce, and bloody campaign against the British, a hero, while for many, Begin remains a villain or, at the very least, a Jewish leader with a compromised background? Some of the difference has to do with time. We have photographs of the two British sergeants Begin ordered hanged in response to the British hanging of his men, and of the shattered King David Hotel, which he ordered bombed. We know the names of the sergeants and of the victims in the hotel attack, but not of the British young men who died at the hands of America's revolutionaries. The passage of time and the absence of details have allowed the heroic story of America's freedom fighters to endure, while the pain and suffering of those whom they fought has gradually faded into oblivion. The leaders and fighters of the Zionist revolution have been afforded no such luxury. The fighters of the Zionist revolution have also had the misfortune of another inequality. Native Americans are not the object of the world's sympathies. Early Americans killed or moved entire tribes, yet the American revolution is now seldom assailed for its treatment of Native Americans as vehemently as is the Israeli revolution for its conflict with Arabs. The Palestinians have been infinitely more successful in their quest for international support, and the reputation of Israel's revolutionaries-despite their similarity to those in America two centuries earlier-has borne the brunt of the international community's displeasure. And Begin's reputation was also scarred by David Ben-Gurion's refusal to acknowledge his own participation in some of the events for which Begin is vilified. Ben-Gurion consistently denied having had anything to do with operations that did not go as planned, while Begin stood ready to take responsibility. The Haganah's David Shaltiel had approved the now infamous Deir Yassin operation, but when it went tragically and horribly awry and many innocent people died, Ben-Gurion painted Begin as a violent thug, pretending that his organization had had nothing to do with it. The Haganah was also intimately involved in the approval and planning of the King David bombing (for Ben-Gurion had come to see that Begin was right, that the British needed to be dislodged), but when civilians were killed because the British refused to heed the Etzel's warnings to leave the building, Ben-Gurion assailed Begin, pretending that he and his men had known nothing of the plan. David Ben-Gurion was one of the greatest Jewish leaders ever to have lived, and the Jewish state might well not have come to be were it not for him. But his greatness notwithstanding, he was unfair to Menachem Begin-consistently and mercilessly. Yet Ben-Gurion was not alone. Menachem Begin is, in many ways, still the victim of campaigns waged against him by Diaspora Jews. When, on the eve of Begin's planned 1948 trip to the United States, Albert Einstein and political theorist Hannah Arendt joined some two dozen other prominent American Jews in writing to The New York Times to protest his visit, they could probably not have imagined the long-term damage they would do not only to Begin's reputation, but to the causes for which he stood. "Within the Jewish community," Einstein and Arendt wrote, the Etzel has "preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority." American Jews believed them. But that characterization of Begin was utterly false. Unless believing in God makes one a religious mystic, Begin was far from any such thing. The Menachem Begin whom they accused of "racial superiority" was the same Begin who argued for the end of military rule over Israel's Arabs, whose first act as Prime Minister was to welcome the Vietnamese boat people as Israeli citizens, who initiated the project of bringing Ethiopian Jews to Israel and who gave up the Sinai to make peace with Egypt. That Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, both immigrants to America who had found in the United States freedom that they would never have been afforded in their native Germany, could not-or would not-see the similarities between the American and Zionist revolutions is astounding. They saw the American colonists as harbingers of freedom who created the world's greatest democracy, a land of unlimited opportunity for those who came to its shores, but Begin and the Etzel as "terrorists" worthy only of shame and denigration. Why? Part of the problem was that Begin's Jewish worldview was, in many ways, infinitely more sophisticated than that of his detractors. He understood that life is a messy enterprise, and that great things cannot be accomplished in the pristine conditions of the laboratory. Were he alive today, he would be perplexed by those American Jews who are despondent about the conditions of Arabs living under Israeli rule but who rarely so much as mention the horrific conditions of Native Americans, whom those very same heroic American colonists cheated, deported, and murdered. He would in no way have condoned the treatment of Native Americans, of course; he was far too great a humanist for that. Indeed, he might well have identified with them, considering himself indigenous to Israel. What would have saddened him beyond measure was the Jewish people's ability to be so intolerant of the messiness of life in its own unfolding history, yet so understanding of that messiness in the actions of others. Begin was nuanced in other ways that make his worldview difficult for many to appreciate.  His was a Judaism in which one could harbor both deeply humanist convictions and a passionate allegiance to one's own people. A particularism that comes at the expense of broader humanism is inevitably narrow, and will likely become ugly, he would have said. But a commitment to humanity at large that does not put one's own people first and center, Begin believed and made clear time and again, is a human life devoid of identity. He understood that to love all of humanity equally is to love no one intensively. Such unabashed yet nuanced particularism, even tribalism, was and remains difficult for many contemporary Jews, who see in Western universalist culture an ethos utterly at odds with the peoplehood that has always fueled passionate Jewish life. To be sure, it is impossible to read about the results of the Deir Yassin battle, the hanging of the two British sergeants that Begin ordered or the horrific human toll in the King David Hotel bombing without pausing to reflect on the great loss of life, without at least wondering-if only momentarily-whether there might not have been another way. Begin himself acknowledged that some of the means were extreme. But Jews were dying in Europe. And no one cared. Not Churchill. Not FDR. Not even American Jews, for the most part. The British had sealed the shores of Palestine. The United States sealed its own shores. American Jewish life continued apace without huge disruptions; American Jews did not mass around Capitol Hill or the White House time and again, exerting pressure until FDR dropped at least one bomb on one track to one camp. As thousands upon thousands of Polish Jews went up smokestacks at Auschwitz, American Jews celebrated Bar Mitzvahs almost as if nothing was awry. The world knew, Begin understood, but still reacted with silence. There were ships filled with Jews, roaming the globe, searching for a place to drop anchor, but no one would have them. Someone needed to carve out a home for those Jews whom no one else would have. Someone needed to stand up for the Jews that even Jews had abandoned. Menachem Begin had survived his flight from the Nazis. He had endured Soviet prison. He had made it to Palestine as a Jew in the Polish Free Army. How on earth, he would have asked, could anyone not believe that something had to be done to make one small space for the Jews? His life was about doing something. Those who continue to dismiss him repudiate his tactics, yet take for granted the existence of the State that he helped create. When the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, "What made Begin ... dangerous was that his fantasies about power were combined with a self-perception of being a victim ... Begin always reminded me of Bernhard Goetz, the white Manhattanite who shot four black youths he thought were about to mug him on the New York subway. . . [Begin] was Bernhard Goetz with an F-15," Friedman failed to understand that the issue was not "fantasy." Begin was opposed to fantasy: Why should Jews buy into some fantasy that they had no power, when they finally did? Why should they imagine that they could not once again become victims, when others were clearly plotting their destruction? How was destroying Osirak (which he did in June 1981), when Saddam had explicitly stated that he was going to destroy Israel, indicative of a fantasy or of a power fetish? Thankfully, Einstein, Arendt, and Friedman were not the only perspectives voiced about Begin, even during his life. Abba Hillel Silver, the American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader, had said, "The Irgun will go down in history as a factor without which the State of Israel would not have come into being." Rabbi Silver was right. Jewish sovereignty did not happen by chance, nor simply through negotiation. It came about through determination, grit, courage, and blood. It was wrought not only by Ben-Gurion and those he invited to that memorable afternoon in Tel Aviv when he declared independence, but also, to paraphrase Moses, by "those standing there that day, and those not standing there that day." Despite the venomous animosity that divided them almost all their working lives, Ben-Gurion and Begin were both necessary elements of the creation of a Jewish state. Without either one, Israel might well not have come into being. Menachem Begin's complex life was a study in the possibilities of "both/and," rather than "either/or." Born into war, he never gave up the hope for peace. Forced into hiding upon declaring the revolt, his greatest moments were in public, in front of adoring crowds. Animated and energized by the citizens who rallied behind him, he spent the last decade of his life out of their sight, ending his life in Israel as he had begun it in Palestine - in hiding. Hunted by the British as "Terrorist No. 1," he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He made peace with Egypt, but attacked Iraq and invaded Lebanon. Capable of great emotional highs, he was also dogged by periods of great lows. Willing to use force to expel the British, he was also among the chief protectors of the rule of law in the Jewish state. Fiercely and uniquely devoted to the Jews, he gave refuge to Vietnamese boat people and urged the end of military rule over Israel's Arabs. Having avoided civil war over the Altalena, he threatened it with reparations and brought Israel to the brink of it, once again, when he ordered the evacuation of Yamit. By no means punctiliously observant, he both loved and honored Jewish tradition. Begin taught the Jews that love of their tradition was by no means exclusively the province of the ritually observant, that the religious-secular distinction in Israeli life could be rendered meaningless by people with a profound knowledge of and love for Jewish texts and rituals. Yet despite this "both/and" tendency, Begin's life had, at its core, an unwavering constant, a guiding principle that shaped everything. It was a life of selfless devotion to his people. That devotion fashioned a life in which determination eradicated fear, hope overcame despondency, love overcame hate, and devotion to both Jews and human beings everywhere coexisted with ease and grace. It was a life of great loyalty-to the people into which he was born, to the woman he loved from the moment he met her, and to the state that he helped create. That is a legacy infinitely greater than most are able to bequeath. In an era in which many Jews are increasingly dubious about the legitimacy of love for a specific people or devotion to its ancestral homeland, the life and commitments of Menachem Begin urge us to look again at what he did and what he stood for, and to imagine - if we dare - the glory of a Jewish people recommitted to the principles that shaped his very being. The original Jerusalem Post article can be read here.

Why Europe Has a Problem with Israel - Prager University

Why do so many in Europe feel so much hostility to the most open and liberal democracy in the Middle East? Daniel Gordis, President of the Shalem Center, zeroes in on the source of the problem in this fascinating look at the complex relationship between Europe, Israel and the Arab World.

Note to Boycotters: Israel is Not a Thief By David Suissa

There is an obvious way to respond to author Alice Walker's refusal to allow her novel "The Color Purple" to be translated into Hebrew. In case you missed it, Walker accused Israel of being "guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories."

The obvious response is to refute her charges, as many writers have done.

As Daniel Gordis wrote in JPost: "Walker writes as though the Palestinians are identical to the blacks of South Africa; they suffer only because of the color of their skin (or their ethnicity, in this case), not because of anything they have done. She writes as though Israel is the only obstacle to their 'freedom,' as though Israel is, as a matter of policy, committed to perpetuating their second-class status without end. But no reasonable reading of the Middle East justifies any such claim."

Gordis adds: "[Walker] even makes a point of saying that Israel is guilty of apartheid inside the Green Line as well. But name a single country in which some minorities do not get the short end of the stick. Is every country on the planet therefore guilty of apartheid? And if so, why boycott only Israel? It can't be because of Israel's social policies, which are far better than those of many other countries that Walker is not boycotting."

I agree with everything Gordis said, but I also think he didn't go far enough.

Here's my theory: As long as the world believes that Israel is an "illegal occupier," nothing we do or say will make much difference. The haters and boycotters of Israel will keep exploiting that perception. The stench of the illegal occupation will continue to undermine the good that Israel does, inside or outside Israel.

In other words, the strongest case Israel can make against boycotters is to show, once and for all, that it is not a thief.

Israel's historic mistake has been to unwittingly reinforce, in its search for peace, the dubious and dangerous narrative that it is returning stolen land.

When Israel made its peace offers, it never said: "We believe that, according to international law, Israel has a legitimate claim to Judea and Samaria. But for the sake of peace, we're willing to give up most of that land."

By focusing on security and failing to make this legal claim, Israel allowed the illegal narrative to take hold - and the haters and boycotters went on to have a field day.

As if that weren't bad enough, Israel's land concessions were perceived as worthless. Since the Palestinians believed that all the land already belonged to them, and no one ever disabused them of that notion, what was there to negotiate?

The sad part is that Israel could have made a strong case that the territories are not, in fact, stolen land. At the very least, they had enough evidence to argue that the land is "disputed" rather than "occupied." For example:

Jeffrey S. Helmreich, author and writer for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: "The settlements are not located in 'occupied territory.' The last binding international legal instrument which divided the territory in the region of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza was the League of Nations Mandate, which explicitly recognized the right of Jewish settlement in all territory allocated to the Jewish national home in the context of the British Mandate. These rights under the British mandate were preserved by the successor organization to the League of Nations, the United Nations, under Article 80 of the U.N. Charter."

Stephen M. Schwebel, professor of International Law at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (Washington), and President of the International Court of Justice from 1997 to 2000: "Where the prior holder of territory [Jordan] had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense [Israel] has, against that prior holder, better title."

Eugene W. Rostow, former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and Distinguished Fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace: "The Jewish right of settlement in the West Bank is conferred by the same provisions of the Mandate under which Jews settled in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem before the state of Israel was created. ... The Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated. ..."

There are plenty of books and essays that elaborate on the above. But the point here is not to defend the wisdom of the occupation; you can believe that the occupation is the dumbest move Israel ever made and still believe there is value in making a legal claim to the land. In fact, maybe the occupation will end only after Israel regains its moral standing by showing it is not occupying stolen land.

A thief is never credible. Israel needs to face the monster head-on and begin an all-out campaign defending its legitimate claims to Judea and Samaria. It's the most powerful way to counter the boycotters.

There will always be haters of Israel, but we don't have to make it easier for them. Before Israel can make peace, it needs to reclaim a piece of the truth.