• Jared Kushner is reportedly trying to buy the L.A. Dodgers, too. Bring ‘em back, Jared! [NY Daily News]

• Former Dior designer John Galliano was seen at a friend’s birthday party in London, one of his rare public outings since his highly publicized outburst last year. [NY Mag]

• Dave McKenna and Dan Steinberg talk D.C. sports reporting (and, of course, Dan Snyder). [Capital]

• A federal judge ordered that a baroque painting be returned to the heirs of Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, an Italian Jew who died in Paris in 1940. [AP/Online Athens]

• Adam Platt goes to Kutsher’s. [NY Mag]

OK, OK, we get it!

Meanwhile, David Sanger had a valuable article over the weekend reporting that China has finally decided to understand what Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer told it almost two years ago: that Iran’s raising of the temperature would, for a number of reasons, increase economic instability and tamper with world energy markets—two things China loathes. “For years,” Sanger notes,

China resisted sanctions on Iran, since it buys so much Iranian oil. Now it sees that escalating sanctions are inevitable, so it is busy hedging its bets, looking for alternative sources (with help from the Obama administration) while delaying a crisis. “They are a little late to the game,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said. “We have been telling them this was coming for two years now. But they are only now believing it.”

Fellow veto-wielding Security Council member Russia, by contrast, benefits from a crisis that raises energy prices: After all, it is the world’s largest producer of crude and a net energy exporter by a wide margin. To convince it to go along, Israel may need to get going on the Soviet-born Foreign Minister Lieberman’s meager feed.

Related: Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections [NYT]
Earlier: Iran Foes Try to Coax China
In Homefront-Heavy Speech, Iran Warned

• Shmuel Rosner argues that President Obama could receive less than 70 percent of the Jewish vote. [Rosner’s Domain]

• Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood is fully on the anti-Assad bandwagon. Maybe Hezbollah will climb aboard next? (Probably not.) [JPost]

• Robert F. Worth on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. [NYT Magazine]

• Zvika Krieger finds evidence that Hamas is willing to reform. [Atlantic Is Peace Possible?]

• The (Jewish) policeman who arrested Mel Gibson for drunk driving will be able to sue his supervisors, who he claimed subjected him to discrimination and tried to get him to remove Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade from his statement. [JTA]

Happy new Bruce single day!

• Israel will tell U.S. officials later this week that, according to its intelligence, Iran has not yet decided to build a nuclear bomb but it greatly fears for its regime’s stability; a genuine opposition could win March’s parliamentary elections. [Haaretz]

• President Ahmadinejad has ordered extra security for scientists, five of whom have been assassinated in recent years. [NYT]

• Oil, oil, oil, and nary a drop to sell (if you’re Iran). [WP]

• After initially promising to extend the Tal Law, which allows yeshiva students to more easily avoid army service, by five years, some members of the Cabinet objected and now Prime Minister Netanyahu is postponing discussion. [Ynet]

• A hearing into Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s alleged financial misdeeds that could result in his indictment began yesterday. [NYT]

In the early 1990s, Fuchs, then working as an oil trader in New York, developed a plan to build a pipeline to transport oil and gas from the newly free and resource-rich regions of the former Soviet Union. Through a Georgian-born member of the Israeli Knesset, Fuchs met a variety of officials in the country’s new government. In 1993, he won a 30-year exclusive concession from Georgia to develop an energy transportation network to carry the Georgian oil and gas westward from the Caspian Sea to Europe, potentially earning him tens of millions of dollars.

At the time Fuchs signed the contract, the small country in the Caucusus was one of the most corrupt in the former Soviet Union; basic things like the rule of law and sanctity of legal contracts had not yet been established. But the potential windfall was huge—and Fuchs thought he had the right connections. Yet when a new government led by former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze came to power in 1995, it quickly canceled all previous energy contracts in order to make deals with larger, multinational companies.

Fuchs hired Kissinger Associates to help him recoup his claim. In January 2003, Henry Kissinger himself wrote to Shevardnadze. “Shevardnadze accepted what Dr. Kissinger wrote to him and everything was on the verge of solution,” Fuchs told an arbitration panel that later ruled on his case. But in November 2003, the Rose Revolution, which brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power in Georgia, interrupted the process. While Saakashvili promised to clean up Georgia’s image as a post-Soviet backwater, he apparently had little interest in resolving the Fuchs dispute. So in 2007, Fuchs brought a complaint for the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, an autonomous body affiliated with the World Bank. In March 2010, it ruled that the Georgian government owed Fuchs $102 million, a sum that represented forgone profits and legal costs.

But Georgia refused to pay. And so senior officials in the Georgian Finance Ministry in Tbilisi, the capital, decided on an easier and cheaper way to settle the matter: Nab Fuchs in a sting operation. As Paul M. Barrett reported in a story for Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year, a Georgian Finance Ministry official tasked with working as intermediary between Fuchs and the Georgian government reported to his superiors in early September 2010 that he had made contact with a “Jew businessman acting in Georgia [who] had tight relations with Rony Fuchs.” The “Jew businessman” was Ze’ev Frenkiel, a former employee of Fuchs’ living in Georgia.

Less than two weeks later, Frenkiel arranged a meeting between the Finance Ministry official and Fuchs at an Istanbul hotel. In a conversation secretly recorded by the Georgians, Fuchs agreed to a $72 million settlement if the Georgian government promised not to appeal the arbitration decision, with the expectation that he would return $7 million of the sum to the country’s deputy finance minister as a kickback. The October dinner in Batumi, thrown by the Georgian Finance Ministry, would finalize the deal.

It didn’t go down that way. Right before the signing ceremony, Fuchs and Frenkiel were placed under arrest, interrogated, and thrown into jail.

***

Fuchs, now 61, retained President Barack Obama’s former White House counsel Gregory B. Craig and Geoffrey Robertson, a prominent British lawyer who represents WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He would need the best defense money could buy: 99.96 percent of defendants in Tbilisi courts are convicted. According to Fuchs’ lawyers, a Georgian official had told the Israeli ambassador to Georgia that the convictions would be dismissed if Fuchs would give up his claim to the $100 million. Fuchs refused. “We are being held hostage here, and the Georgian government wants a $100 million ransom,” he said in January to a reporter attending the trial, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. “We will not pay it.” Up until this point, Georgia and Israel had had generally positive relations; a sizable number of Georgian Jews lives in the Jewish state. But both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman unsuccessfully lobbied the Georgian government on behalf of their imprisoned countrymen. In April 2011, Fuchs and Frenkiel were found guilty of bribery and given prison sentences of seven and six-and-a-half years, respectively.

Yet three weeks ago, on Dec. 2, after the two businessmen had spent some 14 months in jail, Saakashvili announced that he had pardoned the two businessmen. Immediately after the men were released, Peres called the Georgian president. “I know this was your personal decision,” Peres said, according to the Jerusalem Post. “It was a generous gesture and I have tremendous respect for it.” Saakashvili repaid the praise, issuing a statement: “This episode was difficult and uncomfortable for both sides, and I am happy it has ended.” Peres, he added, is a “big friend of Georgia.”

Continue reading: A Georgia-Israel alliance

• Iranian students (“students”?) have stormed the British embassy in Tehran. [WP]

• This comes following an official downgrading of ties with Britain, which came after further sanctions aimed at Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. [NYT]

• In Egypt, the news is that the first day of elections went down relatively smoothly and peacefully. [NYT]

• Now that he has held out a month and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is no longer threatening to break up the coalition over it, Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely unfreeze the $100 million in Palestinian Authority tax revenue. [Haaretz]

• Stalin’s daughter died at 85 in Wisconsin (!). Her first two loves were Jewish men; in neither case did her father approve. [NYT]

It was reported today that Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, told his ultra-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, that he would leave Netanyahu’s coalition government if two settlement outposts—Givat Assaf and Migron—were demolished. The two outposts were ordered to be destroyed by none other than the Israeli Supreme Court. At a time when Israel looks to stand firm in a region undergoing massive upheaval as well as potentially strike Iran in the wake of its burgeoning nuclear program, this move is another ploy out of the hostage-taking playbook that has bent Netanyahu to the will of the right for much of his time in office.

Should Lieberman succeed in keeping these two outposts intact, he will defy one of the last institutions bringing political balance and clarity to a country that is lurching dramatically and unchecked out of democracy. Lieberman’s back-up plan: to withdraw from the coalition if tax money that is designed to keep Palestinian security apparatuses in place is delivered to the Palestinian Authority.

Should Lieberman leave and take the government down with him, he will enfeeble a country that a time when stability is most paramount, an act which may have been his goal this whole time.

Lieberman threatens to bring down government over outposts [JTA]

• The explosion at the weapons depot/secret missile base outside Tehran has drawn the curtain back on Iran’s missile program. [NYT]

• King Abdullah’s hold over Jordan is shaky and getting shakier. [NYRB]

• Bernie Fine has denied the charges. [ESPN]

• Toward the end, Libyans accused Muammar Qaddafi of being a Jew, because it’s Libya. [Forward]

• A disabled Jewish Venezuelan marathoner drew the ire of anti-Semites, because it’s Venezuela. [Time Global Spin]

• New Bravo reality show Shahs of of Sunset is exactly what you think it is. [Hollywood Reporter]

• It would certainly be funny if intelligence was withheld from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. [AP/FP]

• The Chicago Bears placed rookie right tackle Gabe Carimi on injured reserved, ending his season. You’ll get ‘em next year! [ESPN]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Shalom Auslander has a new Showtime comedy coming out you should watch. [Deadline]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Etgar Keret has this contest you should do. [Something Out of Something]

• Macaro/oo/nis: a user’s guide. [Slate]

• The Quandt family, which owns BMW, has pledged $7 million to memorialize forced laborers who worked at the Quandt patriarch’s Nazi factory. [JTA]

Happy pre-Thanksgiving weekend!

It concludes, “These antagonistic Palestinian policies cannot reasonably be understood apart from the personal conduct and goals of Palestinian Authority Chairman Abbas.”

Yet sharp Israeli journalist Amir Mizroch argues that the person with whom Lieberman is really picking a fight is not Abbas but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Noting that Netanyahu’s stated policy is to continue to push for direct talks with a P.A. run by Abbas, Mizroch notes,

Lieberman is saying these nasty things about Abbas because he knows Bibi won’t fire him or call him to order. Bibi can’t fire Lieberman, unless he’s willing to jettison Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party and bring Kadima into the coalition, which he doesn’t want to do ([Kadima leader Tzipi]Livni won’t do it either unless Bibi agrees to resume substantive peace talks). If and when Netanyahu does decide to fire his wayward foreign minister, Lieberman can make a play for the more right-wing elements of the Likud, the National Religious Party, as well as others, and head into the next elections as the official representative of the Right. Bibi fears this more than anything else, and is loathe to see Lieberman, his one-time employee, as the champion of the Right, heading into elections.

Palestinians: Lieberman’s Remarks Are an Explicit Threat on Abbas’ Life [Haaretz]
Lieberman’s Onslaught on Abbas Continues [Ynet]
By Lashing Out at Abbas, Lieberman Targets Netanyahu [Forecast Highs]

• A whip-count of the new batch of non-permanent U.N. Security Council members finds it even more U.S.-friendly, and less likely to support Palestinian membership, than the prior one. [Haaretz]

• New video has emerged of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center, bombed 17 years ago allegedly by Iran-backed terrorists, before the police had even arrived. [TVPublicaArgentina/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The Ilan Grapel incident is not likely to repeated anytime soon. [JPost]

• After the earthquake in Turkey’s east, there is a backlash brewing against Prime Minister Erdogan’s ambitious foreign policy: Many Turks would rather he spend the bulk of his time focusing on his own country. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Readers who enjoy, and readers who are infuriated by, Washington Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin will want to read Ben Smith’s profile. [Politico]

And quite a plan: Haaretz reports there will be 11 phases, a series of preordained moves in which the several sides (the Israelis, Hamas, the Egyptians) take various steps to reassure the others that they will follow through on their ends of a bargain that will ultimately see over 1,000 prisoners go free. For example, Israel releases a few dozen female prisoners; then Shalit is transferred, via the Rafah crossing, from Gaza to Egypt, only at which point will Israel begin releasing some of its male prisoners. (Upon transfer from Egypt to Israel, Shalit “will be given his old cell phone in order to telephone his mother.”) Prime Minister Netanyahu is playing an extensive, symbolic role in the latter part of the proceedings. After all, this was his decision, and his to own—for better and for worse. He was reportedly difficult to persuade throughout, right back to when chief negotiator (and former Mossad official) David Meidan first made informal contacts with Hamas.

It was not hard to see why Netanyahu, or any Israeli, might hesitate to make this deal, and the disclosure of the names of nearly 500—almost half—of the Palestinian prisoners whom Israel will release makes it even less hard. “These are not just prisoners with ‘blood on their hands,’” Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff (who wrote about the Shalit situation for Tablet Magazine) report. “Rather, the list includes some of the founders of the Hamas military wing, such as Zaher Jabarin and Yihya Sanawar, and prisoners involved in some of the most ignoble terror attacks in Israel, including the 1989 attack on bus 405 and the 1994 abduction of Israel Defense Forces soldier Nachshon Wachsman.” And the people behind the 2001 Tel Aviv night club attack. And the 2001 bombing of the Jerusalem Sbarro. And the Passover massacre at Netanya in 2002 (for me, the always-remember-where-I-was moment of the Second Intifada). More names, and the crimes they committed, are listed here.

It is therefore unsurprising that the deal has not been greeted with unanimous approval. Three cabinet members—Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the Yisrael Beiteinu head; Uzi Landau, the infrastructure minister, also of YB; and Moshe Ya’alon, of Netanyahu’s own Likud—voted against the deal outright. Interior Minister Eli Yishai, head of Shas, suggested freeing certain Jewish terrorists as part of the deal for the sake of “balances.” And speaking of: one entrepreneurial soul, an Israeli Jew who claimed he was related to terrorist victims, vandalized Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s grave in protest (click for ugly, important picture). Victims’ families have the opportunity to petition the High Court to overturn releases, but the court is expected to stare the government’s decisis on this one. In a touching article, the Times’ Ethan Bronner reports on two families of victims of prisoners who will be released—one of which opposes the deal, the other of which supports it. Two Jews, two opinions. (A new poll suggests that 79 percent of Israelis support the exchange.)

Is it a gift to terrorists? Plainly. Is it massively, just gargantuan-like, lopsided? Inarguably. The only consolation to be taken is that some of the terrorists Hamas has wanted these past five-plus years were not included (and nor is Marwan Barghouti, although he is a special case: it is far too complicated to try to parse whether Israel should truly wish him jailed, or Hamas truly wish him freed). It’s not even clear that Hamas will honor elements of the deal barring the return to the territories of some prisoners, who are being deported upon their releases. Is it going to lead to further kidnappings of Israeli soldiers in exchange for further prisoners? Well, why wouldn’t it? This is what happens when you literally negotiate with terrorists.

Meanwhile, is Israel getting much in return besides Shalit? Freeing Israeli-American Ilan Grapel will require more Israeli prisoners released. Turkey claims it aided the mediation, but Egypt disputes it, and certainly the deal is not suddenly going to repair Israeli-Turkish relations. Aaron David Miller is quite correct when he notes that this will have no effect on the peace process—in fact, in empowering Hamas and marginalizing the Palestinian Authority, it’s pretty sure to hurt it (further).

If the deal seems totally bewildering to non-Israeli readers, well, maybe it’s simply bewildering. Or maybe we don’t understand what it means to live in a society where one soldier can be everyone’s son, and everyone’s son can provide a reason for staying together, and engineering a major strategic defeat is worth it so that none of your citizens can claim they were never alive at a time that Gilad Shalit was a free man.

Shalit Swap: The Step-by-Step Guide [Haaretz]
Behind the Scenes of the Shalit Deal [Ynet]
Israel Releases Names of 477 Prisoners to be Freed in Trade [NYT]
In Shalit Deal, Israel Crossed Its Own Red Lines [Haaretz]
A Yearning for Solidarity Tangles Public Life [NYT]
Related: News of a Kidnapping [Tablet Magazine]
Everyone’s Son [Tablet Magazine]

Breivik is far from alone in making this transition. The English Defence League— which is praised in Breivik’s document and with which he may have been in contact—strongly supports Israel as a bastion of western civilization facing the “totalitarian threat” of Islamic fundamentalism. Israeli flags are now waved routinely at demonstrations mounted by the EDL in places of high Muslim concentration. Right-wing parties, such as the National Front in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the Austrian Freedom Party are now forming links with the governing Israeli Likud (led by premier Bibi Netanyahu) and its coalition partner Yisrael Beiteinu (led by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman).

As Ayoob Kara, a deputy Israeli minister for development who is actively promoting these contacts, told the Israeli daily Maariv in June, “I am looking for ways to lessen the Islamic influence in the world. I believe that is the true Nazism in this world. I am the partner of everyone who believes in the existence of this war.” His sentiments are echoed by Eliezer Cohen, a former member of the Knesset with Yisrael Beiteinu in a recent interview with Spiegel Online: “Right-wing politicians in Europe are more sensitive to the dangers facing Israel. They are talking exactly the same language as Likud and others on the Israeli right.”

I argued that a close look at these parties’ Zionism reveals a disdain for many Jews and the same DNA that led past European reactionaries to advocate the destruction of world Jewry.

Ruthven goes on to make a fascinating point concerning the fact that, if contemporary Islamophobia and earlier anti-Semitism share much, they nonetheless are not simply different variations on the same theme. And the chief difference is that today’s Muslims are poisoned by putrid Islamism from governments and communities outside of Europe who have neither Europe’s nor European Muslims’ best interests at heart. “Before the recent atrocity,” Ruthven recounts,

a group of Muslims residing in a major Norwegian city sought permission to build a mosque. They explained that the biggest part of their funding—around $3 million—would come from Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. The municipal authorities—backed by the Norwegian government—turned them down.

This was not Islamophobia, but a wise decision that should be emulated throughout the West. The construction of mosques, which serve as community centers as well as places of worship, is to be welcomed when the funding comes from sources that are accountable to communities that use them. When that funding comes from the state that produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists (and whose intelligence services may even have been implicated in the attack), or from other religious sources that preach hatred or disdain for “infidels,” the authorities have every right to refuse.

The New European Far-Right [NYRB]
Related: The New Anti-Semitism [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: What to Make of the Oslo Attacker’s Zionism

The demise of the Israeli left is a fact. Together, Meretz and Labor—formerly the twin pillars of the Zionist left—currently hold 11 Knesset seats, four fewer than Avigdor Lieberman’s ultra-right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party. But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Ignored by most political commentators is the strange and unexpected death of the Israeli right. And like all good thrillers, this one, too, is a murder mystery.

At first glance, pronouncing the Israeli right dead sounds like a bit of sophistry. The current governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is widely regarded as the most stringently conservative in Israel’s history. Since being voted into office in 2009, it has, among other achievements: de facto outlawed the public commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of the events that led to Israel’s establishment in 1948 and to the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million Arabs from their homes; passed a bill requiring new immigrants to swear a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, a stroke of legislation that mainly targets Palestinians from the West Bank who wish to marry Israeli Arabs and become Israeli citizens; enacted the anti-boycott bill; and threatened to establish official committees of inquiry targeting human-rights and civil-rights nonprofits. But this busy résumé hides the fact that the political and ideological leviathan that shaped so much of the country’s character for its first five decades has been supplanted by a new and foreign political culture that would have been utterly unrecognizable to Israelis even a decade ago.

One major influence on that culture arrived in Israel from Russia after 1989, along with the million or so immigrants who made aliyah after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While it is never wise to speak of a culture as if it were inalterable and hereditary, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that, to the extent that Russian political culture can be discussed, it is a ghastly oppressive enterprise. This is, after all, a nation that has spent much of the past millennium stumbling from one oppressive autocracy to the next. The majority of Russia’s population lived, until as recently as 1861, as serfs. As Richard Pipes, professor emeritus of history at Harvard and a former Soviet expert, suggested in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, given the Russians’ iron-fisted history, they have traditionally expected their leaders to be groznyi, a word that, applied to Czar Ivan IV, was improperly translated as “terrible” but really means “awesome.” This, Pipes wrote, explains why a 2003 survey found that 22 percent of Russians supported democracy, while as many as 53 percent actively disliked it. Pipes called this phenomenon, still very much in force today, a flight from freedom, and he explained it had much to do with Russia’s perception of itself as a country under permanent siege. The prominent newspaper Izvestiya, he noted, captured this spirit perfectly when it described Russians as “living in trenches,” surrounded by enemies.

It takes a very small leap of imagination to see how perfectly this mentality translates into Hebrew: In Israel, aspiring politicians born in the former Soviet Union found that talk of trenches and enemies made for stellar political currency.

The most renowned example of this new autocratic style is, of course, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current foreign minister. The Moldovan-born politician started his career as Netanyahu’s assistant; within less than two decades, he surfaced as his former boss’s most valuable political partner and, some say, puppet master. Lieberman’s path to power was simple: Whereas most other right-wing politicians spoke sotto voce about ideological opponents, he favored incendiary statements. The Israeli left, he told a radio interviewer in 2007, was responsible for all the nation’s woes. Appearing on television that same year, he compared a prominent civil rights group to concentration camp capos. He snubbed or humiliated foreign dignitaries who would not play by his protocol, refusing, for example, to meet with the former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when da Silva chose to skip the customary visit to Theodor Herzl’s grave. While most Israeli pundits saw such acts as petty and harmful to Israel’s standing in the world, most Israeli voters think Lieberman is groznyi: In mock elections held in Israeli high schools in 2009, a majority of students said they would vote for Lieberman.

But Lieberman is far from alone. Nearly every one of the current government’s repressive bills was sponsored by politicians who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The Nakba law, for example, was sponsored by the Moscow-born Alex Miller of Yisrael Beiteinu. The anti-boycott bill was the brainchild of Ze’ev Elkin of Likud, who emigrated from Ukraine. The bill to form official committees of investigation targeting the left, defeated last week in the Knesset, was formed by Faina Kirschenbaum, also from Ukraine. The list goes on.

Even some staunch Likudniks have been appalled by the Russification of the Israeli right. Most vocal among them was Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset and one of the party’s most prominent figures. A day after the anti-boycott bill passed, the chairman took the unlikely step of criticizing the parliament he himself headed. His ire was reserved for his colleagues on the right; they, he argued, are a disgrace to the legacy of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism and the ideological founding father of Israeli conservatism.

“I stand ashamed and mortified before my mentor, Jabotinsky, for not having succeeded in protecting the individual, whom he likened to a monarch, against the parliamentary fists of the majority,” Rivlin wrote. “It might have been hoped that in an era in which Jabotinsky’s followers are scattered across the whole political spectrum, from the coalition to the opposition, things would be different. But in the absence of an ideological backbone, it appears that even the deep commitment to democracy and individual freedoms of those who call themselves his successors is conditional. It is the State of Israel that is compelled to pay the price of political interests that supersede national interests.”

Other Likud stalwarts were equally horrified. Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, for example—the son of Eliyahu Meridor, a former Likud Member of Knesset and close confidant of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—gave repeated interviews in which he called several of the legislative initiatives brought forth by Lieberman and his associates “very dangerous.” Lieberman wasted no time: Meridor, he told the Israeli media, was a “fineschmecker,” a derogatory Yiddish term for an elitist dandy.

And, as American legislators are learning, once politics becomes a zero-sum game, it is very hard for moderate and mindful legislators to thrive. Ze’ev Elkin, the author of the anti-boycott bill, is a great example. When former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon abandoned the Likud to form Kadima, he was searching for a token settler to add to his new parliamentary faction as a nod to his former supporters in the settler movement who had largely abandoned him in light of his commitment to withdraw from Gaza; he found Elkin. In Elkin’s native Ukraine, the young politician had been known as a capable and committed Zionist activist. After emigrating to Israel in 1990, he excelled in his academic studies, earning degrees in both mathematics and history. When interviewed by Sharon’s associates, he expressed views that were right-of-center, but he stood out as a pragmatic, fair-minded, and soft-spoken individual, a perfect choice for Kadima’s transideological aspirations. Elected to the Knesset in 2006 as a member of Kadima, Elkin soon realized that the winds were blowing away from Sharon’s centrist platform. In 2008, he quit Kadima and joined the Likud. Within a few years, he learned that the only way to survive in a perpetually rightward-moving political universe was to move even further to the right. This, claim some who have long known Elkin, is what’s really behind the anti-boycott bill he sponsored. Aviad Friedman, the Sharon aide who recruited Elkin to politics, told the Israeli daily Maariv last week that “the anti-boycott bill may be good for Elkin when he faces off his rivals in the Likud, but it is very bad for Israel, and I think that deep inside, Ze’ev Elkin knows this well.”

The ideas of the Russified Israeli right find a clear reflection in current Russian political culture, down to the details of the bills that Russian-born Israeli politicians sponsor in the Knesset. In his 2004 State of the Union address for example, Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, announced his intention to investigate nonprofit human rights organizations “obtaining funding from influential foreign or domestic foundations.” Accepting international funding is standard operating procedure for many nongovernmental organizations the world over, but Putin’s speech insinuated that those who criticized the government and profited from foreign funds were disloyal to Russia and somehow dangerous. Within a few years, Putin and his henchmen have succeeded in creating an environment in which it is nearly impossible for NGOs to operate successfully, thereby severely crippling the possibility of a robust political opposition. Faina Kirschenbaum’s proposal to investigate left-wing NGOs, and her allegations that the foreign funds some of those NGOs receive—lawfully and transparently—are a sign of nefariousness, are a page out of the Putin playbook.

The blame for the death of the Israeli right, however, lies not only with Russia but with the United States as well. Orchestrated mainly by Netanyahu, a parade of American political consultants began marching into Israel’s electoral battlefields in the 1990s, changing what was previously a cantankerous but civic-minded political culture into a toxic terrain of secrets and lies familiar to anyone who has grown up on American campaign ads. Take a look, for example, at this extended ad for Labor from 1988. Even in the midst of mad inflation and shortly after the breakout of the first Palestinian intifada, the party’s leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, used their on-screen time to calmly address potential voters, offering up the key points of their political plans, sitting at a desk.

By 1996, political ads looked a lot scarier—the ominous voice-overs, the allegations that political opponents are not just wrong but dangerous: They’re staples of a particular style of campaigning introduced to Israel by the American Arthur Finkelstein, the spin-master Netanyahu had hired. Finkelstein had made his political fortune in the United States by applying simplistic tags to the mostly liberal candidates he’d helped unseat. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, in his catchy formulation, was “too liberal for too long,” and the 1992 Democratic candidate for Senate in New York, Robert Abrams, was “hopelessly liberal.” Both men lost despite overwhelming odds in their favor—Cuomo to George Pataki, Abrams to Alfonse D’Amato. Liberals lost, too: Finkelstein had helped turn the very term “liberal” into a bad word.

In 1996, Finkelstein was recruited by Netanyahu to run a rather hopeless campaign. Rabin, the popular leader of Labor, was assassinated a year prior to the election by a right-wing fanatic whose act was preceded by months of vehement demonstrations featuring signs portraying the elderly prime minister wearing a Nazi officer’s uniform. Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition, was severely criticized after Rabin’s death for fanning the flames of hatred and failing to denounce the violent language and imagery favored by his supporters. To make matters worse, Netanyahu’s opponent was Shimon Peres, Rabin’s closest political ally and co-recipient with him of the Nobel Peace Prize. Early polls predicted an easy victory for Peres. This was when Netanyahu called in Finkelstein.

The American adviser applied the same tactics that worked so well stateside, but he turned up the heat considerably. He orchestrated ads showing the aftermath of suicide bombings. He devised numerous spots showing Peres with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accusing Peres of blindly succumbing to Arafat’s schemes. Most memorable was his leading slogan: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” It was false; as prime minister, Netanyahu signed on to the very same peace accords that Peres and Rabin were committed to, and none of them advocated the de-unification of Israel’s capital. The slogan was scary, and it worked wonders: Netanyahu won by slightly less than 1 percent.

Finkelstein’s engagement was the first time an American consultant was so deeply involved in an Israeli campaign, but it wasn’t the last—nowadays, many Israeli politicians, left and right, hire Washington’s brightest minds to orchestrate their quests for power. In less than a decade, Israeli political culture, once staid in a C-SPAN sort of way, has become a horror film, with ads and jingles featuring fear, loathing, and blood.

It is, of course, naïve to expect any political culture to remain unchanged and free of outside influence. But when a transformation as massive as the one that has swept the Israeli right in the last five or 10 years occurs, it is time to stop and recalibrate. Old-time Israeli right-wingers like Dan Meridor and Reuven Rivlin are far more likely to see eye-to-eye these days with Meretz’s Nitzan Horowitz, say, than they are with Elkin and other members of Likud.

A few weeks ago, when the anti-boycott bill passed into law, I walked to my bookshelf and pulled out a volume. It was my wedding present from my father, a book bound in thick, rich leather, on its cover a copper emblem featuring the map of Israel crossed by an outstretched hand grasping a rifle and the words rak kach, meaning “only this way.” It was the emblem of the Irgun, the paramilitary organization that fought to expel the mandatory British regime from pre-state Palestine. The book’s author was the Irgun’s last commander in chief, Menachem Begin. It was inscribed to my great-grandfather, Chaim Leibovitz.

“Let justice be the cornerstone of Israel,” Begin wrote in Hebrew, “established with labor, with tears, with suffering, with battle, with blood.”

If only the same spirit still guided the Israeli right.

It is likewise unclear whether Turkey’s Erdogan is making serious threats or merely posturing when he insists on an apology. If Erdogan holds fast to this demand, he has sticks at his disposal: He could further downgrade diplomatic ties, and he has even made noises about attempting to visit Gaza, which is not a spectacle Israel wants. On the other hand, if Erdogan refuses to play ball, he would be denying himself the carrot of a U.N. report less harsh on Turkey than the current one. The implication of Israel’s request to delay the release of a favorable report, after all, is that Israel would be willing to make that report less favorable in exchange for a deal.

Which is why I must (sigh) agree with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and others and oppose this apology. There is the principled reason: an apology undercuts the blockade and Israel’s soldiers ability to act in self-defense. And there are realpolitik reasons: an apology proves that bullying works, and that Turkey has the power and can dictate the terms of whatever new Turkish-Israeli alliance results. By contrast, the Syria situation as well as the U.N. report reveal that Turkey needs Israel as much as the other way around. “So what should Israel do?” asks Amir Mizroch, former executive editor of The Jerusalem Post. “Fuck’em. Seriously. Apologizing would be a massive, historic capitulation we’ll end up paying for on a much larger scale.” I don’t share his hyperbole, but the sentiment makes sense.

U.N. Report on Gaza Flotilla Delayed Due to Israel Request to Continue Turkish Talks [Haaretz]
Turkish PM Insists Israel Must Apologize If It Wants to Repair Ties [AP/WP]
Apologizing to Turkey Would Undermine Israel’s Interests Twice Over [Contentions]
Earlier: Israel Enjoys Victory With Gaza Flotilla Probe
‘I’m Semi-Sorry’
Have Israel and Turkey Reached Détente?

My first experience with the history of the Nakba came as a young Jewish Studies student at the University of Maryland. One graduate seminar I attended was led by Benny Morris, the prominent Israeli historian responsible for revolutionizing his country’s historiography pertaining to the founding period. The subject of the seminar was 1948, and the course material—army reports from the field, personal letters, radio transcripts—came directly from Morris’ influential first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, published in 1988.

Early on in the seminar, I asked Morris, a short man with a fiery personality, if it was difficult to be a post-Zionist—an adherent of a movement that strives to replace Israel’s Zionist identity with a liberal cosmopolitan one—in Israel. He responded, almost snapping at me, that he was not a post-Zionist and never had been. As I would see in the seminar, Morris had exposed one of Israel’s darkest chapters without abandoning a strong allegiance to Zionism.

The traditional Israeli 1948 narrative, which Morris challenges, starts with the Arab rejection of the U.N.-sponsored partition plan for Palestine. The plan guaranteed an Arab and a Jewish state, living in peace, after the British mandate over Palestine expired, according to that traditional narrative. Due to the Arab rejection of the plan, a violent regional war broke out in which a small number of Israeli soldiers fought thousands of Arab fighters bent on driving the Jews into the sea. Caught in the crossfires of war, the native Palestinian population voluntarily fled their homes to neighboring Arab countries. As the dust settled, the newly formed state of Israel had no choice but to refuse the return of the Palestinian refugees, given the high numbers of Jews who had been expelled from Arab countries in the course of the war.

In the late 1980s, a group of Israeli “new” historians began rewriting the foundation myths of the country. Through recently declassified Israeli and British state documents, the new historians uncovered a different version of events, which was much closer to Palestinian accounts of partial ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948. Led by Morris, a devoted archive historian, they were able to confirm that roughly 750,000 Palestinians fled from their homes, in part due to Israeli military force, small-scale massacre, episodic cases of rape, and violent intimidation. The new historians proved that Israel had planned to expel thousands of Arabs regardless of the success of the U.N. partition plan. As the 1990s dawned, Israeli society was no longer able to easily dismiss the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba as mere propaganda.

Israeli society was also slow to react to the information coming from the halls of academia. There has always been a narrative of Palestinian flight during 1948, but never one that acknowledged undertones of ethnic cleansing or active Jewish participation. Given the small size of Israeli society in 1948, it is striking that high-ranking military and intelligence officials, not to mention soldiers and kibbutz members who were responsible for expulsions, did not come forward in the 1950s and share their experiences.

According to Haaretz, the Israeli ministry of education faced a crisis when textbooks including the Palestinian narrative of 1948 were introduced for 11th- and 12th-grade students in 2009. For the first time in the history of the country, Palestinian narratives were presented alongside Israeli narratives, and the words “ethnic cleansing” appeared in high-school texts. In one section, the textbook’s authors argued that armed Jewish forces instituted a policy of ethnic cleaning, “contrary to the proclamations of peace in the Declaration of Independence.” After 61 years, the Palestinian narrative had reached Israeli high-school classrooms—but that inclusion did not last long. In 2009, the textbooks were replaced.

Despite the damaging nature of his research, Benny Morris maintained in opinion pieces and interviews that one must “break eggs to make an omelet.” He vociferously argued that ethnic cleansing was a necessary part of Israeli state building, just as the creation of the United States required the ethnic cleansing of the Native American population. In a now famous 2004 interview with Haaretz, Morris even argued that David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and commander of the Israeli Defence Forces in 1948, did not go far enough in the expulsion of Palestinians from newly controlled state territory. Had Ben Gurion removed all the Palestinians, Israel would have been better off in future conflicts with the Palestinians and the Arab world, Morris said.

Not all of the new historians share Morris’ rationale for Israeli actions in 1948. Ilan Pappé, author of the 2006 work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and one of the prominent new historians, uses the Nakba to portray an overall Zionist strategy predicated on the ethnic cleansing of all the native inhabitants of historic Palestine to establish a Jewish state. Pappé is a social historian who relies on testimonies, interviews, and first-person accounts of Palestinians to construct his version of events. Unlike Morris’ pragmatism concerning the process of Israeli state building, Pappé has condemned the events of 1948, in his professional and political life, as a part in Israel’s growingly oppressive posture toward anything Arab, including Jews from Arab countries.

***

The Israeli social and political climate has not changed much since the new historians began publishing their books in the halcyon days of the Oslo peace accords. The Israeli political debate still lacks honest discussion of the Nakba and its relevance today. The Nakba debate and the groundbreaking research associated with it remain confined to small intellectual circles and the halls of academia, and even that arena is under attack. To mark the Nakba this year, Im Tirztu, an Israeli university group, published a 70-page booklet in Hebrew titled “The BS That Is the Nakba.” The pamphlet demonizes the new historians (excluding Morris, who is selectively referred to) and other Israeli academics for disseminating Arab propaganda about the country’s founding.

“There was automatic resistance when we first started publishing,” Benny Morris told me in a recent telephone interview from Oxford, where he is conducting research. “Many told me that the conflict with the Arabs is ongoing, and discussion of certain aspects of 1948 should wait until after the conflict is over and peace is here.”

Ilan Pappé told me by email from the University of Exeter, where he is a professor of Middle Eastern history: “One cannot deny that during the Oslo years (1993-2000), it was possible to air some questions about the Israeli mythology of the 1948 war. When I commenced my research I was convinced that there was a basis for a dialogue with my peers in the academia and with the public at large. But this was an illusion.” He continued, “The debate was allowed as long as it was conducted within the Zionist frame of mind; if you were able to liberate yourself from this mind-set, which I did, you were delegitimized as a partner in the debate.”

After the high-school textbook controversy broke with the Haartez coverage, education minister Gideon Saar launched an investigation that found “a great number of mistakes” in the text. The book, Nationalism: Building a State in the Middle East, was quickly edited so that the term “ethnic cleansing” and most of the Palestinian narrative disappeared. New copies lacking the controversial terms—and without any explicit mention of the Palestinian narrative of 1948—were then sent to Israeli classrooms.

In March 2011, the Knesset passed a bill that made publicly-sponsored commemoration of the Nakba a punishable crime. The bill, sponsored by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, is designed to prohibit activity “which would entail undermining the foundations of the state and contradicting its values.” In practice, the bill will allow Israel to levy fines on local- and state-funded organizations that commemorate the Nakba inside the state.

The bill has been denounced by some, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, as an attack on free speech, which it clearly is, and criticized for its vague language. Israelis and Palestinians on the right and the left will continue to differ about the meaning of the Nakba and the relative validity of different versions of their national narratives. But the refusal to acknowledge documented historical realities is clearly something else. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts.”

Including the Nakba in Israeli public discourse, newspapers, and textbooks hardly means the unqualified embrace of one version of history over another. But open discussion of competing narratives with reference to the historical record is clearly a precondition for any wider kind of social and political understanding between Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel and between Israelis and Palestinians. Repressive attempts to criminalize narratives of the Nakba—however partial or wrong-headed its opponents may believe those narratives to be—block any possibility of mutual understanding and weaken critical discourse inside Zionist circles and within Israeli society as a whole. The most likely victim of such misguided attempts to shore up Zionism through attacks on free speech and the historical record is Zionism itself.

Joseph Dana, an Israeli-American writer based in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, is a contributing editor to the Israeli web magazine +972. His work has appeared in The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, The National, and Haaretz.

The sole student aboard the school bus that was hit by an anti-tank rocket last week took a turn for the worse this week. Daniel Wipliech, 16, is in a deep coma and appears to have suffered serious brain damage. “We see no evidence of any brain activity,” said the chief of the pediatric intensive care unit at Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva. Israel says the rocket that hit the bus was manufactured in Russia and made its way to Hamas via Syria and Hezbollah.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will be indicted for fraud and money-laundering, pending a hearing, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein announced this week. But formal charges could take a while; legal sources predicted that the pre-indictment hearing would take place no sooner than October. Lieberman, who also made news this week for flushing the toilet while being interviewed—Ynet titled the audio clip “Live from the Bathroom” (“Beshidur Hai Mehasherutim”)—said he has no intention of resigning. Israelis are equally divided over whether the charges against Lieberman are justified, with 38 percent saying they are and the same proportion calling the decision a form of “political persecution.” The remainder said they didn’t know.

A few hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about finally connecting far-flung regions of Israel by rail, the country suffered its second train wreck in a week. Unlike last Thursday’s accident near Netanya, which lightly injured about 60 people, this week’s incident in the south involved a cargo train and platform cars, and there were no injuries. “It’s starting to be scary to ride the trains,” said a woman who was hurt in the Netanya crash. That story’s fear-mongering headline on Ynet: “Panika al Hapasim” (“Panic on the Tracks”). Over the past four months Israel Railways has sustained millions of shekels in damage to trains and railroad tracks caused by three fires on its trains, in addition to the collisions.

Justin Bieber, who was entangled in politics on his first trip to Israel, got cited in a police complaint when an Israeli freelance photographer claimed the teen idol almost ran him over with a motor scooter. In a two-page spread detailing what it called “blue and white Biebermania,” Yedioth quoted freelance photographer Elad Dayan as saying that as he tried to get a shot of Bieber driving away from a restaurant, the 17-year-old nearly flattened him. (The paper’s rhyming Hebrew headline was “Hahoress Hadoress,” which translates loosely to “The Trampling Stud.”) The photographer’s lawyer is demanding that police investigate “whether Bieber—who is reportedly a minor—even has a driver’s license.” Maybe Justin was just upset because his Israeli ticket sales were so sluggish that the concert manager was giving them away free to parents.

According to the giveaway daily Israel Hayom, Steven Spielberg was sighted in Jerusalem’s Germany Colony this week and apparently plans to attend the screening of The Last Days, his 1998 movie about Hungarian Holocaust survivors, at a May 1 event in Ra’anana commemorating 50 years since the Eichmann Trial. The paper said he is attempting to walk around incognito and has asked his contacts in Israel to keep his visit quiet.

This Week in Israel returns April 29, after Passover.

• Lebanon’s more complicated, diffuse upheaval. [NYT]

• Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is taking notification that he will likely be indicted in strive. If it happens, it won’t happen for several months. [NYT]

• David Ignatius looks at three important leaders in the new Egypt: Amr Moussa; Mohammed ElBaradei; and mega-businessman Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic Christian. [WP]

• Acting on a U.S. extradition request, Israelis arrested an official from the scandal-tainted Iowa Agriprocessors kosher meat plant. [AP/NYT]

• For the first time, two non-Jews entered into a civil union in Israel. [JTA]

So, was Lieberman trying to send a signal to the terrorists regarding what he plans to do with them? Or was he just, you know, exiting the office? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that if you go to the Hebrew-language article you can listen to the clip! Go go go!

Live From the Bathroom Lieberman [Ynet]

• Except for Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who opposes people not shooting at each other. [JPost]

• And who will apparently be indicted within 24 hours on charges of fraud, money laundering, and breach of trust. [Haaretz]

• The Thursday explosion at a California Chabad house, previously thought to be a pipe bomb, then a freak accident, is now confirmed as a deliberate attack. More at 10. [NYT]

• Egypt has stopped building an underground wall at the Egypt-Gaza border. [JPost]

• I’m mad as hell, because Sidney Lumet, director extraordinaire, is dead. He was 86. More on him later. [NYT]

The new law’s fine print defines treason according to sections of the Israeli criminal code that, as Haaretz’s Zvi Barel quickly noticed, include not only treason and espionage, but also far wider, and vaguer, actions: One section, for example, defines as treason “If a person commits an act liable to remove any area from the sovereignty of the State … then he is liable to the death penalty or to life imprisonment.” Section 97, alas, does not make any allowances for areas removed from Israeli sovereignty under the auspices of diplomatic negotiations—which means that Netanyahu, who ceded territory during his first term as prime minister, might want to instruct his lawyers to come up with a criminal defense for much more than the extreme corruption of which he is now accused.

In fact, there are ways around prosecution for the prime minister. But such a cloudy legal situation should worry even those who consider the new law to be commonsensical. Like other bits of political grandstanding recently orchestrated by the Israeli right—the Rotem bill, the loyalty oath, the Nakba bill, etc.—this one, too, imperils Israeli democracy by opening enormous holes without contributing anything of substance to safeguard the lives and well-being of Israelis. With a law already on the books condemning traitors to death or life imprisonment, revoking their citizenship is a laughably mild measure—unless it is seen as a future political tool against Israeli Arabs, leftists, and other undesirables.

Knesset Passes Law Revoking Citizenship for Treason [JPost]

In the south of the country, the Kipat Barzel—which translates to Iron Dome, not iron yarmulke (“kippa”)—mobile anti-missile defense system was deployed near Be’er Sheva this week, in what one right-wing blog described as a sign of an “exile mentality” that accepts enemy attack as inevitable. Hamas’ offer of a mutual cease-fire means the defense system hasn’t had a chance to see action. The army is warning that the lull won’t last for long, though, saying the deterrent force of Operation Cast Lead is on the wane.

Yoram Cohen became the Shin Bet security service’s first director to wear a skullcap, which adds another layer of meaning to Yedioth Ahronoth’s front-page headline “New Head” (Rosh Hadash). (Cohen is known as “Captain Sami” to his buddies, a nickname one radio host derided as sounding like the name of a comic book character.) Eli Gabizon, tapped to become the first Israel Prison Service chief to have risen from its ranks, was booted out of the running this week after he failed a polygraph test asking if he had received favors in exchange for arranging special treatment for certain prisoners. Yedioth punned: “Released from Jail,” (Shuhrar Mehakele, in Hebrew).

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s 2009 campaign slogan, “No loyalty, no citizenship,” was translated into law this week, when the Knesset approved a bill making it possible for those convicted of espionage or treason to lose their Israeli citizenship. The Knesset debate got so raucous that an Arab parliamentarian used the word “shiksa” to refer to fellow legislator Anastassia Michaeli, a Russian immigrant member of Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party who previously converted to Judaism, which prompted another Arab speaker to plead for a translation of the Yiddish, adding: “I don’t understand Russian.” Earlier the same day, some of the more than 1,500 Israeli Arab protesters at a Land Day event in Lod had burned images of Lieberman. “It’s because he’s the most racist person in the country,” said one. “We can’t stand the sight of him.”

Yoram Arbel, perhaps Israel’s best-known sportscaster, was suspended by Channel 10 TV for 48 hours after he dedicated Saturday night’s broadcast of Israel’s Euro 2012 qualifying soccer match against Latvia to former IDF soldier Anat Kamm, who recently pleaded guilty to retaining copies of secret documents during her military service and handing them over to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau. Arbel’s suspension ended just in time for the broadcast of Tuesday night’s home match between Israel and Georgia, which ended 1-0 for Israel.

Israel sprang ahead with the end of Daylight Saving Time Thursday night, putting it seven hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time. Israelis renewed the debate over what’s known as “Summer Time” (sha’on kayitz) in Israel, as per the British terminology, pitting business and other interests against ostensibly religious ones. More daylight hours are said to yield higher manufacturing rates, longer shopping hours, and a decrease in traffic accidents, and there have been repeated calls to delay Israel’s early onset of Winter Time (sha’on horef). But Interior Minister Eli Yishai of Shas has expressed little interest in changing the law, which calls for the clocks to fall back just before Yom Kippur every year to make Israelis feel like the fast day ends an hour earlier than it would otherwise—never mind that it also starts an hour earlier. Yishai said in a statement this week that although both he and the public like Summer Time, the “social characteristics of Israel” must be taken into account. A committee is due to submit its findings on the issue in May. There’s no word yet on whether Bob Dylan, scheduled to perform in Israel’s Ramat Gan Stadium on June 20, will be singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

That changed in early August, when, out of the blue, the Israeli Foreign Ministry announced that a 34-year-old citizen by the name of Rafram “Raphael” Chadad, who had been held captive for five months in Libya, had just been released and was on his way back to Israel. At the same time, details behind his disappearance began to emerge: Chadad, a Tunisian-born Israeli who maintains dual citizenship, had been arrested by Libyan officials in Tripoli while on assignment there for Or-Shalom, an Israeli non-government organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of the 2,500-year-old Jewish community in Libya. Despite efforts by Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, and Nicolas Sarkozy, it was the well-connected Jewish-Austrian billionaire Martin Schlaff who ultimately secured his release. Having flown Chadad out of Libya on his private jet, Schlaff brought him to Vienna, where he was met by Foreign Secretary Avigdor Lieberman. With Shlaff’s mediation, Lieberman had apparently orchestrated the entire deal behind closed doors.

Although the exact nature of the agreement that brought about Chadad’s release is still unknown, the deal reportedly included Israeli permission to transfer Libyan aid supplies into Gaza (as well as $50 million from Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s charity foundation, marked for rebuilding houses in Gaza). “These have been reasonable demands by Libya,” announced Lieberman upon Chadad’s return. “Libya’s responsible behavior was a pleasant surprise.”

***

Greeted at Ben-Gurion Airport by a swarm of reporters, the otherwise serene, gentle, and extremely amicable Chadad was noticeably taken aback by the microphones stuck into his face during what was supposed to be a private reunion with his family. Accordingly, he hastily thanked all those who had helped secure his release, gave a few token remarks to the press, and made his way home without ever revealing what he had been through in Qaddafi’s prison. But last month, exactly six months after his return, Hadad agreed to finally break his silence and discuss with Tablet Magazine what he jokingly refers to as his “spa vacation” in Libya.

“This is the first time I am discussing it,” he tells me in Hebrew as we sit down in a Jaffa coffeehouse next door to one of Israel’s most popular hummus joints. “It still feels weird to suddenly be talking about all that happened there.” For the next two hours, he lets his memories flow virtually uninterrupted, recalling with both sobriety and humor everything he could—and some things he prefers to forget—in a somewhat cathartic monologue about events that had evidently begun to take a toll on him. Although the Israeli foreign ministry has yet to confirm these events—and the Libyan government has not formally denied them—Chadad’s vivid, detailed, and emotional account of what happened to him in Libya appears not only genuine but incredibly difficult to challenge. Baby-faced and bespectacled, Chadad, who looks much younger than his age, is dressed in a homemade T-shirt with Qaddafi’s portrait printed on it in the style of the well-known Che Guevara stencil. Rather than suffering from Stockholm syndrome, it was actually a fitting example of the good-natured, almost Panglossian, optimism that seems to suffuse Chadad’s entire Libyan adventure.

When the authorities came to arrest Rubashov, the legendary hero from Arthur Koestler’s dystopian novel Darkness at Noon, he had been expecting them. Chadad, on the other hand, had been sitting in his Tripoli hotel room waiting for his flight back home, watching a Simpsons rerun without the slightest idea of what was about to take place. “At 12 o’clock sharp on Saturday, there was a knock at my door,” he recalls. The hotel receptionist and bellhop, escorted by three suited men who introduced themselves as being “with the office,” took Chadad’s luggage and insisted on driving him to a nearby building. “I immediately understood who they were,” Chadad says; they were Libyan officials.

The men started interrogating him about his cameras and his travels in Libya, and they informed him that they were confiscating his film. Apparently more disappointed by the fact that he would not have the chance to taste chraime, Tripoli’s legendary spicy fish stew, than by missing his flight out of Libya, Chadad was then instructed to wait at the hotel for his passport to be returned to him. “At this point, I am still sure everything is all right, and I figure I will just fly out the next morning, and try to get the film back afterwards,” he says. That night, after Chadad missed his flight out, two young men from the security services returned to pick him up. “They had brilliantine in their hair and were wearing black jackets,” he recalls. Unsuspecting, he got with them into the car, as one of the men entered the driver’s seat, and the other sat beside him in the back. Chadad relays what happened next: “Suddenly, as we are driving around Tripoli’s coastline, the guy next to me pushes my head down while the car starts speeding up. The next thing I remember is finding myself in a detention camp. Once there, they started screaming at me to take off my belt and shoes, and ordered me to empty my pockets. The moment the yelling started and they threw me out of the car and into a prison cell is when I understood I was in big trouble.”

***

Chadad’s odyssey had begun a few weeks earlier, when he was contacted in Tel Aviv by representatives of Or-Shalom. Would he be willing to take on a special assignment and photograph the remnants of the long-gone Jewish community in Libya? A Tunisian-born Jew who had immigrated to Israel in his youth, Chadad, who is fluent in Arabic and well-traveled throughout the Arab world, did not hesitate. A respected artist who has exhibited his installation work in the prestigious Venice Biennale, Chadad is also well known in Israel as an accomplished chef who once cooked a meal for the crown prince of Lichtenstein and is a coordinator for the Israeli slow-food movement. For a romantic adventurer like Chadad, the opportunity to experience the exotic sights, sounds, smells, and especially tastes of Libya was too much of a temptation to resist—not to mention the fact that he would also be able to do something in which he believes. “I decided to do it because preserving Jewish heritage in Arab countries is a cause dear to my heart,” he tells me. “I deal with this theme in my art and my food. And I felt as if I would be doing a mitzvah.”

Chadad left Israel for Tunisia, where he dropped off his Israeli passport with relatives before continuing on to neighboring Libya. After all, despite occasional gestures toward rapprochement, Israel and Libya continue to be on hostile terms, so much so that Israelis are forbidden by law from traveling there. Qaddafi, who remains one of Israel’s most vocal critics, has in the past funded Palestinian terrorist groups and often chastises Arab states that conduct diplomatic relations with Israel. In 2009, he blamed Israelis for engineering the crisis in Darfur and declared that “Israel is responsible for all the conflicts in Africa.” In light of these tense relations, Chadad made sure to strip himself of all traces of his Israeli identity before crossing the border.

Continue reading: a 6-by-6 cell and the early interrogations. Or view as a single page.

Lieberman is considering withdrawing from the government and bringing about a general election unless his party pushes through the military conversion bill that recently passed a preliminary reading in the Knesset.

Lieberman said as much last month in a meeting with MKs from his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, at a Dead Sea hotel. The meeting was documented by journalist David Deri of Channel 10′s Saturday news magazine. The report will be broadcast this Saturday.

Oh noes! Say it ain’t so—we wouldn’t want Lieberman, the hardcore right-winger with a penchant for saying provocative things out of step with his own government’s policy, to no longer be running Israel’s Foreign Ministry!

Of course, his decision might be made easier should the attorney general decide to indict him on corruption charges, for which he has been under investigation.

Lieberman Mulls Leaving Netanyahu Government If Conversion Bill Fails [Haaretz]
Related: The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]

“The Holy Land is set to become an even more magical place. Disney has announced that it is to open a theme park in Israel. The Walt Disney Company, which has amusement parks in the US, France and Hong Kong, is planning to open another in Haifa in 2013.”

—The Jewish Chronicle, January 5

Steve Brodner is an illustrator, journalist, and filmmaker living in New York. A regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1993, he also makes films for the PBS news magazine, Need to Know. He blogs at Brodnersbicycle.com.

• Jared Lee Loughner, the accused attempted murderer of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, faced a judge, who indicated she wanted the case to be tried out of state given that one of the dead was an Arizona federal judge. [NYT]

• Aaron David Miller argues that the United States needs to take a step back from the peace process for the time being, since “the Israeli-Palestinian endgame is not ready for prime time.” [LAT]

• The IDF disputes accusations that it killed an innocent Gazan farmer, 65, near the border. [NYT]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Ministor Avigdor Lieberman: Not getting along. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Here’s the Times Debbie Friedman obituary. [NYT]

The leading figure behind the halakhic ruling is Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi in the northern city of Safed. Eliyahu began agitating against renting to Arabs in Safed in October with a 400-participant conference titled “Quiet War: Combating Assimilation in the Holy City of Safed.”

Since then, Eliyahu has drummed up support among dozens of rabbis across Israel to condemn real estate deals with non-Jews. His ruling cites the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to call on Jews not to sell or rent to gentiles to prevent intermarriage and to protect Jews from “sinful influence.” But Eliyahu’s arguments aren’t all biblical: The edict also notes that “following the sale or rental of one apartment, the price of all the neighboring apartments declines even when the buyers or tenants are nice at first.”

Signatories include the chief rabbis of Eilat, Bat Yam, Holon, Dimona, Ashdod, Maaleh Adumim, and Meitar—a mix of religious and secular cities, and almost a third of Israel’s 126 municipal rabbis, who are appointed by councils made of local rabbis, synagogue leaders, and representatives from the municipal religious council. These rabbis receive their salary from their municipalities, which in turn are funded by the Ministry of the Interior and by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. According to David Rosen, an Israeli rabbi based in Jerusalem who works on interfaith dialogue for the American Jewish Committee, these rabbis supervise kashrut, register marriages, appoint local rabbis, and preside over the local beit din, or religious court.

In an interview Sunday evening with Israel’s Channel 2 News, Eliyahu appeared in a white dress shirt, a wide white yarmulke, and frameless spectacles. Asked about comparisons to the Nuremberg Laws, which included a prohibition against renting to Jews, Eliyahu explained that Israel’s Arabs aim “to flood Israel with Arab refugees.”

“No Jew said he wanted to throw the Germans into the sea,” Eliyahu said. “But the Arabs have been declaring for 70 years that this is their goal.”

Mordechai Negari, the rabbi for the settlement of Maale Adumim, said he signed the letter because Eliyahu “is fighting the holy war on behalf of our daughters.” He continued: “We must keep our Jewish identity. You know the percentage of intermarriage in America? Eighty percent. This is what we need in Israel?”

Eliyahu’s Safed is a mostly Jewish city of 30,000, and it is one of the four holy cities in Israel, along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias. It is also home to Safed College, where 550 of the 2,600 students are Arab, according to a college spokesman. Those Arab students come from neighboring Druze, Christian, Muslim, and Circassian villages, and those who live far away rent apartments and rooms in Safed. The spokesman said that in response to Eliyahu’s call, Safed College is trying to find space in the dorms, which house 130 students, and that the student union helps Arab students find apartments.

Meanwhile, much of the media attention has been focused on Eli Tzvieli, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who has lived in Safed for 60 years and happens to live next door to Eliyahu. Over the summer, Tzvieli rented rooms in his apartment to three Arab students of the Safed College, which is within walking distance of his home. But Tzvieli soon realized he got more than he bargained for. His neighbor, the rabbi, visited and offered to buy out the students’ lease so they would leave. Tzvieli refused. Tzvieli said he began getting phone calls and even an anonymous threat to burn down his building. Someone posted placards on his door accusing him of “returning the Arabs” to Safed, in reference to the 12,000 Arab residents, including the family of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who left the city in Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.

“I see them as people,” Tzvieli said of his tenants. “They are residents of Israel; they don’t do anything against the state. They are nice boys. If I can help them with their studies, I will.”

Tzvieli is hardly alone in rejecting the edict. In a statement released last week, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum condemned the rabbis’ letter as “a serious blow to the fundamental values of our lives as Jews and people in a democratic state.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also condemned the ruling last week in Jerusalem. “How would we feel if someone would say not to sell an apartment to Jews?” he said. “We would be outraged. These things cannot happen, not to Jews and not to Arabs.”

Two prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis who Rosen termed “the nonagenarian chief honchos of ultra-Orthodoxy,” are also rumored to be against the edict. Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, a leading ultra-Orthodox posek, or arbiter of Jewish law, reportedly said of Eliyahu and his supporters, “There are rabbis who must have their pens taken away from them.” Rabbi Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman, another prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbi, also did not sign the letter, and as a result, some of the signatories are backpedaling. At the same time, hundreds of other rabbis are also signing on. In a similar spirit, Lehava, an anti-assimilation organization, set up a hotline last week for callers to snitch on people who rent or sell property to Arabs, so that their names can be made public.

Eliyahu is unapologetic. “The rabbi will continue to serve his loyal public and to help the people of Israel, wherever they may be, to continue to help in the process of returning to Zion,” Eliyahu’s aide, Mor Dahan, said. “The base of the state of Israel is to build a Jewish house for the people of Israel in the land of Israel.”

The edict is a small part of a larger widening gulf between Israel’s 20-percent Arab population and its Jews, highlighted by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to redraw the borders of Israel around an exchange of Jewish settlements in the West Bank for major Arab cities like Umm el Fahem. The increasing tension was highlighted last May when Haneen Zoabi, a member of the Arab Balad party, joined the Mavi Marmara, which was bound for Gaza despite an Israeli blockade.

In Safed, Arab students say it has gotten more difficult to find apartments since Eliyahu began his campaign. Mohamed Ganaim, a 22-year-old law student from the nearby Arab town of Sakhnin, said religious Israeli students at Safed College began demonstrating after Eliyahu announced his edict.

“They said ‘death to the Arabs’ and started throwing stones at the Arab students’ houses,” Ganaim said.

Ganaim moved to Safed last year and said he never used to have a problem with his Jewish neighbors. In fact, he said, religious Jews often asked Arab neighbors to turn their lights on and off on the Sabbath, when it is forbidden for Jews to work.

Tzvieli said he will continue to rent to Arabs above the protests of his vocal neighbor. “This is already a matter of principle,” he said. “I think it is forbidden for us to create a rift between ourselves and the Arab population. It’s not human, and it isn’t appropriate to Judaism at all.”

Daniella Cheslow is a freelance writer and photographer based in Jerusalem.

Born in 1958 in the southwestern Ukrainian city of Chernovitz, Edelstein currently serves as Israel’s first minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. The path from his non-religious communist upbringing to his current life is at once remarkable and familiar: University years studying foreign languages at the Moscow Institute for Teacher Training, a growing appreciation for his Jewish identity that compounded his desire to escape the Soviet Union, resistance followed by punishment and, finally, freedom.

For his crime of teaching Hebrew to his fellow Refuseniks, Edelstein was convicted and sent to prison in 1984 on false charges of drug dealing. Three years later, he was released on Israel Independence Day and allowed to emigrate to Israel, where he joined a population of around 200,000 Russian-speaking Jews.

Upon his arrival in Israel, Edelstein took a job as vice president of the Zionist Forum, a position he held until 1996. During that time he began his involvement in party politics by advising Benjamin Netanyahu, then in opposition. In 1996, Edelstein co-founded, with Natan Sharansky, the Yisrael ba-Aliya party. That same year, he was named minister of Immigrant Absorption, a position he held off and on until 2003, when a struggling Yisrael ba-Aliya was officially folded into Likud. In the 15th through 17th Knessets, from 1999 to 2009, Edelstein intermittently served as deputy speaker. In March 2009, the new Netanyahu government created his current portfolio.

Edelstein lives with his wife and two children in the southern West Bank settlement of Neve Daniel. With its significant number of Jews from the former Soviet Union, it is the type of community now enjoying a troubled reputation in the United States. Weeks before I spoke with Edelstein, Bill Clinton had publicly singled out settlers from the former Soviet states as a “staggering problem” for the peace process.

Edelstein addressed the question of perceived Russian Jewish extremism during a conversation last week at the Israeli Consulate near the United Nations in New York. Two press attaches and a security guard were also present.

You are the first-ever minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora. Some would say the creation of the ministry was 20 years late. What took so long?

Twenty years ago, most Israelis would have said, “Take all your ideas and shove them. Who cares?” The feeling was, “There are Jews, where, in Chicago? They may either come to Israel, or give a million dollars to build a kindergarten in Sderot, OK?” That’s it. Now it’s different. When we ask the hard questions of whether the taxpayers’ money should be invested in Jewish education among the Diaspora, and connecting the Diaspora to Israel through all kinds of programs, the majority of Israelis say yes. It’s no longer seen as either-or—either they come to Israel or the hell with them.

There is a view, most recently expressed by Bill Clinton, that Jews from the former Soviet Union are all extreme in their politics.

When we are talking about a million people, you can’t perceive them as unified. They vote differently, they think differently. There are geographical differences. You can’t talk about these people as a bloc. As for [Bill Clinton’s comment], I don’t buy it. It’s common to think that Russian Jews are more hard-nosed. But I learned living in the Soviet Union that a pessimist is a well-educated optimist. I can’t blame Soviet Jews for saying, “Sign an agreement with Assad? He’s lying!”

Are you saying the experience of having lived under a totalitarian regime—

For a normal person, who’s never lived under a state based on lies, it’s difficult to imagine. I can’t blame Jews coming from the former Soviet Union for being very distrustful toward certain regimes and dictators in the area.

Is this why they show such strong support for Yisrael Beiteinu?

If you check statistically, look at the polls, Soviet Jews in Israel have never voted against the stream. They are always with the stream, sometimes with a slight shift towards the winner. In 1992 they mostly voted for Rabin and the Labor Party. In ’96 they mostly voted for Netanyahu, but so did most Israelis. In ’99, they voted for Ehud Barak and Labor, as most Israelis did. And then Ariel Sharon—the same thing. So it’s a nice legend about all Soviet Jews being very hard-nosed. But even if there’s some truth to it because of the experience I mentioned, it’s not reflected or proven in the voting habits.

How do you see the future of Russian Jewish political influence?

There are four parties in which a Russian-language constituency is represented—Kadima, Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas. This diversity is here to stay. Even if [Yisrael Beiteinu leader and current Foreign Minister] Avigdor Lieberman decides he wants to leave politics, the political influence is here to stay. The head of the Shas faction is a Georgian who speaks Russian. There are lots of majors and colonels who in 10 years will be generals. It’s the nature of the political system in Israel. People are coming up the ranks.

How has Russian Jewish immigration impacted the Russian-Israeli strategic relationship? And what is the role of Moscow’s Jewish elite?

The contribution made to this relationship by the Russian Jewish community in the successor states of the Soviet Union was much more significant during the first years after the fall of the USSR. It used to be built on personal connections. If I needed to arrange a high-level meeting for Netanyahu in Moscow in the early ’90s, when he was in the opposition, then I called someone who called someone, and then that someone called the deputy foreign minister. That’s how things worked.

Now it’s more government-to-government. But there is still a role for the Russian Jewish community in cultivating economic and cultural ties. Community leaders like  Boris Shpigel, and some others who are also elected officials, they definitely contribute. It’s legit to be a prominent politician or businessman who is involved in Russian- or Kazakhstani-Israeli relations, maybe contribute financially to Tel Aviv University, or a Diaspora museum, or some educational program in Israel.

Do you see Russian identity weakening with the second-generation of Russian-speaking Israelis?

Logically it must be. But my friend has a Russian bookstore in Jerusalem, and he always says to me, “It’s amazing how many young people come there. It’s not that they don’t speak Hebrew, but they buy Russian books.” It’s the same thing with TV, there’s the Russian Channel 9. Everyone predicted Channel 9 would be dead in a year, and now it’s been around for six, seven years. So, ties to the old countries are not disappearing.

I think Israel is strong enough as a society to a little bit get rid of the melting-pot model. People are no less Israeli when they speak Russian to each other, or French or English. Most famous is the story of the Gesher Theater. Twenty years ago, we were trying to persuade ministers that it was a good idea for actors to come from Russia and set up a theater. They were like, “We don’t even have a Yiddish theater, and you want a Russian-language theater?” And we found the money, and before long our actors were winning Israeli Oscars. Now the plays are all in Hebrew, but the theater was a creation of Russian-speaking Jews. This is just one example of this process.

What efforts are under way to cultivate Zionist politics and Jewish identity among Russian Jewish immigrants in the United States?

Russian Jews in this country are in a totally different place. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, my meetings with Russian Jews here were a disaster. After a few meetings I stopped meeting with them. For me at the time, they were like the ultimate traitors. I was spitting and spilling blood and they were here in the United States instead of Israel. And in their eyes, I was a total jerk. We couldn’t understand each other—they thought I should be in New York, and I thought they should be in Israel. It was not a dialogue but two monologues. Now Russian Jews are in a totally different place. Sometimes when I talk to Russian Jews here I feel that I am not Zionist enough. Everyone now has relatives in Israel, and they visit, and so on.

Also, the Russian Jews who came here in the ’70s and ’80s went through a process of understanding that not only does it not hurt to be an active part of this community, but it can help. The motivation during the early years was to “become Americans.” This meant not going to Jewish schools or community events. But they realized that Americans are Jewish, Irish, Mexicans, you name it. It didn’t mean they love this country less. So, it was a process of becoming closer to Israel.

The rest is technical and tactical. There are youth programs. Birthright. Youth groups. An emissary who is working with the Russian Jewish community here.

We had a meeting last week during which the prime minister asked myself, the minister of Absorption, and [current Jewish Agency chairman] Natan Sharansky, “How many Jews do you think are still left in the former Soviet Union?” And we all looked at each other, and no one had a good answer. Some would say half a million; some would say 3 million, depending on definitions. But there’s no reliable estimate. As for Israel, we know that around 1 million Russian-speakers have come during the last two decades. We estimate that approximately the same number went all over, the main bulk being here in the United States and Canada. And, unfortunately Germany has what some say is a population close to 200,000.

Do you say “unfortunately” because of a perceived rise in anti-Semitism and far-right politics in Germany?

I am the son of Holocaust survivors, so it’s very difficult for me to understand Jews going to Germany. I say the same thing when I’m interviewed by German Jewish media. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to Jews who emigrate to Germany, or that I don’t want to see them continuing Jewish life, but emotionally it’s difficult for me to understand.

Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

• Vice President Biden gave a speech yesterday at the Federations of North American’s General Assembly in New Orleans saying there is no daylight between Israel and the US. [Haaretz]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu gave Biden a very public private message that the sanctions will fail without a credible US military threat. [Haaretz]

• Speaking of which, Senator Lindsey Graham suggested at a security panel that if it comes to it, a US attack would not “just neutralize their nuclear program, but… neuter that regime.” [Digital Journal]

• Israel launched two airstrikes in the Gaza Strip. [JTA]

• Prime Minster Netanyahu will present UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with a plan today to unilaterally withdraw from the northern part of the village of Ghajar, says Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. [JPost]

Halevi, a kind-looking, good-humored middle-aged man with close-cropped whitish hair and a kippah, made aliyah in 1982 (he grew up in Boro Park, Brooklyn), but yesterday he sat around a table with 20 or so journalists and activists, mostly Jewish (though Irshad Manji, the prominent Muslim critic of Islam, sat opposite me), as we munched on kosher sandwiches as guests of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. I decided to schlep to the fourth floor of SoHo’s Puck Building all the way from Tablet Magazine’s offices on the fifth floor of SoHo’s Puck Building to hear what Halevi had to say, because I’ve long admired—though not always agreed with—his work in The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor.

Halevi used hand-written notes as he talked for the first 30 minutes. In between writing his book—which will follow a group of paratroopers from the Six Day War, some of whom ended up leaders in the settlement movement, some of whom ended up leaders in the peace movement—he has been grappling with an essay about the danger of what he called the “re-ghettoization” of the Jewish people. Lunch was based around his essay-in-the-making, and therefore had the welcome feel of a creative writing workshop: One person reads his story; then everyone else responds with their constructive criticism and complaints; the story itself is strengthened.

In a nutshell, Halevi’s thesis is that the right-wing agenda, which focuses on combating the international demonization of Israel, and the left-wing agenda, with its litany of grievances—settlements, the threat to democracy posed by the religious and nationalist parties—are really targeting the same fear: “That the Jews stand to be re-ghettoized.” If the Holocaust is the ultimate of ghettoization, then the state of Israel and the thriving American Jewish community—and the pact the two have made—mark a resistance to lapsing back in that direction. In turn, the far left’s attempts to de-legitimize Israel and the far right’s gambits that turn American Jews off the Jewish state mark threats to that resistance.

The Israeli right wants a loyalty oath to spite the world; the world wants to spite Israel because of the loyalty oath. And so on. Yet, curiously, the moderate right and the moderate left remain at odds. Halevi wants a re-alignment wherein the sensible, moderate forces on each side, without abandoning their substantive ideologies—he is no mushy-middle Jon Stewart or anything like that—recognize their common goals and common enemies and, together, wage a two-fronted, coordinated counter-attack against worldwide demonization and domestic right-wing alternatives, the twin tools of re-ghettoization.

Acknowledging first the legitimacy of right-wing fears, he noted: “This is a classic anti-Semitic moment. Israel has become the symbol of human rights violations, apartheid, and colonialism.” He continued: “It’s not that the U.N. Human Rights Council has singled Israel out for condemnation more than any other country. It’s that it has singled it out more than all the other countries combined.” The ultra-Orthodox—Halevi listens to their radio stations, almost as a mischievous hobby—see the international campaign of delegitimization “as confirmation of their theological despair: How it is an inviolate law of human nature that Esau, the goy, hates Jacob, the Jew.” And, he added, it’s not just the right: 55 percent of voters for the left-wing Meretz party recently said that they believe there is nothing Israel could do to alter international perceptions. The left-wing party! “I’ve never seen a statistic that shocked me more,” he said.

Therefore, as a moderate Israeli, he has little but contempt for those in America who “support those Israeli groups aligned with the demonization of Israel.” “There needs to be a red line drawn between the American Jewish community and the far left,” he added. And what is the red line? It is Judge Goldstone—whom he kept coming back to, as both symbol and touchstone, metaphor and metonym, of the international community’s unique animus toward Israel. (He noted that J Street dissociated itself from Goldstone only after significant external urging. “If J Street understood what Goldstone means to the mainstream of Israel,” he argued, “there would not have been hesitation.”)

“That’s not to let us off the hook,” he continued. Ah: Time to switch gears, to the left’s fears. I was surprised, though perhaps I should not have been, to hear him endorse President Clinton’s controversial statement regarding the illiberalness of the million Russian immigrants—“they come from a non-democratic culture,” Halevi noted. “In their minds, they’re associating democracy with the radical left.” He condemned Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s “genocidal banter”—the man who was formerly Israel’s chief rabbi recently mused that all Palestinians should go away, pretty much for good. As for settlements? Our host, Professor Steven M. Cohen, noted that in a recent essay Halevi devoted most of his word count to explaining why Israel is unlikely to abandon settlements, while mentioning, in a brief aside, that he would personally support an extension of the freeze. Halevi’s emphasis remained on the first point. Besides, he pointed out, when war with Hezbollah and who knows who else could start any day, do you really want to antagonize the religious Zionist movement whose members constitute 40 percent of the IDF’s combat-officer corps?

But Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the influential president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who sat directly across from me, would not accept Halevi’s more-in-sorrow defense of not extending the freeze. For many American Jews, Yoffie argued, it is difficult to move onto combating international demonization when that demonization is provoked by the blatant moral and practical blight that is continued West Bank construction.

Here came, for me, the most useful part of the conversation, because I got to see, in Halevi, something I had heretofore only read about: The widespread Israeli understanding of the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from all the Gaza settlements and a few in the West Bank as a complete disaster, which must never be repeated. “I don’t want Netanyahu to give anything away for free,” Halevi insisted, his voice carrying a harsh undercurrent for the only time that afternoon. The problem with extending the freeze for nothing in return, he said, is that the last time the settlements were put on hold—indeed, they were eliminated—in exchange for nothing, there were rockets; and then there was an attempt to stop the rockets; and then there was a near-total absence of international support for stopping the rockets; and then there was the Goldstone Report.

I decided to ask a question. Earlier, Halevi had set up an equivalence between the fringe Israeli right and the fringe Israeli left, in how they both are working, consciously or not, to re-ghettoize the Jewish people—the former by casting Jews as uniquely just, the latter by casting Jews as uniquely unjust. Even if that’s so, I inquired, in Israel, right now, the fringe left has barely half a voice, while the fringe right is running much of the government. Therefore, I inquired, shouldn’t American Jews focus on condemning the Israeli right fringe, if only to help bring about an equilibrium? He ceded my point about the fringe right’s outsize power in Israel—after all, when the foreign minister is Avigdor Lieberman, the point is inarguable—but parried by referring back to the international community, where, he said, the fringe left is at least as strong. (My rebuttal, which I didn’t get the opportunity to make, would be that “the international community” doesn’t really matter—what matters, really, is Israel and the United States, and in those two communities, the fringe right maintains far more power than the fringe left.)

No doubt lefties familiar with Halevi cringed when I described him as moderate, but the fact is that well over an hour had passed before I heard a genuine right-wing voice, and it wasn’t Halevi. Jonathan Mark, an associate editor at The Jewish Week, had been sitting skeptically silent with an overly large tape recorder perched on the table in front him; its red light was especially big, giving the impression that every word was being captured extra clearly, the better to be thrown back at their speakers with extra velocity. Finaly, Mark spoke, comparing Shas, the premier ultra-religious Israeli party (of which Rabbi Yosef is spiritual leader), to Herschel Grynszpan, the teenage Jew who shot a German official in Paris and thereby “provoked” Kristallnacht, as Nazi propoganda had it. It is an ugly analogy—that Mark floated it confirms that, for some Jews, it will always be 1938—but one that can be engaged without being taken completely literally. Essentially, Mark was arguing that Shas’s desire to religiously regulate most facets of Israeli life, Ovadia’s “genocidal banter,” and the rest, is not why the world hates Israel, and that blaming the world’s hatred of Israel on Shas is a canard equivalent to blaming Kristallnacht on one Jew. Israel could banish Shas tomorrow, Mark was saying, and many of Israel’s enemies would continue to be Israel’s enemies.

Halevi’s response was deft: Not even addressing those irreconcilably ill-disposed to the Jewish state, he said, “I’m concerned how Rabbi Ovadia plays to our friends.” I’ll lift a kosher salmon sandwich to that.

Halevi is just one man, with idiosyncratic views. Yet I won’t consider it the height of irresponsibility to extrapolate somewhat from him to a broader Israeli consensus. Which means I’ll be waiting for that essay (which hopefully I haven’t just ruined!) Toward the end, without anyone even attempting to define his specific politics, Halevi volunteered them: “I’ve voted for every winning Israeli prime minister since 1992,” he said.

Related: Why Israel Won’t Abandon the Settlers [WSJ]

Oh snap! While Israel is denying that the cancellation is intended to send a message, it doesn’t seem like many are buying it. The dis reflects Israel’s disappointment that the law has not changed, as British politicians have promised it would be, ever since an arrest warrant was issued for opposition leader Tzipi Livni last December. The English papers, on the other hand, were not amused by the snub. The Daily Mail suggested it was “an ambush” and the Financial Times called the matter an “embarrassing spat” which is “irritating British officials.”

Hague for his part seemed to take the cancellation in stride, promising that the law would change as promised, but, “We will do that in our own way and within our own time frame.” The British Embassy put out a statement saying a first draft of the amendment will be put before parliament in a few weeks, and diplomats say the changes will be ready by next summer.

The much less contentious news (though that might be wishful thinking) from the trip is that Hague and Foreign Minster Lieberman managed to sign a ten-year-in-the-making agreement that makes Israel a favored location for the British Film industry, which is the third largest in the world. Apparently this increases the chance of the Holy Land making a cameo in the next Bond film. Hopefully by then Israelis will be able to make the London premiere.

Hague to Israel: UK will repeal war crimes law [YNet]
Hamas to Britain: Keep law permitting arrest of foreign officials [YNet]
Earlier: Livni, Daring Arrest, Will Go To London

Almost as absurd is the theory introduced by British security officials, with some recent support from the White House, that the bombs weren’t going to go off in America at all. Instead, they were going to blow up the planes carrying them in mid-air. This narrative is, it seems, mostly substantiated by the fact that a UPS cargo plane crashed in Dubai two months ago—even as there is no evidence that this crash was an act of terror.

More to the point, the mid-air explosion thesis needs to explain why the two bombs had already been transported by two air-carriers and yet failed to explode. “This was a potential attack on U.S. business,” explained one British official, “and the impact could have been huge. Damaging the West’s economy is a key objective of al-Qaida.” But it is not clear how these attacks would have damaged the economy of the West. The practical effect would have been to close down express mail services, like FedEx and UPS, out of Yemen. A 20-minute delay on the New York subway any given Monday morning is apt to affect our trillion-dollar economy more than two cargo planes from Yemen with no passengers blowing up in mid-air. Either al-Qaida has entered the spectacularly pointless and silly phase of its war against the West, or the latest narrative doesn’t wash.

What we do know is that the bombs were addressed to American synagogues—not churches or mosques (or financial institutions)—and that our national security apparatus is visibly uncomfortable dealing with this established fact. Neither the president, nor his spokesman, nor the White House’s counterterrorism czar made much of the notion that this act of terror had specifically targeted the Jewish community. No one denounced the attempted murder of American citizens based on their faith. No one said that foreign maniacs who target Jews are part of a global sickness.

It is unpleasant to have to make the comparison, but instructive nonetheless: Had a mosque been targeted, or had American Muslims been marked for death, we can be sure that the president, rightly, would have denounced not only the act but the idea that it had singled out a particular section of the American people.

As I argued right after the prospective attack was first announced, we have accustomed ourselves to acts of terror against Jews by rationalizing them. After all, since Israel “occupies” Muslim lands in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Shebaa Farms—and since many people see all of pre-1967 Israel itself as occupied land—it’s not surprising if Jews around the world are going to have their blood spilled because of boundary disputes in the Holy Land.

But that’s not why President Barack Obama and his Cabinet are loath to point out that this thwarted operation constitutes a hate crime. Americans believe that the worst thing you can be accused of is racism, our “original sin,” as the former senator from Illinois once phrased it before he was elected the 44th president of the United States. We assume that other people must feel exactly the same way, even if it is clear they do not, as the Arabs do not. The common word in Arabic for a dark-skinned black person is abed, slave. In Egypt, the butt of almost every joke are the Saidis, those reputedly shiftless, not-too-bright, and dark-skinned inhabitants of Upper Egypt.

The Arabs are not particularly embarrassed by their racist feelings about Jews. Rather than detail the anti-Semitic offerings available all day and night on Arab TV, where wild fantasies about Jews drinking blood and stealing the organs of gentiles occupy the same place that hardcore pornography does on your average hotel pay-per-view menu, suffice it to say that the father of the UAE’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayid, who was thanked on Sunday by White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan for his help in foiling the Yemen package bomb attack, gave his name and financial support to a think tank in Abu Dhabi notorious for its hatred of Jews. The Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow Up hosted Holocaust deniers, promoters of the protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other assorted Arab and Western anti-Semitic intellectuals before it closed in 2003.

The Arabs recognize that we’re very sensitive about racism and anti-Semitism, which is why they know their calling Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman a racist resonates with us—even as the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to Washington openly calls for the transfer of all Jews from any future Palestinian state. We are the ones who quiver at the accusation of racism—not them. We would not dream of calling the Arabs anti-Semitic or racist because we fear that we have subjected them to our Western colonial racism, and we feel guilty about it. Indeed, many in the West have even gone so far as to ignore the evidence of 1,300 years of Muslim anti-Jewish polemics to claim that anti-Semitism is a Western import. To call the Arabs anti-Semitic would be shaming a people we have already hurt too much.

All of our noble sentiments toward the Muslim world would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that our political correctness has created a context where it’s OK to dehumanize, terrorize, and murder Jews.

However, I have to say that when reading the comments to my pieces, I am routinely surprised that some readers appear to believe anti-Semitism is simply about the Jews. That is, that there are some in the Jewish community who would seem to prefer it if someone with a name like Lee Smith would stop stirring the pot and just let it alone. But as I said, anti-Semitism is not just about Jews; after all, it’s not a Jewish idea, any more than the Holocaust was. I like Jews as much as I like the next man on the bus. But I’m not particularly interested in the internal politics of the Jewish community. I am interested in anti-Semitism not just because it sickens me, but because it poisons American society as a whole, affecting both Jews and non-Jews.

If racism is our original sin, then anti-Semitism is the essential test of our character. Our current failure to recognize it and denounce it proves that our enemies have taken our measure. They know who we are. After killing 270 people, many of them Americans, over the skies of Lockerbie in 1988, Abdul Basset Ali al-Megrahi walked out of a Scottish prison last year to pave the way for British oil deals. It is not clear why Megrahi’s release caused shock, disappointment, and anger among American officials who demand the Israelis release Arab prisoners with Jewish blood on their hands as a show of “good faith.”

In Washington, the world’s superpower looks on in detached wonderment as we hazard educated guesses as to whether or not the Israelis are really going to attack the nuclear facilities of a regime that has called for another Holocaust. In our universities, professors explain away the Islamic Republic’s threats to destroy the Jewish state by claiming the translations from Farsi are flawed.

It’s not just about the Jews. As the most recent Wikileaks documents show, the George W. Bush Administration deliberately covered up the extent of the Iranian war against the United States in Iraq so as to save itself the trouble of responding to the killing of American soldiers by a foreign government. There was no way the American military was going to open up a third front in the war on terror, reasoning that that only made American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan more vulnerable—as well as American civilians at home whose government will not name and pursue their enemies. This is an old habit now of U.S. policymakers, and it knows no party. Democrats and Republicans alike play the same sick game. The Islamic Republic released the American hostages it had taken under the Jimmy Carter Administration to the newly elected Ronald Reagan—who blinked when Iran and Syria, via Hezbollah, killed diplomats and Marines in Beirut.

Rather than making our enemies pay, we’ve let them off time and again over the last 40 years, thus ushering in the golden age of international terrorism, which is helping to capsize the short-lived Pax Americana. Our leaders will not speak frankly to the people who elected them because they fear the American electorate has no stomach for it. War in the Persian Gulf that sends gas to $10 a gallon combined with terror attacks at home would ravage the American economy and our national psyche. So we are silent. And in our silence, monsters breed.

Some, such as Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz (who yesterday polemicized against the oath) and the protestors who thronged Tel Aviv’s streets this past weekend will still say any oath at all is too much. And others, including Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith, will argue the oath is unremarkable, and restricting it to non-Jews follows the established, broadly observed principle of jus sanguinis. Actually, the group that most prominently advocated the compromise that Bibi has now adopted is the Anti-Defamation League, whose director, Abraham Foxman, met with Netanyahu yesterday in Israel.

But enough of the substance—what about the politics? When Netanyahu first backed the hardline version of the oath, I (and many others) guessed it was an effort to buy credibility with the right in order to extend the settlement freeze. It’s nearly two weeks later, though, and Netanyahu was able to do no more than futilely offer an extension in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewish character. So: Is Bibi’s newfound willingness to make the oath more moderate a sign that bargaining with it is not worthwhile, because the extension is, officially, a lost cause?

Netanyahu Orders Change in Loyalty Oath To Include Jews [JPost]
Related: Under Oath
Earlier: What Did You Do in the Loyalty Oath War?
Bibi Floats Oath Quid for Freeze Quo

In the winter of 2009, Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party campaigned under the slogan, “Bli ne’emanut ein ezrahut”: No loyalty, no citizenship.

This week, the Israeli cabinet voted in favor of a bill that, unless the Knesset shoots it down, would require new non-Jewish citizens to pledge allegiance to a “Jewish and democratic state.” There are a few Hebrew terms for this oath: Hatzharat ne’emanut, or “declaration of loyalty,” which includes a word that, as Lieberman has discovered, has the advantage of sort of rhyming with the Hebrew word for “citizenship”; hatzharat emunim, or “declaration of allegiance”; and shvu’at emunim, which means “oath of allegiance” and is also the Hebrew title for the 2003 movie Pledge of Allegiance.

These terms have in common the Hebrew root that also appears in the word emunah, meaning belief, faith, trust, or confidence, often in a religious context. The same root is also used in a term that frequently comes up on Israel’s version of C-SPAN: Hatza’at ee-eemun, or no-confidence motion.

In Israel, a no-confidence motion passed by the Knesset can topple the government (as it once did, in 1990), but only if a majority of the total number of Knesset members votes in favor. While the goal is ostensibly to bring down the government, these motions are more often used by opposition parties to grab attention. When Israel was hit with triple-digit inflation and the outbreak of the First Intifada in the 1980s, the 11th Knesset proposed a whopping 165 no-confidence motions, not one of which brought down the government. And earlier this year, the Knesset actually passed a no-confidence measure—to no effect on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, because most of the Knesset members didn’t vote.

No-confidence motions are often overused gimmicks, and though the government faced several when the Knesset’s winter session opened this week, there was nary a mention of them. Similarly, the loyalty oath won’t actually affect that many people, since the vast majority of new immigrants are considered Jewish under Israel’s Law of Return and would therefore be exempt from taking it.

And likewise, the proposed hatzharat ne’emanut is partly symbolic, and the latest way for politicians to show that they’re bigger Zionists than the next guy.

But the loyalty oath debate reverberates far beyond the Knesset plenum. Intentionally or not, the cabinet’s endorsement of the oath bellows to Israel’s Arab citizens, and to the world, that Israel sees religion as a core component of its citizens’ status and is confident that reciting the proper words constitutes a value in its own right—a position that, even for some of Israel’s most loyal citizens, may require too large a leap of emunah.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: ‘After the Holidays’

• U.S. diplomats are seizing on a PLO official’s willingness to recognize Israel this way at the pre-1967 borders as a welcome place to start negotiating. [JPost]

• The rift between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Lieberman is growing, and Bibi’s biggest fear is moving so far to the center that Lieberman and his nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu come to define the right. [NYT]

• After Israeli security razed illegal outposts in the northern West Bank, settlers and Palestinians clashed. [JTA]

• Ahmadinejad says: Nuclear power plants for everyone! [Haaretz]

• This article. More at 10. [NYT]

“The State of Israel has reached the height of fascism,” says Haneen Zoubi, a member of the Knesset representing Balad, an Arab Israeli party. The oath’s author, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, charges that it is precisely those like Zoubi who make the oath necessary. Zoubi was aboard the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish-sponsored boat that attempted to run the naval blockade of Gaza. The ship violated international law by refusing to respect a blockade and then attacked an Israeli boarding party, which would make Zoubi, were she a citizen of, say, the United States while it was at war, subject to a number of charges, including conspiracy and treason, and liable to execution by the state. And she’s not alone: Some of her fellow Knesset members from Arab Israeli political parties have become notorious in recent years for actions that no Western government would tolerate from its citizens—let alone from legislators who are privy to government decisions and counsels. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, served as a close political adviser to Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader planned to undermine the Oslo Accords and murder hundreds of Israelis in the second Intifada. Tibi’s colleague, Azmi Bishara, resigned from the Knesset and fled to Syria in 2007 to avoid facing charges of espionage and treason for giving Hezbollah detailed information about optimal rocket targets inside Israel during the Second Lebanon War.

The idea that mandating an oath of allegiance for new citizens is a sign of Israeli fascism is part of the delegitimization campaign against Israel. It fits so well with media blather about the decline of Israeli democracy—and the nightmarish scariness of Israel’s foreign minister—that critics have conveniently ignored the fact that such oaths are normal fare in every major Western democracy. The U.S. oath of allegiance for new citizens, for example, requires new Americans to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty”; promise to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic”; promise to “bear arms” and “perform noncombatant” service at the direction of the U.S. government; and swear that one takes the oath “freely and without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” in the name of God Almighty himself, all of which makes swearing an oath of allegiance to the democratic Jewish State of Israel seem like pretty weak stuff.

The fact that Jews who become new citizens under the Law of Return are exempt from taking the oath is wrongly cited as proof of the inherent racism of the proposed new law. Countries that allow individuals not born in the country to establish citizenship on the basis of blood and cultural ties—a doctrine known as jus sanguinis, or “right of blood”—commonly have a different citizenship procedure for those citizens than for other immigrants. Most European countries—and many other countries—rely on jus sanguinis as the foundation for citizenship. In Bulgaria, persons of very distant Bulgarian origin can become citizens immediately upon arrival in the country without any waiting period and without giving up their current citizenship. The same is true in Croatia. China has a similar policy. And that only takes us through the Cs.

But the furor over the oath is more than just an index of the increasing tension between Israel and its Arab citizens, and of a combination of rancid anti-Israeli sentiment and sheer ignorance that makes news coverage of the Middle East so difficult to read. Because this is the Middle East, the uproar over the oath of allegiance also reveals the true dynamics that are shaping the region.

Many observers have noted that the oath coincides with Israeli demands that their Palestinian interlocutors acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. This is broadly correct: Israeli leadership expects that negotiations entered into with the Palestinian Authority will lead to a final settlement, that at the end of the process, there will be a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish one, and there will be no interminable haggling over the question of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.

And the reason Jerusalem wants Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to acknowledge the Jews’ right to a homeland is not merely a feel-good exercise in Middle East tolerance and coexistence, or to salve the national insecurities of the Jews. Rather, the Israeli demand is a referendum on Palestinian sovereignty: If PA officials can’t declare that Israel is a Jewish state without the very legitimate fear of assassination from rivals like Hamas, or state actors like Iran and Syria, then they are incapable of exercising the monopoly on legitimate violence that is the fundamental requirement of nation-building. Jerusalem is highlighting the fact that without the authority to make such a statement, the Palestinian leadership cannot build a Palestinian state; therefore, any treaty the PA signs with Israel is worthless.

It is clear that this logic is lost on Washington. After all, dreamers are not susceptible to disenchantment with the dream worlds that they themselves have built. Even before President Barack Obama came to office, the Americans were pumping so much cash, arms, prestige, and hope into the Palestinian Authority that they convinced themselves that Palestinian institutions would one day lead to a state. U.S.-built Palestinian institutions, like the economy, security forces, and the prime minister, are therefore premised on a questionable assumption: that what the Palestinian people really want is a functioning state side-by-side with Israel.

Statehood represents only one form of political organization; and as the E.U.’s bureaucratic elite will attest, the nation-state is not necessarily the best or even most progressive form of mass politics. But Washington does believe in old-fashioned nation-states, and it is U.S. money and power that gets to call the shots in the Middle East—until the region itself votes otherwise. Yet post-Saddam Iraq is clearly not going to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Rather, the wars in Iraq have revealed the sectarian nature of the region, where the designation “Arab” is meant to disguise that there is no unified Arab nation, but rather Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Maronites, Alawites, Kurds, Greek Orthodox, as well as Jews. Often these sects are at war with each other in various levels of intensity within what are now state borders, like Iraq or Lebanon. The French and British are blamed for the way they drew the post-World War I borders, but these accusations ignore the fact that all borders in the Middle East have always been random and malleable, depending on factors like conquest and population transfers, some voluntary and others not. For all the Middle East rhetoric about land as a birthright, the people of the region know when it’s time to go—because the land will no longer support them or some greater power is threatening to wipe them out.

Right now it is Middle East Christians who are leaving Iraq and Lebanon, but they won’t be the last. Consider the Druze, a sect that started in Egypt in the 11th century and moved to the Levant—Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon, where their population is largest. Lebanon’s Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt believes that the sect’s time there is running out; Lebanon will be left to the Sunnis and Shiites to fight over, and eventually they will draw their own borders. The same will happen in Iraq, and perhaps much sooner, as the country is partitioned, while the Kurds will go their own way as soon as they believe they can weather likely wars with the Turks and Persians. Someday Alawi rule in Syria will come to an end, and if they’re lucky this minority sect considered heretical by the Sunnis will break away in time to the Mediterranean coast, where they’ve carved out an escape hatch state for themselves. The East Bankers of Jordan know that the West Bankers, the Palestinians, will outnumber them someday and Jordan will become either part or the whole of Palestine. In other words, Israel’s foreign minister is the one man in the Middle East who is publicly discussing an issue that everyone else in the region is also confronting in the wake of the Iraqi war—internal sectarian conflict where one side threatens to topple the political order. For example, despite the rhetoric of resistance, Hezbollah’s war with Israel on behalf of Iran and Syria that threatens to destroy the Lebanese state is no less treason than Azmi Bishara’s selling information to Damascus. The Arab regimes, regardless of their public criticism of the oath and Lieberman, are watching closely, because Israel’s treatment of the issue may well shape how they deal with their own sectarian issues—or at least we can hope they learn from Jerusalem rather than Saddam, who laid waste to Iraqi Shia and Kurds.

The choice the Israelis face is maybe not so tough, after all. And even if it is tough, so what? What Frenchman thinks that it is inherently part of his national identity to be fearful of war with Germany? And yet for reasons of geography, ethnicity, and history, it has been so. It would be nice if Palestinians wanted to make peace with Israel on terms that allowed for Israel’s secure existence as a Jewish state, but the recent historical record and regional dynamics offer little assurance that such a blessed day is coming anytime soon. If Zionism must not allow for transferring Arabs or ruling over them, then is it about Jews picking up and leaving when a Jewish state in the Middle East doesn’t look exactly like local democracy in Vermont? Based on the historical evidence, the Jews of Israel will continue to try their hardest to appease U.S. policymakers—hopefully led by those, like Avigdor Lieberman, who understand what it takes to maintain their national existence in the region where they have made their home.

• Shmuel Rosner says Netanyahu should fire Lieberman, as do others, while also acknowledging he can’t. [Rosner’s Domain]

• Given an earlier court ruling, eviction notices for Arabs living in the East Jerusalem Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood threaten to come every day and topple the peace process. [LAT]

• In his first speech as British Labor Party leader, Ed Miliband traced his desire to aid society’s lower rungs to his parents’ having needed to escape the Nazis. [Haaretz]

• Former cardiologist writes pork cookbook. In Israel. Hey, it happens. [NYT]

• 63 percent of Jewish Israelis believe non-Orthodox converts ought to be considered Jews. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Rookie New York Mets first baseman Ike Davis’ paternal grandfather was a U.S. soldier who helped liberate a German concentration camp. His maternal grandparents survived one of those camps. [NYT]

• President Ahmadinejad will symbolically hurl a rock at Israel when he visits Lebanon next month. Be a terrible thing were said rock to ricochet off a tree branch and co fly right back at him. [JPost/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Hussein Ibish advocates an “informal compromise” to the settlement issue—which he frames as U.S.-Israeli as much as Palestinian-Israeli—that would allow for certain building but let President Abbas save some face. [Now Lebanon]

• Guess who loves Peace Now’s iPhone app that shows all the West Bank settlements? West Bank settlers! [Arutz Sheva]

See how many hip musicians you can recognize in this video of Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand.” And what do we think of this Babs impersonator?

• Mideast leaders expressed hope concerning what will follow last week’s direct peace talks. (Except for Avigdor Lieberman.) [NYT]

• A detailed look into who is funding both sides of the Park51 debate. [Politico]

• Palestinian Authority security forces face their toughest challenge yet—you can expect a continued uptick in West Bank violence as direct talks proceed apace. [LAT]

• Israel and Russia signed their first military deal, pledging cooperation in fighting nuclear proliferation and terrorism and leaving the door open to Russia’s buying further Israeli-made drones. (Defense Minister Barak had also sought to prevent missile sales to Syria.) [LAT]

• An interview with a Reform rabbi who has taken the lead in trying to force Israeli courts to grant greater accomodations to Progressive Jews. [LAT]

• Mayor Michael Bloomberg clarified and extended his remarks defending Park51 at a Gracie Mansion Iftar dinner. [Politico]

• The U.N. probe into former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s death wants more of Hezbollah’s alleged evidence that Israel is culpable. [Haaretz]

• Opening arguments were heard in the trial of four men accused of plotting to bomb Bronx synagogues. Defense lawyers argued their clients were illegally entrapped. [NYT]

• Israeli public schools in a pilot project will begin the cumpulsory study of Arabic in fifth grade rather than seventh. [NYT]

• Benjamin Kaplan, who helped prosecute Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, died at 99. [NYT]

• Former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) dies in a plane crash; AIPAC mourns him and his “steadfast commitment to America’s alliance with the Jewish state year after year.” [JTA]

• After initially refusing it, New York City buses will bear an anti-Cordoba House ad juxtaposing a plane flying toward the burning Twin Towers with the proposed Islamic Center. [Ynet]

• Richard Cohen takes noted hipster periodical The Economist to task for eliding Sayyid Qutb’s rampant anti-Semitism. [WP]

• Thomas Friedman chastises Nicholas Kristof in public, in secret. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• From here on out, The Scroll will refer to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as “the bouncer from Kishinev.” [Foreign Policy]

Johnny Mathis will receive an award from the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation in commemoration of his 1959 recording of “Kol Nidre.” Here it is:

All of which raises the question: Why? Part of the answer may lie in Peter Beinart’s recent New York Review of Books essay, which called for the need “to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth.” What Beinart, like others, has failed to take into account is that the various illiberal trends that he deplores do not signal the erosion of Israeli democracy, but the exact opposite.

While it’s true that liberal societies have traditionally evolved into democratic ones (and vice versa), it’s still worth remembering that liberalism has comfortably existed in the absence of substantial democracy (think of Britain and the United States prior to the expansion of suffrage in the 1830s or of classical Athenian democracy that lacked a liberal creed). Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland sketches a blueprint for a future Jewish state that is remarkably indicative of this asymmetric relationship. Despite imagining a liberal society where “everyone is free and may do as he chooses” and that abides by the motto “Man, though art my brother,” Herzl conspicuously disregards the possibility of popular democracy. In The Jewish State, he even goes so far as to suggest an “aristocratic republic.” The actual founder of the Jewish state and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, seems to have followed suit. Although a fervent supporter of universal human rights and of granting “full and equal citizenship” to all the state’s inhabitants regardless of their religion, race, or sex—a right Israel’s declaration of independence enshrines—Ben-Gurion was far less democratic than liberal.

Ben-Gurion’s perception of democracy was as elitist as they come: Not only did he infamously describe the Israeli immigrant classes as “human dust,” but he once declared, “I don’t know what the people want, I know what they need.” The late Israeli historian Amos Elon appropriately compared Ben-Gurion and his fellow founding fathers to a “mandarin class” that ruled Israel like “feudal principalities.”

The watershed moment—the revolution, if you will—when the “old regime” was dethroned took place with Labor’s first-ever national electoral defeat at the hands of Likud in 1977. It is at this historical locus that we can begin to trace the contemporary decline of Israeli liberalism at the hands of democratic forces, which suddenly discovered an unprecedented opportunity to escape the periphery of national politics and taste the previously forbidden fruits of power.

The first example is that of the conservative Shas party. What began in the 1980s as a political association of North African and Middle Eastern ultra-Orthodox Jews has since burgeoned into a highly influential kingmaker of Israeli politics. Unfortunately, while Shas has nobly fought on behalf of underprivileged and historically discriminated lower classes and ethnic groups, it has also waged a commensurately stubborn battle against secular liberalism. That the spiritual leader of Shas, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has compared Arabs to “snakes” and called for their “annihilation,” while party chairman and Interior Minister Eli Yishai often likens homosexuals to “sick people,” is a sobering reminder that the price of democracy may be paid for in the coin of liberal ideals.

Next there are the settlers. Jewish messianism has always played a prominent role in the Zionist enterprise. However, the conquest of the West Bank in 1967 facilitated the rise of millennialist social and political movements such as Gush Emunim, Tehiya, National Union, and Mafdal, which reinvented itself as a rightist party in the 1980s. Together, their entire raison d’être rested in their commitment to preserve “eretz yisrael hashlema,” or a “greater” Israel. By consistently holding between 10 and 15 seats in the Knesset over the past three decades, not only did these parties solidify a vocal rightist block that remained a formidable impediment to any land-for-peace negotiations, but, more detrimental, they also sprouted militant offshoots that advocated forceful Arab-population removals and violence. It’s worth remembering that the virulent incitement propagated by members of these democratically empowered forces fueled the delegitimizing of the peace process and tragically culminated in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Yet another example is that of the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi parties. On the eve of Israel’s founding in 1947, many of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, leaders in then-Palestine were hesitant to endorse the fledgling Jewish state and only came on board after Ben-Gurion assured them in the famous “status quo” agreement that their prerogative in all religious affairs would be maintained. Needless to say, the Haredi leaders got the hang of democratic politics in no time. In the bifurcated Israeli parliamentary system, in which tenuous coalition governments often hang on to power with a handful of seats, the Haredi parties have in recent decades repeatedly supplied this electoral lifeline—but at a cost: Their religious institutions maintain a monopoly on marriage laws, among other things, and enforce a rigid criteria that prevents the state from authorizing marriages between Jews and those deemed “not sufficiently Jewish,” which especially affects Jews who undergo a non-Orthodox conversion. As a result, any Israeli seeking to enter into a secular civil marriage—a staple of modern liberal society—can only do so outside of Israel.

Finally, the fourth and most recent threat to the sustenance of Israeli liberalism is that reflected by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Russian-immigrant-dominated party, Yisrael Beiteinu. If there ever was a collective failure to assimilate, it is this: Two decades after the influx of a million Jews from the collapsing Soviet Union, the once-boiling Israeli melting pot had evidently lost steam. The same party that offers Russian immigrants a much needed political voice is also founded upon profoundly racist and nationalistic ideals, including tying citizenship to loyalty and conditioning Arab citizenship on service to the state. Not only is such a suggestion vehemently discriminatory, but it essentially seeks to revoke the axiomatic understanding that citizenship is a right, not a privilege—an understanding upon which the postwar concept of human rights is founded.

The implications that arise from this apparent consolidation of Israeli democracy at the expense of its liberal ethos are as complex as they are depressing. That a majority of Israelis still remain staunchly liberal and democratic does not contradict the fact that diverse and powerful illiberal forces are gradually—and democratically—tipping the balance of this delicate equilibrium. One thing that therefore must be said about the current Jerusalem government is that Netanyahu and his cabinet are actually fulfilling their part of the social contract and representing remarkably well the public will. It is in light of this sociopolitical process that it’s no longer plausible to convince ourselves that what we are witnessing is yet another chapter in the historical March of Folly, in which a reckless leadership leads the people astray—if only because the Israeli people themselves are holding the compass.

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for the Israeli daily Maariv.

American Jews, who are mostly politically liberal—some 80 percent voted for President Obama—have felt their attachment to Israel strained during its military operations in Lebanon and Gaza and the recent attack on a Turkish flotilla seeking to break Israel’s Gaza blockade. And since the conversion bill is being sponsored by Yisrael Beiteinu, the nationalist and mostly right-wing party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, conditions were especially ripe for mistrust.

“There is increasing discomfort among American Jews with Israel,” commented Rabbi Donniel Hartman, president of Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute, which is devoted to exploring Jewish issues. “This issue is a place where they can express the displeasure that they might not be willing to state on the flotilla and other political matters.”

For that reason, some here, even among those sympathetic to the Reform and Conservative movements, like Rabbi Hartman, feel that the American reaction to the Rotem bill was overly aggressive.

“They overstated this one,” he said.

In other words, the Rotem bill was a pressure valve enabling American Jews generally loathe to criticize Israel a place to let it all out, under the justification that, unlike the flotilla raid, this potential Israeli policy was (to borrow from Jeff Goldberg) a message in a bottle that reads: “Israel to Diaspora: Drop Dead.”

However, to believe that this reaction—which was undoubtedly strong; have American Jews been so galvanized over an Israel-related issue since the Second Intifada?—derives from something more than just the substance of the bill itself, you must subscribe to a view of the world wherein there are relatively observant Jews who tend to be pro-Israel (and, frankly, not liberal), and relatively non-observant Jews who tend to be indifferent to Israel (and these, I suppose, are the liberals). Statistically and anecdotally, that binary seems to be oversimplified at the very, very best.

You must also, to some extent, subscribe to the argument Bernard Avishai made (and Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz rebutted), which is that the connection between Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews is overhyped and less important than many would have you believe. In the Times last Friday, editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse spoke up for that connection:

The redemptive history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust has rested on the twin pillars of a strong Israel and a strong diaspora, which have spoken to each other politically and culturally, and whose successes have mutually reinforced the confidence and capacities of the other. Neither the Jewish diaspora nor Israel can afford a split between the two communities.

In its original notion, Bronner explains, the bill “was actually aimed at making conversion easier for the 300,000 Israelis who moved here from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and are not, by Orthodox rabbinic law, considered Jewish because they come from mixed parentage.” It was only after the bill began to take real form that it became clear that its true effect would be to reside power to define Jewish identity in Israel in the hands of a small, specific, ultra-Orthodox rabbinic coterie.

Writing in response to Alana’s article, a spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy confirmed that: “The impetus behind this bill, it must be stressed, was humanitarian—to facilitate the conversion of tens of thousands of Israelis, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union or their Israeli-born children,” he said. Though Netanyahu opposes the bill in its current form, he added, the prime minister “support[s] this goal.”

On the other hand, we also have what the bill’s sponsor, David Rotem, told Bronner: “They need to check the facts before they speak,” he said, referring to the bill’s non-Orthodox opponents. “They are acting like absolute idiots.”

Israel Puts Off Crisis Over Conversion Law [NYT]
Related: The Diaspora Need Not Apply [NYT]
‘Future Historians Will Invariably Wonder’ [TPM Cafe]
Earlier: The Too Jewish Jewish State

“The Prime Minister said today in the cabinet meeting that he objects to the proposed conversion bill, which could tear the Jewish people apart,” said an official statement released yesterday by Netanyahu’s office. “Efforts will be made to consensually remove the bill, but if they fail Netanyahu will ask members of Likud and other coalition parties to reject the bill.”

As someone who normally does not find himself in the position of praising this particular Israeli prime minister, let me say that the latter half of that statement speaks volumes: By taking a principled stand against the bill, Netanyahu is rejecting its author, David Rotem of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, as well as Rotem’s political patron, party boss Avigdor Lieberman, a rift that could spell the downfall of Netanyahu’s precarious cabinet. While Lieberman has said repeatedly that neither he nor his party is slated to leave the government anytime soon, the foreign minister has nonetheless engaged in a series of provocative steps against the prime minister: On Friday, for example, Lieberman appointed a new ambassador to the United Nations without following protocol and first clearing the appointment with Netanyahu.

Seen in this light, Netanyahu’s position is even more impressive. While some skeptics noted that the prime minister originally supported the bill and changed his mind only when American Jewish leaders expressed their dismay, Netanyahu is nonetheless required to pay a steep political price for his struggle against the Rotem Bill, and opponents of that disastrous bit of legislation should take heart in knowing that Bibi’s up for the battle.

Interior Minister Yishai: Absence of Conversion Law Poses Danger to Jewish People [Haaretz]

As a veteran Israeli World Cup watcher, I can’t remember any previous international tournament that plunged the people around me into such fanaticism and ecstasy. Even the straitlaced mothers from my son’s kindergarten, who normally don’t even know the meaning of the word “offside” walked around our sleepy neighborhood these past weeks armed with vuvuzelas and draped in Argentinian or Brazilian flags—the more despondent they felt, the more they identified. And in this World Cup, I saw increasing numbers of despondent people who embraced this much-loved, sweaty, and extremely unrefined sport not out of deep affection but out of the profound fear of being stuck with the unpleasant alternative—the world we live in.

World Cup month is always unofficially considered a hiatus from the troubles served up around us, and it’s a hiatus that exists on two levels. The first is the personal level: We are free to avoid thinking about the unbearable July khamsins, the desert winds; our sweaty country’s isolation in the world after the attack on the Turkish flotilla; our foreign minister’s refusal to wipe the beads of sweat from his brow for ideological reasons (khamsins are nothing but an anti-Israel plot with only one purpose—to make us sweat), along with his reassurances that there’s no reason to worry about isolation now because everyone hated us before anyway; that same foreign minister’s fat-cat government, which last week rejected a proposed law to raise the minimum wage and provide a little help for the weakest economic sector of the population; and the depressing reports from the criminal trial of the man who stood at the head of the previous fat-cat government, Ehud Olmert. In short, everything.

The second level is that of reality itself, which also decided to take a short break in honor of the World Cup festivities: The IDF’s latest reports show that the number of attempted terrorist attacks by the Hamas and border clashes with the Palestinians in general has dropped drastically over the last few weeks; another item in the papers told us that the committee investigating the Turkish flotilla incident postponed announcing its conclusions to the day after the World Cup; and it seems that even the murderers and rapists stayed home this last month glued to their TV screens.

Thinking about it on the macro level, the only disadvantage of the World Cup is, in fact, that it ends. Maybe if it could somehow be spread over four full years, so there would be no dead time between one World Cup and the next, we could solve all the world’s problems: The hungry would forget their hunger; the occupiers that they’re occupiers; the oppressed that they’re oppressed. And we could all simply concentrate on staring at that harmless game that, on the face of it, has managed to neutralize all our negative feelings. That idea could easily be translated into a petition, maybe even into a radical political movement, if not for the edifying story of Paul the Octopus.

The octopus that answers to the name of Paul, who lives in an aquarium in the little-known city of Oberhausen, Germany, was first discovered to have remarkable soccer-predictive powers during the 2008 Euro Championship. Before each game, his caretakers placed two transparent plastic containers into his tank, each filled with plump little Paul’s favorite food. The German flag was painted on one of the containers, its opponent’s flag on the other. When Paul chose to open and go into one of the receptacles, he was actually choosing the winning team. At the beginning of the present World Cup, Paul predicted the German team’s progress from one stage to the next (including the surprise loss to Serbia), and, contrary to many commentators, he believed in that young, inexperienced team’s ability to demolish the strong Argentinians. The problems began when the multilimbed prophet rightly predicted that the Germans would lose to the Spanish team. As soon as the game ended with Germany being ousted from the tournament, threats against the life of the poor creature began to appear. Various German blogs started publishing octopus recipes; others called for the oracle to be tossed into a tank of hungry sharks. And so the gifted octopus was instantly transformed from local hero to public enemy No. 1.

The conclusion I draw from Paul’s story is that while it is possible to escape from the violent, ugly reality we have created to a nicer, more innocent one, as long as we remain what we are violence and hatred will always find their way back to the center of things. So, all we actually have to do to make the seemingly impossible connection between the naïve green fields of the World Cup and this paranoid, violent world of ours is to paint the Israeli flag on one of Paul’s food containers and the Palestinian flag on the other, if only to discover once and for all whether that slippery German mollusk is a closet anti-Semite or just another Arab-hater.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

• For practical purposes, the West Bank construction freeze has not, strictly speaking, involved a total moratorium on building. [NYT]

• The “proximity talks” do not appear to be accomplishing much; Palestinians accuse Netanyahu of playing for time. [NYT]

• This morning, the Libyan-sponsored ship that had been heading for Gaza but then agreed to divert to Egypt was waiting off the dock of El Arish, in the Sinai. [NYT]

• Keeps getting weirder: The CIA says it paid $5 million to the alleged Iranian nuclear scientist who has just returned home after showing up at the Pakistani Embassy, and who has claimed U.S. agents abducted him. [WP]

• U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked Jewish groups to make Alan Gross, an American Jew imprisoned in Cuba for helping Cuban Jews connect to the Internet, a cause of theirs. [JTA]

Bibi’s double books exploded this week with revelations of a secret meeting (for “secret,” read “behind Lieberman’s back”) between Turkey’s foreign minister and Israel’s industry minister in Zurich over the flotilla fallout. So the Turkish foreign minister met not with his Israeli counterpart, as diplomatic protocol would have it, but with Industry Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer—a member of, yup, Barak’s Labor Party.

Lieberman was reportedly furious (from his perspective, he has every right to be); reportedly refused to take Netanyahu’s calls initially and plotted revenge; and eventually met with Netanyahu and got the prime minister to admit that the whole thing was a big mistake. Lieberman says he won’t leave the government over it. Phew?

The continuing problem is that it was not necessarily a mistake. Though a student of international relations, Lieberman has minimal diplomatic experience in absolute terms; compared to Barak, the former prime minister who has developed relationships with top officials all over the world (and nowhere more than in the United States), Lieberman may as well possess as much diplomatic experience as you or I. Additionally, Lieberman’s view of the world is a bit … cruder than Barak’s—or even the more right-wing Netanyahu’s. An Israel whose de facto top diplomat is Avigdor Lieberman is almost certainly a yet more isolated Israel.

And yet, and yet! Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reaction to the secret meeting? Unchanged demands: Until Israel apologizes, agrees to an international probe, lifts the Gaza blockade, and pays compensation, Turkey says, it will not appoint a new ambassador. Maybe Lieberman is onto something? But if he is the most sane one, we’re all in trouble.

Turkish and Israeli Officials Meet Secretly on Raid Crisis [NYT]
Lieberman Demands Netanyahu Backing in Face of Global Backlash [Haaretz]
FM To Take ‘Calculated’ Revenge on PM [JPost]
PM to FM: ‘It Was A Mistake’ [JPost]
Earlier: Israel’s Top Diplomat
Lieberman Nixes Palestinian State in ’12

When Lieberman traveled stateside earlier this month, he stayed in New York, mostly buttering up the Russian Jewish community (as Allison Hoffman reported). Barak headed to Washington, D.C., and met with top officials.

Adds Guttman:

Washington’s warm embrace of Israel’s defense minister stands in stark contrast to the public display of chill that came out of the White House during Netanyahu’s last two visits, which were both scheduled in the evening, without photo-ops or press availabilities. Then, there is the almost nonexistent contact that administration officials have had with Lieberman, Israel’s actual foreign minister.

But it is not just U.S. difficulties with these two officials that puts Barak in his current role. According to David Makovsky, director of the project on the Middle East peace process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Obama administration is actively attracted to work with Barak in particular, because he is seen as someone who “understands that time is not on Israel’s side” when it comes to negotiations with the Palestinians.

Israel’s Stealth F.M.: Barak, Not Lieberman, Tasked With Weighty Issues [Forward]
Earlier: Lieberman Nixes Palestinian State in ’12
Lieberman, in New York, Meets With Russian Jews

The other context in which to understand Lieberman’s comments is Israel’s complicated coalition politics. Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu want to pull the government led by Likud Prime Minister Netanyahu further away from too much territorial (or, really, any kind) of reconciliation with the Palestinians, even as opposition leader Tzipi Livni flirts with trying to replace Lieberman’s right-wing party with her centrist Kadima. It is rumored that Livni—whose party, let’s not forget, actually won the most votes in last year’s elections—would be willing to enter the coalition on the condition of replacing Lieberman at the Foreign Ministry. Yet Livni also just yesterday took aim at Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (of the Labor Party) for leading the country “from crisis to crisis.” She may or may not want to enter this coalition; but as she made clear this weekend, she very much wants to lead the next one.

As for Yisrael Beiteinu, Foreign Ministry bureaucrats are dragging their feet in arranging for Netanyahu’s planned July 6 visit to the White House, ostensibly as part of a partial strike for better wages. And today, Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau—another hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu member, who was last seen saber-rattling with Lebanon—compared Barak to a “battered wife,” who, “instead of standing up to the person who is beating her tries again and again to see what more she can give up on,” which, in Landau’s extremely tasteful metaphor, represents Barak’s preferred policy of continued territorial withdrawals.

So, Lieberman’s comments today? They are designed to provoke the Palestinians, sure. But they may also be designed to force Netanyahu to take a stand, against Livni and against the more centrist negotiating policy favored by his coalition-mate Barak, at the risk of losing his right flank.

Oh, and hey, you know what none of this stuff really applies to? Gaza, and its 1.5 million residents.

Israel Rules Out Palestinian State By 2012 [NYT]
Lieberman and Netanyahu in Spat [JPost]
Related: The Pragmatist [Tablet Magazine]

• In an op-ed, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman lays out his peace plan: Land transfers designed to maximize the number of Arabs who are in the new Palestinian state (and minimize the number in Israel). [JPost]

• The Way We Live Now: “Iran, Turkey & Brazil To Stategize” reads one headline. [Arutz Sheva]

• President Obama sacked Gen. Stanley McChrystal over insubordinate remarks made in a Rolling Stone profile and instead put Gen. David Petraeus, who had been running military operations in the whole region, in charge of Afghanistan. [LAT]

• The International Gem Tower in in Manhattan’s midtown diamond district will soon be the recipient of New York state’s largest loan ever, along with numerous tax breaks. Tenants are also not required to pay many customs duties on their trades. [NYT]

• Another daily magazine of Jewish life and culture reports on Jack Abramoff’s new pizza gig and concludes the same way we did: That there’s no such thing as bad publicity. [NYT]

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman arrived at JFK on a red-eye Monday morning and went straight to briefings with his ambassadors and consuls. On Tuesday, he spoke to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations about Israel’s concerns that it is being de-legitimized, and to religious leaders about pending Israeli legislation on conversions, which would expand the Israeli rabbinate’s power to decide who can be called a Jew.

But Lieberman’s official schedule failed to mention what was perhaps his most important mission: Outreach to America’s Russian Jews. On Monday, Lieberman met with more than two dozen leaders of that community at the Intercontinental to discuss the flotilla and the current threats to the Jewish state. “Our mentality and our ideas and our problems can be different from the mainstream American Jewish community, and I can give you one explanation,” Michael Nemirovsky, who directs Russian outreach for New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, told Tablet Magazine. “About 83 percent of the Russian Jewish community has relatives in Israel, so if something happens in Israel, it’s my own family. It’s a physical relationship, not just a moral relationship.”

On Tuesday, Lieberman attended a gala thrown by Russian media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, who lives in Connecticut, in celebration of the 62nd anniversary of Israel’s independence. The 300-person dinner at the Harold Pratt House, on Park Avenue, was also attended by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, who came up from Washington, and by diplomats from Moldova and the Ukraine, according to Nemirovsky; the chief rabbi of Moscow was also there.

Nemirovsky, as it happens, knew Lieberman when they were both young men in Soviet Chisinau, now the capital of Moldova; one of Nemirovsky’s cousins was a classmate of the minister’s. “New York is the capital of the Russian Jewish diaspora, and what he is looking for from the Russian community, he is looking for public support,” Nemirovsky said. “Because the Russians can bring to events like rallies thousands of people. It’s not about the money.” Nemirovsky said he asked Lieberman why he hadn’t gone to Washington. “He told me, ‘I have Ambassador Oren and he will provide all our ideas to the government.’” Added Nemirovsky, “He waits for the right time.” And when is that? “When the emotions will go down, and reality comes back to the table.”

Earlier: Tablet Magazine Talks to Vice PM Shalom