• The International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran are warily considering the former visiting the latter. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• According to the comptroller, Israel lacks the sufficient number of bomb shelters and is generally unprepared for war on the civilian front. [NYT]

• The value of Iranian currency has been in free fall over the past few days due to uncertainty and fears of sanctions. [AP/WP]

• Due to Israeli efforts, the Jordan River may once again flow rather than just quietly babble. [AP/WP]

• Yiddish is the hot new class on several college campuses. [AP/WSJ]

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 flotilla will sail next week, a spokesperson said (while Gaza businessmen said the main problem with the blockade was exporting, not importing). [Reuters/Haaretz]

• It’s not just Egypt: Across the region, the United States is engaging with Islamist parties in order to try to steer the Arab Spring somewhat. [WSJ]

• An anti-settlement riot breaks out in the northern West Bank. [@IDFSpokesperson]

• Meet the Local Coordination Committees, the emerging, street-level opposition to the Assad regime in Syria. [NYT]

• Meanwhile, senior Syrian opposition members have signed and presented a road map for Assad, which includes him leading his country to true democracy. Do we have to call it a road map? Those tend not to work. [Ynet]

• Despite a formal Palestinian Authority ban on the practice, 14.2 percent of employed West Bank Palestinians work in settlements—where, on average, they are paid twice as much. [JPost]

• The assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis, the Palestinian-Israeli theater director and political activist, was almost certainly motivated by his art, not his politics. [Guardian]

• Tuvia Geffen: Brilliant rabbi, prescient anti-Nazi crusader, proud Jewish advocate … and the man responsible for the annual miracle that is kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola. Great piece. [NYT]

• A fascinating history of the Likud Party. Its prime ministers—Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon—have ended up enacting consequential policies that contradict the party’s maximalist ideology. Will the trend continue with today’s Likud PM? [Jewish Ideas Daily]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Justin Vogt reports from New Orleans on how David Simon’s Treme is imitating life—in the form of Simon’s clash with NOLA’s mayor. [Slate]

• Is Syria’s nuclear program still going strong? [TNR]

• At this point, according to experienced negotiator Aaron David Miller, the peace process is, literally, all talk. [Foreign Policy]

• Alfred M. Freedman, a psychologist who was critical to reversing the paradigm that treated homosexuality as a mental illness, died at 94. [NYT]

• Arsonists burned a synagogue on the Greek island of Corfu. [JPost]

Happy Good Friday and Easter to all our Christian readers. Here is one of our own with a tribute to, er, another one of our own:

According to news reports, the baby’s throat was slashed but she still had a pulse—was, still alive, three months old—when the ambulance arrived at the scene long after the reported attack. The thought that she spent hours in physical and perhaps psychological torture before dying is unbearable, which is why this was terrorism at is purest.

There are a lot of questions and political implications packed into the above event, and they aren’t unimportant, and they deserve scrutiny. I’ll explore them after the jump. But first, please do whatever it is you do—whether you pray, meditate, or just take a moment—before you click ahead. And you can first click here, which the Israeli Public Ministry is trying to publicize to see photos of the slain Fogel family.

It has not yet been firmly established who killed the Fogels; the IDF is currently conducting a massive manhunt in the West Bank looking for those responsible. They do currently suspect Palestinians. “The killers appeared to have randomly picked the house,” the New York Times reports, “one of a neat row of identical one-story homes at the edge of the settlement, on a rocky incline overlooking the nearby Palestinian village of Awarta.” That location, as well as the fact that the attackers apparently first entered a different house only to find it empty, to my unexpert hearing militates in favor of the suggestion that this was an ideologically motivated terrorist attack against Jewish settlers. (A systematic failure on the Army’s part has been blamed for the breach.) A Palestinian Authority minister has argued that Palestinians were not involved in the attack, partly on the basis that it will not help the Palestinian cause.

Well … whose Palestinian cause? Hamas praised it, arguing, “According to the international law, Palestinian resistance factions have the full right to resist any kind of occupation on the land of Palestine.” (Not that it is much of its business, but Iran praised the attack too A semi-official Iranian news agency ackwardly paraphrased the statement of one group that took responsibility for the attack: “The operation was a natural response to the crimes of the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people.”) Prime Minister Fayyad was relatively quick to condemn the attack, while President Abbas (who is in charge) was less so, basically waiting all of Saturday before issuing an unconscionably bland “condemnation” and “rejection” of “violence” (it bears repeating at this point that a three-month old baby had her throat slashed). It wasn’t until today that he found harsher, and more accurate, words to describe the attack.

The upheaval throughout the Arab world has put added pressure on Abbas to accede to more democratic governance. The problem is that more democratic governance in the West Bank would, if the prior elections were any indication, involve more power for Hamas. Which, if it turns out Hamas was behind the attack—and some have already noted that a senior Hamas operative was released from a Hebron prison only a few hours beforehand—could provide an explanation for it: Hamas wishing to create a crisis atmosphere that will require Abbas to either firmly side with Israel (making him unpalatable to much of his people) or with his people (making him unpalatable to Israel).

The White House called the murders a “terrorist attack.”

It seems to have shaken Israeli society far more than, say, the murder last August of four settlers in the southern West Bank. Prime Minister Netanyahu reserved some blame for the P.A. itself: “The time has come to stop this double-speak in which the Palestinian Authority outwardly talks peace and allows—and sometimes leads—incitement at home,” he said. The mayor of the nearby settlement of Ariel went a step further, laying responsibility not only at the hands of Palestinian incitement but of left-wing Israeli journalists.

More provocatively, Saturday night, the ministerial committee on settlement affairs approved the construction of 500 new homes in various West Bank settlements; as if to underline that this approval came in direct response to the Fogel murders, hard-right-wing Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared at a cabinet meeting today that there must be “at least a thousand new homes for each person murdered,” a reckless dare that I hope neither side takes up.

An Abbas spokesperson condemned the announcement—more quickly, it must be said, than Abbas condemned the attack itself. The U.S. also issued a statement declaring the building conunterproductive to peace. By Sunday, Palestinian newspapers were basically treating the attack and the building as a “he said, she said.” (There were also reports throughout America of tens of thousands of Jews banging their heads against the nearest walls, bemoaning the fact that, first, Israel is in a position where approving more homes will be seen by many in the international community as basically the equivalent of the killing of five innocent people; and that, second, Israel, knowing this, decided to do it anyway.)

Finally, there is a report that the killer or killers first entered a different house, only to find the residents not home—it turns out the Chai family was on vacation. But it was their pure luck, rather than their fortuitous name, that saved them from the Fogels’ fate.

Suspecting Palestinians, Israeli Military Hunts for Killers of 5 West Bank Settlers [NYT]
‘Daughter Yelled in Horror, Something Terrible Happened’ [JPost]
PA FM Says No Evidence of Palestinian Involved in Killing [JPost]
Mahmoud Abbas Condemns Itamar Attack [JPost]
Iran Praises Savage Murders; Haaretz Fears Right-Wing Jews [Arutz Sheva]
White House Condemns Terrorist Attack [News.AU]
Miracle in Itamar: Chai Family Escapes Murder [Ynet]
Yishai: Israel Must Build 1,000 New Units in Settlements for Every Person Murdered [Haaretz]
Ariel Mayor: Delegitimization of Settlements Caused Attacks [JPost]
Palestinians Denounce Itamar Murders, But Lay Criticism on Israel [Haaretz]
Earlier: Four West Bank Settlers Killed

The latest to-do, Aaron David Miller told me this morning, “reflects a much-diminished administration that got off on the wrong foot from the beginning.” Prior history as well as the prospects of continued Israeli-Palestinian negotiations give Netanyahu greater leverage, according to the former negotiator. The prime minister “knows that the administration believes the only way this Israeli-Palestinian problem is going to be resolved is negotiations, and so he’s convinced himself that they need him more than he needs them,” Miller said. “I don’t think he’s looking for a confrontation, but he’s willing to stand his ground.” Especially, Miller added, since we are talking about Jerusalem here: “Building in Jerusalem is as natural as breathing.”

To be fair to Obama: The timing of the announcement again seemed calculated to provoke and to assert Netanyahu’s (new?) upper hand; East Jerusalem lies on the far side of the 1967 Green Line; and Israel also just announced the construction of more than 1000 homes in Ariel, an unequivocal West Bank settlement.

But to be fair to Netanyahu: It is nigh impossible to imagine a final deal that does not include some sort of Israeli sovereignty in all of Jerusalem; East Jerusalem was never included in any freeze deal; and even the freeze deal that was reached a year ago has since expired. “Building in Jerusalem was never considered off-limits by either the government of Israel or frankly—with respect to the Obama administration, they basically acquiesed in it,” Miller noted. He also pointed out that the neighborhood the announcement concerns is one that Netanyahu himself made a move on when he was prime minister in the late 1990s.

(Miller opined that the recent Republican surge is the least important factor here, though it does mean that Obama will have enough to worry about over the next two years without also pushing the Israelis on East Jerusalem as well. Certainly this is, as Ben Smith noted, the first post-midterms test of Obama’s stomach for foreign confrontation.)

To put it another way: Neither opposition leader Tzipi Livni, of Kadima, whose GA speech yesterday was fairly well received by the left, nor any other plausible leader of Israel is going to be any more willing to cede Israeli claims to all of Jerusalem.

On top of all that, some others have complained that Obama made his remarks while drumming up support in Indonesia—the world’s largest Muslim country, which does not permit Israelis to enter.

So, where are we now? A crucial thing to watch is Netanyahu’s meeting Thursday in Washington, D.C., with Secretary of State Clinton. Her bona fides as a friend to Israel are pretty much impeccable. But she was the one who, in March, famously upbraided Netanyahu on the phone for 43 to 45 minutes (depending on your source) for that prior settlement announcement. “If it’s a reprise of what happened in March,” explained Miller of the Clinton-Netanyahu get-together, “we’re not prepared to back it up. We just look weak—we look pathetic, frankly, it’s beyond weak.” How she and the administration handles this situation, I think, will be the most telling hint over the direction the circus will travel over the next few months. Miller’s advice? “Save your powder for an effort that could actually advance the negotiations.”

In Curt Exchange, U.S. Faults Israel on Housing [NYT]

Crowley Chides PM’s Statements on J’lem Building [JPost]
After U.S. Chides Netanyahu over East Jerusalem Construction, More Settlement Plans Unveiled [Haaretz]
Earlier: Biden’s Brief, Bibi’s Bombast, Simon’s Sermon
The Jews and their City. And their Umbrellas.
U.S.-Israel Relations Hit Nadir

• The Emergency Committee for Israel has created a “Super PAC” (seriously!) and continues to press hard against Senate candidate Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pennsylvania), as does the Republican Jewish Coalition. [Ben Smithl]

• A Tel Aviv gallery will feature a realistic-looking sculpture of a comatose Ariel Sharon. [ArtsBeat]

• You will soon be able to scan the Dead Sea Scrolls from the privacy of your personal computer, smartphone, iPad, or –hone. Google helped out, of course. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Another day, another crazy Israeli arms-dealer trying to sell bad stuff to Somalia. [PBS]

• Israeli President Shimon Peres led a candelight vigil marking the 15th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. [JTA]

Cliff Lee put on a clinic last night, holding the all-powerful New York Yankees lineup to two hits, one walk, and zero runs in eight innings, as our team, the Texas Rangers, took a 2-1 lead in the American League Championship Series. Below: The final of this 13 strikeouts of the night.

Taub starts out by reminding us that Zionism, properly understood, is a liberal movement. It is nothing more or less than the belief that, in the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, it is “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations.” The Jewish experience in Europe, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, convinced the early Zionists that it was only in a sovereign Jewish state that this self-determination could be achieved. Indeed, the same belief inspired all the peoples of Eastern Europe, from Lithuanians to Greeks.

It is often said, in reproach of Theodor Herzl and the other founders of Zionism, that their eagerness to establish a Jewish state in Palestine led them to ignore the existence of the Arabs already living there—that they believed in “a land without a people for a people without a land.” In fact, as Taub points out, this is not at all the case. From Herzl onward, the Zionists were aware that any Jewish state would inevitably have a large Arab minority, and Israel’s founding laws established collective rights for that minority, as well as legal equality. As Taub writes, this ideal of an Israel that is both Jewish and democratic was not fully lived up to, for a variety of reasons. But it was not until 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the Six Day War, that the ideal itself came under serious threat. Ever since then, there has been a two-tiered government: democracy in Israel proper, military rule and harsh subordination of Arabs in the Occupied Territories.

The philosophical danger of the Occupation—to say nothing of the diplomatic and military and economic dangers—is that its illiberalism will make Zionism itself look illiberal in retrospect. This is, as Taub points out, the view of the “post-Zionists” in Israel and of much of the left in Europe and America: that “Zionism was never democratic, and the very idea of a Jewish democratic state is a mere contradiction in terms.” Ironically, Taub argues, this is the same thing that the settler movement believes. The difference is that, while anti-Zionists want to resolve the contradiction by making Israel cease to be Jewish (the so-called “one-state solution”), the settlers want to resolve it by making Israel cease to be democratic. For as Taub writes, “the concept of a Jewish democratic state [stops] making sense if Jews are not a clear majority,” and an Israel in permanent possession of the West Bank would, in time, inevitably have a non-Jewish majority.

The reason why the religious settlers can face this prospect with equanimity is that they are not democrats but fundamentalists and theocrats. This is made quite explicit in some of the statements Taub quotes. To Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the chief theologian of “redemptive religious Zionism,” “The Almighty has his own political agenda, according to which politics down here are conducted.” Shlomo Aviner, head of a religious Zionist yeshiva, went still further, saying that settlement is “above moral-human considerations,” because it is a direct command from God. Actually, Taub writes, Judaism has historically had little to say about resettling in the Land of Israel, except to caution against it. According to one Midrash, when the Jews went into exile after the destruction of the Temple, they made three vows: “not to hasten the end of days (i.e., not to do anything to expedite the coming of the Messiah), not to ascend the wall (i.e., not to immigrate to the Land of Israel and reestablish the House of David), and not to rebel against the nations of the world.”

To some haredi sects, these prohibitions still hold, which is why certain fringe ultra-Orthodox rabbis opposed and continue to oppose the existence of the state of Israel (such as Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s favorite rabbi). But Zvi Yehuda Kook preferred to follow the so-called fourth mitzvah (mitzvah dalet) of Nahmanides, which held that “we were commanded to take possession of the land which God gave to our fathers … and we must not abandon it to any other of the nations or leave it in desolation.” In the hands of Kook and his followers, this became one of the most important of all commandments, so urgent that it was held to justify sacrificing life—or taking it. When Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Rabin in 1995, his justification was that Rabin had been branded a rodef (literally, “pursuer”) by some settler rabbis, a halachic designation that meant it was justified to kill him.

For Taub, the Rabin assassination marks the crucial turning point in the history of the settler movement. It demonstrated beyond a doubt that the settlers’ mission to redeem the land of Israel was on a collision course with the security of the state of Israel. For two decades, starting with the election of Likud in 1977, this distinction had been elided: Territorial expansion was the policy of conservative Israeli governments on national-security grounds, which fit in nicely with the settlers’ religious agenda. But when even Ariel Sharon, whom Taub describes as “the patron of the settlers,” decided that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, it became clear that this political alliance was over. Ultimately, all factions of secular and mainstream religious Zionism believed that the secure existence of a Jewish state was more important than its control of the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The larger problem, which The Settlers only begins to address, is how this consensus should be translated into actual policy. For, as Taub acknowledges, the settlers on their own have never been numerous or powerful enough to dictate to Israel’s government. When Israel encouraged settlement in the Occupied Territories, it was because the government believed this policy would ultimately strengthen the state. This has proved to be a huge mistake, and there is little doubt that most Israelis would now be glad to see (most of) the West Bank and Gaza turned over to a moderate Palestinian government. But there is no immediate prospect of such a government emerging—and the fate of Gaza, where Israeli withdrawal led to Hamas rule and a barrage of rocket attacks, makes withdrawal from the West Bank even less likely. “For all its military and economic power,” Taub writes, “Israel was helpless to extract itself from the territories and prevent itself from sliding down the slippery slope to binationalism.” The title of Taub’s last chapter is “Conclusion: What Next?” and he is no more able to answer the question than anyone else. But The Settlers goes a long way toward reminding us of the values that Zionism must preserve, if it is to be worthy of its great history.

On Monday, the CREF side of the company (the College Retirement Equity Fund) held its annual board meeting. It happened to fall on Tisha B’Av, which JVP used to lend its activism some gravitas, with the destruction of the Temples compared, in a lucid analogy, to the contemporary plight of the Palestinians. Around 8:30 in the morning, 10 members held a commemorative service across the street from the headquarters. They lit candles and read aloud, competing with the whirs and screeches of the midtown traffic.

Once a law professor, Harvey left academia to move “into the trenches” of activism as a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. But her pensions are still tied up with TIAA-CREF, which makes her a “participant”: A decided advantage on this day, when only participants who registered at least four days in advance were allowed inside the two-hour-long meeting (which was closed to press). Eight eligible JVP members planned to deliver 1,400 postcards the group had collected over the past month. These read: “Divest from the Israeli Occupation.”

As the expansion of Israeli settlements persists, divestment has emerged as one of the most viable means of protest, although it splits the Jewish left, with groups like J Street standing cautiously against it. “I’m disappointed that they have decided not to get involved,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, JVP’s Executive Director, of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group. Her campaign, she emphasized, is not targeted at the Israeli state but the settlement practice.

Specifically, JVP is turning to shareholder activism—trying to nudge policy changes by leveraging financial investments. It’s a tactic that has worked on TIAA-CREF before. Last year, the company pulled significant investments over human rights violations in Sudan. The divestment was the culmination of an advocacy organization’s three-year campaign as well as TIAA-CREF’s lengthy negotiations with its clients. That campaign, Vilkomerson told me, “was inspiring for us.”

After the meeting, the JVP members expressed gleeful surprise at the warm reception their remarks received. Bob Carpenter, a large man with a thick beard and a “Veterans for Peace” cap, was the first to emerge. “They were listening,” he said of the company’s heads, “Godammit, they were listening.” Aaron Levitt, an active JVP member, agreed. The CREF management, he told me over the phone, “[Was] both aware of, and sympathetic to, concerns about the occupation.” He added: “That was different than what I expected.”

However, despite its kind ear, the financial company is not planning to divest anytime soon. “While we appreciate the opportunity to hear from JVP,” Abby Cohen, a TIAA-CREF spokesperson, told me, “we are unable to divest from the companies on the group’s target list.” Roger Ferguson, the company’s CEO, said during the board meeting that the Darfur divestment possessed “significant consensus” among clients and “in the global community,” whereas, the company’s clients, Cohen added delicately, hold “varying concerns” in the Middle East.

Vilkomerson hadn’t expected consensus. There are, she said, “a lot of people who will be against.” Nor does she anticipate a short campaign. But the JVP members were encouraged by the significant number of postcards and online signatories that came from the heartland, from cities and towns in Ohio, Kentucky, and Colorado. “This issue has activated the young community,” Harvey said of her native Detroit. “They really get it.”

But the divestment efforts there, she admitted, would not move unhindered. “It’s an uphill battle,” she told me, “because it is the heart of AIPAC-land.”

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article reported that the CREF board meeting was open only to participants who registered four days in advance, and was closed to press. In fact, according to a TIAA-CREF spokesperson, the meeting was open to all participants, and to press, although this reporter was turned away.

Jewish Group Petitions TIAA-CREF To Divest From Israel [JTA]
Earlier: Boycotting Hits the Mainstream

I. The Accused

The safest place in Yosef Espinoza’s two-story, red-tile-roofed house in Shvut Rachel, a tiny Orthodox Jewish settlement in Samaria in the West Bank, is a windowless computer room that doubles as a fallout shelter with a 5-inch reinforced steel door. The room is airtight and has a ventilation system, a TV, and a couch. In case things get rough there is a get-away bag with a pair of binoculars and a U.S. Army-issued helmet that reads “Yosef Espinoza, Airborne Ranger.”

“Even if the Arabs rain fire on my house, I feel safer here than growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the 1970s,” Yosef says. Dark-skinned and born Jewish, he wears a black fisherman’s cap and speaks Spanish, English, and Hebrew. His faded blue jeans are caked with the reddish-brown dirt of the land on which he lives.

He would sit in this room, he explains, with his good friend Yaakov, watch Jet Li kick ass on the television, and critique the practicality of the actor’s fighting style. “Oh, it can’t be lights out with one punch,” Yaakov would say to Yosef. “He’d go out like this,” he’d continue, while illustrating the succession of blows required to bring down a real-life opponent.

“Yaakov was my homie from my home town,” Espinoza says of his friend Yaakov Teitel—born Jack Tytell in the United States—the accused Jewish terrorist, and Espinoza’s good friend and neighbor in the gated community of Shvut Rachel. Tytell was arrested on October 7, 2009, in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof. A former student of the Akiva Hebrew Day School in Lathrup Village, Michigan, he was apprehended by the police and Shin Bet while hanging posters that praised that summer’s shooting of two teens in a Tel Aviv gay and lesbian community center. Since his arrest, Tytell has confessed to two counts of premeditated murder, three counts of attempted murder, and one count each of carrying a weapon, manufacturing weapons, manufacturing bombs, and incitement to violence. The crimes included in his reported confessions and charges filed in Jerusalem District Court include:

• The 1997 murders of two Palestinians, Samir Balbisi, a taxi driver in East Jerusalem, and Isa Jabarin, a shepherd near Hebron, while Tytell was visiting Israel on a tourist visa. (He returned to Florida until becoming an Israeli citizen in 2000.)

• Planting three land mines near Abu Gosh in 2001.

• Leaving a homemade bomb near an Arab family’s home near Ramallah in 2003.

• Setting out three bottles of poison-laced juice in a Palestinian village near the settlement of Eli in 2004.

• Starting a fire near the Beit Jamal monastery in August 2005.

• Placing a homemade bomb near the Eli police station, to deter security for the Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem in November 2006.

• Placing a bomb near the Beit Jamal monastery in April 2007 that exploded and injured a Palestinian tractor driver.

• Causing a bomb to explode near a police car in Jerusalem.

• Hand-delivering a booby-trapped Purim gift basket to the home of a family of Messianic Jews in Ariel, severely injuring 15-year-old Ami Ortiz.

• Leaving a pipe bomb outside the home of Zeev Sternhell, a professor and winner of the Israel Prize, who was lightly injured by the explosion.

Two dominant accounts of Tytell’s personality emerged in the interviews I conducted in Israel and the West Bank with his friends, acquaintances, and family members. One described a young Orthodox high-school student who was known for his anti-Arab sentiments. The other portrayed a gentle family man who was devoted to his God and country. Even getting his name right has proven elusive: Some know him as Jack, others as Yaakov, and while his Akiva yearbook has his last name spelled Tytell, most media have taken to referring to him as “Teitel.” Elli Fischer, an Israeli reporter and translator originally from the United States, explained to me that the spelling “Teitel,” which is common in U.S. and English-language Israeli newspaper reports about his case, is due to an incorrect translation of “Tytell” from Hebrew back to English.

The violent crimes to which Tytell has confessed make him an anomaly in the population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. While tramping through the West Bank, not once was I, a gentile, treated with violence, hate, or disrespect. I played basketball with young settlers, went grocery shopping with a mother of six, and hitched rides with settlers who treated me, a stranger, with hospitality and respect. Yet the relationship between Tytell’s actions and the community that he claimed to represent is a politically explosive one that cannot be easily erased by claiming that Tytell is a psychotic. Though his actions are clearly abhorrent to his former neighbors and schoolmates, he is also a product of certain fringe elements of the communities in which he lived his life and which set the psychological and practical context for his actions.

II. A Friend

Yosef Espinoza claims he only knew his friend as Yaakov—no last name, no background information. Yaakov was “the little baldy man” with a neatly trimmed beard. He never had sidelocks, and he seldom laughed. He apologized profusely for small things, like not visiting enough, or going to the store without asking if Espinoza needed anything. Espinoza says his friend, who is now 38, looked up to him not only because he was older—Espinoza turned 52 in March—but because of his special training in the U.S. Army, which he said gave him expertise in espionage and special operations. When Espinoza was taken into police custody shortly after Tytell’s arrest, the police and Shin Bet suspected Espinoza had guided Tytell through military training. Espinoza was arrested twice, spent a week in jail, and passed what he described as a 14-hour polygraph test, after which investigators released him.

Shvut Rachel, the settlement where the two men lived, is a 15-year-old hilltop community of less than 100 families with neither street signs nor house numbers. It is located in Judea and Samaria, which is known to most of the rest of the world as the occupied West Bank. Life here revolves around praying three times a day and observing Shabbat every weekend. Tytell—born in Miami in 1972—settled there after he became an Israeli citizen in 2000. He met and married Rivka Pepperman from Manchester, England, and had four children, all currently under 5 years old.

Yosef Espinoza.
CREDIT: Will Yakowicz

The settlement sits beneath Shilo, across the way from Eli off Route 60, a highway that runs north through the West Bank from Beersheba to Nazareth. During the drive to Shvut Rachel, my companion—a Christian settler—tells me that the settlers nicknamed part of this highway the “60 percent road,” stemming from the belief that one has a 60-percent chance of getting to where you’re going. “Right where I picked you up, two Jewish women were stabbed last week,” he explains.

In the face of such real dangers, it comforts Espinoza that the settlers live their lives according to the Torah on the land that God granted to the Jewish people. We stand together outside his house and smoke menthol Pall Malls while looking at the green hills, which are cut with jagged limestone. He has three barbeque pits in his backyard, appreciates a good knife, and loves a good conversation.

“Yaakov had this affinity for hand-held weapons,” Espinoza says. “He’d always be playing around with a stick, or knife. He’d come over and practice with his sling-shot, things like that, so if anyone saw the weapons they’d think no big deal because it was a stick.”

Once, Espinoza says, when the two were hanging out, he showed Tytell his knife collection, unimpressive blades he bought at Walmart to protect himself while hitchhiking along Route 60. A couple of days later Tytell presented Espinoza with a knife he had made by hand for him, melting down carbon and steel over a charcoal fire. Espinoza says that Tytell’s obsession with weapons seemed more about self-protection in a dangerous land than about killing. Both men loved the outdoors, knives, and martial arts. And both appeared to share in the American faith in starting over: Each moved to the West Bank to shed his former life and dedicate himself to the land and the Torah.

As Tytell got more comfortable with his friend he would frequently speak about the end of the world. “He was always preparing for doomsday, so to speak, the fulfillment of the prophecies,” Espinoza says as he lights another cigarette and leans against a dolly stacked with cardboard boxes labeled “cassette tapes” and “office supplies.” Tytell wanted to build a network of tunnels leading from each house sitting on the settlement’s sun-cracked dirt to a large shelter under the mountain, which would be fully equipped with supplies to deal with biological warfare or a terrorist attack.

Another thing about Tytell that Espinoza remembers is that he never used a watch to tell time. On Fridays, when the sun would start its descent behind the mountains, Tytell would look at the horizon and say, “Oh, it’s time for Shabbat, I have to go home.” He was trying to live his life like the Jewish Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Espinoza remembers. Espinoza says Tytell claimed that God sent him messages. “We must understand what God wants for each one of us,” Espinoza remembers Tytell saying. “And protect and uphold Jewish traditions.”

His friend also placed great importance on marrying inside the tribe, Espinoza says. Tytell became involved with what he called “protecting” Jewish women from dating non-Jewish men. Espinoza says Tytell told him one day about working for Yad L’Achim, a Jewish anti-missionary organization. According to news reports, Tytell told investigators that for five years he carried out five “rescue missions” a year for the group, though Yad L’Achim has strongly denied any association with Tytell. Espinoza says there would be a preset time and place, and Tytell and a few other rescuers would penetrate a village, armed and prepared to fight, and remove the Jewish girl. “If they want to go with an Arab, then they want to go with an Arab, that’s their problem,” Espinoza says he remembers saying to Tytell.

Tytell appears at a Jerusalem court on November 12, 2009.
CREDIT: Emil Salman/AFP/Getty Images

“Everyone is following their own truth, everyone has a little piece of the puzzle, and it’s their version of the truth,” my host tells me gently. We watch the sun dip under the mountains. I’m getting a little worried that the sun’s going down and I’m nowhere close to home. “Hopefully we will all get together one day and put away our differences,” Espinoza tells me. “But for now everyone has their own belief of what’s right.” He pauses and inhales a puff of smoke, contemplating his friend’s character, then he sees my glass is empty, apologizes, and fills it.

“He was prepared to get involved in any kind of ruckus if it so developed,” Espinoza says. “He had his gun with him and he felt if anything happened he was ready and if anything did happen, ‘I am doing it for God and Country,’ so to speak.” The night is chilly and we have no more cigarettes, so we decide to drink more beer inside. Most of Espinoza’s belongings are in boxes stacked on the floor, couch, and table. He tells me he’s moving down the block to a cheaper house tomorrow with his wife and his son.

Espinoza’s wife, a small, older woman wearing all black, makes me a snack of tuna salad on pita. I eat while she packs some belongings and her husband continues to talk. As the evening wanes and the bottles empty, Espinoza’s speech gets slower and less coherent, and I decided to ask the question I’ve been waiting to ask the entire time: “Did Yaakov do it? Is he a terrorist?”

My host slumps in his chair, droopy-eyed, and bounces around a few topics before he settles on the story of Joseph, which he begins to relate to me: Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, he became the Pharaoh’s slave, was sent to jail on false accusations of trying to rape the Pharaoh’s wife after he refused to sleep with her, and was finally released after he predicted the Pharaoh’s dream. Joseph ruled Egypt with God’s blessing and made a good name for the Hebrews. Espinoza says that all of the Jewish patriarchs went through trials and tribulations before God blessed them. Moses was accused of killing an Egyptian, and then through him all of the Children of Israel were redeemed.

“We learn from the story of Joseph that everything is in God’s hands,” he concludes. “We don’t know for what reason, but God willing, it is for a higher purpose, and it will be good.”

I try to get him to be straight with me. “Do you think he—”

“Everyone goes through trials and tribulations,” Espinoza says. “Everything that we see as negative that happened, we’ll see as something positive in the end.”

“So, you think he did it, but it will be for the greater good of the Jews?”

“I answered your question with the story of Joseph,” Espinoza says, and it’s clear the conversation is over. “That’s how I answer your question.”

I realize it’s after 10 pm, and I have to get back to Jerusalem. We walk out of his house and down the steps to the road. He says under the streetlight is a good place to hitch a ride. “Just remember get a car that’s going to Jerusalem. You don’t want to need a miracle,” he says, and laughs darkly. I see two yellow eyes in the distance. Espinoza comes closer. He remembers one last thing about Tytell, a moment that should have been a red flag.

“He came over and looked at me intensely and asked, ‘What would you do if the government asked you to be an informant?’ ” Espinoza tells me. He believed at the time that his friend might have been trying to suggest that he was working for the Israeli government.

“I told him that if I ever found out that he was a traitor, a double-agent for the Arabs, that I would be the first person to put a bullet in his head,” Espinoza says with uncharacteristic seriousness. “If he was putting our community at risk, I’d be the first to put a bullet in his head,” he says again. “He never talked about that stuff again, and I guess looking back on it, it saved me. I have no idea what he was up to, and I didn’t want to know either.”

A dusty Fiat hatchback pulls up and stops. I open the back door, wave to Espinoza, and chug down the mountain with my ride.

Next: The Americans

Most of the money, which must pass through an American charity to become tax-exempt, goes to established settlements near the Green Line that are permitted under Israeli law; two-state endgames typically envision land-swaps that would place these conurbations in Israel proper.

But, to the consternation even of Israeli security officials, smaller (but impactful) amounts of tax-exempt funds flow to illegal outposts inhabited by radical settlers unlikely to leave without a fight.

The Times isn’t breaking this story; if anything, the news is that this dynamic has long been an open secret. “It drove us crazy,” former U.S. Ambassador Daniel C. Kurtzer says. “It was a thing you didn’t talk about in polite company.”

The article will likely prompt closer looks at and arguments over the current state of Israeli settlements and settlement policy; the Obama administration’s relative friendliness to Israel (or lack thereof); and even The New York Times, which pretty clearly intended to publish the piece on the day that was supposed to culminate the months-long reinforcement of U.S.-Israeli ties.

The piece certainly hits home in the context of the typical locution, “I don’t want my tax money going toward” a given cause.

Says the Times:

While a succession of American administrations have opposed the settlements here, Mr. Obama has particularly focused on them as obstacles to peace. A two-state solution in the Middle East, he says, is vital to defusing Muslim anger at the West. Under American pressure, Mr. Netanyahu has temporarily frozen new construction to get peace talks going. The freeze and negotiations, in turn, have injected new urgency into the settlers’ cause—and into fund-raising for it.

The article, co-written by Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner, quotes a “senior State Department official” on the tax policy: “It’s a problem. It’s unhelpful to the efforts that we’re trying to make.” (The article notes that the Free Gaza Movement, which sponsored the flotilla, welcomes tax-deductible donations.)

Donors tend to be either right-wing Jews or Christian conservatives. The controversial Rev. John Hagee is a prominent evangelical for the cause of pro-settler philanthropy.

The Times also catches a few pro-settler groups flirting with law-breaking “by using the money for political campaigning and residential property purchases, by failing to file tax returns, by setting up boards of trustees in name only and by improperly funneling donations directly to foreign organizations.” Jack Abramoff was in the past involved with one of the sketchier charities.

The article paints a scenario whereby future forcibly evacuated settlers “will very likely be aided by tax-deductible donations from Americans who believe that far from quelling Muslim anger, as Mr. Obama argues, handing over the West Bank will only encourage militant Islamists bent on destroying Israel.”

Incidentally, the article profiles one David Ha’Ivri, a leader among some of the more radical settlers. He was born in Queens as David Axelrod—the same name as one of President Obama’s top advisers.

Tax-Exempt Funds Aid Settlements in West Bank [NYT]

The answer revealed itself to me the other day atop Mt. Gerizim overlooking the city of Shechem, otherwise known as Nablus, where the High Priest Aharon Ben-Av Hisda, 83, 132nd holder of the post since Aharon, the brother of Moses, was presiding over the Passover sacrifice. He wore a white beard, a loose green silk robe tied at the waist with a wide cloth, and a blue-striped tallit draped over his head. Rising above the jostling assembly of his entire people, which numbered fewer than 750 souls, he clutched a chest-high wooden staff, worn smooth with age, in his left hand. He stood on a small platform facing priests bedecked in white turbans and elders outfitted in red tarbooshes wrapped with a gold and white sash. As the sun set to unveil a full moon, Hisda’s chants (ancient Hebrew and Aramaic comingling in his throat) crescendoed, and with an ecstatic cry the sacrifice rites commenced.

All at once, dozens of white-robed Samaritan men, descendants of the ancient northern Kingdom of Israel, sliced their knives into the throats of the lambs—one per family—which in accordance with biblical instruction had been purchased four days earlier (Exodus 12:3-12:4) and had been coaxed to the sides of a long altar. Hisda’s congregation dipped their fingers into the warm, newly shed blood, dabbed it onto their foreheads, and embraced one another with joy. The slaughtered animals were skinned and disemboweled with expert haste, skewered on 10-foot spits, and placed in fire-pits gaping in the ground nearby, there to be roasted until the midnight feast commemorating the Exodus from Egypt.

***

Samaritans are the smallest religious group in the holy land, and probably the most ancient. Best known for their cameo role in the most famous of New Testament parables, the story of the Good Samaritan, they offer modern Jews a glimpse into our own past. Indeed their ceremonies prove impossible to witness without the jarring chronological blur that comes from a disruption in the historical continuum. They are our ancestors come to life—except they are not. The most faithful followers of the Torah, it seems, may not be Jewish at all.

Samaritan faith is monotheism at its simplest: a belief in one God, the God of Israel (whom they call “Shema,” or “the Name”); one prophet, Moses; and one Torah. Anything outside the five books—later prophets, oral law, rabbinic interpretation—is alien to them. There is neither Purim nor Hanukkah, no bar mitzvah, no requirement of a minyan (a quorum of 10 men) for prayer. On the other hand, Samaritans enforce strict observance of the Bible’s laws of ritual impurity (menstruating women are separated from their husbands for seven days) and the Sabbath (no traveling, cooking, writing, or sex).

Passover, celebrated this year a month after the tamer Jewish version, is far from the only sign that religious habits that for Jews have receded into a symbolic representation of an ancient memory—the burnt shank bone on a seder plate that represents the paschal sacrifice—remain for the Samaritans a living practice. Take the way this tiny community organizes itself according to religious hierarchy. Unlike the Jewish priesthood, which faded after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, Hisda and his fellow priests still serve as unquestioned decision-makers, interpreters of the law, and keepers of the calendar (an abstruse art they call by its Aramaic name “Ishban Kashta,” or “truth calculation”).

In another sense, however, the Samaritans present to Jews not so much a primeval past as an alternate vision of themselves, a road not taken.

The divergence, the fork in the road, began here on Mt. Gerizim above Nablus, where Samaritans have lived and worshiped since the day Joshua brought the holy ark here and offered the first sacrifice in Canaan (Deut. 27:4). Hisda and his community, which broke away from mainstream Judaism more than two and a half millennia ago, venerate Mt. Gerizim as the center of Samaritan sacred geography. Samaritans face Gerizim when then pray. It is where Adam was fashioned of the dust of the earth, where Noah built his altar after the flood subsided, Jacob dreamt of the angel-ladder, Abraham offered up his son Isaac, and Joshua placed the 12 stones he had brought from the Jordan when the Israelites entered the land of Canaan. (The Samaritan calendar counts from the year Joshua crossed the Jordan into the land of Canaan: the year 2794 on the Jewish calendar, which counts from creation.) This spot went by various biblical names, Samaritans say: Bethel (Gen. 12:8), House of God (Gen. 28:17), Luz (Gen. 28:19), the Chosen Place (Deut. 12:11), and the Everlasting Hill (Deut. 33:15).

The Samaritans believe that Mt. Gerizim, and not Jerusalem, is the real Moriah. They insist that the legitimate line of high priests, from the family of Eleazar, remained on Gerizim; the false line, from the family of Itamar, stole the ark to Shiloh and thence to Jerusalem. When the Jews made Jerusalem, some 40 miles to the south, the exclusive center of worship—a chosen city for a chosen people—the Samaritans regarded the Jewish cult as illegitimate.

This initiated the ancient “temple race” between the Samaritans and the Jerusalem-centric Jews whose beliefs and history shaped modern Jewry. By permission of Alexander the Great, the Samaritans built a temple of their own, measuring 400 by 560 feet, atop Gerizim. In use for some 200 years, the temple was destroyed before the first century BCE, never to be rebuilt. Israeli archaeologist Yitzhak Magen, who supervised the digs on Gerizim, has found coins and inscriptions dating back 2,200-2,600 years.

The Bible recounts that when Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem and its temple, the Samaritans tried to prevent them; Sanballat, then leader of the Samaritans, mocked “these feeble Jews” (Neh. 4:2). The 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus reports on Samaritans who intruded into the temple in Jerusalem one Passover eve and scattered human bones to render the place unclean. The Samaritan Chronicle boasts of another episode in which Samaritans substituted rats in a cage of doves being carried to Jerusalem as temple offerings.

The antipathy ran both ways. Among Jews threatened by a rival to Jerusalem’s claim of exclusivity, a deep anti-Samaritanism prevailed. This culminated in a rabbinic ruling by Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi that, despite their scrupulousness in the observance of biblical law, the Samaritans were to be considered as Gentiles in every respect.

Yet the rival temples and the rival communities, each claiming to be true heirs of the Mosaic tradition, were fated to share a common experience of persecution. Like the Jews, Samaritans were massacred by the Romans. Hadrian built a pagan temple on Gerizim, torched Samaritan scrolls, and forbade Samaritans to perform circumcisions. Early Christians forcibly converted Samaritans and in the 5th century expelled them from Gerizim and built a church to Mary on the site. Later, Muslim rulers forbade them from praying or bringing the Passover sacrifice on Mt. Gerizim, a ban that lasted until 1820.

Despite the persecutions, most Samaritans remained in nearby Shechem (some 300,000 by the end of the 2nd century), with vibrant communities also in Gaza, Ashkelon, Beth Shean, Caesarea, and Yavneh. As of the 5th century, they numbered well over a million. It is true that starting in the 2nd century, a small Samaritan diaspora spread to Egypt, Greece, North Africa, Italy, and Sicily, but this was a peripheral, short-lived affair, limited by the mandate incumbent on every Samaritan to make the pilgrimage to Gerizim three times a year.

Over the subsequent centuries, a precipitous decline set in. By the 17th century, the number of Samaritans in the world had dropped to 140, where it more or less remained through World War I. Birth defects became common. In 1867, Mark Twain encountered in Shechem a “sad, proud remnant of a once mighty community” that had dwindled to near extinction. “I found myself staring at any straggling scion of this strange race with a riveted fascination,” he wrote in The Innocents Abroad, “just as one would stare at a living mastodon.”

***

The resurgence of the Samaritan community owes something to the establishment of the modern State of Israel, whose second president, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, encouraged Samaritan priests to allow the community’s men to marry Jewish women who committed to Samaritan observances (Samaritans, unlike Jews, rely on patrilineal descent). Their numbers rebounded: 350 in the early 1960s, 500 by the late 1970s. Today, the community counts 730 Samaritans, divided into four extended families: Cohen, Tsedaka, Danfi, and Marhib.

This Passover, I was hosted by Benyamim Tsedaka, founding editor of the biweekly Samaritan newspaper, A.B., for Aleph Bet. Tsedaka’s wife Miriam, an Israeli from Nahariyah, married into the community in 1969, and his grandmother, a Russian Jew, was the first woman to marry in.

Another of his guests that evening was the first woman to join the Samaritans on her own, not by marriage. Sharon Sullivan, an earnest graduate student at Hebrew University from a family of lapsed Catholics in Michigan, moved to Israel a year ago. It was the Samaritans’ sense of fidelity to the Torah, without the rabbinic frills, that attracted her, she said. Today Sullivan is part of a team led by Jim Ridolfo of the University of Cincinnati, which was awarded National Endowment for the Humanities funds to create an online archive of Samaritan texts (including three 15th-century Pentateuchs), scrolls, and artifacts housed in the E.K. Warren collection at Michigan State University.

It is not uncommon to find a Samaritan family that has been in continuous possession of a Torah codex for 600 years. Each generation adds a layer of fine colored cloth, and on Passover or other special occasion, when the current trustees show the venerable volume to a guest, they must peel back layer upon layer. This Passover I wondered whether there is in that gesture, magnificent in its modest way, both a reminder of the quality of timelessness, of eternal recurrence, that characterizes the Samaritans and a hint of what, for better and for worse, the Jews might have become.

***

Today, the Samaritans are split in two. Half, including the new convert Sullivan, live in Holon, near Tel Aviv, home to a Samaritan community since the 1950s. The other half live in the village of Luza atop Mt. Gerizim in the West Bank on land purchased for them by King Hussein of Jordan. (Another gift, oddly enough, came from the Vatican. Pope John Paul II donated $190,000 to help build a Samaritan school here.) Luza now shares the mountain with the Jewish settlement of Brakhah (population 1,400).

During the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank, Holon Samaritans were permitted to visit Gerizim only once a year, on Passover. The Six-Day War opened the borders between the two, but of necessity, the community has long practice with the intricate choreography of neutrality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is nothing new. The 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus accused the Samaritans of playing both sides: “they alter their attitude according to circumstance and, when they see the Jews prospering, call them their kinsmen, on the ground that they are descended from Joseph and are related to them through their origin from him, but when they see the Jews in trouble, they say that they have nothing whatever in common with them nor do these have any claim of friendship or race.”

These days, Samaritans use both a Jewish and an Arab name; most are fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. They seek good relations with the Arabs in Nablus and send their children to the city’s An-Najah University. The late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat honored their loyalty by appointing a Samaritan to the 88-seat Palestinian Legislative Council. On the other hand, the Holon Samaritans, full Israeli citizens since the earliest days of the state, are fully integrated into Israeli life and serve in the IDF. (Nablus Samaritans like Tsedaka were granted Israeli passports in the mid-1990s.)

And so the delicate dance, set into motion by the dependence of this improbable remnant of an ancient people on its more powerful and more numerous neighbors, continues.

Benjamin Balint is a writer living in Jerusalem. His first book, due out next month, is Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right.

• President Obama won’t approve the end-of-Passover prayer, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” until both sides agree on the exact wording. These things are complicated. [Frum Follies]

• A columnist faults Prime Minister Netanyahu for not offering an alternate concession in order to stave off U.S. pressure over East Jerusalem settlements. [Haaretz]

• U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates asserted that the stalled peace process does affect “U.S. national security interests in the region,” though not necessarily directly. [Ynet]

• “WTF (What the Fish) is Gefilte!” A Passover conversation with Russ & Daughters. [Bon Appetit Daily]

• Because everyone else has linked to it, here’s a Hasidic band covering Lady Gaga. [The Gloss]

• U.S. officials continued to criticize Israeli building in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized again for the construction announcement’s timing while maintaining support for the settlements. My 10 am post will have much more. [LAT]

• While the main victors in France’s regional elections were leftist parties, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ultra-right National Front won a higher-than-expected 12 percent. Among other provocations, Le Pen has minimized the Holocaust. [JPost]

• The IDF chief-of-staff is in Turkey on a fence-mending visit. [Haaretz]

• Even as U.S. officials assert no tolerance for Iranian nuclear weapons, America has already, quietly, initiated containment policies. [NYT]

• The 2010 NCAA basketball tournament bracket was announced. Maccabi USA Head Coach Bruce Pearl’s Tennessee Volunteers drew a six seed and will play San Diego State Thursday evening. [ESPN]

Israel’s interior minister says the announcement’s timing was unfortunate and not intended to offend. Even if that last part is true, it made the Palestinians look stupid for agreeing to the talks (it also made them look like the victims of Israeli bullying); it made it seem that Israel was passive-aggressively expressing unseriousness about the talks; and it made the Americans appear, simply, foolish.

Even so, Biden’s condemnation was notable. One expert put it well to Haaretz: “If Netanyahu is at all serious about talks with the Palestinian Authority, this will be just the beginning of his coalition woes. Meanwhile, the Israeli bilateral relationship with the United States has just become much more difficult. It is hard to remember a time when a senior U.S. official used the word ‘condemn’ to describe the actions of any ally.”

The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and Americans for Peace Now of course sided with Biden. J Street, with typical savvy—J Street’s savvy being the one thing its admirers and detractors seem able to agree about—let Biden do the talking: “J Street joins Vice President Biden in condemning … As Vice President Biden said … We echo Vice President Biden’s call.” The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group seems to be betting that when it actively evangelizes for its positions, it does more alienating than persuading. Instead, it is positioning itself to be there, waiting, when (it believes) the facts on the ground usher Americans, and particularly American Jews, into its camp.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman told Haaretz that the announcement’s timing was poor but that Biden lacked tact: “The condemnation should have been issued by the State Department in Washington. … Biden undermined the central purpose of his trip to Israel—strengthening the friendship and cooperation between Israel and the U.S.” Meanwhile, no mention of the announcement appears on AIPAC’s Website. The silence is conspicuous, but is it wise? Joe Biden is known as a talker, and American Jews can surely hear him, even across a couple continents.

How Did U.S. Groups React to Biden’s Condemnation of Israel? [Haaretz]

Earlier: Biden Bashes Settlement Announcement

• Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a favorite of centrists on the Israeli side, vows that Palestinians will not be provoked to violence by “the terrorism of the settlers, and the terrorism of the settlement project.” [Haaretz]

• In Finland, authorities are trying to bar anyone but doctors from performing circumcisions by prosecuting a Jewish couple whose baby experienced complications after a mohel performed his bris. [Jewish Chronicle]

• A library at Oxford University has a fascinating, and revealing, exhibit of late-medieval manuscripts, with a special focus on Jewish ones. [Times of London]

• Jewish Week columnist Abe Novick bemoans the dissipation of trust and true connectedness in our supposedly globalized world. [Jewish Week]

• Apparently there’s a big Illinois plant that makes gefilte fish. And there’s a trade dispute preventing the gefilte fish from being shipped to Israel. So, yeah, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally pledged to resolve the problem in time for Passover. Me? I prefer my gefilte fish caught in the wild. [JPost]

I made my first congressional trip to Israel in 1983. It was then that I began to discern the primary problem Israel would have to face if it maintains its rule over the West Bank and Gaza. Either it would eventually have to rule over a disenfranchised Palestinian majority, or if it enfranchises the Palestinians Israel would eventually cease to be Jewish. I call it the demography-democracy problem. I knew I wanted Israel as a Jewish homeland to be a democracy. That was 1983. Over the years, I discovered two things: first, I learned that there were indeed many Palestinians who were prepared to accept Israel and who genuinely believe in coexistence. Second, I discovered the immense toll the occupation is taking on Israel.

He went on to praise APN, which tends to the left on these sorts of matters, for its “firm commitment to peace.”

Here’s the thing: Berman is no peacenik. Last time we mentioned him, for example, he was pushing for tougher Iran sanctions; and you don’t attain his position of power, much less keep getting elected to his Hollywood district, if you are perceived as unduly harsh on Israel. What he utters represents, by definition, what is mainstream for America’s pro-Israel political leaders. Which is, apparently, that Israel’s current policy of occupation and disenfranchisement is unsustainable.

Earlier: House Passes Symbolic Iran Sanctions Bill

Prime Minister Netanyahu announced the freeze, which applies to construction that is not already underway or in areas annexed to Jerusalem, last Wednesday, framing it as a bid to restart peace talks with the Palestinian Authority. On Thursday, though, P.A. chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said the move was insufficient and intended to appease the U.S. government rather than Palestinians.

For their part, settlement leadership is having none of this. The head of the Samaria Regional Council “tore up a stop-work order delivered to him by an Israeli army major” yesterday and called the order “racist, immoral, and illegal,” Reuters reports. Today, a group of settlement leaders met with the government’s Construction and Housing Minister and told him they would continue building in spite of the freeze, saying “no defeatist governmental decision will stop us from building,” according to the Jerusalem Post. As of today, a settler lobbying group has also taken the issue to court, filing a petition that claims the freeze order was issued in an improper way and its implementation should be postponed.

Israel Says Enforcing W.Bank Settlement Moratorium [Reuters]
Settler Leaders: We Won’t Let Inspectors Into Settlements [Jerusalem Post]

New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, however, remains firmly supportive of settlement consturction. He told the New York Times this week that he wants to buy a new pad in East Jerusalem. On a visit to Israel with about 50 other Americans, Hikind said restricting where Jews can build homes “is segregation” and that Obama’s no-settlement-expansion position means Jews “cannot build a toilet” in the West Bank. There are many kinds of arguments a person could make against Hikind’s intended purchase, but given that Thanksgiving’s around corner (and that Hikind introduced the bathroom rhetoric in this case)—we’ll make a patriotic one: the American economy is still in the crapper, why not spend the dollars here?

China Criticizes New Israeli Move on Settlements [Ynet]
Real Estate Shopping Is Used as Political Theater on Jerusalem’s Contested Ground [NYT]
Hikind Steps Into West Bank Settlement Row With Housing Plan [Jewish Week]

Number of people who live in Israel: 7,465,500
Percentage of those people who are Jewish: 75.5
Percentage of those people who are Palestinian: 20.3

Percentage of children in Israel labled to be at risk of poverty in 2007: 40
Percentage of Jewish children at risk of poverty in 2007: 27
Percentage of Arab children at risk of poverty in 2007: 73

Percentage of secular Jews “foregoing food for economic reasons” in 2007: 15
Percentage of ultra-Orthodox Jews “foregoing food for economic reasons” in 2007: 30

Percentage of Palestinians who support “a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, separate from Israel”: 55
Percentage of Palestinians who favor a bi-national state of Palestinians and Israelis: 11

Percentage of Palestinians who believe the most important step that could be taken to advance the peace process is evacuation of settlements and outposts: 28
Percentage who believe the most important step is the release of prisoners: 27
Percentage who believe the most important step is “halting demolitions and settlement building activity”: 6

CBS: Israel’s Population Numbers 7,465,500 [JPost]
40 Percent of Israeli Children at Poverty Risk [Ynet]
IPI Poll: Palestinians Support 2-State Peace Plan, Fatah, Abbas [International Peace Institute]

Palestinians Shut Down West Bank School After Students Contract Swine Flu [AP]
How Israel Warms Up For a Settlement Freeze [CSM]

The anti-settlement cause was buttressed by a prominent (if unsurprising) voice: Jimmy Carter. The former president, who a few years ago published Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, reported Sunday on a trip he took to the territories with a few other former world leaders, whom he refers to (somewhat creepily, no?) as “the Elders.” “We found a growing sense of concern and despair among those who observe, as we did, that settlement expansion is continuing apace,” he relates. He calls a settlement freeze “key.” This earned him the ire of prominent neoconservative writer and former Bush adviser Elliott Abrams, who chastised Carter and cited the West Bank’s predicted 7 percent rise in GDP (“a rate of growth that would be far in excess of ours—or Israel’s”) as evidence that Palestinian society is, with Israel’s conscious help, actually beginning to thrive. Also today, this time on the International Herald Tribune’s opinion page, Zahi Kouri, who runs the West Bank’s Palestinian National Beverage Co. (which appears to be a Coca-Cola bottler), credits that 7 percent growth rate not to Israeli benevolence but to “Palestinian reforms undertaken in spite of the obstacles Israel continues to place in the way of Palestinian development.” Like Carter, he deems a settlement freeze “a crucial first step to salvaging the two-state solution.”

Actually, a crucial first step would be knowing whose facts to believe. But in a world where everyone has an opinion, perhaps that’s asking too much.

The Elders’ View of the Middle East [WP]

What Carter Missed in the Middle East [WP]
The West Bank’s Deceptive Growth [NYT]

Any other time of year seems tailored for exile. Autumns, for example, are much better in New York than they are in Tel Aviv, the city in which I was born and which I left, not without considerable pain, in 1999. Back there, on the coast of the Mediterranean, all of autumn’s tenderness is crushed by the long reach of summer’s clammy hand. Leaves changing colors? That earthy smell singeing the nostrils with the first gusts of brisk air? Forget about it: in Tel Aviv, you can still lounge on the beach in December.

Similarly, winters are largely absent as well, and springs are like short and furious arms races, with each month rushing the next into the escalation of summer’s inevitable heat. Come June, however, there’s no better place to be than Tel Aviv. As humid as the city is, as humming with the discontent of sweating, heated souls, the first Hebrew town in modern history was really for summer born.

Growing up, my friends and I would start our summer mornings running around on the beach, playing matkot —a popular beach game played with two paddles and a rubber ball that makes a frightful thwacking sound—and eating lemon popsicles before lying down for a nap. A few hours later, our skins roasted and our heads dazed with sun, we’d amble over to one of three or four nearby cinemas to catch a silly action film, then rush to the local burger joint to soothe our gurgling stomachs. Greasy, sunburnt, and wildly happy, we’d return home late in the evening. I’m many years and thousands of miles removed from those glorious summer days, and yet I still miss them terribly.

It was with much interest, then, that I read recently about some Israeli children spending their summers not in similar pleasurable pursuits but by building settlements on the rocky hills of the West Bank. As I reported earlier this week, “Youth for the Land of Israel,” a new non-profit organization, is offering Israeli youth a summer stint on the hills of Judea and Samaria where they can learn about the importance of our ancestral land and partake in its settling, government strictures and international condemnations be damned.

Reading the committed campers’ accounts, I was stirred by feelings of admiration. Unlike myself at their age, these ideologically driven youth could return home at the end of a sizzling summer afternoon and say that they had done something to further their beliefs. They sacrificed their idle days—a teenager’s most precious resource—for the greater good. Their voices pealed with conviction, with the kind of clarity that is ours in abundance when we’re young—and that grows ever dimmer as we age.

Shlomit Amitai, 16 years old, a counselor in the settlement camp, was quoted as telling her young charges that the Zohar, the sacred book of Kabbalah, teaches us that the land of Israel is like our collective mother. “Just like you would dress your mother’s wounds,” she said, “empty land is a wound we need to dress by settlement.”

It is probably useless to tell Ms. Amitai that the Zohar, so mighty in its mystical force, was traditionally available only to scholars 40 and older who’d reached a level of mastery in Judaism’s earthly foundations before being allowed to travel to its more ethereal realms. I’m not so far removed from my own youthful years to remember that there’s nothing teenagers like less than being preached to by didactic dunderheads; but if I could, I would suggest to her and her friends a better book to read this summer: Deuteronomy.

They wouldn’t even have to read the whole thing. This week’s parasha is enough. It’s short, and it’s as heartbreaking as anything in literature. It’s Moses’s farewell speech. Weary and elegiac, the dying leader, done retelling the past, speaks to his people about the future.

Me, says Moses, I won’t make it to the Promised Land. But you will. And, once there, you will mess things up.

“When you beget children and children’s children,” he prophesies, “and you will be long established in the land, and you become corrupt and make a graven image, the likeness of anything, and do evil in the eyes of the Lord your God, to provoke Him to anger, I call as witness against you this very day the heaven and the earth, that you will speedily and utterly perish from the land to which you cross the Jordan, to possess; you will not prolong your days upon it, but will be utterly destroyed. And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will remain few in number among the nations to where the Lord will lead you.”

But things, he continues, aren’t all grim: this terrible exile, Moses concludes, will reawaken Israel’s appetite for righteousness, the people will once again keep the laws of the Torah and worship the Lord, and He, in turn, will redeem them and return them to their ancestral home. The saga of Israel will have a happy ending after all.

This story is often taken by biblical scholars to be a bit of a retroactive rewrite, the work of post-exilic scribes wishing to fortify the faith by peppering the story with premonitions, supposedly authentic, of the doom that is to come. But as is so often the case with scripture, reality’s concrete details are eclipsed by a grander, eternal meaning: Moses’s story is not some sliver of Jewish history, but a warning that is, has always been, and will always be timely.

To those who revere the land above all, seeing it as a wounded mother (somewhat of a graven image there, some might say, the bleeding and martyred woman), Moses’ story couldn’t be more relevant. Jews, it reminds us, have had Hebron and Jericho and Shechem once before. They were long established in the land. And, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord their God, they speedily and utterly perished from it. They returned again, once again transgressed, once again perished, once again returned. It’s not for lack of territorial sovereignty that Jews had suffered terribly, not for forfeiting a holy hill or a sacred wadi. The answer to our suffering lies not in the soil but in the soul. This summer, may we all listen to Moses, and believe him when he tells us our true, eternal, and only strength lies in justice, in compassion, in love. By now, we know all too well what happens when we ignore him.

Senior Obama administration officials bristled at Benn’s suggestion that “The Arabs got the Cairo speech; we got silence,” reports Atlantic blogger (and Tablet Magazine contributing editor) Jeffrey Goldberg. They noted that in Cairo Obama rebuked Arab leaders’ exploitation of the Palestinian issue and unequivocally condemned Palestinian terrorism. The officials’ defense of Obama may be accurate; it may even be that Benn and Burston are demanding an unfair amount of the new president. (Benn all but admits as much, writing, “In the 16 rosy years of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Israelis became spoiled by unfettered presidential attention.”) But perceptions, fair or unfair, sometimes matter most, and Benn’s and Burston’s reading of the Israeli people’s perception carries a great deal of weight. Besides, if Obama is not embarrassed about what he is asking the Israeli people—and we see no reason why he ought to be embarrassed—then he should have no problem asking them to their faces.

Why Won’t Obama Talk to Israel? [NYT]
Mr. Obama, Have a Talk With These Israelis, And Soon [Haaretz]
The White House Reacts to Aluf Benn’s Arguments [The Atlantic]

Instead of a Summer Camp by the Beach, The Girls Came To Settle [Ha’aretz, in Hebrew]

Reading the article and watching the accompanying video one is struck by how little these haredim conform to the traditional image of the settler. Strikingly, this distinction is apparent even to the Palestinian villagers of nearby Bilin, where “the settlers over the fence are viewed as different from the Jewish nationalists in, say, Hebron.” That said, these settlers’ ideological flexibility does not lessen “the harm to the villagers caused by the very existence of Modiin Illit and the contest over its land.” (indeed, in the video, we learn that Bilin’s zucchini and cucumber crop is affected by the settlements’ sewage runoff). This truism, that the land is the land no matter the beliefs of those living on it, does somewhat undercut the “hope” alluded to in the article’s headline.

In 2 West Bank Settlements, Sign of Hope for a Deal [NYT]

Ex-Envoy To U.S.: Israel ‘Totally Committed’ To Razing Outposts [Haaretz]

All of these decisions have been undertaken with the express consent of Netanyahu, who has been signposting his willingness to do business with Barack Obama ever since the U.S. president’s Cairo speech, Harel notes. Elsewhere in Haaretz, meantime, is the news that Israel is currently discussing a settlement freeze with the United States. Netanyahu government’s position is that it should not last longer than six months and that building projects in progress in pre-existing settlements should be allowed to continue.

Israel removes dozens of West Bank roadblocks [Haaretz]
Israel mulls temporary freeze on settlement construction [Haaretz]