• At a debate last night in Florida, the Republican frontrunners laid into President Obama’s dealings with Israel. Mitt Romney reiterated the “threw Israel under the bus” line from the 1967 borders speech last May. [JPost]

• Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife has now given $10 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC, denies (through an aide) that he is trying to buy off the presidency. [NBC]

• Even as he sounded more bellicose notes, in a speech President Ahmadinejad also acknowledged the havoc that sanctions and the looming oil embargo are wreaking on Iran’s economy and currency. [NYT]

• Though he resigned as top Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross—long seen as the most pro-Israel voice in the White House—retained his security clearance and still advises the president from time to time. [Haaretz]

• The West’s favorites from both sides, President Peres and Prime Minister Fayyad, met at Davos. [IMEMC News]

• The guy who wrote that dumb op-ed resigned. [JTA]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Sohrab Ahmari reviews the new book by Trita Parsi, a Lee Smith profile subject. [WSJ]

• Wayne Barrett reports that Newt Gingrich has grown more hawkish on Israel ever since Sheldon Adelson started giving him lots of money. [The Daily Beast]

• The Judah L. Magnes Museum becomes the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library. Still in the Bay Area, though! [NYT]

• Jewish Milwaukee Brewers slugger Ryan Braun classily accepted his Most Valuable Player honor in person despite recent allegations that he used illicit performance-enhancing substances. [NYT]

Word is that esteemed Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer wants to succeed Shimon Peres. “Mother, should I run for president?”

• At the conference in March, President Shimon Peres will win AIPAC’s lifetime achievement award. Which does make you wonder who else could possibly have ever qualified for the honor. [Arutz Sheva/ Vos Iz Neias?]

• Marc Lynch argues against Western military intervention in Syria, in part explaining what makes it (very) different from Libya of several months ago. [FP]

• On the centennial of his birth, Secretary Clinton and Sweden’s foreign minister celebrate Raoul Wallenberg. [NYT]

• James Kirchick and other TNR-ers have uncovered yet more conspiracy-mongering from the Ron Paul newsletters. [TNR]

• One of the four men who accused former Syracuse assistant basketball coach (and Jewish Coaches Association founder) Bernie Fine of sexual assault now says he was lying. [ESPN]

Go to the 28-minute mark of this episode of Radiolab for a great, moving profile of Fritz Haber, the German-Jewish inventor of ammonia, which (as fertilizer) saved Europe from famine. He was also Fritz Stern’s godfather; he invented, also, Zyklon A.

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

• President Obama asked the Iranians for the U.S. drone, more porridge. [LAT]

• The planned relocation of West Bank Bedouins is prompting international concerns on Israeli designs on their current land. [WP]

• All those hugely anti-democratic bills some Israeli politicians are trying to pass? President Shimon Peres is “ashamed” of them, too. [AP/WP]

• David Mamet does his thing on Israel. Something about the binding of Isaac. [WSJ]

• The U.N.’s death toll for Syria has passed 5,000. [NYT]

DAVID LANDAU: You were his emissary in the matter of exempting yeshiva students from army service. Would you say that his subtext in this mission of yours was that with time this problem would simply disappear, or at least would not grow? History has of course shown that that was not the case, and the yeshivot have grown exponentially.

SHIMON PERES: His purpose was to remove every obstacle on the path to the creation of the state, which for him was an ongoing process, not a one-time event that took place in 1948. He wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen later. He sent me on many assignments. For some reason he thought I could do things, let’s say, unconventionally. So for all sorts of unconventional things, he’d send me. He once asked me, for instance, to set up a national soccer team that would beat the world.

LANDAU: And why weren’t you successful?

PERES: Because it was impossible. There’s a limit to what you can do.

LANDAU: You didn’t think of buying foreign players?

PERES: No, it never occurred to me. The team was going to be purely Israeli.

LANDAU: So this was one of your failures?

PERES: Yes, you can put that on the list. Anyway, to be completely frank, in negotiating with the venerable rabbis, I felt like I was sitting with my grandfather.

LANDAU: Who was murdered by the Nazis.

PERES: Yes, who was burned to death in his synagogue as the head of his community. And who influenced my life, in a positive way, more than anyone else. Personally, I had yirat kavod [reverence] toward these people. I didn’t sit with them to haggle. At the same time, I knew that Ben Gurion’s approach was mamlachti [unifying despite difference] and that was the basis of my mission. First, I asked myself: Imagine there were Buddhists in Israel and they’d asked for 150 of their people to be monks. I would have approved. So for Jews not? Second, they claimed very cogently that throughout the Diaspora period even the czars and other rulers had facilitated the existence of yeshivot. Did I want all the yeshivot to be abroad? I thought this was a powerful argument. I reported everything to Ben-Gurion—except the bit about feeling like I was sitting in front of my grandfather.

LANDAU: That’s what I wanted to ask: Could you have said to Ben-Gurion that you felt reverence for these people?

PERES: Yes, I had no difficulty with that. But strange though it may sound, I’m shy. I’m an introvert. So I didn’t mention it. But not because I was worried about how he would have reacted. I had no fear of Ben-Gurion that way.

Faith unites us, knowledge gives us freedom. We shall therefore prevent any theocratic tendencies from coming to the fore on the part of our priesthood. We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks.

Suffice it to say, it didn’t quite work out that way, not even from the start. In his new Nextbook Press book, Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, co-written with the veteran Israeli journalist David Landau, Peres describes the deal that Ben-Gurion made with ultra-Orthodox rabbi-politicians at the time of Israel’s founding: kashrut in all public institutions, Shabbat as the day of rest, rabbinic control of marriage and divorce, and the exemption of full-time yeshiva students, who at the time numbered only in the hundreds, from army service. This would all seem a violation of Herzl’s vision, but Peres defends Ben-Gurion’s consensus-building move as wise and pragmatic, “because the number of people in Israel who defined themselves as people of faith was large.” In a dialogue between the co-authors, the president of Israel declares:

Israel is a secular state. The Orthodox have bargaining power, so everything has to be done by compromise. But Israel is not under religious control: It’s not a halachic country, it’s not a theocracy. Ben-Gurion opposed religious coercion and opposed anti-religious coercion.

True, Israel is not a theocracy the way, say, Iran is one. But stop any bareheaded Jew on a Tel Aviv beach and ask them if there’s religious coercion in their country, and the knee-jerk response will be yes. For many Israelis, “religious coercion” doesn’t mean forced synagogue attendance, but the evasion of military duty by tens of thousands of young ultra-Orthodox men; the harassment of Reform rabbis and citizens who drive on Shabbat; the overflowing of public money to yeshivas and to ultra-Orthodox families that don’t pay taxes; the premature ending of Daylight Savings Time before the High Holidays to facilitate penitential ritual; and the hurling of dirty diapers at women wearing prayer shawls at the Western Wall, a spiritual magnet for all Jews that has been turned, with the complicity of governmental authorities, into an ultra-Orthodox synagogue. As for “theocratic tendencies,” we have the hegemony of the ultra-Orthodox-dominated, state-funded Chief Rabbinate over marriage, divorce, and conversion, protected by the ultra-Orthodox parliamentarians in the Knesset.

How did all this come about? The reasons are over-determined, as the Freudians say. Landau presses Peres, who as a young man was Ben-Gurion’s emissary to the ultra-Orthodox on the conscription issue, on whether they had perhaps miscalculated the staying power of Orthodoxy in Israel. “He wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen later,” says Peres of his mentor. “Anyway, to be completely frank, in negotiating with the venerable rabbis, I felt like I was sitting with my grandfather.” In The Imaginary Voyage, Peres puts it even more frankly: “Whenever I had to make a decision touching upon the relationship between religion and state,” he tells Herzl, “I asked myself whether grandfather would agree with what I’d done.”

As a child in White Russia, Peres studied Torah at the knee of his pious grandfather, who years later, we learn in this new book, was murdered by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen—burned alive in his synagogue. After the Holocaust, out of guilt and nostalgia, along with a sense of moral obligation, Ben-Gurion and his secular comrades understandably felt a need to indulge the surviving practitioners of the separatist Judaism that kept Diaspora Jews afloat for centuries. Besides, they probably figured that ultra-Orthodoxy, in a sovereign, modern state, would soon wither away. How wrong they were.

***

To this day, there are no civil marriages in Israel. A Conservative rabbi, steeped in Maimonides, cannot perform a legally binding wedding in the Jewish state. Yet each year, thousands of Israelis hop over to Cyprus for civil marriages recognized as valid by Israel’s Interior Ministry. Some time back, as a publicity stunt, a couple married by a Reform rabbi in Israel had their civil ceremony in Las Vegas, where they were wed by an Elvis impersonator.

Every so often, there’s a movement by Secularists in the Knesset to remedy this absurd situation, but it always fails. Coalitions are fragile, and ultra-Orthodox parties, supported by legions of faithful voters, are able to thwart such maneuvers. “Israel is the only democracy in the world where Jews don’t have freedom of religion,” groused Nitzan Horowitz, a Knesset member from the Meretz party, after a civil-marriage bill he sponsored was shot down in July.

Israeli disregard for Jewish religious pluralism creates an unpleasant wedge between this country and American Jewry. But the sad truth is that most Israelis don’t much care. As a secular sabra businessman once explained to me: “For me, a Rabbanut wedding is like getting a driver’s license. In both cases, you play by the rules.” It has long been remarked that American Jews are Protestant Jews, and Israeli Jews are Catholic Jews. As in Italy, you’re a bad Catholic or a good Catholic, but still a Catholic. In other words—and despite the laudable blossoming, in some communities, of Israeli renewal-style Judaism—the shul the average Israeli doesn’t go to is still Orthodox.

In reality, of course, Israeli society is not truly polarized between dati and hiloni, “religious” and “secular.” You can be religious without being Orthodox, though in Israel this mainly means mesorati, or traditional. This large category is characteristic of Jews from Arab lands, who observe many rituals and go regularly to synagogue, but are not strict Sabbath observers. This does not, however, make them pluralists. I’ve lectured many times to IDF officers—a mixed audience of religious-nationalist, mesorati, and secular Jews—about liberal Judaism in Israel. When I am challenged to explain where one “gets the right” to pick and choose what religious laws to observe, I say that the Reformim behave much like mesorati Jews, to which the rejoinder will often be: You’re wrong, because the Moroccan Jew who drives to Teddy Stadium to watch soccer on Shabbat knows he is sinning. You don’t.

***

Behold a central irony of Israeli Judaism: Ultra-Orthodox Israelis may be widely resented as draft-dodgers who sponge their living from hard-working, tax-paying citizens. But they are, at the same time, widely perceived as custodians of the flame.

For its part, the Rabbinate unabashedly prefers the Tel Aviv metrosexual who goes windsurfing on Yom Kippur and eats pork in a pita on Pesach to a devoted Reform Jew who teaches her daughter to read from the Torah. The former, in rabbinic parlance, is a tinok shenishba, equivalent to a child abducted by heathens or Cossacks who cannot be blamed for his ignorance, and is so far gone as to be a prime candidate for hazara beteshuva, the full embrace of Orthodoxy. The Reform Jew, by contrast, is a defiant apostate, a scofflaw who dares suggest an alternative to old-time religion. When first I moved to Israel, I found in my mailbox on the eve of Rosh Hashanah a flyer sternly warning Jews not to be tempted to hear the blowing of the shofar at a Reform congregation, for these folks are a neta zar, a “foreign sapling in our holy land.”

Such a blinkered worldview encourages a cynical symbiosis, providing the secular Israeli with ample reason to remain distant from Judaism. Thank you, he or she says to the Rabbinate, for affirming your authority and authenticity. You have reminded me that Judaism is rigid, coercive, and sexist, which is why I want no part of it. Perhaps the sorriest legacy of Ben-Gurion’s political deal is widespread Israeli alienation from the beauty and wonder of Jewish tradition.

A story is told—in several versions, though not by Peres and Landau—of a meeting in 1952 between Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Avraham Karelitz, a Russian-born ultra-Orthodox leader known as the Chazon Ish. The rabbi seeks to persuade the prime minister of the need to defer to Torah scholars by citing a passage from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin: “If two camels met each other while on the ascent to Beth-Horon … How then should they act? If one is laden and the other unladen, the latter should give way to the former.”

Was there a part of Ben-Gurion, champion of the Bible and Hebrew culture, that believed that his own camel lacked Jewish gravitas? He famously said, as quoted again by Peres, “that in Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” In exempting the yeshiva students from the draft, did he also believe that their lives of study and prayer would bring about the protection of the Almighty? Or by giving a green light to “theocratic tendencies,” did he have another agenda entirely?

The Israeli religious philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a sternly Orthodox Jew, wrote in 1977 that Ben-Gurion had told him in the 1950s: “I will never agree to the separation of religion from the State. I want the State to hold religion in the palm of its hand.” For Leibowitz, this meant that “the status of Jewish religion in the state of Israel is that of a kept mistress of the secular government,” which he deemed “contemptible.” But in the ongoing Israeli soap opera, it often seems like the mistress is running the show.

The Provisional Government had issued an ordinance on May 26 establishing the Israel Defense Forces and prohibiting “the establishment or maintenance of any other armed force.” On June 1, Menachem Begin, the Etzel (also known as the Irgun) leader, signed an agreement with the government whereby Etzel units would join the IDF in battalion formations and take an oath of loyalty. The Etzel’s separate command structure would be disbanded within a month, and the organization would cease buying arms abroad.

Nevertheless, on June 11, the Altalena, a ship that the Etzel had purchased, set sail from southern France with a large quantity of arms and explosives on board as well as some 850 immigrants. As it approached the shores of Israel, Begin informed the government that 20 percent of the arms would be sent to Etzel units in Jerusalem. Since Jerusalem was not yet formally under Israel’s jurisdiction, Yisraeli Galili, negotiating for the IDF, agreed. Begin then proposed that the remaining weaponry go first to equip Etzel units within the IDF. Whatever was left could then be allocated to other units. Galili balked. He reported to Ben-Gurion on June 19 that the danger of a “private army” was evolving. Ben-Gurion convened the cabinet. “There are not going to be two states,” he declared, “and there are not going to be two armies. And Mr. Begin will not do what he feels like. … If he does not give in we shall open fire!” The cabinet resolved unanimously to “authorize the defense minister to take action in accordance with the law of the land.”

Ben-Gurion feared that Begin might use the arms aboard the Altalena to equip Etzel units outside the sovereign jurisdiction of the state—thus ostensibly not violating his commitment—in order to extend the war with the Arabs into the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), thereby defying government policy.

The Altalena anchored off Kfar Vitkin, a moshav, or settlement, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and hopefully far from the prying eyes of U.N. observers, and began off-loading the weapons with the help of hundreds of supporters who had gathered at the site. Galili and Yigael Yadin, chief of operations for the IDF, deployed troops to surround the beach and ordered Begin to surrender. Some of the troops with Etzel sympathies crossed the lines and lined up with the Altalena crew and its enthusiastic sympathizers. The ship, with Begin and other Revisionist leaders now on board, weighed anchor and put out to sea, chased by IDF craft. It sailed south toward Tel Aviv and eventually ran aground close to the shore. At army headquarters in Ramat Gan, I spent that night with a rifle in my hand in Ben-Gurion’s office, in case the headquarters compound was stormed by demonstrators.

Off the Tel Aviv boardwalk, a traumatic scenario unfolded the next day. Etzel soldiers and civilian sympathizers streamed to the site. Some waded into the sea and swam out to the ship. At military headquarters, Ben-Gurion paced back and forth, fuming. Eventually he issued written orders to Yadin to concentrate “troops, fire-power, flame-throwers, and all the other means at our disposal in order to secure the ship’s unconditional surrender.” Yadin was then to await the government’s instructions.

Ben-Gurion then convened the cabinet again. Some colleagues suggested possible compromises, but he was of no mind for any such weakness. “This is an attempt to destroy the army,” he thundered. “This is an attempt to murder the state. In these two matters there can be no compromise.” The cabinet backed him. Small-arms fire broke out between shore and ship. The government evacuated homes and shops in the line of fire. The Palmach commander Yigal Allon, now a senior IDF general, was put in charge of the operation. He ordered a cannon deployed. Yitzhak Rabin was in command of it. The first shell fell wide, but the second struck the vessel. Fire broke out in the hold. Those on board began to abandon ship. (It stood barely one hundred yards from the beach.) But before they could all do so, an explosion tore through the ship, destroying it. Sixteen Etzel men and three IDF soldiers died in the episode; dozens more were wounded.

Begin delivered a two-hour broadcast live on Etzel radio that night, roundly cursing Ben-Gurion who, he claimed, had been out to kill him. For his part, Begin said, he would continue to restrain his men and thus prevent the outbreak of civil war: “We will not open fire. There will be no fraternal strife when the enemy is at the gate.” Ben-Gurion spoke at the People’s Assembly, the transitional parliament. He said that since the arms had not been destined for the IDF, he was glad they had been destroyed. He added a line praising “the blessed cannon” that had fired at the Altalena—a phrase the Revisionist stalwarts never forgot nor forgave.

Excerpted from Ben-Gurion: A Political Life by Shimon Peres in conversation with David Landau. The book, published as part of the Jewish Encounters series from Nextbook Press and Schocken Books, is out this week.

With the help of journalist David Landau, Peres has written a new biography of Ben-Gurion, his mentor: Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, available now from Nextbook Press. Landau, a former editor of Haaretz and Israel correspondent of The Economist, spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Ben-Gurion, his realpolitik approach to leadership, and what lessons his example can provide to Israel’s leaders today. [Running time: 30:09.]

Though price tag attacks have been something of a trend recently (in response not only to perceived Palestinian attacks but also official Israeli actions such as the uprooting of settlement outposts), this morning’s incident appears to be the first time in at least awhile that one has taken place in (for lack of a better term) Israel proper.

Both Prime Minister Netanyahu and opposition leader Tzipi Livni condemned the attack, as did several prominent Arab Israeli politicians. (I’ve received similar statements from the Orthodox Union and the Anti-Defamation League as well.) But perhaps the most moving words came from Israel’s ultimate éminence grise, President Peres, who announced that he and several chief rabbis would be visiting the site at an unrelated ceremony this morning. He said,

It is unconscionable that a Jew would harm something that is holy to another religion. This act is not-Jewish, illegal, immoral, and brings upon us heavy shame. I strongly condemn this horrible act in every language. This is not only a difficult day for the residents of Tuba Zangria, it is a difficult day for all Israeli society. As the President of Israel, during these days of introspection between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I call upon all to denounce these terrible acts. These acts, destroy relations between us and our neighbors, and between the various religions in Israel.

We will not allow extremists and criminals to undercut the need to live together equally in equality and mutual respect. Arabs and Jews as one.

That “in every language” is a very subtle and very justified dig at the way Peres’ counterparts act when similar attacks occur.

Last month, inspired in part by our article on young women who are Jewish settlers, a prominent religious Zionist rabbi questioned who ought to be held responsible for the price tag epidemic.

Mosque Torched in Northern Israel [WP]
Netanyahu: Galilee Mosque Arson ‘Horrifying’ and Has No Place in Israel [Haaretz]
Earlier: Who Buys ‘Price Tag’ Crimes?

• An Israeli airstrike in Gaza in response to a rocket killed one. [NYT]

• Omri Casspi will join Jordan Farmar and Jon Scheyer on his old team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, due to the impending NBA lockout. [JTA]

• You want free Jewish books? Of course you do! On September 15, you can get ‘em. [Jewish Book Council]

• Regarding circumcisions: don’t try this at home (someone did). [AP/Boston Globe]

• Happy 88th birthday, President Peres! [JTA/Jewish Journal]

John Lennon sings “Hava Nagila” and more in a 1969 Israeli radio interview. Must-listen.

• Syrian forces’ assault on another Syrian city, the port of Latakia, included naval shelling. President Obama and other leaders told them to stop. [NYT]

• After a much smaller turnout of protesters than prior weekends, Prime Minister Netanyahu vowed to find economic solutions to satisfy their demands. [NYT]

• This morning, Israel approved the construction of 277 new homes in Ariel, the major West Bank settlement farthest from the Green Line that Israel would seek to keep even under a two-state deal. [Haaretz]

• For the first time ever, a Chinese military chief visited Israel. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Changes in Egypt have led to the absence of police in northern Sinai and, consequently, a smugglers’ paradise. [NYT]

First, some backstory. Until 1973, Jerusalem had consciously kept relations with South Africa on the back burner to avoid offending friendly black-majority African states. There was genuine opposition within Israel to the philosophy of apartheid, and the two countries didn’t even maintain full diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level. But none of that was enough for African countries to overcome Arab pressure to sever relations with the Jewish state following the Yom Kippur War. Israel’s isolation in Africa was virtually complete by the end of 1973.

For South Africa, the situation was just as bleak. Anti-apartheid sentiment was on the rise around the world and widespread violence had broken out at home. By November 1973, the United Nations had declared apartheid to be a “crime against humanity”; economic boycotts and arms embargos would ensue. Even South African athletes were to be prohibited from international competition. And it was about to get worse.

Unlike many of its African neighbors, who abandoned Israel at the first real test of their relationship, South Africa came to Israel’s aid in its desperate hour in 1973. More than 1,500 South Africans—mostly Jews—volunteered to fight for Israel, and the Pretoria government permitted over $30 million in aid to be sent to Israel.

But following the Yom Kippur War, as the harsh reality of international isolation set in for both countries, perhaps it was inevitable, as a matter of self-preservation, that they would drift together. And in June 1975, Oscar Hurwitz, a prominent Jewish-South African businessman and architect, facilitated a meeting in Israel the primary objective of which was to cultivate a new relationship between the two countries.

The South African delegation arrived under a heavy fog of secrecy. At its head stood Interior Minister Connie Mulder, a rising star in South African politics. He was accompanied by General Hendrik van den Bergh, head of South Africa’s Bureau of State Security, and maverick Information Secretary Eschel Rhoodie. The mission circumvented South Africa’s Foreign Ministry, which they all viewed as lazy, bureaucratic, and ineffective.

They candidly discussed South Africa’s difficult predicament, revealed a top-secret, five-year plan, approved by Prime Minister B.J. Vorster, to attempt to influence world opinion in favor of the South African apartheid regime, and asked for Israeli participation in a “consultative role.” Specifically, they asked Rabin and Peres to appoint an individual to join a secret group known as the Club of Ten, which consisted of 10 key individuals from 10 different countries. These anonymous representatives would do everything possible to undermine embargos and boycotts, and enhance the image of South Africa, by purchasing or influencing international media outlets.

The members of the Club of Ten were carefully chosen for their cupidity, connections, drive, competence, and proven ability to get things done. They would operate in secret, collaborating directly with Rhoodie’s information ministry. Rhoodie had already established a front company named Thor Communicators to coordinate and fund activities, which in Israel’s case, would also mean coordinating a plan to strengthen South African-Israeli relations, codenamed Operation David. The operation would handle everything from South African cultural and sports exchanges with Israel, to secret defense deals and nuclear collaboration.

The project was designed as a fully funded psychological war, in which no government oversight or regulations of any kind would be applied. “You should keep your paperwork to an absolute minimum and anything not necessary should be destroyed. In fact, where you can do without documentation, you should do so,” Vorster, the South African prime minister, told Rhoodie, who was assigned to oversee the operation.

The secret enterprise would be funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, though the exact number will never be known because accounts were not kept. Funding would be off-budget, without parliamentary approval, from South Africa’s vast gold reserves in London. A large shipment of gold bars was transferred under heavy security from London to a bank vault in Zurich, where banking secrecy laws at the time were suitable to serve South Africa’s covert goals.

In exchange for military technology and covert public relations assistance from Israel, South Africa would open up an entire world of possibilities in defense contracts to the Jewish state, plus access to its vast natural resources, especially uranium. Somebody in Israel would need to be the designated point-person, joining the Club of Ten. That somebody would receive contracts and other potentially lucrative transactions.

Following the meeting with the South Africans, Rabin and Peres considered the matter carefully, weighing the risks and potential rewards. As relations with most African countries were now shattered, the need to maintain appearances vis-à-vis South Africa had all but disappeared, and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had asked that Israel act as the U.S. proxy in support of South Africa’s battle against Communist forces in Angola.

Having just experienced the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, which had brought the state to the brink of destruction, the prevailing winds in Israel were that survival should take precedence over any other consideration. South Africa represented a large and wealthy market for potential Israeli arms sales, to keep Israel’s crucial and growing domestic defense industry humming. Most importantly, the relationship offered the prospect of a steady supply of uranium and nuclear testing locations for Israel, all of which was deeply seductive.

It was also troubling: Apartheid was an unpopular and unappealing philosophy. Furthermore, South Africa’s prime minister had been imprisoned as a Nazi sympathizer in his youth, and a voluntary U.N. arms embargo against South Africa had been in place since August 1963. But on balance, even these blemishes didn’t outweigh the potential benefits of a secret strategic alliance.

Every choice is between two imperfect alternatives, Peres reasoned with Rabin. Black South Africa was aligning with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and with the Soviet Union, and against Israel. “But we shall never stop denouncing apartheid,” Peres said. “We will never agree to that.”

Rabin and Peres decided to sign on to Mulder and Rhoodie’s scheme. They knew who their operative would be: a dynamic individual who knew how to keep a secret, operate behind the scenes, and was not afraid of danger or averse to getting his hands dirty. That man was Arnon Milchan, and Peres moved immediately to arrange the meeting.

When Milchan arrived he was greeted warmly by Peres, who introduced him to Mulder, van den Burgh, and Rhoodie. David Kimche, a Mossad superagent who specialized in African affairs, was also present, and no introductions were necessary. They all exchanged pleasantries and sat for a quiet talk.

Peres informed his guests that Milchan was a trusted independent businessman who owned a fertilizer and agro-chemical company. He explained that Milchan had completed a number of important joint U.S.-Israeli projects in Iran and was handling a sizable portion of Israel’s defense procurements—a real go-getter.

Mulder and Rhoodie were surprised at how young Milchan was; he was just 30 years old. Rhoodie began to pepper Milchan with questions about his views on South Africa and the world in general. Milchan quickly disarmed the three South Africans with his trademark charm, wit, and youthful enthusiasm. Like most people who met him, they all took an instinctive and immediate liking to him.

The feeling was mutual. Although Rhoodie was in his 40s, he and Milchan quickly discovered that they shared a similar temperament. They were both athletic with a passion for tennis, and indeed would meet on the tennis court for years to come. They both appreciated the good life, fine wine, fine foods, women, and gaming. Both had a vivid imagination and both had a flair for pushing the limits of whatever they were involved in.

Rhoodie invited Milchan to South Africa to formalize the relationship, and thus began Milchan’s great South African adventure. Most of it is shrouded in secrecy, but enough is known about these activities to conclude with confidence that they were deep, extensive, covert, highly profitable and, in hindsight, highly controversial.

Milchan was never ideologically attracted to apartheid, and has since expressed regret at having worked to maintain the policy. His involvement was initiated by his own government in the larger interests of his country, and his activities can be divided into three primary categories: defense procurement, the propaganda war, and nuclear collaboration.

***

Eschel Rhoodie, Yitzhak Rabin, Hendrik Van den Bergh, and Shimon Peres during a key meeting.
David Rubinger, The Real Information Scandal (1983, Orbis SA)

When Milchan arrived in South Africa for the first time, to his surprise, he was greeted like a head of state. “Rhoodie put on quite a show, and you couldn’t help but be impressed,” Milchan said. “Happy Africans were dancing to traditional drumbeats, and little African children presented him with traditional gifts; it was all picture-perfect,” and in great contrast to the realities of apartheid.

After the formalities, Milchan was whisked away to a luxury hotel in Johannesburg. During dinner, Rhoodie extended to him an item to study. It was Milchan’s crisp new South African passport, Rhoodie’s way of telling him that he was one of them now. Just like that.

Over dinner, Rhoodie filled him in on the game plan. Their mission was to identify important opinion-shapers in Western media and entertainment, such as journalists, cultural icons, and politicians, and target them for subtle recruitment to the South African cause through gentle persuasion, through bribery, or, if necessary, by buying controlling interests in entire media outlets.

The need for secrecy was obvious. The objective was not to promote apartheid directly, which Rhoodie understood was a losing proposition, but rather to stress the strategic value of South Africa in general to the free Western world: a country rich in minerals and threatened by the spread of Communist totalitarianism.

The following morning, Rhoodie and Milchan flew south toward Port Elizabeth, on South Africa’s coast. As the plane reached the Indian Ocean it banked west and flew along the beautiful Garden Route, on the Southern edge of the continent. They landed near the picturesque little town of Plettenberg Bay, with its golden white beaches. This was the South Africa that Rhoodie wanted Milchan to see—isolated, idyllic, peaceful, and safe.

Rhoodie informed Milchan that he had arranged for a permanent luxury apartment for him in Plenttenberg Bay, and that he should consider it his home in South Africa. As they lounged around in the new apartment, they delved deeper into the plan. In essence Milchan would play the same financial role for South Africa that he had played for Israeli intelligence. He would open secret bank accounts and spread the money around as guided by Rhoodie, with no South African fingerprints on it.

***

Things kicked into high gear quickly after Vorster’s official visit to Israel in 1976. At the core of his discussions with Rabin and Peres was the trade of Israeli weaponry and nuclear technologies for South African capital and raw material. The parties immediately agreed to the sale of mortars, electronic surveillance equipment, anti-guerrilla alarm systems, night-vision equipment, radars, patrol boats, Bell helicopters, armored vehicles, and howitzer artillery pieces. Israel would also supply South Africa with blueprints for its Kfir fighter jet, which were themselves based on stolen blueprints of the French Dassault-manufactured Super Mirage. The result was the South African Atlas Cheetah fighter. Of course, somebody had to supply the missiles for the Cheetah platform, and Raytheon, through Milchan, stepped up to the plate with the latest systems.

On Nov. 4, 1977, the U.N. Security Council adopted resolution 418 imposing a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa. Until then, the arms embargo had been voluntary; now the United Nations acted with uncharacteristic firmness, which meant that the United States and European countries would have to pretend to abide.

That put Israel and its covert operative Milchan in the ideal position to act as the middleman. Of course, on the surface, Israel would officially abide by U.N. resolution 418, but secretly, primarily through the services of companies established by Milchan, it would act as South Africa’s primary defense systems supplier, funneling millions of dollars for purchases from third parties and through direct sales of its own military industries. The timing of the embargo could not have been better for Milchan. He was already deeply plugged in to the rapidly emerging Israeli-South African alliance as Israel’s representative in the Club of Ten, and just as he’d enjoyed the princely insider track in Israel for years, he’d now operate similarly in South Africa, an even larger environment. Like a night flower, Milchan would flourish in the dark.

Continue reading: tritium, rough seas, and South Africa’s covert global propaganda campaign. Or view as a single page.

The skinny young guy sitting next to me says, “It’s me. I did it. When we got on the plane, I talked to my wife on my cell, remember? She told me she was on the way to the beach with our daughter and the baby. I’m sitting here with my safety belt buckled, and all I can think about is, why the hell am I going to Italy? Instead of spending Saturday with my wife and daughters, why am I flying six hours, including a connecting flight, for some hour-long meeting my boss said was important? I hope the plane breaks down. I swear, that’s what I thought; I hope the plane breaks down, and look what happened.”

As we re-enter the terminal, a big woman wearing a flowered dress and dragging a suitcase the size of coffin goes up to the skinny guy and asks him where we’re coming from. “Who cares where we’re coming from,” he winks at me, “the main thing is that we’re on our way home.”

A few hours later, when I get on the small, crowded replacement plane that will take me to Rome on my way to Sicily, I’ll walk down the aisle and notice that the skinny guy isn’t there. Throughout the flight, I’ll picture him on the beach in Tel Aviv building sandcastles with his wife and daughter, and I’ll be jealous.

I also have a wife and little boy waiting for me in Tel Aviv. From the start, this trip was really inconvenient for me too, and it’s becoming less desirable with every minute of delay. On Saturday evening I’m supposed to take part in an event at the small Sicilian book festival in the town of Taormina. When the organizers invited me, I agreed to go because I thought I could take my family with me, but a few weeks ago, my wife realized that she had a prior work commitment, and I was stuck with my own promise to attend the festival. The trip, originally planned for a week, would be shortened to two days, and now it turns out that, due to the supernatural powers of a skinny young guy who wanted to play in the sand with his kid, half of those two days would be wasted in airports.

Because of the delay, I miss my connecting flight from Rome to Catania, in Sicily. When I finally make it to the island, it’s another long ride to Taormina, and by the time I arrive at the hotel, it’s already dark. A mustached reception clerk gives me the key to my room. Lying asleep on a small couch in the lobby is a cute little boy, about 7, who looks just like the reception clerk, minus the mustache. I climb into bed with all my clothes on and fall asleep.

The night goes by in a long, dark, dreamless instant, but the morning makes up for it. I open the window to find that I’m in a dream: Stretched out before me is a gorgeous landscape of beach and stone houses. A long walk and a few conversations in broken English punctuated with a lot of enthusiastic arm-waving reinforce the unreal feel of the place. After all, I know this sea very well: It’s the same Mediterranean that’s only a five-minute walk from my house in Tel Aviv, but the peace and tranquility projected by the locals here is something I have never encountered before. The same sea, but without the frightening, black, existential cloud I’m used to seeing hanging over it. Maybe this is what Shimon Peres meant back in those innocent days when he talked about “the new Middle East.”

This is Taormina’s first book festival. The people on the organizing team are extremely nice, and the atmosphere is relaxed; this festival seems to have everything but an audience at the events. Not that I’m passing judgment on the city’s residents: When you’re in the heart of a paradise like this, in the middle of a hot July, would you rather spend the day at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world or in a mosquito-riddled public garden having your mind numbed by a wild-haired writer speaking strangely accented English?

But in the harmonious atmosphere of Taormina, even a small audience isn’t considered a failure. I think that these pleasant people, who speak such a lovely, melodious Italian and live in such gorgeous surroundings, would accept even boils and plagues with an understanding smile. After the event, the mild-mannered English translator points to the dark sea and tells me that during the day you can see the Italian mainland from here. “You see those lights there?” he asks, pointing toward a few flickering pinpoints. “That’s Reggio Calabria, the southernmost city in Italy.”

When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me bedtime stories. They’re both Holocaust survivors, and during the war, the stories they were told by their parents were never read from books because there were no books to be had, so they made up stories. As parents themselves, they continued that tradition and, from a very young age, I felt a special pride because the bedtime stories I heard every night couldn’t be bought in any store; they were mine alone. My mother’s stories were always about dwarves and fairies, while my father’s were about the time he lived in southern Italy, from 1946 to 1948.

His fellow members of the Irgun wanted him to try to buy weapons for them, and after asking around and pulling a few strings, my father found himself at the southernmost tip of Italy, from which you can see the Sicilian coast—Reggio Calabria. There he rubbed shoulders with the local Mafia and, in the end, persuaded them to sell him rifles for the Irgun to use to fight the British. Since he had no money to rent an apartment, the local Mafia offered him free lodgings in a whorehouse they owned there, and that, it seems, was the best time of his life.

The heroes of my father’s bedtime stories were always drunks and prostitutes, and as a child, I loved them very much. I didn’t know yet what a drunk and a prostitute were, but I did recognize magic, and my father’s bedtime stories were filled with magic and compassion. And now, 40 years later, here I am, not far from the world of my childhood stories. I try to imagine my father coming here after the war, 19 years old at the time, to this place that, despite its many troubles and dark alleys, projects such a sense of peace and tranquility. Compared to the horrors and cruelty he witnessed during the war, it’s easy to imagine how his new acquaintances from the underworld must have appeared to him: happy, even compassionate. He walks down the street, smiling faces wish him a good day in mellifluous Italian, and for the first time in his adult life, he doesn’t have to be afraid or hide the fact that he’s a Jew.

When I try to reconstruct those bedtime stories my father told me years ago, I realize that beyond their fascinating plots, they were meant to teach me something. Something about the almost desperate human need to find the good in the least likely places. Something about the desire not to beautify reality, but to persist in searching for an angle that would put ugliness in a better light and create affection and empathy for every wart and wrinkle on its scarred face. And here, in Sicily, 63 years after my father left it, facing a few dozen pairs of riveted eyes and a lot of empty plastic chairs, that mission suddenly seems more possible than ever.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

It’s also an outcome that is clearly partly the result of positive diplomacy between Israel and Turkey, although on that front, reportedly, there has yet to be a full healing. Members from both sides are currently negotiating in New York; yesterday, Israeli President Shimon Peres urged reconciliation. Turkey is demanding an apology for the flotilla raid; Israel wants only to respect regret. The U.N. report is expected to side with Israel, not Turkey, on this question. Indeed, perhaps most telling of all is that Turkey, and not Israel, is urging the report be kept secret.

Gaza Flotilla Probe: IDF Used Excessive Force but Gaza Blockade Legal [Haaretz]
Earlier: Have Israel and Turkey Reached Détente?
Anchored

• Barack Obama (August 4, 1961): “Prosecutor Will Demand Death Penalty for Eichmann When Trial Reopens”

• Hillary Clinton (October 26, 1947): “U.S. Experts Studying Palestine Partition Map for Boundary Recommendations on Monday”

• Shimon Peres (August 2, 1923): “Hooligans Attack Jews in Doz Park”

• Natalie Portman (June 9, 1981): “Israeli Planes Destroy Iraq Nuclear Reactor: Furor Spreads”

• Mark Zuckerberg (May 14, 1984): “Mondale, Hart Take Jackson to Task for His Refusal to Repudiate Support by Black Muslim Leader”

• Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933): “Warsaw Jew Killed on Way to Synagogue”

• Justin Bieber (March 1, 1994): “Clinton Administration Scrambles To Salvage Mideast Peace Process”

• Barbra Streisand (April 24, 1942): “Evacuation of All Jews from Coastal Areas in Holland Ordered by Nazis”

(Staffers)

• Liel Leibovitz (November 9, 1976): “Sartre Says Mideast Peace Can Be Achieved by Israel-Arab Dialogue”

• Matthew Fishbane (December 10, 1971): “Israel, Vatican Swapping Relics”

• Wayne Hoffman (December 8, 1970): “Israel Trying to Persuade U.S. to Use Veto Power in Security Council” (apparently this was once a novel thing)

• Margarita Korol (April 21, 1986): “Tension, Violence Mount in Gaza Strip”

• Abigail Miller (December 20, 1983): “Israeli Forces Continue to Pound PLO Forces in Lebanon”

• Alana Newhouse (February 26, 1976): “Manifesto Calls for Co-Existence Between Israel, Palestinian State”

• Gabriel Sanders (December 21, 1972): “Kahane Gets Israeli Citizenship”

• Len Small (August 28, 1972): “Foreigners Blamed for Rise in Israel Drug Use”

• Marc Tracy (January 3, 1985): “U.S. Sephardic Jews Urged to Revive Their Tradition Before They Assimilate”

Jewish News Archive [JTA]
Earlier: These Were the Weeks that Were

• Some Israeli officials see Egypt’s opening of the Rafah Crossing as a boon: It will ease international pressure on Israel’s blockade of Gaza (with the flotilla sailing next month), and the weapons are getting in anyway. [NYT]

• Word is Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have been talking secretly. [Telegraph/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Amy Winehouse has gone back to rehab. I wish there were an adequate song lyric that I could utilize to cleverly summarize this. [Page Six]

• President Obama visited the memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto today. [AP/Haaretz]

• Iran’s atomic envoy insisted sanctions have had no effect on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. So then they won’t mind the yet tougher ones that were proposed in the U.S. Senate? [AP/WP]

• U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon—Italian troops— sustained injuries in a bomb attack, the first since 2008. [AP/WP]

• Amazing story about IDF paramedics, and their treatment of, among others, injured Palestinians. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Robert Satloff wrote the most cogent objection to President Obama’s mentioning the ’67 borders. [Washington Institute]

• Howard Jacbson’s Jewiest interview yet! (Which is saying something!) [KCRW]

•For your weekend viewing, a Charlie Rose roundtable on Mideast peace, starring (among others) contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg. [Charlie Rose]

• Not all Democrats have sold Obama out on Israel. [The Plum Line]

Happy Memorial Day.

In a conference room down the hall, Jerusalem-based accountant Philip Stein stood in front of a PowerPoint projection talking taxes. Although presenting to a group of mostly retirement-age couples, Stein was showing a slide that showed a happy young family frolicking on a perfect sandy beach, under a headline announcing their “Ten Year Vacation From Israeli Tax.” The slides that followed outlined the benefits offered by a series of new tax breaks aimed at encouraging olim and expatriate Israelis to come to Israel. In addition to the 10-year tax break on income earned abroad, Stein explained, the new law would also give them breaks on business taxes, exempt them from paying taxes on their pensions, and offer a series of point-based deductions for their first three years in Israel.

The small crowd sitting in front of him seemed to lack the necessary attention span for Stein’s spiel, constantly interrupting with irrelevant questions and uncontrollable cell phone rings. A small, quiet man with a dark blue kippah over his neatly combed sandy brown hair, Stein persisted, trying in his measured way to sell these American Jews on the benefits of a reform aimed at them. At the end of his presentation, he turned to the crowd to make one last appeal: “Israel’s a very exciting place, you’ll meet a lot of exciting people,” he said in perfect Midwestern monotone.

When Philip Stein and his wife made aliyah more than 30 years ago, Israel certainly was a very exciting place. At the time there were virtually no support systems in place to help new immigrants. Raised in Chicago, Stein was a young, newly minted accountant, and no one tracking his professional development would have recommended that he move to Israel. A few days after the Paramus “Mega” event, I asked him what his family thought when he told them he was moving to Israel. “That I was out of my mind,” he responded, grinning.

In its drive to attract professional, “high quality” immigrants, Israel faces the stark reality that Jews in America have relatively little to complain about. The people at these events are not the pioneering kibbutzim of an earlier era, embarking on a mission to build Israeli society from the ground up. The current success of Nefesh B’Nefesh lies in shifting the focus of aliyah from the ideological onto the material, as they aim to eliminate the practical barriers keeping American Jews in the United States. Nefesh seminars and webinars often take on the no-nonsense qualities of a business convention. And if they rarely mention questions of ideology, this is perhaps because, like every confident salesperson, Nefesh’s people are operating under the assumption that you already want what they’ve got.

Perhaps they are right. Since Nefesh B’Nefesh was founded in 2002, the number of North American Jews moving to Israel has doubled, up to nearly 4,000 last year. More than a third of that increase happened between 2008 and 2009, the year the U.S. economy fell through the floor. While the unemployment rate in the United States surged to nearly 10 percent, in Israel it hovered between 6 and 7 percent through 2010, according to data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. As a nod to the organization’s success, in 2008 the Jewish Agency, its one-time “rival,” ceded North American aliyah efforts to Nefesh, retaining responsibility only for confirming the eligibility of candidates and paying their airfare.

And with new incentives like the tax reform, which was passed as a part of the “Returning Home for Israel’s 60th” promotion in 2008 and first went into effect in 2010, the Israeli government is actively recognizing that economics can play a pivotal role in the decision to move to Israel. “We wanted to give people the right conditions so that they move to Israel and stay there,” Israeli Minister of Immigrant Absorption Sofa Landver said of the motivations behind the reform in an interview with Tablet Magazine. “The government’s decision suggests that there’s a change in attitude. I think Jews belong in Israel, and Israel will do everything to get them back home.”

“It’s expensive to be Jewish in America,” Landver added. Moving to Israel frees American Jews from burdensome day-school tuition and health care costs, for example. And with its focus on overcoming practical obstacles to aliyah, Nefesh B’Nefesh may be benefiting from Israel’s relative economic stability when compared with America, gaining traction with a niche group of quietly passionate people who have long held Israel at the back of their minds. Now, as the economic disparities between the two countries have narrowed, Israel has become a more attractive option, a place where they can fulfill both their emotional and financial life goals. Put another way: “People need numerous reinforcements in their decision to make aliyah,” Nefesh Vice President Danny Oberman told me. “This is one of them.”

***

Stein sits across from me just a few days before Christmas in the lobby of the Upper West Side hotel he booked for the last leg of his cross-country tour with Nefesh B’Nefesh, which had invited him as an expert speaker at events from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Chicago and now New Jersey. A small man with an open, friendly face, he hardly seems to me the kind of hardy, passionate Zionist who would leave his life behind and strike out for unknown horizons. Instead, he is the sort of man who always keeps at least one pen tucked neatly into the breast pocket of his collared shirt.

But Zionist passion was in fact the source of his decision. His young wife had just returned from a year in Israel, and when she insisted they make aliyah, Stein promised to give it a year. “I had the aliyah experience pre-Nefesh B’Nefesh, and when I came you were really on your own,” he tells me. At the time, in the late 1970s, Israel was still a volatile and underdeveloped nation, and Stein’s main client prospects—a group of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors stationed at a base in the Negev—were transitory at best. But the two of them stayed, and slowly, through the economic trials of the 1980s, he built up a clientele of Americans and returning Israelis. With the birth of his five daughters, he and his wife put down roots in Israel, and now, as his company website boasts, he runs the “largest U.S. accounting firm in Israel.”

As a tax-man, Stein naturally speaks in highly pragmatic terms. Israel has changed, he says, listing the benefits. Income disparities are not as great as they used to be. And with the medical expenses retirees face in America, they might actually profit from the move. “When I meet people, they’re talking about the practical side. I don’t see the zealousness,” he says, without any sense of pioneering self-righteousness. “It’s sort of post-ideology. They’re just seeing a nice lifestyle.”

Many of Stein’s clients are Israeli expats residing in the States. Because they are tuned in to Israeli TV and news sources and are saddened by the idea of watching their children grow up outside of Israel, they may be most receptive to many of the government’s latest economic incentives. The new tax reform, for example, extends to returning Israelis many benefits previously reserved for olim. The Ministry of Immigrant Absorption website for the new law loudly trumpets this fact, with sparkling, Saturday-morning-cartoon-styled rainbows shooting from the headline. The ensuing description is so ecstatic it almost descends into absurdity, describing the reforms as “a genuine revolution, one that for the first time combines Zionist and ethical principles with financial viability.”

***

Israeli President Shimon Peres addresses new Jewish immigrants upon their arrival from the United States at Ben Gurion International airport near Tel Aviv on August 3, 2010.
Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

“The desire to make aliyah has been there forever,” Debbie Rapps tells me at the Paramus fair expo in Conference Room A. With her dark-rimmed glasses and gently sarcastic sense of humor, she seems like the kind of cool mom everybody wanted to have in junior high school. “I definitely have the passion,” she tells me. “I need the means,” she adds, as she politely shoos away a representative from Meuhedet Insurance. Stein has just arrived and is arranging his business cards on a back table.

Several days after the Paramus event, Debbie and I meet to talk in the cafeteria at Stern, the women’s college at Yeshiva University, where she occasionally works proctoring exams to students. When we both get stuck at the register without any cash, she casually asks the other students in line if they have extra meal plan points they’d be willing to donate, and one girl wordlessly passes her card up to the cashier. As we talk, Debbie stops periodically to exchange small talk with students she knows, asking about their parents and where they plan to go over their winter breaks. She comes across as incredibly friendly, I notice, while maintaining an honest, tell-it-like-it is attitude.

“Israel was always at the forefront of everything I’ve ever done,” she says, explaining that making aliyah is something she has dreamt of for more than 20 years. Because she was recently laid off from her job in public relations, there are several factors she must take into consideration when planning the move. The first is her five children (three boys and two girls). Her three older children are already in Israel, but the younger two—aged 16 and 7—are still in Jewish day schools. The tuition she and her husband pay is a major expense, and cutting that expense is a big draw to Israel.

And then there’s the job question. Her husband is a kosher food broker, but because of Debbie’s lay-off, they are limited financially. For the moment, she tells me, she is “freelancing” and occasionally driving into Stern from her home in Teaneck, N.J. “We’re basically very practical, cautious people. So, we’re still here.”

While hardly naive about the difficulties of living in Israel, Debbie is enthusiastic about the country’s status as a “start-up nation,” referring to authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s 2009 paean to Israel’s entrepreneurial achievements. She has been impressed by what she’s seen at the Nefesh B’Nefesh seminars and has looked into incentives like the Go North program, a $10 million project that provides extensive financial assistance for people to move to less-developed areas of northern Israel. In particular, the program provides a family grant of up to $25,000 and up to $16,000 in vehicle subsidies. She praises Nefesh B’Nefesh for cutting through Israel’s notorious bureaucracy. “There are certainly more options,” she says, mentioning the convenience of Nefesh’s online jobs bank. “It’s a very American organization.”

Continue reading: the “push” and “pull” factors, missing America, and “building Israel one person at a time.” Or view as a single page.

• A report from the bitter clash on the streets of Tel Aviv between the leftist intellectuals who want a two-state plan and their counter-protesters. [NYT]

• Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, who has been imprisoned for 25 years, sent a letter to President Obama through President Shimon Peres asking for his release on Passover. [Ynet]

• Israel told the United Nations that the Gaza-bound flotilla prepared for a May launch has ties to “Hamas and other terrorist organizations.” [Haaretz]

• Prominent Israeli historian Tom Segev discusses how the Eichmann Trial 50 years ago altered Israeli perceptions of themselves. [LAT]

• This very brief profile of Prime Minister Netanyahu, written for Time’s annual “most influential people in the world” list, ain’t half-bad. [Time]

• If it’s Friday, it means post-prayer marches in the Arab world. Anti-government forces are protesting throughout Syria. [AP/WP]

• At the United Nations, President Shimon Peres condemned attempts to achieve Palestinian statehood through the international body and bemoaned the damage already done by the Goldstone Report. [NYT]

• Speaking of which, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice told a congressional hearing, “What we want to see is for it to disappear.” [JTA]

• After a visit from Prime Minister Netanyahu, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned of the urgency of peace talks. [NYT]

• Saad Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister ousted earlier this year by Hezbollah, blamed Iran for its “flagrant intervention” in internal affairs. [AP/WP]

• President Shimon Peres met with President Obama at the White House. In addition to discussing Iran, the peace process, and Gilad Schalit, Peres asked Obama to free convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. [JPost]

• How Kabbalah—or, to be more precise, the sketchy Kabbalah Centre—helped ruin Madonna’s plans for a multimillion-dollar girls’ school in Malawi. [Newsweek]

• A dispatch from the Egypt-Gaza smuggling tunnels. [The Daily]

• The world has one deaf-blind acting troupe, and it’s Israeli. [JPost]

• Somebody sent a pig’s foot and an anti-Semitic note to Rep. Peter King, who recently chaired controversial hearings into homegrown Muslim radicalism and who, despite the surname and Long Island district, isn’t Jewish. [JTA]

Jake Gyllenhaal talking about the afikomen on Shalom Sesame? Jake Gyllenhaal talking about the afikomen on Shalom Sesame.

• A group of prominent, mainstream centrist Israelis will present a peace plan—with all the standard basic parameters—that it hopes will catch on and push both leaderships toward a deal. [NYT]

• Juliano Mer-Khamis, the Israeli-Arab director and actor who tried to promote interfaith tolerance (he also appeared in Miral), was killed yesterday in Jenin by Palestinian terrorists. [NYT]

• The Palestinian village next to the settlement of Itamar has been the subject of a massive, intrusive probe in order to find the Fogel family killers. [NYT]

• Both human rights activists and some Capitol Hill leaders have called on the administration to take a tougher line on the Assad regime’s crackdown on Syrian protests. [WSJ]

• The Goldstones are going to Israel! [AP/WP]

• “The current Israeli government has become a source of embarrassment to many liberal American Jews,” opines New York Jewish Week editor-in-chief Gary Rosenblatt. “More creative ways must be found to convince the world, starting with American Jews, that Jerusalem really wants a two-state solution before the option becomes moot.” [NY Jewish Week]

• If you can figure out exactly what Shimon Peres is saying about Muammar Gaddafi and John Galliano, you know him better than I do. [Ynet]

• Ilan Stavans expands on his thoughts on the late Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar. [Forward]

• Résistant Stéphane Hessel, 93, born half-Jewish in Berlin, writes leftist pamphlet that some have called anti-Semitic based on what it says about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The pamphlet, “Indignez-Vous!” is a best-seller. Gotta love the French. [NYT]

• Jack Gottlieb, onetime assistant to Leonard Bernstein and composer in his own right, died at 80. [Jewish Theatre]

For Stephen Colbert, Lent is not that far removed from Judaism.

Yes, it’s confusing.

Basically, what we’re seeing, if Aluf Benn’s widely read column from several days ago is to be believed, is the battle over Bibi’s soul. With his domestic popularity sinking; his coalition threatened by everything from differences over fundamental principles, corruption investigations, and the potential willingness of opposition leader Tzipi Livni to strike a deal with the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu similar to his own; and the upheaval in the Arab world arguably lending greater urgency to an Israeli peace drive—or at least an Israeli initiative of any sort of boldness—the central question is whether Netanyahu will betray his past and his hard-line father, who will turn 101 (!) later this month, and make substantial concessions.

As Benn frames things, it could be Netanyahu’s Sharon moment: A parallel to the former prime minister’s bold Gaza pullout, which at least at the time substantially improved his domestic popularity and which for all time likely salvaged his international reputation. Or, it could be just more Netanyahu.

The prime minister, Benn wrote, “needs to make a decision, something he has avoided doing for two years: choosing between the ideology he was raised on and which is part of his internal belief system, and the duties of the leader of a small country entirely dependent on international support.” Speaking of which! “It was only the flick of Obama’s finger that prevented a huge diplomatic defeat for the prime minister,” Benn noted of the United States’s U.N. veto last month, “and the White House went out of its way to make it clear that it does in fact support the condemnation and was voting against it only for domestic political considerations. Now the time has come to cash in, and Obama will demand a price.”

So far, National Union has refused to join Bibi’s government because the prime minister will not commit to a new spate of building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Developing …

Peres Seeks Meeting with Obama to Kick-Start Peace Process [Haaretz]
Netanyahu Vows to Keep Jordan River Posts [NYT]
Fayyad: PA Must Have Jordan Valley [Arutz Sheva]
Netanyahu May Be Breaking Away from the Far-Right to the Center [Haaretz]
Related: Personal History [Tablet Magazine]

• The Palestinians are planning to abandon the peace process in favor of nonviolent protests, U.N. action, and other gambits toward achieving statehood. [WSJ]

• Are you a Middle Eastern country? Wanna buy advanced weaponry? Business is still booming! [WP]

• Amazing pictures of Soviet Jews in the 1920s and ‘30s. [English Russia]

• Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen: Who said what? Fun quiz! [VF]

• Shimon Peres meets Florentino Perez, the president of the Spanish soccer team Real Madrid. I wonder if Perez just called Peres his given name—Perski—to make life easier? [JPost]

• Judith Butler on the Kafka papers. A certain type of reader will be very excited to read this. [LRB]

Loyal Scroll readers will know how bummed I am that I did not get to write the canonical article on observant Jewish Phish fans.

So far, so good: Over the weekend, the governing Supreme Council of the Armed Forces announced it would honor the 1979 accord; Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed the pledge. The countries’ defense ministers have also spoken (Egypt’s defense minister, Mohammed Tantawi, is the ruling figurehead); Ehud Barak dismissed comparisons of Egypt in 2011 to Iran in 1979. And in the past few days, many Israelis, while still shaken, have come around both to the unlikelihood of any dramatic alterations in its country’s relationship with Egypt—Israel “has no reason to fear,” a former Mossad chief told the New York Times—and to the fact that, well, the country that often proudly (and correctly) calls itself the region’s only democracy should be warm to the fact that it may soon have some company. “Israel will have no choice but to make peace with 80 million Egyptians,” Thomas Friedman writes. Such a peace will be more difficult to attain, but, if attained, he argues, it will be more durable.

Shimon Peres has been prominent in Israel for as long as there has been an Israel. He is 87 years old. “We bless the Egyptian people in anticipation that its desires for freedom and hope be met,” he said over the weekend. “A regime went away, and a new generation arrived.” Is there anything nicer than when someone whose old road is rapidly fading lends a hand in building the new one?

Israel’s Netanyahu Welcomes Egyptian Military’s Pledge to Honor Peace Accord [WP]
As Egypt Calms Down, So Do Israeli Nerves [NYT]
Postcard from Cairo, Part 2 [NYT]
Israel Hopes Egyptians Receive the Freedom They Seek, Peres Says [Haaretz]

• Is Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution about to spread to Jordan? [JPost]

• BREAKING: Some people argued over what it means to be pro-Israel. [Ben Smith]

• Hussein Agha and Robert Malley argue that the status quo is going to remain, well, the status quo. [NY Books]

• Sacha Baron Cohen will be playing Saddam Hussein in a forthcoming movie. Sure, why not? [Animal NY]

• Is Urban Outfitters drawing fashion inspiration from the ultra-Orthodox? [Jewcy]

“Some of you so called boycotters are just assholes,” declared Macy Gray, announcing she and her band would indeed play an upcoming gig in Tel Aviv. Here is that one Macy Gray song I know!

More than a decade ago, when you took the stage at some crowded Tel Aviv banquet hall and gave your first speech as Israel’s prime minister-elect, I was standing in the back of the room, pressed against many of my friends, all of us dirty and exhausted. We had spent the previous weeks darting from street to street, putting up fliers, canvassing, doing whatever we could to convince whomever listened that you were a far better alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu. And when you won, by a landslide, we were all thrilled; after the bumbling Shimon Peres and the sinister Bibi, you were, we thought, just the man we needed. When you spoke of your election as the dawn of a new day, we believed you.

Earlier this week, as I sipped my morning coffee and watched you announce your decision to leave the Labor party, found an independent faction, and remain in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, the first thought that came to my mind was that quick, sweaty handshake you gave me as you were inching your way out of the room on the night of your victory in 1999. That evening, you had won the confidence of 670,484 Israelis, or 20 percent of voters, representing 26 seats in the Knesset. Exactly 10 years later, in your most recent electoral challenge, the numbers were very different: 334,900 votes, less than 10 percent of the voting public, 13 Knesset seats. In the course of 10 years of leadership, dear Ehud, you’ve cut your party’s electoral strength by exactly half, a disgrace very few other Western politicians can claim.

Momentous as your political failure is, it is not much of a factor in the profound and bubbling contempt I feel for you, a visceral enmity that few of your colleagues have inspired in my otherwise tranquil political imagination. Nor am I too hung up on your record as the squanderer-in-chief of precious opportunities, from peace with Syria—which you bumbled after flying to Washington, getting cold feet, refusing to disembark from your plane, and sending the Clinton Administration into a rage—to talks with the Palestinians, which you largely doomed with your impulsive, poorly thought-out decision to try to resolve a century-long conflict in two make-or-break weeks. What I resent more than anything, Ehud, is your catastrophic misunderstanding of the burdens of leadership.

You are, I know, a reader; you like to boast about having polished off James Joyce’s Ulysses in a matter of hours, a bit of bravado that seemed appealing when I was young and seems pathetic now. But take a look, then, at this week’s parasha—there’s a lesson there about leadership you cannot afford to ignore. As the story begins, Moses, groaning under the burden of being the sole leader of nearly a half-million people, is visited by his father-in-law, Jethro. The latter is quick with advice: “The thing you are doing is not good,” he tells Moses. “You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people who are with you, for the matter is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” The solution Jethro suggests is simple, and it involves deputizing competent leaders and judges and setting up a structured hierarchy.

You were preoccupied this week with emptily comparing yourself to past leaders, from David Ben Gurion to Ariel Sharon; you might want to reach further back into Jewish history and take a page from Moses. Seeing the merit in Jethro’s suggestion, Moses immediately cedes much of his own power. He understands that good governments, and good governors, are those capable of shaking the unshakable feeling that they alone know what’s best. You, Ehud, have allowed that false feeling of omnipotence to shake you.

In 2005, when you announced your return to politics, you told participants in an online Q&A that you and only you were capable of resuscitating the Labor Party, and that you anticipated winning as many as 35 Knesset seats. That never happened, and your reappointment, in 2007, as minister of defense brought with it a spirit of repression and arrogance that many close to you have decried, remembering, for example, how you had once told a well-respected and knowledgeable general who disagreed with your analysis to sit down and shut up. You treated your political colleagues with the same imperious impatience; when they disagreed with you, you accused them of being post-modern—as if Labor was manned by Jean Baudrillard and Jürgen Habermas rather than Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Isaac Herzog—and left, leaving the party to lick the wounds you yourself had inflicted.

In light of all this, you might find Moses’ behavior puzzling. In giving up his power willingly, he, after all, is the ultimate freyer, or sucker, a character trait you’ve repeatedly mocked. Maybe, then, you should skip ahead in the parasha and get to its truly astonishing part: Designating the Israelites as his chosen people, God has his own thoughts about the nature of governance. “And now,” says the Lord, “if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasure out of all peoples, for Mine is the entire earth. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of princes and a holy nation.”

Imagine that, Ehud—a whole kingdom of priests, a holy nation moved by the spirit, with little need for guidance and less for small men with large egos. These days, we’re seeing sparks of this utopian vision in the Middle East far away from Israel, in embattled Tunisia. As the citizens of that country fight to unburden themselves of the onus of a corrupt, despotic, and incompetent leadership, the world, for the most part, is deeply supportive. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, urged the Tunisian government to reflect “the wishes and aspirations of Tunisian people,” and the Arab League called on “all political forces, representatives of Tunisian society and officials to stand together and unite to maintain the achievements of the Tunisian people.” The word out of Jerusalem was distinctly different. Netanyahu expressed his concern about the popular uprising jeopardizing the “stability” in the region, while his deputy, the Tunisian-born Silvan Shalom, focused on the fate of the country’s approximately 2,000 Jews, as if the rest of those taking a risk and lifting their voices were negligible.

A Tunisian-style popular reform movement terrifies Netanyahu and Shalom, men whose careers are firmly rooted in the arid ground of the status quo. And I imagine it terrifies you, too: There’s little room in a kingdom of priests for bonapartes and solipsists. But the people are in the streets in Tunis, and they might soon be in the streets in Tel Aviv, too, tired of the corruption and opportunism and perfidiousness of their rotting political class. When that happens, don’t bother turning to this week’s parasha for inspiration. It would be too late.

Sincerely,

L. Leibovitz

• The IDF will discharge the soldier who allegedly shot an innocent 66-year-old Palestinian in Hebron during a raid of Hamas earlier this month. [WP]

• A major debate is taking place over funding of Israeli human rights NGOs, some of which, right-wing critics say, contribute to the deligitimization of Israel. [WP]

• Sonia Peres, the wife of the Israeli president, died at 87. She and Shimon were married for 65 years. [JPost]

• The Iranian population is slowly adjusting to raised prices, which are the result of slashed subsidies. [WSJ]

• Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution was the talk of the Arab Economic Summit. [LAT]

Visiting Israel yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed the naysayers, insisting, “There are many differences in the United States system versus Israel. Part of that is driven by sheer size.” She did say she was impressed after receiving a security-focused tour of Ben Gurion Airport—a good reminder that security expertise is likely to be an increasing Israeli export over the coming years. Just don’t expect the whole system.

Napolitano: Israeli-Style Airport Security Won’t Work for U.S. [Fox News]
Related: What’s So Great About Israeli Security? [Slate]
Earlier: Israeli Airport Security All the Rage

To their credit, most of Israel’s leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres, fiercely denounced the rabbis and stated that the ruling stands in opposition to Judaism’s values and teachings. But words aren’t enough: To clearly send a message that racism will not be tolerated, the government must act swiftly to remove these noxious men from their posts.

According to the law governing religious services, a chief municipal rabbi, being a public servant funded by taxpayers’ money, is prohibited from behaving “in a way unbecoming of the stature of a rabbi in Israel.” As Haaretz noted in its editorial this morning, racist and populist rulings that rely on feeble-minded and simplistic interpretations of the Halacha very much fall into the unbecoming category.

Theoretically, the rabbis in question are accountable to their respective municipalities. If, however, the attorney general decides that a municipal rabbi has acted inappropriately, he can instruct Israel’s two chief rabbis to discipline the errant clergyman. If Netanyahu is sincere in his condemnations, he should instruct his attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, to take immediate actions against the rabbis and make sure they no longer enjoy the prestige and the public funding that comes with their posts. Anything short of such direct action is shameful.

Racism at the Expense of Israeli Citizens [Haaretz]
Israel’s Legal Establishment Silent Amid Uproar Over ‘Racist’ Rabbis [Haaretz]

Justin Bieber, to those of our readers without access to gossip blogs or tween girls, is the implausibly coiffed, underaged, pseudo-Jewish singing sensation, known for intricate pop masterpieces with titles like “Baby,” “Love Me,” and “One Less Lonely Girl.” He is also the focus of a recent campaign by the Peres Center for Peace, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to “reconciliation by and for the people of the Middle East.” And what better way to reconcile than to bring Bieber, at a reported cost of $1.5 million, to Tel Aviv, where he’s slated to give a concert next April?

“The Peres Center is thrilled to invite renowned persons and artists, to expose them to the Center’s activities and show them a different side of Israel,” a spokesperson for the Center told Haaretz‘s entertainment magazine, Mouse (translation mine). The Center stepped in after a planned Bieber concert in Israel fell through for financial reasons, and helped rally the necessary funding. Which has got to be Peres’s second most formidable accomplishment, after that business with the Oslo Accords and the Nobel Peace Prize.

Earlier: Justin Bieber, Almost Jewish

• 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.

The flotilla episode is fraught with complexities and ironies on both sides. While the Turkish-led mission focused on a grave human rights crisis—Israel’s oppressive treatment of Gaza’s Palestinians—Turkey’s righteous indignation toward Israel both oversimplifies Israel’s distress about Hamas and seems glaringly hypocritical in view of its own human-rights problems. Those problems, which include Turkey’s repressive and violent treatment of its large Kurdish population, some 15 million or more, and its record of legal detention, imprisonment, and torture of Turkish intellectuals, journalists, and political activists, constitutes one of the world’s worst human rights records, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports repeatedly show, over the past 20 years. Add to that Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus in violation of international law and its international campaign to falsify the history of its genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and the ironies multiply.

While there remains a narrative among opinion-makers like New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman that frames Turkey as an exemplary friend and a real democracy, Jews should wrestle with some truths about past and present realities. Jews, like Christians, lived as designated infidels under the Ottomans, often under harsh and repressive laws; Zionists were jailed and killed outright by the Turkish government through the end of World War I (Palestine was under Ottoman rule then). The U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an American Jew, Henry Morgenthau, said more than once that he feared that the fate of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks awaited the Jews next. It remains uncomfortable for Jews to recall that Turkey supplied the Nazis with large amounts of chromium during World War II, a mineral that was used, among other things, for killing in concentration camps. And today a virulent anti-Semitism has spread throughout Turkey so that recently a banner of the Islamic Saadet Party read: “Legendary leader Hitler, our patience is running out, we need your spirit.”

It’s a strange irony that in recent decades Israeli and Jewish diasporan groups have colluded with Turkey’s aggressive policy of denying and rewriting the history of the Armenian Genocide. In this equation the Armenian past has become a bargaining chip between Turkey and Israel, which have a regional partnership based on reciprocal needs. Turkey is an important source of Israel’s water supply and at least until recently, had been a friendly Muslim ally in a hostile region. Israel supplies Turkey with high-powered weapons, and the lucrative military manufacturing deals are important to Israel’s economy.

In 1982—by threatening the lives and livelihoods of Jews in Turkey—Turkey pressured the Israeli government to stop a genocide studies conference in Tel Aviv, at which a group of scholars were giving papers on the Armenian Genocide. As a result the Israeli government pulled out its support, Elie Wiesel decided he could not participate, and the conference was moved to an out-of-the-way location and was greatly diminished. In the 1990s, two Armenian documentaries that were to be aired on Israeli TV—one of them about the Armenian community of Jerusalem—were canceled at the last minute because of Turkish pressure. From 1989 on, Jewish-American organizations have worked at Ankara’s request to help stop a simple, non-binding Armenian Genocide resolution from passing in the U.S. Congress. When former Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid declared 10 years ago that he wanted to institute a new history curriculum with a chapter on genocide that would have “a broad reference to the Armenian genocide,” he was rebuked by his government and shortly thereafter left office.

In recent years, the Israeli government has mimicked at times the Turkish government’s propaganda about 1915. Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, went as far as to say: “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide.” Peres’ crude denial elicited angry responses from Israeli scholars, and Israel Charny, the director of the Institute on Genocide in Jerusalem, crystallized the anger of many when he replied: “As a Jew and an Israeli I am ashamed of the extent to which you have now entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to denials of the Holocaust.”

The question remains: Is aiding Turkey’s denial of a genocidal past something Israel can continue to do? And at what cost? Amos Elon, writing in Haaretz about the “hypocrisy, opportunism, and moral trepidation” of Israeli collusion with Turkey, put it well when he asked: “But where is the boundary between the natural chauvinism of exploitation and the cheap opportunism of hypocrisy? What happens when the survivors of one Holocaust make political deals over the bitter memory of the survivors of another Holocaust?”

***

While political events provide opportunities for moments of reform, change, or introspection, it is not crass opportunism, I believe, that should dictate a change in Israeli policy on the Armenian Genocide. Rather, might this be a time—when the ironies of history have surfaced in the wake of the flotilla episode—for Israel and some Jewish diasporan organizations to rethink the moral concession Israel has made in this ethical arena—not as revenge against Turkey, but as thoughtful reflection on painful truths?

Given Turkey’s relentless campaign to deny the Armenian Genocide and insinuate its own extreme national narrative into democratic societies around the world, Israel’s call for the genocide’s proper and long overdue recognition would have important ethical meaning. It would, among other things, be a redress to genocide denial in general. As scholars have noted, denial is the final stage of genocide. The distinguished Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt has written that “denial of genocide, whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews … strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.”

Recognizing the Armenian Genocide would allow Israel to embrace the deeply rooted relationship between Jews and Armenians in the modern age. When Hitler exhorted his military advisers eight days before invading Poland in 1939, “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” he made it clear that he was both inspired by what the Young Turk government had done to the Armenians in 1915 and also noted that because the memory of what had been the most well-reported human rights catastrophe of the first quarter of the 20th century had been washed away, it was easier to commit genocide again.

Hitler learned a good deal from the genocide of the Armenians because Germany was Turkey’s wartime ally, and there was a great deal of documentation from German foreign officers and other German personnel in Turkey at the time. There are, of course, parallels—in bureaucratic organization, killing squad implementation, race ideology, and more—between the two events. Yet what ties Jews to Armenians even more deeply is the powerful role Jews have played in bearing witness to and later defining Turkey’s genocide.

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s life remains a crucial part of the history of rescue and resistance during the Armenian Genocide. As U.S. ambassador to Turkey, he had the courage to step outside his prescribed role as ambassador and confront Pashas Talaat and Enver—the two major architects of the plan; he implored both the U.S. and German governments to intercede and stop the mass killing of the Armenian population; and he was a primary force in helping to organize the first major relief campaign for the Armenians in the United States.

In the end Morgenthau would lose his job because of his stance on the Armenians. After leaving Turkey in 1916 and noting that it would remain “a place of unutterable horror” for him, he included in his acclaimed World War I memoir of 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, the first full narrative about the Armenian Genocide in English.

Franz Werfel, the Austrian Jewish novelist who escaped Hitler’s death list by a hair in 1934, wrote the first major novel about the Armenian Genocide, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which depicted Armenian resistance to massacre in a small mountain village; it was also a novel that was a specific warning to the Jews of Europe about what might happen to them. The Nazis banned and burned the book in 1934, but the novel would inspire Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and became an important text in the educational curriculum for Jews in Palestine and then Israel.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar who coined the word genocide, was the first to use the term Armenian Genocide in the early 1940s—noting that it was the precise term for intended group destruction of the Armenians in 1915. He underscored that the concept “genocide” derived from his understanding of the acts committed against the Armenians in 1915 and against the Jews in the 1940s: “Examples of genocide,” he wrote in 1949, “are the destruction of the Armenians in the first World War, the destruction of the Jews in the second World War.” He also noted in his autobiography that his study of the Armenian massacres was a turning point in his life’s work.

In the modern era, the contributions to the Armenian Genocide discourse made by Jewish scholars both in Israel and worldwide has been extraordinary, and a list would be long and include Elie Wiesel, Robert Jay Lifton, Deborah Lipstadt, Robert Melson, Jay Winter, the documentary filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, Israeli scholars Yehuda Bauer, Israel Charny, and Yair Auron, who wrote The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. Recently, the Center For Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York put on brilliant exhibitions on the lives of both Raphael Lemkin and Henry Morgenthau—in which the Armenian genocide figured significantly.

Given this long-standing record of Jewish engagement and intellectual achievement concerning the Armenian Genocide, and the deep ties between the two cultures—it would seem an organic thing for Israel to finally say: The game is over. The truth of history, the meaning of genocide, the importance of ethical memory is a defining part of Jewish intellectual tradition and identity. And, in the Armenian case, the two genocidal histories commingle in deep and historical ways. As for fear of Turkey? The other 20 countries (including France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Greece, and Canada) that have passed Armenian Genocide resolutions have witnessed Turkey’s initial diplomatic anger, an ambassador recalled for a short time, and then it’s been back to business as usual—proving that the hysteria passes and life goes on.

The Israeli government could recognize the Armenian Genocide by honoring the words of the great founding genocide scholar Lemkin—a Holocaust survivor who lost 49 members of his own family to the Nazis. In August 1950, Lemkin wrote to a colleague: “Let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat of the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.”

As for Armenians, in the midst of this, they look on with bewilderment, anger, bitterness. For the sizable meaning and historical significance of the genocide committed against them, they feel endlessly embattled in the effort to preserve the truthful memory of what happened to them. It seems to most Armenians that the accurate memory of their history is an ethical necessity, a minimal thing to ask others to affirm in the face of the continued assault on historical truth by Turkey. Israel’s affirmation would be of distinct ethical importance given the common experience the two peoples have shared. For Israel, colluding with a denialism is too painfully ironic.

Peter Balakian, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, among other books.

Click here to view all articles in this series.

Outside its territory, Turkey has given aid and cover to Iran’s nuclear ambitions while trying to assert its leadership over some of the most radical forces in the Middle East. Turkey launched a series of salvos at Israel, beginning with Erdogan’s furious verbal assault on Israeli President Shimon Peres in Davos and culminating in the Gaza flotilla martyrdom mission of the Mavi Marmara, which was planned and staffed by the IHH, a Turkish fundamentalist organization with close ties to Erdogan’s government. Meanwhile, the question of who “lost Turkey” has become a political football between the United States and Europe—with Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently blaming the E.U.—and has disrupted President Barack Obama’s hopes of constructing a pro-American security architecture to follow the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The transformation of Turkey from close military and strategic ally to bitter public enemy may be the most consequential blow Israel has sustained in the past decade: Unlike the Second Lebanon war, Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, or last summer’s flotilla incident, the recent shift in foreign relations is not just a public relations disaster but a fundamental change in the regional order, which has turned a powerful friend into a determined enemy.

Coming this week:

Monday, October 18: “Another Israel.” James Kirchick reports from Kurdistan on the plight of the Kurds, and their affinities with Jews.

Tuesday, October 19: “State of Denial.” Peter Balakian, author of among other works Black Dog of Fate, sees a moment for Israel to reconsider its stance on the Armenian genocide.

Wednesday, October 20: “Veiled Threat.” Columnist Lee Smith talks to Harvard economist Dani Rodrik about the Ergenekon Affair, and the prospects for Islamism in Turkey.

Thursday, October 21: “Asia Minority.” Aliza Marcus, author of Blood and Belief, checks in on imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, and examines why Erdogan is losing control of the Kurdish problem.

And more.

Click here to view all articles in this series.

In a country and a region led by men with outsize egos and florid personality disorders, the leader of Israel’s opposition Kadima party is an anomaly because she seems so resolutely normal—the hard-working child of ideologues who devoted their lives to building the state. Along with President Shimon Peres, she is the acceptable face of Israeli democracy in world capitals that feel little affection for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A protégée of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Livni served as foreign minister under Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert. She was the official lead Israeli negotiator during the 2007 Annapolis peace conference (while the real negotiating was done in secret by Olmert) and explained Israel’s wars to the world.

She began her career in an elite Mossad unit in Paris between 1980 and 1984, after being recruited into the agency at the age of 22 by a childhood friend named Mira Gal, who later became her chief of staff. “The risks were tangible,” Gal has said of those years, when the Jewish community in Paris was targeted by Palestinian bombs and machine-gun attacks and Israeli agents were said to have assassinated a key figure in the Iraqi nuclear program, an Egyptian physicist named Yehia el-Mashad, who was found in his hotel room with his throat slashed open and multiple stab wounds.

While it is assumed that Livni’s role as a young Mossad officer involved her formidable analytical skills and fluency in French, it is also worth noting that her father, Eitan Livni, served as chief operations officer for the Irgun during the Jewish underground’s bloody revolt against British rule in mandate Palestine.

I spoke to Livni in a modest room in an Upper East Side hotel. She was accompanied by a handler and a lone security man.

After Sept. 11, many in the American Jewish community had a renewed sense of a shared fate with Israel, especially in New York City. We were looking around nervously on buses and subways and being checked for weapons and bombs. Do you think that feeling of mutual understanding has dissolved?

Sept. 11 was a shock to the whole world. But I don’t think we should define ourselves through shared threats, because in doing so, we allow our enemies to define us. We need to define ourselves through a common vision that helps Israel put some meaning into the words “Jewish State.”

Many American Jews were shocked when the Rotem bill got wide publicity here. They felt that the State of Israel asks them to support the state and consider themselves partners in a shared vision, and here the State of Israel is saying that we, our children, our marriages, our rabbis, our customs, are not really Jewish.

I think that it’s a combination of a problematic system of election with very weak politicians. The problem is that a party like Likud, which is not ultra-Orthodox, gives the monopoly on the substance of the words “Jewish State” to the ultra-Orthodox. And this is something that affects not only our relationship with world Jewry but also my life in Israel. Together we need to change this bill. Kadima voted against it, and we hope the coalition will change it as well.

I was recently at a very nice dinner at the Plaza Hotel with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, and assorted luminaries of the American Jewish community, hosted by Danny Abraham to honor President Mahmoud Abbas. Do you think these kinds of events are helpful in promoting peace, or do they simply give the Palestinian leadership a propaganda card they can play here?

In order to understand the others, we need to sit and speak with them. Since the elections, I decided personally not to have these kinds of meetings with Palestinians, because according to the rules of Israeli democracy I need to give space to the prime minister to make the right decisions. But I think this is an opportunity not just for Mahmoud Abbas to make propaganda but also to be asked difficult questions.

Supporting Israel was a free ticket for American Jews when George W. Bush was president. The Jews could count on the fact that Bush would support Israel even while they voted for the Democrats. Now with Barack Obama in office, some American Jews seem to feel torn between their traditional attachments to the Democratic Party and to Israel.

I know at first that when Obama was elected and he said that he supports a two-state solution, there were some people in Israel who said that he was anti-Israeli. But this was basically the same vision as President Bush. I don’t think that everything is a zero-sum game, in which when the president of the United States says something, that means that he is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli, or vice versa. I think that part of the responsibility of leadership here and in Israel is to find the common interests and issues on which we can work together. I believe that the need to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon is a shared interest, and to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a shared interest.

You had a close relationship with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. What did you learn from her about how American administrations, regardless of party, perceive the conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and its neighbors?

For me it is clear that when it comes to the need of Israel to defend itself, the role of the United States of America is crucial. It was clear in our relations that we don’t have a hidden agenda. We played with open cards, I with her, and she with me, hopefully. There was the same kind of relationship between the prime minister and the president. This openness is something very important.

In World War II, the American Jewish community sent 550,000 troops to fight Hitler, and Jewish scientists were central figures in the invention and manufacture of the atomic bomb. They were the foot-soldiers of American democracy. Now they go to Harvard and start Facebook.

They contribute in another way.

But we have no connection to military life. When we see pictures from the war in Lebanon or Operation Cast Lead, we say, “This is wrong. Why should we support this? It’s terrible. This is not what Judaism in my synagogue was about. This is an army that’s killing people.”

I made a speech at Harvard, and someone asked me the same question. [Here, Livni’s handler states that the person who asked the question was also a Jew. Livni nods.] He said, “How can you speak about Jewish values when the Israeli army killed a thousand people in Gaza?” I said to him the following: “I don’t ask the world to turn a blind eye when Israel is attacking Gaza or Lebanon, and I’m willing to be judged by the entire world, as long as the world is judging us according to its own values. In each democracy, in the legal system, which is the expression of the values of the society, there is a distinction made between a murderer and someone who kills somebody by mistake. When a terrorist is looking for a child to kill, on the lines at a discotheque, at a pizza parlor, on buses, in schools, in kindergartens, that person is a murderer who is looking for children to kill. When an Israeli soldier in Gaza is trying to kill terrorists sometimes, by mistake, civilians are also killed. I expect the entire international community, and especially the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and other members of the free world, who send their soldiers to fight all over the world, where sometimes civilians are killed, will understand and support us in making that distinction.”

I expect the Jews to understand because they know that in Israel, these soldiers are our children. An Israeli soldier is raised on values of respecting human life, and they don’t change their values when they turn 18 and enter the army. Even though they feel uneasy when these pictures are coming, they need to understand that these things happen when you defend your own citizens.

But that’s not how American Jews live their lives. They go on Facebook, they go to the shopping mall, they go to Harvard—but by and large, they don’t go into the army. Their reality is the reality of most people in the West, who live in a world that is largely detached from the killing that our soldiers do every day in far-away places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

While you were talking I had the following thought, which I think is important, and perhaps not unrelated to what you just said. In the past, Israel said to world Jewry that Israel is the safe place to be when things deteriorate in the places where you live. Israel is the safe shelter, we are going to keep this shelter for you, we are going to fight for the existence of this shelter. In return, you need to defend Israel whenever it is necessary, whether it is with AIPAC, or whatever. This was the nature of the dialogue between Israel and the Jews in the Diaspora.

Today’s Israel is not a safer place for Jews to live than other places in the world. Sometimes Israel is more dangerous. I don’t expect world Jewry just to defend Israel unconditionally. It is fine for them to criticize the policy of any Israeli government, as long as they understand that there is a difference between criticism of the policy of any government and the basics. Because there is a process of delegitimization of the State of Israel, and some of the criticism is being used by those who do not accept the right of Israel to exist. Simultaneously, we need to work together in order to decide what the meaning of the Jewish State is in terms of our shared values, and to speak about it.

I’m going to ask you a nice question that relates to the major themes that brought you here after I ask you one more bad question.

[Laughs] OK.

How many more years do you think that the State of Israel can maintain a wide-ranging settlement policy in the West Bank and still speak to the American Jewish public and the leaders of democratic nations as a normal, functioning democratic state?

I believe that the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state require us to make one big decision, which is not easy for any Israeli leader, and this is to divide the land of Israel and to implement the vision of two states for two peoples. We need to choose between two different visions, one of which used to be the vision of the State of Israel, and is now the vision of a minority, which is that we need to have Jews living on the entire land—

That’s the vision that you grew up with. It was your father’s vision.

Yes. But I grew up with other values, including respect for others. That was also part of the vision of my parents and of Jabotinsky. Usually people are familiar with Jabotinsky for saying that both sides of the Jordan River will be ours. But that is not simply what Jabotinsky wrote.

Jabotinsky was the most human and realistic of the early Zionist leaders because he understood that the Palestinians were also a people with a history and human pride and that they would not simply accept the idea that the Jews would transform Palestine into a Jewish state.

So, you see, I grew up with this understanding and these values also. We need to divide the land so that we can have Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and a democratic state.

Former Prime Minister Olmert recently spoke in public about what he says are the terms he offered to Mahmoud Abbas, including the division of the land more or less on the 1967 borders and giving up Israeli sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem. He says that Abbas did not respond to his offer. If Netanyahu were to make the same offer and again there was no response, do you think that Israel simply needs to leave that land unilaterally the way Sharon left Gaza?

I supported the disengagement plan, but I prefer to have a peace treaty with the Palestinians. Any withdrawal from more land needs to be part of an agreement that this is the end of the conflict.

But what if that’s not possible?

I know it’s possible. I negotiated for nine months. Olmert’s offer to Mahmoud Abbas was not part of these negotiations. I believe that by building the negotiations in the right way we can end the conflict. At least, I believe we haven’t tried it the right way yet, so we don’t know what the result will be.

If you had to imagine a project that would help to build a sense of community and shared destiny between the American Jewish community and the government and the people of Israel, what would that be?

I think we should have a kind of roundtable in which we decide on our priorities. But from listening to the situation here and knowing the situation in Israel, I think it’s education. In Israel we have a young generation that—whether they are ultra-Orthodox and not willing to accept other streams in Judaism, or whether they are secular and for them being a Jew is being a Hebrew-speaking Israeli person and going to the army—they don’t relate to the understanding that they are part of something larger and have brothers and sisters all over the world. In the Jewish communities here, my understanding is that, as you said, some young people feel embarrassed by Israel, they don’t defend Israel, for them Israel is somewhere in the Middle East, and they don’t feel that they need to be that concerned when things deteriorate in Israel. I think we need to invest in education on both sides.

I am being told that I have exhausted my 30 minutes. Can I have another five minutes?

OK. Three minutes.

How successful has the campaign to isolate and delegitimize the Iranian government been over the past year?

I think that the economic sanctions were not effective enough. And since you were talking in terms of delegitimization, I think that it didn’t work, because you could see Ahmadinejad only a few weeks ago taking the stage at the United Nations—

I was there. The room was two-thirds empty. Except for the press gallery, which was full.

The world gives Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials stages to express their agenda of hatred. I think that part of the sanctions should be diplomatic sanctions that deny these people stages to express these ideas. This is another kind of sanction that would not hurt the Iranian people but target these officials. The people in Iran can feel that these leaders are being delegitimized and not being given stages to say whatever they want to say, including Ahmadinejad’s horrific words about Sept. 11, denying the Holocaust, and stating clearly that his vision is to wipe the State of Israel off the map.

Is it your sense that the Stuxnet worm—

Oh, no. Your last question was enough.

If the Iranians can’t be sure that they control their own nuclear facilities, it makes it less possible for them to believe in the efficacy of their program, or in a future bomb. You have nothing to say on this subject?

Nothing.

• Community board approval of the Ground Zero Islamic center in May was followed (caveat: Correlation does not prove causation!) by a significant uptick in local U.S. governments’ alleged discrimination against Muslims trying to build mosques. [Ben Smith]

• Holocaust denier David Irving was denied permission to conduct a tour on the Auschwitz grounds. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Remnants of a 1500-year-old Samaritan synagogue were uncovered in the Jordan Valley. [JTA]

• The New Israel Fund has modified donation guidelines so as to try to avoid supporting groups not seen as sufficiently Zionist. [JTA]

• Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, unleashed on midtown Manhattan. Look out, ladies! [Page Six]

Mayor Bloomberg announced the winner of the Sukkah City competition. Jewcy was there.

The first person to learn about the Balfour Declaration—even before Rothschild—was Chaim Weizmann, who more than any other individual was responsible for winning the British government over to the Zionist cause. In The Balfour Declaration, his dynamic new telling of this famous history, Jonathan Schneer describes Weizmann’s reaction to the news, as recalled by a fellow Zionist leader, Shmuel Tolkowsky. “Weizmann was so filled with pleasure, Tolkowsky recorded, that he ‘behaved like a child: He embraced me for a long time, placed his head on my shoulder and pressed my hand, repeating over and over mazel tov.’ That night, at his home, at an impromptu celebration, Weizmann and his wife and friends literally danced for joy.” A month later, at a mass meeting in London, thousands of people heard Rothschild declare, “We are met on the most momentous occasion in the history of Judaism for the last eighteen hundred years.”

But was it? The Balfour Declaration is still regarded, almost a century later, as one of the great milestones in Jewish history and as the unofficial beginning of the State of Israel—if not its birthday, then its date of conception. Certainly, as Schneer shows, Weizmann and his colleagues—including Nahum Sokolow, the Zionist movement’s chief diplomat, and less famous figures like the Manchester-based Zionists Harry Sacher, Israel Sieff, and Simon Marks—had ample reason to celebrate. They had been working for years to convince the British government that Jewish settlement in Palestine would advance British interests in the Middle East, as well as being an act of historical justice for the Jews. They lobbied politicians all the way up to the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. They enlisted journalists like C.P. Scott, liberal editor of the Manchester Guardian, and society figures like Dorothy Rothschild, the 18-year-old daughter-in-law of the family’s French scion. And they met with a surprising degree of enthusiasm from the British Foreign Office, especially from Sir Mark Sykes, the roving diplomat who was Britain’s chief Middle East expert. (It was Sykes who told Weizmann about the Declaration, greeting him with the words, “It’s a boy.”)

One of the many ironies in this story is that Weizmann, a Russian-born Jew who more or less appointed himself the leader of British Zionism, came to be seen by the government as a more legitimate representative of Jewish interests than Britain’s own established Jewish organizations, which were mostly anti-Zionist. Schneer focuses on the figure of Lucien Wolf, a former journalist who was the head of the Conjoint Committee, a group devoted to lobbying against the Zionist program. To Wolf, just as to some Jewish anti-Zionists today, Zionism was a betrayal of the Jews’ “invincible attachment to things of the spirit and … their strongly marked individualism.” The future, he and his supporters believed, would be post-national, with no place for ethnically based states. Worse, creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine would endanger the claims of Jews everywhere else to equal citizenship.

It was to assuage this fear that the Declaration included the phrase about not prejudicing the rights of Jews in any other country. But this provision was not enough to satisfy Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, who was the only Jew in the Cabinet that approved the Balfour Declaration—and its most vocal opponent. When the Declaration was approved, Montagu wrote in his diary: “The Government has dealt an irreparable blow to Jewish Britons, and they have endeavoured to set up a people which does not exist.” There was a certain idealism in the assimilationist view, Schneer shows, as well as an obvious dread of Jewish conspicuousness. What it lacked, as Schneer points out, was any realism about the Jewish predicament. “Anti-Semitism has scaled heights beyond Montagu’s imagining in 1917,” he writes, “but without regard to Britain’s recognition of Palestine as ‘a national home for the Jewish people.’ ”

In other ways, however, it is surprising how much the Balfour Declaration still seems to matter. Readers of Tablet will remember, for instance, that this summer, Israel’s President Shimon Peres caused a sensation when he undiplomatically told Benny Morris that the British establishment had always been pro-Arab and anti-Jewish. In the ensuing debate, exhibit number one was the Balfour Declaration. To Zionists, it is a standing rebuke to British hypocrisy, since—according to historian Efraim Karsh, writing about Peres’ comment in the Jerusalem Post—“no sooner had Britain been appointed as the mandatory power in Palestine, with the explicit task of facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the country in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, than it reneged on this obligation.” To foes of Israel, on the other hand, the Declaration looks like proof that the country is a creature of imperialism. Thus a writer at the anti-Israel website middleeastmonitor.org speaks of “the persistent question marks over [Israel’s] legitimacy, going back to 1917 and colonial Britain’s endorsement of the Zionist project through the Balfour Declaration.”

It seems bizarrely easy to lose sight of the fact that, in the 93 years since the Declaration was issued, the Jewish population of what began as Palestine and is now Israel has grown from less than a hundred thousand to nearly 6 million. A network of agricultural settlements has become an advanced urban society and a powerful state. In short, it should no longer matter, practically or morally or legally, whether the Balfour Declaration made Israel possible, since it certainly did not make modern Israel actual. As Karsh notes, in fact, the Declaration was the high point of British enthusiasm for the Zionist project. Within five years of the Declaration, the British were restricting land purchases by Jews in Palestine; in the 1930s, they closed the region to Jewish immigration, just as Nazism made it more necessary than ever; and in the 1940s, they resisted Jewish claims to statehood as long as possible, including with violence.

Even the subtitle of Schneer’s book—“The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict”—seems to overstate the Declaration’s real significance. It is certainly true that Britain’s Middle East policy during World War I—and nothing less than that is Schneer’s real subject—laid up plenty of trouble for the future. Parallel to the story of the Declaration, Schneer tells the even better-known story of the Arab Revolt: the attempt, assisted by British officials including Lawrence of Arabia, to overthrow the Ottomans and establish an Arab state in the Middle East. Even before the war was over, it became clear that Britain’s promise to Sharif Hussein of Mecca—to install him as king of an Arab empire stretching from Damascus to Baghdad—was not made in good faith.

For one thing, of course, it contradicted the pledge of Palestine to the Jews. Still more duplicitous was the Sykes-Picot agreement, in which Britain and France secretly carved up the map of the Middle East between them. Britain even considered making a deal with the Ottoman Turks—a part of the story that Schneer tells in great detail, even though the unofficial negotiations never amounted to much. Even the willingness to consider a separate peace with the Turks, however, showed how ready the British were to throw over their Arab and Jewish clients in the interest of winning the war.

But even if the British had not been so feckless, there is no reason to think that more careful diplomacy could have headed off “the Arab-Israeli conflict.” The root of that conflict was not that Britain promised the same land to two different peoples, but that two different peoples wanted the same land. The Balfour Declaration, which inspired such jubilation among Zionists in 1917, did not give that land to the Jews. It only gave the Jews the opportunity to struggle for it.

In one of these towns—Oguz, Azerbaijan, a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Baku, the country’s oil-booming capital on the western shore of the Caspian Sea—live up to 80 Mountain Jews among a population of more than 6,000. The history of the Mountain Jews, who live mainly in Azerbaijan and the Russian republic of Dagestan is, according to members of the community, rooted about 2,500 years ago in their exodus from Israel, their gradual passage through Persia (where they picked up the Farsi-based language they still speak), and their eventual settlement in the Caucasus mountains.

Sitting in the dark-stone building that houses Baku’s Mountain Jewish synagogue, Semyon Ikhilov, the Mountain Jews’ national leader, shakes off the idea that his people might be descended from indigenous Caucasian mountain dwellers who converted to Judaism. “We’re real Jews who came out of Israel,” Ikhilov said, explaining that they acquired the moniker “Mountain Jews” because they settled in the peaks. “We were not mountain people.” And according to a recent genetic study led by researchers in Israel and Estonia, Mountain Jews share a common origin in the Levantine region of the Near East with other Diaspora Jewish communities.

While once there were as many as 40,000 Jews in Azerbaijan, today there are between 8,000 and 25,000. The estimate varies widely in part because many of them live in Israel or Russia but still retain Azeri passports. Among those who remain in Oguz, many seem to practice a Judaism guided by the spirit of the religion rather than by the letter of its law. They live in a country where more than 90 percent of the population is Muslim, and the demanding rhythm of working on the Soviet-era kolkhoz, or collective farm, coupled with the atheism of the Soviet Union, may all have, over time, muted the zeal of the Jews of Oguz.

Yet push a bit further and an attachment to Judaism emerges. “Last night we lit the Shabbat candles,” says 30-year-old Gunai Iusupova, sitting in the airy dining room of her wooden-balconied Caucasian house. “We said a brucha and ate salted bread. I served up food prepared fresh for Shabbat.” The garden outside was bright with pale pink and deep red summer roses. “And that’s not just us, that’s all the Jews here in Oguz,” she adds, explaining that although they may not observe all the rules of Shabbat precisely, Friday night dinner is sacrosanct.

Standing in the hot sun outside one of the town’s two synagogues, Temur Natalinov, 54, who maintains both houses of worship, explained that he opens them every Shabbat. The men leave quickly, he said, but the women often linger.

Arranged marriages are not uncommon here, Racim Hananayev, 50, the leader of Oguz’s Jews, told me, even for those who leave the town. Hananayev’s wife, Dilbar, served a breakfast of egg, salty cheese, fresh bread, and thick homemade strawberry preserve. She offered met, a bitter, uniquely Caucasian condiment made from the green cherry plum.

Nowhere is the mix of Azeri and Jewish cultures more fascinating than in Krasnaya Sloboda, which sits across a river from Guba, famous throughout the Caucasus for its woven rugs. Just beyond the two settlements looms an imposing mountain, white and icy even in summer.

The two towns seem similar enough, though Krasnaya Sloboda looks more prosperous, full of houses with freshly painted brickwork, new windows, and new iron and lattice roofs mixed in among a few dilapidated wooden homes.

But the difference is more than surface deep. Krasnaya Sloboda is inhabited almost exclusively by Mountain Jews, between 2,000 and 5,000 of them, according to various estimates. In the mid-18th century the khan of Guba, Hussein, established Yevraiskaya Sloboda, literally “Jewish settlement,” as a place for Jews to live safe from attack. His son and successor, Feteli, so the story goes, decreed that if anyone came to attack the town, the Jews should light fires and he would see them from across the river and send help to defend the inhabitants.

The town, which was renamed “Krasnaya,” or “red,” in honor of the Soviet Red Army, has seen its population dwindle from its Communist-era height of 18,000. Some emigrants have gone to Israel, others to Moscow, where many are successful businessmen—hence the prosperous appearance of some buildings here—and where a few have become multi-millionaires, with their reputations becoming legendary back home. According to one Jewish local I spoke with, one of these titans “holds half of Moscow in his hands.”

Those that stay while away the hot days in an outdoor chaikhana, a typical Azeri teahouse, sucking on sugar cubes soaked in tea. Nearby, under the shade of chestnut trees, old men play nard, a traditional board game.

Iunus Davidov, a Jewish 19-year-old, explains that there was no work in the town and that in winter there is hardly a soul to be seen there. “It is hard,” he says. “And in winter it is so cold, it can fall to minus 35 degrees, and sometimes there is no gas or electricity.”

Nonetheless, Krasnaya Sloboda has three schools and two synagogues, with a third being beautifully restored, and in the summer nearly all the émigrés return to spend some time in their hometown, Davidov said.

“There is always a minyan, indeed we always have at least 50 people at prayer time,” says Boris Simanduyev, a community leader. “There has always been a rabbi from Krasnaya Sloboda, and there always will be.” On entering the town’s main synagogue, which is covered wall-to-wall in overlapping oriental rugs, we had removed our shoes, as is the custom here.

Rugs also cover the floor of the cool central room in the Yevdaev family home, where 32-year-old Sara Yevdaeva gathered leaves to stuff with meat to make dolma, food for relatives who were due to arrive from Moscow and Baku for the first anniversary of Sara’s mother-in-law’s death. Sara explains one of the customs of her community. “Whether it is here or in Moscow or elsewhere, Mountain Jews don’t allow their wives to work,” she says.

The hardships of winter make year-round life in the town impossible for Sara to imagine, but Moscow, where she lives for most of the year, has its difficulties too. The rise of extreme nationalism in Russia means Sara, who like many Mountain Jews looks much like any other person from the Caucasus, has experienced the racist abuse frequently leveled at people from Russia’s southern borderlands and beyond. The Mountain Jews all concur that, unlike in Russia, in Azerbaijan they have never experienced any prejudice.

This is all the more surprising, perhaps, in a country where international observers have documented increasing restrictions on freedom of expression and where dissent is often quashed. The current president, Ilham Aliyev, took over from his late father, Heydar, in 2003. Posters of both Aliyevs, in action and thoughtful repose, are everywhere. In 2009 the government amended the constitution to tighten controls on religious groups, making all unregistered religious activity illegal. Those who received their religious education abroad, for example, are banned from leading religious activities.

The Azerbaijan State Committee for Work with Religious Associations, though, argues that the changes in the law on religion strengthen tolerance in the country. The committee’s press office explains that some religious leaders educated abroad had come under the influence of radicals who aimed to destroy Azerbaijan’s “tolerant atmosphere,” and the minister in charge of such matters has previously linked the 2009 moves on religion with combating Islamic fundamentalism—the threat of Wahhabism and of Islamic violence in the North Caucasus spilling over into Azerbaijan.

In late 2009, a Baku court jailed 26 people for an August 2008 attack on a mosque in the capital, in which two people were killed. Those convicted claimed to be members of a radical Islamist group that is believed to have roots in the north Caucasian republic of Dagestan. Also in 2009, two Lebanese men were jailed in Baku for conspiring to attack the Israeli embassy there. In 2007, the Azeri authorities said they had prevented attacks on oil installations and the British and U.S. embassies planned by what they called a “radical Wahhabi group.”

Critics, however, suggest that the authorities are using the threat of fundamentalism to tighten the screws on religious communities and restrict free speech.

Evidently, the government perceives no threat from Azerbaijan’s Jewish communities, nor from Israel, with which it has a developing relationship. Shimon Peres’ 2009 trip to Baku was the most recent and highest-level visit by an Israeli dignitary, a move that angered Iran. Azerbaijan—which is locked in an unresolved territorial conflict with neighboring Armenia—buys arms from Israel, and there is an Israeli embassy in Baku. This relationship is doubtless appreciated by Azerbaijan’s Jews, who are courted by the authorities with official greetings on Rosh Hashanah and Pesach and visits to synagogue openings.

According to Alexander Murinson, an expert on Azerbaijan’s Jews and Azeri-Israeli relations, Azeri respect for the Jews is genuine and deeply rooted—in part stemming from the fact that in Soviet times, Jews, especially Ashkenazim, were well represented among the Azeri intellectual elite. Those Jews who stayed, he said, still have some leverage, with the Mountain Jews wielding power due to the strength of their trading clans.

There is also a more calculated political element to the relationship. In the early days of Azeri independence the authorities deliberately reached out to the Jewish communities, realizing that they could be a magnet for the organized Jewish community in the United States, with its impressive lobbying power, said Murinson. And for a government sometimes accused of intolerance, its relationship with the Jewish minority seems to be put on display, not least by Jewish leaders, two of whom insisted to me that President Aliyev had repeatedly described the Mountain Jews as his brothers. Many foreign dignitaries visiting Azerbaijan find that Krasnaya Sloboda is on their itinerary, as what Murinson called a “showcase.” The state, by email, disagreed: The visits are not for show, a spokesman explained, but to meet its own high standards of tolerance.

Sarah Marcus is a freelance journalist based in Tbilisi, Georgia, and has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Daily Telegraph.

Do Peres’s comments sound familiar? That is because you first read them in Tablet Magazine. (Peres is also a soon-to-be Nextbook Press author.) Israeli historian Benny Morris conducted the interview; we ran it last Monday.

Last night, Peres’s office issued a statement backtracking from his comments: “President Peres never accused the British people of anti-Semitism,” it read. “The president does not believe that British governments are motivated by anti-Semitism, nor were they in the past.” UPDATE: Benny Morris stands by every word quoted in the piece, though he does not agree with the contextualization of the passages quoted in some British newspapers. Peres nowhere said to Morris, as implied by some of the British publications, that the British were an anti-Semitic people or Britain an anti-Semitic country.

Coincidentally, we published Peres’s remarks on the same day that British Prime Minister David Cameron told a group of Turkish businessmen that Gaza was “a prison camp,” though the actual interview took place earlier. Peres “got it wrong,” according to one Conservative lawmaker, and that appeared to be the general official sentiment (though there was also assent from other quarters).

As for that interview: Maybe it demands a fresh read now, hmm? While you are on the topic, you can check out Adam Kirsch’s review of Anthony Julius’s recent book on, yes, English anti-Semitism.

Peres Calls British ‘Anti-Israeli,’ Sees U.K. Anti-Semitism [JTA]
Fury as Israel President Claims English ‘Anti-Semitic’ [Telegraph]
Peres Denies Calling British Anti-Semites [JTA]
Related: Making History [Tablet Magazine]
Albion’s Shame [Tablet Magazine]
David Ben-Gurion [Nextbook Press]

At one point in my recent interviews with Israeli President Shimon Peres, I ask him why his mentor David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, in choosing among many promising young men of his circle, selected Peres as his aide. Perhaps motivated by modesty, the 87-year-old Peres doesn’t offer a clear explanation. But without doubt, the “old man,” as Ben-Gurion was often called, had spotted the youngster’s oratorical and intellectual brilliance, which has entranced world leaders, though not always the Israeli public.

At home, Peres’ persona was shrouded for decades in a pall of popular distrust. He lacked credibility among many Israelis—which explains, in part, his inability to win general and internal Labor Party elections. Rabin repeatedly beat him, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in contests for the Labor leadership. One result of the bad blood between the two was that Rabin called Peres an “indefatigable underminer” (hatran bilti nil’eh), a description Peres thought unjustified. But the charge stuck and thereafter shadowed his political career. Though the two men apparently worked well together during Rabin’s second premiership, in 1992-1995, when Peres served as foreign minister, Peres proved unable to shake off their troubled history. Rabin’s martyrdom reinforced what he had left behind as his legacy. Peres eventually, only on his second try, won the presidency—not by popular majority but by Knesset vote.

How deeply he believes in his oft-proclaimed vision of a “new Middle East” after a decade of disappointment and terror is anyone’s guess. The hard core of “Mr. Security” surely remains: Hamas rocketeers and Turkish “peace flotillas,” and, possibly, Iranian nuclear madmen need to be forcibly contained and faced down. Beneath his polished, world-weary exterior, he is still the ex-defense minister who believes that for a stable Israel, security concerns must take the highest priority and that any chance of peace is ultimately contingent on Israel’s strength, and he seems to carry considerable clout as adviser and elder statesman with the current brood of politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite his repeated failures to win election as prime minister, Peres is now a highly popular president, distanced from the daily toil of politics in the largely ceremonial head-of-state role, with a steady 78 percent public approval rating.

I interview Peres in his office, seated around a coffee table. He wears a suit and tie, about which he complains (“I meet diplomats all day”). His media adviser, Ayelet Frish, and her assistant sit with us throughout the two interviews, which were conducted in the Presidential Mansion in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh quarter in early July and lasted for approximately 80 minutes each. Ayelet occasionally interjects, “That’s off the record,” when she feels her boss has said something excessively revealing. I’m not sure he remembers that I had interviewed him in the past, when I worked at the Jerusalem Post in the 1980s and he was Israel’s foreign minister. I can clearly picture a briefing he gave to journalists accompanying him to Alexandria, where he was to visit Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Peres had sat in an armchair in the center of his hotel room, and the journalists were draped over assorted chairs or seated on the carpet. I remember that he was brilliant. A quarter of a century on, he appears more tired, his voice weaker; perhaps altogether not quite as sharp.

I ask him about the 1948 war, in which some 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of the area that became the Jewish state. (Over the past three decades, I have written extensively about the war, devoting three books to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1947-1949. Peres, as far as I know, has never publicly commented on my books—though I have sensed, over the years, a certain displeasure on his part with my findings, which many viewed as critical of Israel and Ben-Gurion.)

A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter from him praising a highly critical review I had written of a book by an anti-Israeli British historian. (At the start of our first interview earlier this month, Peres commented on my recent book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, saying it highlighted for him the failings of personal memory. But he did not elaborate.) The war ended with Israel having an Arab minority of some 160,000, representing 15-20 percent of its citizenry. Today, Israel’s Arab minority, 1.3 million strong, identify themselves as Palestinians, occasionally riot, and support Israel’s enemies during bouts of hostilities (as when Israel fought Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008-2009).

Morris: Perhaps ending the 1948 war with this demographic was a mistake?

Peres: No, moral considerations took priority over demographic considerations. Ben-Gurion knew that every war and conflict takes place twice—once on the battlefield and then in the history books. He didn’t want things to be written in the history books that were in dissonance with the foundations of Judaism. He really believed that without a moral priority there is no existence for the Jewish people. To expel he saw as contrary to his moral values.

But in 1948 he sometimes gave orders to expel.

He did not give orders to expel.

I suggest that Ben-Gurion did in fact give such orders, as when, on July 12, 1948, he authorized the expulsion of Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramleh on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Peres shakes his head. “I remember sitting in the room, when the matter of the expulsion of the Arabs from Haifa began, when Ben-Gurion telephoned [Labor Party strongman, later Haifa mayor] Abba Khoushi and told him to do all he could to get the Arabs to stay [in Haifa]. I heard this myself. I was there.” (It is worth noting that the Arabs of Haifa were not expelled but fled the city at the end of April 1948, due in part to a decision of the local Arab leadership.)

Next: The first decade of the Jewish state

• Israeli President Shimon Peres argued that the rest of the world should engage with Hamas to press it to renounce terrorism. [WP]

• The Hebrew Language Academy, in Midwood, Brooklyn, is a state-sponsored charter school with many trappings of a yeshiva yet a totally diverse student body, including plenty of Nation of Islam adherents who now can chant Hebrew. [NYT]

• For the first time since the flotilla incident, Israeli planes hit Gaza spots, targeting a weapons cache and smugging tunnels. The strike came a day after a rocket was launched from Gaza into Israel. There were no casualties from either operation. [Haaretz]

• The U.S. State Department took a stand against sea-bound attempts at sending aid to Gaza. “Mechanisms exist,” a statement read. [JTA/Forward]

• The issue of Aharon Barak—the “activist” former Israeli chief justice whom Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has in the past praised—is quickly ballooning into a major potental obstacle on her path to confirmation. Which is both funny and ridiculous. [NYT]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s national security adviser told a group of mostly American Jews that Israel’s endorsement of Palestinian statehood has decreased its own international standing. He also held out the possibility of preemptive military action against Iran. [WP]

• President Shimon Peres said the Gaza blockade is a necessary defense against terrorism. [LAT]

• Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak said Israel is shifting blockade maintenance. [Ynet]

• The IDF has altered strategy to dictate a slower move into Gaza, to make time for complete evacuations, should a future incursion be necessary. [JPost]

• Israel launched a new spy satellite. [NYT]

Tehran’s rise to regional hegemony is best understood as a function of Washington’s drastically diminished influence in the Middle East. With President Barack Obama’s promised withdrawal from Iraq, re-engagement in a strategically meaningless war in Afghanistan, and acquiescence in Iran’s march to a nuclear weapon, the regional power vacuum has become so large that the Iranians now have fresh competition in the region—Turkey. On Monday morning, when Israeli forces boarded a Turkish boat bound for Gaza, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP government officially threw its hat into the ring to become the standard-bearers of the Islamic resistance.

The Mavi Marmara, owned by the municipality of Istanbul, was part of the 6-boat flotilla sponsored by an Islamist organization affiliated with Erdogan’s party, the AKP, that was ostensibly carrying humanitarian relief to Gaza. When Israeli commandos boarded the boats, the Marmara’s passengers armed themselves with knives and other weapons and attacked the Israeli forces. With nine of the Marmara’s passengers dead and dozens wounded, international condemnation of Israel was swift and comprehensive.

It’s hardly surprising that Washington could muster no more than a statement expressing regret for the loss of life and concern for the wounded activists who attacked the Israeli boarding party. After all, last week the Obama Administration chose to endorse a resolution calling for a 2012 Nuclear Proliferation Treaty conference that would require Israel to disclose and then give up its undeclared nuclear arsenal, even as the document made no mention of Iran’s nascent nuclear weapons program. If the White House is not willing to abide by a secret understanding on Israel’s nuclear program that dates back to 1969, there is no reason to believe it would stand by the Jewish state’s “disproportionate” attack on what has been described as a “freedom flotilla” bearing humanitarian goods to Gaza. And if the United States will not support its ally, no one else will either.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cancellation of his scheduled trip to Washington may well afford both Israeli and American leadership an opportunity for reflection. For Netanyahu, there is the fact that his defense establishment blundered wildly. Where many navies might enforce a maritime blockade by first disabling a ship’s engines, the Israeli military used helicopters at sea to land commandos (perhaps because Defense Minister Ehud Barak is a former commando and is rumored to have demanded commando elements for past Israeli operations). Armed with paintball rifles, the commandos, who were vastly outnumbered, were promptly beaten to a pulp by the “peace activists” on the boat before being forced to use their side-arms. Moreover, there is the fact that the vaunted Israeli intelligence apparatus was evidently unable to discern the intentions of a boat bearing radical Turkish Islamists—and reportedly sponsored by a Turkish non-governmental organization (known because of its initials in Turkish as IHH) belonging to a Saudi umbrella organization that the United States and France, as well as Israel, have accused of financing terror. The fact that AKP parliamentarians scheduled to join the flotilla canceled their berths at the last moment hardly conceals the Erodgan government’s enthusiastic support for the trip organized by the IHH, and thus the Turkish state’s part in what was effectively an act of if not state-sponsored terror then certainly state-encouraged terror—carried out by an Islamist group that, among other things, played a role in the 1999 “millennium plot” to bomb the Los Angeles airport.

The ostensible reason for the flotilla was to provide humanitarian aid to Gazans. But not only do the Israelis themselves send regular shipments of goods into Gaza, they had assured the organizers of the trip that their items would be delivered once they had cleared the regular channels. Hence, there can be no other reason for the flotilla’s determination to reach port except to initiate a violent provocation and to lend prestige to Hamas, the terrorist organization that was elected to rule Gaza.

So as to avoid alienating moderate Muslims, the Obama Administration has removed from its vocabulary words like “Islamist” and “jihad”—a move that only makes sense as part of a strategy to identify extremists in order to sideline them and empower moderates. But Obama has done precisely the opposite. He has sought to engage extremists like Iran and Syria at the expense of moderates and of allies like the president of the Palestinian Authority. Worse yet, from this perspective, is the fact that Turkey has gone from the moderate column into the extremist one.

Ankara’s transformation has been in the making since the election that brought Erdogan and the AKP to power in 2003. There was much hand-wringing during the George W. Bush years about who “lost” Turkey, but the fact is that Erdogan is a wily politician who lacks a majority in Turkey and is always competing for an electoral edge. And no one has ever lost support in the modern Middle East by playing the anti-Israel card. Erdogan’s January 2009 performance at Davos, where he accused Israeli President Shimon Peres of “knowing very well how to kill” in the wake of Israel’s Gaza offensive, won him acclaim throughout the region and helped his party build support among the masses. The Turkish military, a strategic ally of the Jewish state for two decades, canceled military exercises with Israel and drilled instead with Syrian forces. Still, it’s not clear that Erdogan’s partnering with American enemies would have been nearly so audacious had the White House drawn red lines or made clear that Syria and Iran are in fact enemies of the United States. Most famously, Turkey, along with Brazil, bought the Iranians time with a phony enrichment deal that embarrassed the Obama Administration—and then produced a letter from Obama that they claimed had encouraged them to make the deal.

While Ankara and Tehran enjoy joint photo ops, and their approaches to many issues may seem similar, it seems that given the long history of Ottoman and Persian enmity and competition for regional leadership is the more likely eventuality than partnership. As a Sunni state, Turkey has a more natural claim on the sympathies of the regional Sunni majority, even as the Ottomans oppressed the Arabs for hundreds of years. In any event, the race is on for regional hegemony. Both before and after the Marmara Mavi incident, crowds in Istanbul gathered to chant the Islamist slogan referring to the prophet of Islam’s infamous slaughter of a Jewish tribe—“Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews/ the army of Muhammad will return”—a chant which for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from Iran’s cries of “death to Israel.”

Washington hands who believe in having a moderate Islamic state like Turkey around as a useful example for the rest of the region are fooling themselves that today’s Turkey is still the moderate, secular Kemalist state it seemed to be just 10 years ago. Nonetheless, the blame can’t entirely fall on Erdogan for seizing the chance that Washington has made available by looking the other way when our NATO colleague in Ankara is acting more like an adversary than an ally. The idea that Turkey is a friend is merely one more paradigm that Washington needs to shake to preserve its order in the region. After all, the Obama Administration has few qualms about interfering in the domestic politics of Israel, where the president is desirous of revising the Netanyahu government to his own liking. Why shouldn’t the White House try to tip domestic Turkish politics against an Erdogan government that aligns itself with terror and against its traditional superpower ally in Washington?

U.S. insistence on supporting a Turkish government that has occupied itself lately with slapping us in the face is the symptom not only of strategic incoherence but of a moral failure as well. It is a failure of easy politics when the leader of the free world singles out Israel’s nuclear program and ignores the Islamic Republic of Iran’s race to build a bomb, in order to gain popularity with the “world community” and gloss over the failure of his attempts to engage Tehran. It is the ethos of the snapshot and the sound-bite to make no distinction between a U.S. ally and a Turkish delegation dispatched to lend “humanitarian” aid to terrorists—because the rest of the world condemns Israel. The White House needs to stop seeing the Middle East in terms of Muslims, moderate and extreme, but in terms of allies who identify themselves by whether they align themselves with U.S. strategic interests. It is not grievance, or resistance to U.S. policies that is tipping the regional balance against us—rather, it is our haplessness. We need to return to an old paradigm for understanding the region: Reward our friends, and punish our enemies.

• We learned that Australia’s expulsion yesterday of a Mossad representative related to the Dubai/Hamas assassination followed the country’s intelligence chief’s personal trip to Israel. Israeli diplomats called this “a very serious crisis.” [Haaretz]

• Others joined Shimon Peres in denying the report that Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid-era South Africa. [NYT]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell revealed that he intends to set a “deadline” for a peace agreement to emerge from the proximity talks. [Foreign Policy]

• Israeli police suggested that the attorney general indict Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman for allegedly attempting to subvert a corruption investigation. His indictment for alleged corruption has previously been recommended, though not followed through on. [WSJ]

• The guest list to Thursday night’s White House Jewish Heritage reception is beginning to trickle out. Hopefully invitee Sandy Koufax will show. (We will have a report afterward.) [AP]

• A new book (reviewed in Tablet Magazine) reports that, in 1975, the Israeli defense minister—then Shimon Peres—offered to sell nuclear warheads to apartheid-era South Africa. A Peres spokesperson vigorously denied the report. [Guardian]

• Sometimes a drill is only a drill. This includes, the Israeli government says, the current five-day civil defense drill, which is not, it adds, designed to drum up war with Lebanon. [NYT]

• The Dubai police now have its 33rd subject in the murder of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud al-Mabhouh: a Scottish-born British national who apparently used his own passport. [WSJ]

• Yesterday’s Salute to Israel Parade drew “tens of thousands” to Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. [JTA]

• Should Turkey continue to try to forestall Iran sanctions, it could seriously rupture its relations with its NATO allies. [WP]

In doing this he gives rise to questions about the place of morality in a country’s foreign policies.

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. Less than two weeks later, in an unrelated event, South Africa’s whites adopted the policy of apartheid—Afrikaans for “apartness”—to enshrine in law a system that made them dominant and to deepen racial segregation. Israel made its disapproval plain: As David Ben-Gurion, the father of the new nation, said, “A Jew cannot be for discrimination.” Israel regularly voted against South Africa in international forums. With only minimal contact between the two countries, Israel instead became a friend and helper of Africa’s emerging independent states.

As Polakow-Suranksy notes, the 1967 Six Day War was a turning point. Arab states used their oil wealth to pressure Africans to sever relations with Israel; France ceased arms supplies, and Israel looked to its own resources and turned to the United States. At home, the right wing was gaining strength and declaring an ideological affinity with South Africa’s whites, despite the anti-Semitism among the ruling Afrikaners, which during the 1930s and 1940s had manifested itself with support for Nazi Germany. (This anti-Semitism, which reached back into the 19th century, is surprisingly understated by Polakow-Suransky.)

The early 1970s saw dramatic changes in Israel’s strategic thinking: It was now an occupier on the West Bank and Gaza, and world opinion, especially on the left, was turning against it. The Soviet Union was more pro-Arab and anti-Zionist. The old Labor Zionists were dying out and being replaced by sabras—homegrown Israelis—and hardened military men and securocrats: Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres.

Polakow-Suransky says these leaders “saw Israeli security as paramount and they were willing to make moral compromises in order to ensure it. It was precisely this worldview that would drive the alliance with South Africa.”

The book is a chronicle of this alliance. It’s the outcome of six years’ doctoral research at Oxford University and reflects impressive perseverance in getting access to secret documents and interviewing more than 100 key players.

Polakow-Suransky notes that by late 1972 Israel had decided against criticizing South Africa at the United Nations. The aftermath of the Yom Kippur War the next year took relations further: Whereas 20 more African countries severed links with Israel, South Africa supplied spare parts for damaged Mirage fighter planes. The left-wing Haaretz newspaper editorialized: “No political fastidiousness can justify the difference between one who has been revealed a friend and one who has betrayed friendship … in our hour of fate.”

The war also had calamitous economic effects, costing Israel an entire year’s worth of gross national product; yet, after having come so close to defeat and annihilation, military expenditure was increased the next year by 40 percent. The domestic arms industry became a savior: Exports increased nearly fifteenfold from $70 million in 1973 to nearly $1 billion in 1981.

As Israel’s military-industrial complex expanded, so did its influence, as did that of the army officers who moved from battlefield to boardroom and used every opportunity to lobby for the defense industry.

The fast-developing relationship between Israel and South Africa was kept hidden, with knowledge of it confined to the defense ministries and high levels of government. On April 3, 1975, relations were formalized in a secret agreement signed by Peres, as then-defense minister, and his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha.

Some indication of what was going on came to light a year later when Prime Minister John Vorster made an official visit to Israel. It caused outrage, at least among some: Vorster not only headed an increasingly oppressive regime, but he had been interned during World War II because of his Nazi sympathies.

Polakow-Suransky recounts interviewing me about the visit; I told him I had watched it on television at my home in Johannesburg and had walked out of the room in disgust at the sight of Vorster, an honored guest of the Israeli government, visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem.

Arthur Goldreich had a more directly bruising experience: He had escaped from a police cell in South Africa after being arrested as a major player in the underground resistance led by Nelson Mandela. He later settled in Israel and became a distinguished architect and artist. As Polakow-Suransky recounts, Goldreich was plastering telephone poles with posters featuring Vorster’s name alongside swastikas, when an elderly man spat on a poster. “At first he thought the man might be a disgruntled South African immigrant who supported apartheid, then he got a closer look at the vandal. ‘He had an Auschwitz number on his arm,’ Goldreich recalls. The Holocaust survivor lashed out at Goldreich, telling him, ‘We will make agreements with the devil to save Jews from persecution and to secure the future of this state.’

“He was left speechless as the old man walked away. ‘That was the climate of the time,’ Goldreich recalls with dismay.”

Polakow-Suransky comments: “The old man’s diatribe represented the views of the young, security-minded technocrats running the country as much as those of the older generation of fearful Holocaust survivors. There was an acute sense that Israel’s existence was threatened and that most of the world didn’t care—and that those that did had betrayed the Jewish state in its hour of need.”

In May 1977, Menachem Begin was voted in as prime minister and was more than happy to violate the new U.N. embargo against arms sales to South Africa. Thus the pattern was set, and it continued for nearly 20 years. South Africa became Israel’s largest arms buyer, soon accounting for 35 percent of military exports (other customers were similarly unpleasant regimes such as Argentina, Chile, and Zaire). South Africa also paid for combat training and the joint production of weapons. The total military trade over two decades is estimated at $10 billion.

The two countries grew even closer as a result of their cooperation in developing missiles to carry nuclear weapons and the weapons themselves. Polakow-Suransky explores these sub-plots, noting that during the 1980s as many as 75 Israeli experts worked “quietly” in South Africa, and more than 250 South Africans went to Israel.

With so much hidden, an anything-goes atmosphere came into being, opening the way for Israeli opportunists and crooks to plunge into profitable ventures in the apartheid-created tribal Bantustans.

South Africa’s motivation for partnership was obvious: It was an international pariah and grabbed what friends it could. Israel, also shunned by many, was motivated by the same sort of expediency as countries throughout the world that traded with South Africa, whether openly or surreptitiously. South Africa had vast strategic value, magnified during the Cold War, as a treasure chest of minerals that industry in the West needed to survive. Whatever the disapproval of apartheid in the capitals of the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Canada, and the rest, the policy over many years was to support the status quo of white rule so as to keep out the Soviet Union.

African nations, even while providing bases for liberation forces, boycotted or traded when it suited them. Thus sundry capitals, when hosting conferences of the then Organization of African Unity, shipped in luxury cars from South Africa, plus carpets and fine foods and wines (with labels, it is said, changed to disguise the origin).

The Soviet Union was strong on anti-apartheid rhetoric and supported liberation movements with money, training, and arms. But it also worked closely with South Africa’s De Beers company to ensure mutually profitable control of world diamond prices.

Above all, apartheid could not have lasted for any length of time without the oil that came largely from the Middle East. In 1973, Arab states agreed to implement the U.N.’s (unsuccessful) 10-year-old embargo. But apart from a few critical weeks, South Africa never lacked oil. It is known that both Iran and Iraq, during their 1980-1988 war, sold oil and bought arms in return. That apart, South Africa bought oil at a premium on the high seas through middlemen. The argument that these were not state-to-state dealings and therefore do not compare with the Israel-South Africa links does not carry weight: Did Saudi Arabian and other rulers not know where their oil was going?

So, was Israel as cynical and uncaring as everyone else in dealing with South Africa? Whether its arms sales and help in the nuclear sphere were more amoral or immoral and more supportive of apartheid than was the supply of oil is a matter for debate. Whether its survival was truly at stake and it was compelled to sell arms to South Africa (as it did too, incidentally, to the post-revolution Iran of the ayatollahs) is difficult to assess these years later; Peres and his cohorts believed it to be the case in the circumstances and climate of the time. Whether the Israeli public would have responded with disgust and demanded a halt to the trading had the extent of it been known also cannot be said.

There is another dimension. If Israel had held its nose, so to speak, while cooperating with apartheid then the worst that could be said was that it behaved no better and no worse than the rest of the world. Unhappily, there was more to it because Polakow-Suransky presents repeated evidence of the enthusiasm with which Israeli leaders behaved. He says letters between military leaders were “characterized by a remarkable sense of familiarity and friendship.” The sense of a “shared predicament had become so strong that Israeli and South African generals saw fighting the African National Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organization as a shared mission.”

In November 1974, Shimon Peres went to South Africa for secret meetings. Upon his return home, he wrote to his hosts to thank them for helping to establish a “vitally important link between the two governments.” Peres, who routinely denounced apartheid in public, went on: “This cooperation is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and refusal to submit to it.”

“Common hatred of injustice”? Could a Jewish leader have sunk any lower than to make that comparison?

In October 1980, General Magnus Malan was appointed South Africa’s Defense Minister and received a congratulatory letter from Israel, from General Yonah Efrat, the former head of the IDF’s Central Command who had helped create the alliance: “May the Mighty God be with you in all you do.”

Public dissimulation concealed the cozy messages: “Disguise and denial became the norm,” says Polakow-Suransky. In 1986, Peres, then prime minister, was again cultivating black Africa and visited Cameroon. He publicly criticized South Africa and told President Paul Biya: “A Jew who accepts apartheid ceases to be a Jew. A Jew and racism do not go together.”

Yet at that time the links with South Africa were as strong as ever, and Polakow-Suransky points out that “some of the biggest contracts and cooperative ventures went into effect on Peres’ watch [as prime minister] from 1984 to 1986. While publicly demonizing apartheid, he simply maintained the alliance that he himself had initiated a decade earlier as defense minister.”

In the same vein, in November 1986, Benyamin Netanyahu, then ambassador to the United Nations and a rising Likud star, gave a powerful anti-apartheid speech at the world body. He denied Israel’s links with South Africa. Was he the innocent dupe of the securocrats in telling a lie?

In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League, and in South Africa, the Jewish Board of Deputies, played toadying and inglorious roles over the years in defending Israel’s ties and in support of the apartheid government.

The tide began to turn in the early 1980s. Israel’s left was energized by massive public protests against the war in Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and there was also a developing rift between the defense establishment and the diplomatic corps. Young diplomats argued for morality in foreign policy and also for getting on board the world’s developing movement for sanctions against South Africa.

In March 1987 the Israeli cabinet voted to “refrain from new undertakings, between Israel and South Africa, in the realm of defense.” In September the cabinet issued a comprehensive sanctions package, including no new investments in South Africa and no promotion of tourism.

But, Polakow-Suransky notes, “in practice it amounted to little more than a cosmetic gesture. Ultimately, the sanctions had hardly any impact on the flourishing trade between the two countries, especially in the defense sector, where multibillion-dollar contracts signed before 1967 remained in effect.”

It all ended after the new South Africa emerged in 1994: Israel found alternative export markets such as China and India, and South Africa turned to Europe for arms.

These days, the African National Congress has forgiven the past and, as the government of South Africa, maintains polite relations with Israel (and is friendly, too, with the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and other previous apartheid traders). It condemns Israeli occupation but generally supports both Palestinian freedom and Israel’s right to existence.

Cooperation could be extended, to everyone’s benefit: Israel could learn from the process of dialogue with the enemy that ended apartheid; Palestinians could learn from the ANC’s nonviolence toward civilians during its struggle. Israel, in turn, has much to offer South Africa, such as agricultural and technical expertise. For Israel, it would be fitting recompense for the past to have South Africa play a significant mediating role between Israelis and Palestinians in securing peace.

Finally, if so many nations were in bed with apartheid, why single out Israel for special attention, as Polakow-Suransky does so effectively? The answer, at least for me, as a Jew and an Israeli, is that he is right to do so because the moral stain remains, and some who were involved still enjoy high office in Israel. Even more, what they did cannot be compartmentalized: Rotten behavior in one sphere carries over into other areas of society. That is evident in Israel’s crude policy and behavior on the West Bank and Gaza, where morality does not apply; in the abusive way in which some Israeli Jews treat Israeli Arabs; and in the spate of corruption scandals emerging from the innermost recesses of the Israeli establishment in business and government.

Other nations can decide for themselves about their past. Israel must deal with itself, especially with a past that hangs so heavily over the present.

Benjamin Pogrund was deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg and was later founding director of Yakar’s Center for Social Concern in Jerusalem. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Kaplan Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town and is writing a book about Israel and apartheid.

• Sorry I missed this yesterday, but an editorial notes that the administration’s pressure on Israel accomplished little to nothing, and calls on it to focus on getting the two sides talking to each other. [WP]

• British elections are today. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg tells a reporter that he cares deeply for British and Israeli Jews; is against cultural sanctions and Britain’s participation in Durban 2; but also questions the Gaza blockade. [Haaretz]

• There are five more suspects in the Dubai murder of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, so 32 total. Plus, there might be a New Zealand connection! [WSJ]

• Comments from the new head of the International Atomic Energy Association seem to presage a firmer stance on Iran. [WP]

• The Czech Republic’s foreign minister told President Peres that Israel should follow Czechoslovakia’s two-state lead. Oh, okay! [JPost]