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

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

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

“They overstated this one,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adds Guttman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier: Tablet Magazine Talks to Vice PM Shalom

It was a classic illustration of the liberal Zionist predicament. In recent weeks this predicament has received an increased amount of attention, due in large part to a bracing and much-discussed essay by Peter Beinart—a former editor of The New Republic, the very citadel of American pro-Israel orthodoxy—in which he sounded the alarm on the plummeting levels of support for Israel among younger American Jews. “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door,” Beinart wrote, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Similar concerns led to the formation in 2008 of J Street, a lobby group that aims to represent the views of liberal Jews and serve as a counterweight to traditionally right-leaning groups like AIPAC. If current trends continue, American Jewish attitudes toward Israel may ultimately be transformed in a way unseen since the bulk of the community first got on board with Zionism, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War.

How can liberal Zionism be saved? For those aiming to revive the form of American liberal Zionism that marked the generation that came of age after the 1967 war, it is tempting to blame its decline on a betrayal by outside forces. On this logic the collapse of support has been caused by Israel’s own shift to the right in recent years—epitomized by the rise of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—a shift aided and abetted by a right-leaning institutional leadership of the American Jewish community that refuses to criticize Israel under any circumstances. Resuscitating liberal Zionism, this argument goes, will thereby involve siding with Israeli moderates while speaking out against settlers abroad and neoconservatives at home.

But can liberal Zionism, at least in the form that has dominated American Jewish life for decades, be saved at all? And should it be? These are harder questions but may ultimately be more important ones. It may be emotionally satisfying to posit a blameless liberal Zionism betrayed by outside forces, or to suppose that younger Jews are reacting only against the right and not liberal Zionism itself, but it is not clear that either claim is true. For one thing, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman undoubtedly make good villains, but the aspects of Israeli politics that have alienated U.S. liberals go deeper than the current right-wing government. (To take only the most recent example, it was not the nefarious Netanyahu or the loathsome Lieberman who brought us the attack on Gaza, but rather the supposed “good guys”: Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni.)

More generally, the apparently impending collapse of mainstream liberal Zionism in the United States is no accident. Some of the phenomenon may be attributed to the simple passage of time—to a generation growing up farther removed from the looming presence of the Holocaust and without memories of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But we cannot adequately understand this collapse without understanding the compromises and contradictions that liberal Zionism became involved in over a period of decades.

***

Let me drop the pretense of disinterestedness for a moment. I am a member of the “younger generation” whose attitudes have become the subject of so much discussion, and in many ways I am typical of it. When the last decade began I considered myself to be, broadly speaking, a fairly standard young liberal Zionist—at least insofar as I thought about these things, which was not often. In the years since, my views have shifted to the point that I would not consider myself a Zionist at all. I make no claim to “speak for my generation,” whatever that would mean, and one should never trust anyone who claims that they can. But I have reason to think that my experience was far from atypical, and it might therefore be worthwhile to examine it more closely.

It’s always tempting, when writing a conversion narrative, to exaggerate the magnitude of the shift for dramatic effect. But I can’t honestly claim that I was ever a neoconservative or a hardliner (aside from a brief Likudnik episode in my childhood). Rather, I held a set of views fairly typical of American liberal Zionism. I was largely uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I was against the occupation and the settlements, and I considered myself sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. Still, I did not really question the basic Israeli narrative of the conflict (“we want peace, but they only want to annihilate us”); I believed that everything would be better if only the Palestinians could find their King or Gandhi; I was convinced that the shrill-sounding activists who constantly harped on Israel’s sins were hysterical at best and anti-Semitic at worst. I was a “serious” and “responsible” liberal, I told myself, and much of this identity hinged on differentiating myself from them.

• 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]

Weeks ago, the Financial Times argued that Clegg (whom the Times profiled today) would likely be the foreign minister (or secretary of state, in American English). Junior coalition partners in other European countries frequently receive the foreign ministry. But new reports yesterday confirmed that the Lib Dems would demand six ministerial posts, including the Foreign Office, in exchange for serving as a coalition’s junior partner.

The problem, as Israel sees it, is that Clegg—potentially Britain’s chief diplomat—has severely criticized Israel over Operation Cast Lead and the subsequent Gaza blockade; at one point called on European countries to stop selling Israel weapons; and, maybe worst of all, is seen as overly soft on Iran. (Incidentally, a Clegg-run foreign ministry would also probably see a slightly less strong British-American alliance.)

As things stand now, the Tories have a decent chance at capturing an outright majority of Parliamentary seats, which would all but completely foreclose a major Lib Dem role in the government. However, if Tories fail to get a House of Commons majority (and if Labour, a longer shot, fails to as well), look for the Tories or Labour to secure the prime ministership by allowing a comparatively marginal party to run the country’s foreign policy. You know, like Israel’s government does.

A Worried Jerusalem Watches the Rise of Nick Clegg [JPost]
Earlier: British Election Is Actually Kind Of Thrilling

• In other “pop” news, Gershon Kingsley, 87-year-old composer of the electronic classic “Popcorn,” tells of escaping Germany before the Holocaust and his abiding love for his home country: “If you make a friend in Germany then you have them for the rest of your life.” [NYT]

• A member of J Street’s advisory board beseeches American Jews to stick with President Obama, a “visionary” who “is listening to the American-Jewish community.” [JTA]

• Meanwhile, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen believes that when it comes to Israel, “What’s missing on Obama’s part is not necessarily good intentions but the perception of them. He ought to do what Egyptian President Anwar Sadat did in 1977 to assure Israelis of his sincerity. Go to Jerusalem.” [WPost]

• And at an Independence Day event, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman also echoed the accord with Egypt and affirmed of the city on everyone’s lips that “Jerusalem is our undivided, eternal capital.” [Ynet]

Israel’s left-wing parties, primarily Labor (but also the farther-left Meretz), were dealt a mortal blow by Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the two-state compromises successively offered by Ehud Barak, then Israel’s prime minister, and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in July and December 2000, and by the Palestinians’ violent follow-up, the launching of the Second Intifada. If there is no Palestinian Arab peace partner, then what’s the point in voting for peace-mongering parties? All Israel’s left-wing parties are selling is pie in the sky.

Clinton settled into a comfortable retirement, but the Israeli left failed to recover from the events of 2000. The Labor Party, which since 1948 has traditionally received between one-third and one-quarter of the votes in each general election and often formed and led Israel’s coalition governments (1949-1977, 1984-1986, 1992-1996, 1999-2001), emerged from the February 2009 general elections with about 11 percent of the vote (13 seats in the 120-seat Knesset or parliament) and is currently a junior partner (though Barak is defense minister, a key portfolio) in the very right-wing coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Even the ultra-right-wing Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, enjoys a stronger parliamentary base (15 seats). Meretz has three.

But there is one major respect in which the current political map inaccurately reflects Israeli public opinion and its ideological and political underpinnings. Most Israelis, to judge by nearly every opinion poll, want peace with the Arabs based on a “territorial compromise,” meaning granting Palestinian sovereignty over the Gaza Strip and the bulk of the West Bank (the desired fate of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and its sacred sites, is more problematic); most Israelis have tired of ruling the Palestinians. These positions have been prompted by historical events and demographic realities. But also, in some measure, by the drumbeat of peace movement activities over the decades since Israel’s conquest of the territories in 1967.

Spokesmen for Gush Emunim, the nationalist-religious movement that has driven the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, used to portray themselves as the “patriotic” response to the “extremists” of Peace Now, the leading Israeli peace organization founded at the end of the 1970s. Nothing riled Peace Now activists more. They saw themselves as law-abiding, reasonable, even mainstream figures, whereas Gush Emunim—which often operated outside the law, serially ignored, circumvented, and defied government orders, and, during the 1980s, spawned a terrorist underground—was deliberately confrontational in tone and Messianic in purpose.

And here, according to Tamar Hermann, a professor of political science at Israel’s Open University and the author of the new book The Israeli Peace Movement: A Shattered Dream, lies one of the key reasons for the peace movement’s ultimate ineffectuality. The peaceniks and the left “talked” a lot and persuasively—logical and sane to a fault. But they had little effect on government policy or on facts on the ground. They failed dismally to block or even limit the settlement enterprise or to successfully pressure successive Israeli governments to make peace with the Palestinians on the basis of territorial compromise.

The hard settler right, on the other hand, “acted,” ultimately pulling along often-reluctant politicians to do their bidding. Gush Emunim succeeded in establishing a series of faits accomplis. Jerusalem today is ringed by massive Jewish neighborhoods and settlements. Territorial compromise, and peace, seem as far off as ever.

But there are two things wrong with Hermann’s picture. First, Israel’s peace movements, which she describes in great detail and with perspicacity and insight (her book nicely complements Mordechai Bar-On’s history of the Israeli peace movement, In Pursuit of Peace), have had a substantial, if sporadic, impact on Israeli policy and Middle Eastern realities. Peace Now helped push the first Begin government to make peace with Egypt in 1978-1979; the movement’s founding document—the so-called “Officers’ Letter” of 1978 (some of whose 348 signatories were actually privates and non-commissioned officers)—and its first, massive demonstrations influenced the government and had a part in preventing the peace talks from collapsing. More recently, the relentless agitation of Arba Imahot (Four Mothers) and other groups affected public opinion and helped persuade Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government to withdraw from southern Lebanon in May 2000.

But perhaps more importantly, the peace camp’s central message, that Israel could not forever lord it over another people and that the right’s dream of Greater Israel was dead, eventually was accepted by the majority of Israelis, including most Likudniks. Of course, historical episodes, primarily the First and Second Intifadas (1987-1991 and 2000-2004 respectively) and demographic realities (higher Arab birth rates) played an even more significant part in affecting this sea-change in Israeli public opinion. But the constant patter of the peaceniks’ message, that Israel had to withdraw from the territories to save itself, morally and physically, also had a role.

Second, it was not the shortcomings or failures of these dozens of peace organizations, as Hermann implies, that resulted in the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This result was mainly due to Palestinian rejectionism and intractability. There was never, as there still is not, a credible, serious Palestinian partner for peace with Israel, not before 1948, and not since. In the years 1920-1948 no Palestinian leader would contemplate either a bi-national, one-state arrangement with the Jews based on political parity or the partition of Palestine into two states, one for the Jews, the other for the Arabs. Indeed, in 1937, the Arab leadership flatly rejected the two-state solution, proposed by the British Peel Commission, which would have given the Zionists only 17 percent of Palestine. The pre-eminent Palestinian national leader during the 1930s and ’40s (and arguably in the 1920s as well), Haj Amin al Husseini, rejected all talk of compromise and consistently advocated substantially reducing the number of Jews already in the country (i.e., by mass deportation, or worse).

Nothing has changed since. The 1950s were a hiatus, while the Palestinians licked their wounds from 1948. But when they re-emerged politically under Yasser Arafat and Fatah/the PLO in the 1960s, and during the following two decades they flatly rejected all talk of a two-state solution, preferring the replacement of Israel either in one fell swoop or in stages by a Palestinian Arab state, possibly to include a small Jewish minority.

During the 1990s, the PLO played a devious, two-faced game of extracting concessions while pretending it had an interest in an eventual two-state solution, which, when offered by Barak (July 2000) and Clinton (December 2000), it promptly rejected. Since then, the ascendancy of Hamas, a fundamentalist organization dedicated openly to anti-Semitic principles and to the destruction of Israel and empowered formally by the general election of 2006 as the leading political force in the Palestinian territories, has assured the rejectionist trajectory of Palestinian political ambitions.

In other words, the Israeli peaceniks and their ragtag collection of parties and associations (Hermann usefully lists more than 100 of them in Appendix 1—but Peace Now is the only large one among them) were essentially in the business of shadow-boxing: from HaOlam Hazeh editor Uri Avnery in the 1950s on, they would issue manifestos and meet in European hotel lobbies with dissident Palestinian officials (who were later invariably gunned down by less peace- or at least dialogue-minded fellow Palestinians), sign on for this or that conciliatory initiative—and all for nothing. There was no real partner with a solid constituency across the divide, not the mendacious Arafat, who sought Israel’s destruction with all his heart and soul, not the Marxist George Habash of airplane-hijacking notoriety, and not the fundamentalists, who sought nothing more than to cast out the infidels and impose Sharia law over all of Palestine.

Given this reality, Israel’s peace movement—and Israel’s peace-minded political leaders, from Rabin and Peres, through Barak, Sharon (who evacuated the Gaza Strip), and Olmert (who, in negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, reportedly offered the Palestinians more than Clinton had, and, of course, was turned down flat)—cannot be held to account for the failure to achieve peace with the Palestinians (or, indeed, Syria, which, in 1994-1996 and again in 1999-2000, even when offered the Golan Heights, refused to sign on the dotted line). Hermann’s book—a work of otherwise fine political analysis and synthesis—never really makes this clear, which is its great failing.

Benny Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and the author, most recently, of the book One State, Two States.

• More than in any past year, pro-Israel campus groups are set to counter Israel Apartheid Week. [JTA]

• What the heck is Iran thinking, publicly moving most of its nuclear fuel into above-ground facilities? This may help you understand the mind games. [NYT]

• Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was questioned by authorities over suspicions that he illegally intervened in a money-laundering investigation against him. [JTA]

• The Austrian Jewish community has condemned the presidential candidacy of far-right Barbara Rosenkranz. But isn’t Rosenkranz a Jewish name? (Yes, I am joking.) [Vos Iz Neias?]

• The Israeli human rights group Boycott! has called on The Pixies to cancel an upcoming gig in Tel Aviv. This, despite the fact that “some of us are huge fans and would love to see your show.” [Haaretz]

Below: The Pixies sing “Where Is My Mind?”

Pixies – Where Is My Mind (Live)
Uploaded by spotless-mind.

The big news today is the Dubai police’s disclosure of 15 additional suspects in the assassination (likely carried out by Mossad) of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, bringing the total to 26. These suspects’ passports—which, according to host countries, were “issued in an illegal and fraudulent manner”—were from Britain, France, Ireland, and (this is a new one) Australia. One of the Australian passports was that of Marcus Korman, who lives in Tel Aviv … and has never been to Dubai. “It’s identity theft—simply unbelievable,” Korman told a reporter.

Yet even as Korman and the others whose passports were forged supply a compelling anti-assassination human interest story, the Jerusalem Post reports that diplomatic tensions related to the incident are falling; Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the whole thing didn’t come up during a lengthy meeting with his European counterparts in Brussels (instead, they discussed Iran and the Palestinians). Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman theorize that European political leaders will be talked out of their anger by European intelligence leaders, who know that Mossad does far more good than harm: “Israeli intelligence can get its contacts in London’s MI6 and Berlin’s BND to put in a good word, pointing to favors Israel regularly does for European security agencies. The Mossad might even unveil dossiers showing how dangerous Hamas is to everyone.”

Raviv and Melman also see no reason to believe this will be Mossad’s final assassination:

Mossad, on the other hand, might well do again what it apparently did in Dubai. The agency would prefer not to—and certainly they would rather choose cities and streets not covered by CCTV systems and competent police forces. But Israel’s spymasters don’t mind being perceived by their enemies as still running “Murder, Inc.” from Warsaw to Bangkok, and from Paris to Dubai. And while they don’t relish risky assassinations, when the target is important enough, Mossad’s chiefs have been known to say, “Nothing is impossible.”

Meanwhile: where previously a couple of Fatah or ex-Fatah folks have been implicated in the plot, now a Hamas man—an associate of al-Mabhouh’s in Syria, in fact—was reportedly arrested by the Syrians on Dubai’s behalf. The man, Mahmoud Nasser, was apparently aware of al-Mabhouh’s plans, and arrived in Dubai shortly before he did. Hamas, on the other hand, denies he was arrested. Well, somebody’s not telling the truth.

Dubai Now Seeking 26 Suspects in Hamas Killing [Reuters/NYT]
Assassin from Tel Aviv: ‘I’m Shocked’ [Ynet]
Diplomatic Fallout Surrounding Mabhouh Hit Receding [JPost]
Israel’s Hit Squads [Atlantic.com]

If you’re looking to dress up as Lieberman or Obama—or Palin—or anyone—you could always attend Hamanbashin, JDub Records’s Purim party (co-sponsored by Tablet Magazine), which takes place this Saturday in New York’s Lower East Side. Bonus points to whoever does the best job depicting the assassinated Hamas guy.

Purim Politics Unmasked: Lieberman Leads Costume Poll [Arutz Sheva]

Earlier: Hamanbashin!

• U.S. Adm. Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that no military strike could completely halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. [Haaretz]

• Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman dodged E.U. questions over Mossad’s suspected assassination of Hamas’s chief weapons man, which involved the use of forged European passports. A complete update of the story will follow on The Scroll today. [AP/WSJ]

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak heads for America today for security discussions with senior U.S. officials as well as a meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. [Haaretz]

• Rabbi Menachem Porush, head of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism political party, died at 93. [AP/NYT]

• Roman and Alexandra Zaretsky, the Israeli ice dancing duo, finished in 10th place in the Vancouver Olympics after skating, last night, to the theme from Schindler’s List (here’s video). [JTA]

What the far-left from Britain to Berkeley has been been unable to bring off—a sense among Israel’s allies that Israel has become a heartless, morally heedless aggressor state worthy of sanction and shunning—the far-right in Israel’s own government, and in particular, its Foreign Ministry, seems determined to inculcate to the full. [Haaretz]

• After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon refused to meet with J Street’s congressional delegation, the Israeli government seems increasingly out-of-touch with American Jews, James Besser argues. [JW Political Insider]

• Boxing promoter Bob Arum reached an agreement with the bar mitzvah boy who rented out the Yankee Stadium Jumbotron on the night of June 5th. Meaning: Orthodox fighter Yuri Foreman will very likely take on Miguel Cotto that night in that place. [AP/ESPN]

• Benjamin Netanyahu, Tony Blair, and Tzipi Livni have all pledged to attend the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., in late March. [Ben Smith]

• The sustainable food movement collides with old-line Jewish delis. Shall the twain ever meet? [Forward]

• Palestinian rights groups are attempting to organize a boycott of an Israeli ballet company’s performance this Sunday at Brooklyn College. [ArtsBeat]

•January 19th: Mahmoud Mabhouh, a Hamas military commander living in Syria who played a crucial role in smuggling weapons to the group (including from Iran), arrives in Dubai. Unusually, he has no bodyguards and is not traveling under an alias; reportedly, his bodyguards couldn’t get plane tickets. No, really, that’s what some reports say.

• January 20th: Mabhouh is found dead in his hotel room (we will subsequently learn that he was killed the night before). I’ve seen reports that he was shot and that he was asphyxiated and electrocuted.

• January 20th: Hamas announces that Mabhouh is dead … from cancer.

• By February 1st, some Hamas officials have suggested that Mossad was behind it. The main focus at this point, however, is whether Mabhouh’s death is likely to slow the flow of arms into Gaza. The consensus: probably, but not definitely.

• February 2nd: After an investigation, Hamas believes that Mabhouh died at the hands of an Arab government (he was wanted by Jordanian and Egyptian authorities).

• Even so, on February 3rd Hamas suspends (already severely stalled) negotiations over kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in protest of the alleged assassination.

• February 4th: Dubai’s police chief pledges to get a warrant for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if it turns out that Mossad was indeed behind the killing.

• February 12th: Reneging on past proclamations from his group, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal insists that Mossad was behind Mabhouh’s death.

Okay, so to recap: Mabhouh, a Hamas weapons guy, is killed in Dubai, but Hamas wants the world to think he died naturally; when that becomes untenable, Hamas wants the world to believe that Mossad or some Arab government killed him. In fact, Mossad, any number of Arab governments, Fatah, and God knows who else would have had reason to want him dead.

Buckle up: now’s when things really start to get crazy.

• February 15th: Dubai releases some information, including photos, on 11 suspects: all of them carried European passports.

• February 16th: it becomes clear that at least some of the passports identified with the suspects are fake. Less clear is what that could possibly mean.

• February 17th: we learn that Mabhouh was at the top of Mossad’s target list. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman issues a classic non-denial denial when asked if Mossad was involved. Of course, since it isn’t really his purview and since he probably shouldn’t be trusted anyway, there is no reason to think anyone would have told Lieberman anything, no matter what.

• February 17th: the passports of the six “British” suspects are all fake, and bear the names of Israelis who are known not to have been involved in the killing. More than ever, signs point to Mossad. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledges an investigation and calls in the Israeli ambassador; Germany and France, whose passports were also used, are also pissed.

• Oh, my. Is that footage of the assassins checking into Mabhouh’s hotel the same day Mabhouh did? They trailed him from the airport and stayed in the room directly across from him? And they were wearing fake beards? This is nuts!

• Today, February 18th, this story is the talk of Israel, with most assuming that Mossad killed Mabhouh. Folks are calling for the Mossad chief to step down (“Mossad is Supposed to Gather Intelligence, Not Sow Death”). They are also angry at the thought that Mossad may have implicated innocent people in the incident with those faked passports. Naturally, and as always, Mossad will neither confirm nor deny involvement.

So that’s where we are.

And now, the real question: did Mossad do it?

It certainly looks that way. Hamas still maintains yes. So does the Dubai police, at least publicly. However, one Hamas official believes Fatah is involved. Hell, there’s even a Hamas agent reportedly under arrest in Syria for aiding Mossad in the assassination. Neal Ungerleider has a great discussion of whether or not it was Mossad:

The Israeli intelligence agency certainly has the motives and the means. The modus operandi also fits prior Mossad operations. However, certain facts don’t add up. … what security agency would implicate their own citizens [with the fake passports]? Additionally, there is always the possibility of a false flag operation—where a foreign intelligence agency killed al-Mabhouh for their own purposes, while making it look like a Mossad killing.

Put it this way: you would find it difficult to get me to put money on it being anyone other than Mossad. Although one theory has, so far, gone un-suggested, so allow me to be the first:

Maggie erschießt Mr Burns – MyVideo

That there is currently no peace is partly a function of Israel’s unwillingness to give up the Golan Heights. But, really, blame for the enmity can probably be primarily laid at the feet of Syrian intransigence. Problem is (as I mentioned last Friday), that intransigence toward Israel has not stopped its newly important neighbor Turkey from seeking closer ties. It has not even prevented the United States from attempting to cozy up to Syria—America, which hopes to send its first ambassador to Damascus since 2005, would love a Syria that is less in Iran’s orbit and is cooperative in trying to maintain stability in neighboring Iraq as U.S. military forces withdraw.

A Haaretz correspondent notes, “Syria is a key country along a new axis being formed in the Middle East, which includes Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. The backbone of this axis is economic, security, and diplomatic cooperation that would replace the old axis of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.” A smart Israeli leader would view the region in a more classically realist way, the correspondent adds, and work extra hard to achieve peace with Syria:

Israel, which is used to examining the region through a lens that counts Hezbollah’s missiles and Hamas’ explosive barrels sent to sea, and which considers the prisoner numbers in the Gilad Shalit deal the crux of the security threat, is blind to the region’s strategic developments. The expression “we want peace,” which is void of substance, cannot even begin to express the folly and shortsightedness of Israel, which is shrugging its shoulders at a chance to reach peace with Syria, if for no other reason than to prevent a damaging blow from this new axis.

To this end, we need a statesman, not a comedian. The leader who can make Israelis understand that peace with Syria does not mean eating humus in Damascus but is an existential interest, no less important than blocking Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Peace With Syria As Vital As Stopping Iran’s Bomb [Haaretz]

Earlier: Israel and Syria In Crisis

Today, Lieberman, cooled down, clarified his remarks in an effort to lower tensions before things get too out of hand.

Kidding! “My response, which I made in order to clarify that the situation [with Syria] is unbearable, was immediately met with a hysterical reaction in Israel of ‘how dare we anger the nobleman,’” he said. “I don’t work for the media or for public opinion.”

No, Minister Lieberman, but you do work for the Israeli people. Particularly at a time when both Israel’s newest enemy, Turkey, and its oldest friend, the United States, are seeking closer ties to Syria (America has proposed its first ambassador in five years), it is difficult to argue that the Israeli people are best served by needless provocations like these. Those who have illusions about Assad’s malevolence are certainly wrong, and should be persuaded otherwise. But even if doing so was Lieberman’s true intention, as he claims, it looks like that message got lost in the noise he made while doing it.

Israeli Minister Adds Heat to Exchange With Syria [NYT]
Tension With Syria Can Turn Into War in an Instant [Haaretz]
FM on Syria Feud: Grave Issues in Mideast Require a Response [Haaretz]

• WINNER: Turkey. Yes, the Arab and Muslim worlds have a new cause célèbre. But even the broader international community perceives Turkey as the victim of tactless, condescending treatment that violated the extensive decorum governing diplomatic relations. Just as importantly, the world has basically forgotten what originally started all this: a Turkish TV series that depicted Mossad agents as bloodthirsty murderers, as well as extremely questionable comments about Israel from Turkey’s leaders.

• LOSER: Israel. Its unjustified actions are noted and condemned, while its justified grievances are ignored—and unlike when that usually happens, Israel can largely blame itself. Plus, Turkey now has cover to do what it was going to do anyway: cozy up to its neighbors to the east, Syria and Iran.

• WINNER: Shimon Peres. Blessed is the peacemaker! A Turkish diplomat credited Israel’s 86-year-old president with arranging the apology that resolved the burgeoning crisis: “You’re lucky you have Peres, the wise man of the Middle East,” he said. Peres’s legacy as the last rise-above-the-fray old-line Zionist probably did not need further buffing, but in case it did, his role in this affair should do the trick.

• LOSER: Danny Ayalon. The deputy foreign minister, a former ambassador to the United States, is an ambitious politician who might have been looking to make a name for himself while Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—his boss and the leader of his right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party—is under police investigation. Instead, Ayalon is now being roundly condemned, with Yisrael Beiteinu members asserting that his career is over and even Peres throwing him under the bus.

• WINNER: Benjamin Netanyahu. Though the prime minister hasn’t been caught on-record saying so, various hints suggest that he at least tacitly supported Ayalon’s actions. Yet Ayalon, and to some extent Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu, took the blame, while Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party look like moderates by comparison.

• WINNER AND LOSER: The United States. When Israel’s image in the Arab and Muslim world suffers, so does America’s. Additionally, it is massively in the U.S. interest for Israel and Turkey, two important strategic U.S. allies, to have a strong relationship, and this latest affair won’t help what was already a deteriorating partnership. On the other hand, this affair frankly could have gotten a whole lot worse before it got better. Yet another country owes Peres its thanks.

Israel and Turkey Patch Up Rift Over a Diplomatic Slight [NYT]
Turkish Official: Israel’s Lucky To Have Peres [Ynet]
‘Ayalon’s Political Career Is Ruined’ [JPost]
Don’t Blame Israel For Ayalon’s Error [JPost]

Earlier: Trouble With Turkey

Brown Says Livni ‘Most Welcome’ in U.K. [Ynet]
U.K. Ponders Law Change After Tzipi Livni Arrest Warrant [BBC News]
Lieberman, British FM Discuss Arrest Warrants [Arutz Sheva]

Earlier: U.K. Court Issued Warrant for Livni

So is the location—the Russia House in downtown Washington, D.C.—a joke, too? Is the party even happening? “We booked Russia House, and then realized there was so much we could do with that,” Spitalnick said. The party, in other words, is a go. Join J Street, friends of J Street, and Michael Goldfarb (maybe) in two Tuesdays for free booze. great times, and good conversation. We’ll even hazard the guess that the topic of Israel might come up.

J Street Chanukah Happy Hour at Russia House [Facebook]

Previously: The Pulse-Taker

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinians envoy to the United Nations congratulated the supporting nations for “fighting against impunity and seeking accountability,” while the Israelis, having initially rejected the result as “deeply flawed, one-sided, and prejudiced,” changed their minds overnight and are now calling the whole affair a victory of sorts. “We are neither surprised nor disappointed with the vote,” Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said today in Jerusalem. The nays, mainly from Western democracies—including the United States, following a Congressional resolution urging the Obama Administration to contest the report—actually constitute a “moral majority” for Israel that proves the country “is succeeding in getting across the message that the report is one-sided and not serious,” Lieberman argued. And now what will happen? Well, probably nothing: the United States is unlikely to let the matter go before the Security Council, and neither Israel nor Hamas are likely, at this point, to respond with any degree of seriousness to the report itself. So, in other words, everyone can say they won, and maybe now we can all talk about something else for a change.

U.N. Assembly Votes for Probes of Gaza War Charges [Reuters]
Earlier: U.S. House Condemns Goldstone Report

According to the series’ website, Ayrilik “brings to life the bleeding wound of Palestine,” and needless to say, the Israeli government is incensed. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called the Turkish ambassador in Israel to a meeting with high-ranking Israeli officials, and one of his deputies, Naor Gilon, told the envoy, “This kind of incitement is likely to lead to physical harm being done to Jews and Israelis who arrive in Turkey as tourists.” Lieberman went further, accusing the Turkish government—the show runs on a state-owned television network—of being complicit in an incitement to anti-Semitic violence.

Meanwhile, yesterday Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the “conscience of our people” impelled him to exclude Israel from joint war game exercises. “I had to be the voice that expresses the existence of my people,” Erdogan said in an interview with the al-Arabiya new channel in Dubai, “and my people were rejecting Israel’s participation.”

Turkish TV Show Has IDF Soldiers ‘Killing’ Palestinian Kids [Ynet]
Erdogan: My People Rejected Israel’s Participation [Ynet]

Netanyahu’s surer hold on power is due in large part to savvy political instincts. As he admitted in private discussion with colleagues recently, reported by Haaretz, his July speech at Bar-Ilan University, in which he for the first time consented to Palestinian statehood, cooled somewhat the domestic media’s hatred of him. But Bibi’s boom is also related to a more ephemeral political phenomenon: luck.

For starters, the ongoing legal woes of his controversial foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who looks set to resign any day, have only consolidated Netanyahu’s singular influence in a top-heavy and overloaded cabinet. Second, the recent turmoil in Iran helped legitimize a perennial pessimist who’s been saying for years that Islamist governments can’t be negotiated with. And perhaps most impressively, Netanyahu has benefited from taking on Barack Obama—perhaps the only politician in the world of whom this could be said.

Netanyahu’s skills as a political tactician have improved greatly in the last decade. Indeed, understanding the unlikely successes of his second term requires knowing a little about the failures of his first.

Originally elected in 1996, half a year after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu was never fully embraced by a constituency still reeling from the late failure of dovish hopes. Back then, “he was lucky to be elected,” said Jerusalem Post pundit Shmuel Rosner. “He was never accepted by elites who thought he was just this young, hawkish guy who stole the election from Shimon Peres. He never got the legitimacy he needed, either from the Israeli people or from the Clinton administration.” According to Noah Pollak, a blogger on the Middle East for Commentary, who’s regularly in touch with officials in the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu was seen back then as an “impediment to the peace process, the naysayer,” running against an enormous tide of sympathy for reconciliation with the Arabs. As such, he was someone whom Bill Clinton—always perceived as a friend to the Jewish state—could easily undercut by appealing directly to the Israeli people. Netanyahu’s response was to buckle to U.S. pressure, making concessions to the Palestinians that he had vowed during the campaign never to make, such as withdrawing from 80 percent of Hebron in 1997, and signing the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which outlined further withdrawals. Both of these gestures alienated Netanyahu’s allies on the far right and cost him reelection in 1999. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote at the time, “the would-be Israeli Churchill began to morph into a Chamberlain.”

Other neophyte mistakes, too, complicated Netanyahu’s maiden effort at governing. Matt Silver, a communications professor at the Academic College of Emek Yezreel, remembers vividly the unsuccessful assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal in 1997, which Silver viewed then as Netanyahu’s attempted macho rite of passage gone awry. “One journal called him a ‘mysterious bungler,’” Silver recalled. “He had to prove himself, that he wasn’t this Johnny-come-lately, [that] he was a real Israeli.”

No longer. According to Sherman and Rosner, Netanyahu has learned from serving in subordinate roles in government in the past decade. His tenure as both foreign minister and finance minister under Ariel Sharon, many long-time observers of his career argue, taught him the value of compromise and alliance-building—what his critics in the Israeli press, including Nahum Barnea, the influential reporter for Yedioth Aronoth, call “opportunism.” To Rosner, however, it was telling that this time around, Netanyahu reached out to the Labor Party, which received only 13 seats in the Knesset in the last election, when he could have simply forged a narrow right-wing coalition government. Retaining as defense minister Ehud Barak, with whom Netanyahu served in the same IDF unit and is said to get along with well personally, was also savvy. “He learned this from Sharon,” said Rosner. “Bibi never liked Sharon, never trusted him, but he learned from his achievements.”

And in the confrontation with the White House over settlement expansion in the West Bank—the starkest challenge Netanyahu has faced so far—Netanyahu has astonishingly emerged less scathed than Obama. Unlike in 1996, the U.S. gambit of taking the case straight to the Israeli people has backfired, Rosner and Pollak said, with Israelis siding with Netanyahu over an even more internationally admired Democratic president. (Since announcing the settlement freeze, Obama’s approval rating in Israel, according to a Jerusalem Post-sponsored Smith Research poll, has dropped from 31 percent to six percent.)

“Obama began exactly where Clinton left off—at Camp David,” Pollak said. “He tried to weaken Bibi politically by making the Israeli public fear a crisis in the relationship with the U.S. But Obama, unlike Clinton, was elected with the baggage of Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and Bill Ayers—these were strikes against him in Israel. He compounded them by giving his first interview to Al Arabiya, and making his first two big speeches in Arab Muslim venues, Turkey and Cairo.”

Pollak suggests that Obama should have tried to cultivate a stronger rapport with the Israeli street before attempting any “arm-twisting.” Furthermore, halting construction in settlements that will likely go to Israel in any prospective peace agreement—particularly the East Jerusalem suburb of Ma’ale Adumin, which has 30,000 residents—is not nearly the cause célèbre in Jerusalem that it is in Washington. “There is no way you can have an agreement with Israel on a settlement freeze that would be meaningful,” said Barnea, who thinks Obama should have simply called for a freeze, which would have made Netanyahu sweat, but not tried to negotiate the details of one, which Israel can’t do, “legally or politically.” Negotiating the freeze “didn’t benefit Bibi,” Barnea added, “it damaged the Obama administration, and made it look ineffective in the eyes of the Arabs.”

Although Netanyahu has dismantled more outposts and roadblocks in the West Bank than did his predecessor Ehud Olmert, and vowed to double the number of Israeli inspectors of settlement construction, these seeming capitulations to White House demands have been carried out with little or no publicity.  According to Pollak, that’s the price of being a pariah prime minister—not receiving credit for aiding Palestinians—but so far, at least, Netanyahu’s coalition hasn’t rebelled against him again for these concessions.

Additionally, an unforeseen international crisis has tacitly bolstered Netanyahu’s credibility. Ayatollah Khameini’s ultra-violent reaction to protests in Iran, following the contested reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also appeared to justify what Israel’s most recognizable national security hardliner has been saying for years: that the mullahs can’t be trusted. Yet Netanyahu has not sought to take credit for being proven right. According to Daniel Seaman, director of the Israeli Government Press Office, Netanyahu’s reticence was strategic. “There’s an old Hebrew saying, ‘The work of the righteous is done by others.’ To people, it’s clear where Bibi stood on this issue. If he starts saying something about it, there’s going to be an opposition. This way, he gets all the benefits out of being right without claiming to be, and the opposition isn’t emboldened.”

Finally, Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right nationalist head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, whom Netanyahu appointed foreign minister much to the chagrin of liberals at home and abroad, is facing a likely indictment for corruption charges, and may soon be a headache no more. Lieberman has promised to resign if he’s indicted, and a source in the prime minister’s office said that in that likely scenario, Netanyahu will keep the position vacant. “He can say he’s leaving it open to Lieberman until he’s exonerated, or leave it open to entice Kadima,” the source said. According to this theory, Netanyahu will run the foreign ministry alongside Barak—longtime chum of Hillary Clinton and Israeli’s preferred diplomat to the United States and Western Europe—and Danny Ayalon, the current deputy foreign minister, who represents the gentler face of Yisrael Beiteinu. As a troika, these men have all along been crafting Israel’s foreign policy without the help or input of Lieberman, who’s been there as a salve to his base. In fact, already “Lieberman is foreign minister in name only,” said Rosner.

Of course, Netanyahu’s fortunes may soon turn again. “Public opinion here, like in the states, is very flexible and exposed to mood,” said Barnea. “Bibi is lucky because, temporarily, the day-to-day security is basically good. Since the end of Operation Gaza, we don’t have any rockets, any terrorist attacks inside Israel. It’s springtime for the government.”

Barnea is quick to point out that this is only the beginning of a tenuous coalition; what’s more, it’s the summer, when as many as 400,000 Israelis (roughly 10 percent of the population) are vacationing abroad in Turkey, Europe, or the United States. “The feeling is that the country is on hold, in a way,” said Barnea, who, in covering Fatah’s sixth general assembly in Bethlehem, said the only thing people he interviewed wanted to talk about was food. “There’s no political news, only criminal. So let’s talk about the murder of a homosexual in Tel Aviv, or the murder of a baby by a father who wants to revenge his wife. If this is Bibi’s luck, OK. I call it August.”

Nevertheless, a rosier picture has thus emerged of Netanyahu’s prospects than anyone last February would have painted. “The day after Bibi formed his government, people were giving it a year at most,” said Silver. “Now it’s two or three years.”

Abbas: Popular Resistance to Go On [JPost]
Lieberman: Fatah Platform Buries Chance for Peace Deal [Haaretz]

Chavez calls Lieberman ‘mafia boss,’ denies links to Hezbollah [Haaretz]

The foreign ministry was characteristically given to moderates under previous Likud prime minister, but this time it went to an ultra-conservative nationalist because of his party Yisrael Beiteinu’s remarkable showing in last year’s elections. According to many observers of his tenuous right-wing coalition, Netanyahu has been hoping that Lieberman’s legal troubles would do him in, thus allowing the prime minister to avoid firing a foreign minister internationally recognized as an embarrassment for Israel. (Even Nicolas Sarkozy, bane of the banlieue “scum” and the Islamic headscarf, publicly called for the ouster of a man.) An indictment, then, would be perhaps the best thing that’s happened to Benjamin Netanyahu so far in his administration.

Lieberman: If I’m Indicted for Corruption I Will Resign [Haaretz]

According to one report, in the Australian, Lieberman intended to counter the American argument that Israel should not allow a 20-apartment development on the site of a former hotel previously owned by the family of the mufti who had sat with Hitler. The site, in the eastern part of Israel’s capital city, was purchased by a Jewish group that is seeking to extend Jewish ownership in the quarter through private acquisition.

“Crude and diversionary” is how Lieberman’s line of thinking is described by the Guardian newspaper’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, who reports that the demarche is “directly related” to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “insistence that he will not give in to international demands to freeze Israeli settlement activity.” The Middle East correspondent of the Australian, John Lyons, quotes one source as telling the newspaper that inside Israel’s own foreign ministry the instruction was met with “laughter, skepticism and a sense of misplaced communication that this doesn’t help one bit the real argument.”

Maybe he should have asked the diplomats’ mothers. Certainly the fact that the Palestinian Arabs hewed to Hitler was understood by an earlier generation as fundamental. It was marked over and over again by such great liberal institutions as the Forward newspaper. The error of the Arabs was compounded as they refused—in sharp contradistinction to, say, the Germans—to make an effort to educate their people to the facts of what happened under Hitler and what it all meant. It seems they wanted the world not to regret but to forget.

The mufti whose picture Lieberman wants circulated was born in 1893, as political Zionism was being organized. I last wrote about him for the Wall Street Journal’s website, when, in August 2001, the German foreign minister was trying to organize a Mideast peace powwow in Berlin. I suggested that such a conference would be haunted by el-Husseini. The mufti didn’t just pass through Berlin during the war. He was in Berlin for three years between 1941 and 1945. Hitler, in the meeting that Lieberman wants people to remember, reassured the mufti that after dealing with the Jews the Germans would turn their attention to liberating the Arabs.

As one of the mufti’s biographers, Joseph Schechtman, tells the story, the mufti went on to build up “a truly world-wide network of anti-Allied activities,” including broadcasting propaganda against the Jews, England, and America. He maneuvered furiously to block the ability of Jews to escape Hitler by going to Palestine. After the war, the mufti ended up in France and was eventually allowed to escape to Cairo.

Sympathetic biographers have tried to suggest that the mufti’s maneuvering in Berlin fell somewhat short of outright collaboration. One, Phillip Mattar, has suggested the Zionists were so eager to prove the mufti guilty of collaboration and war crimes that they exaggerated his connections to the Nazis. But he acknowledges that “the Mufti and other Arabs were so busy justifying his statements and actions in the Axis countries that they ignored the obvious and overwhelming fact that the Mufti had cooperated with the most barbaric regime in modern times.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, in a dispatch issued by The New York Times in January 2008, considered the question of how the anti-Jewish ideas being used by Iranian agencies such as Hezbollah were able to “work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse.” He reasons that they were imported from Europe, and quoted a German scholar, Matthias Küntzel, as warning of their seriousness. Küntzel, Goldberg noted, “makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.”

Küntzel was quoted by Goldberg as saying that the mufti and the “Egyptian proto-Islamist” Hassan al-Banna “willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses.” Goldberg reckons that Hassan al-Banna “did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner” as the mufti, but he quotes Küntzel as saying his movement was subsidized with German funds that enabled it to, among other things, distribute Arabic translations of, among other tomes, Mein Kampf. He quoted Küntzel as writing that across the Arab world, “Nazi methods and ideology whipped up anti-Zionist fervor, and the effects of this concerted campaign are still being felt today.”

Goldberg offered a caveat, saying that “one doesn’t have to be soft on Germany to believe it was organic Muslim ideas as well as Nazi ideas that led to the spread of anti-Semitism in the Middle East.” But he concluded that Küntzel was “right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East.” Goldberg quoted his own interview with a former leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who said: “The question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” Goldberg ended by quoting Küntzel as arguing that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

In other words, the more one gets into it, the more it is plain that Avigdor Lieberman knows just what he is doing—and is doing it for good reason.

Seth Lipsky is a columnist for Tablet. He can be reached at slipsky@tabletmag.com.

The trouble seems to have been how the boy’s mother became a Jew—she used what Haaretz calls an “independent progressive synagogue”—which led Britain’s Office of the Chief Rabbi, which decides on the legitimacy of such conversions, to reject her claim to Jewishness. In their ruling, the three judges wrote: “The motive for discrimination, whether benign or malign, theological or supremacist, makes it no less and no more unlawful,” a decision that reflects the broadest state intervention into the affairs of British Jews since Oliver Cromwell allowed them back into the country.

Interestingly, this sets a international precedent for something Israel is trying to accomplish: the introduction of civil unions as an alternative to the Orthodox-approved religious kind (currently the only legal way to go for Jews there). A bill to do that was recently outvoted in the Knesset when Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party absented itself from the vote, claiming the measure—sponsored by a swath of Labor and Kadima Knesset members—was designed merely to humiliate the party by forcing a wedge between it and its conservative religious allies. Yisrael Beiteinu candidates had campaigned in the last Israeli election as very much in favor of allowing civil marriage, a move popular with one of its largest voting blocs, Russian immigrants who, having grown up in the Soviet Union, are often deemed insufficiently Jewish by the Israeli rabbinate. But Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu’s ally, is against civil marriages.

Who Is a Jew? Let the Civil Court Decide ] [Haaretz]
Related: The Other Civil Union [Tablet]

Earlier this week, the New York Times disclosed that French President Nicolas Sarkozy personally told Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu that his foreign minister, the far-right ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, was toxic and should be fired, comparing Lieberman to France’s best-known xenophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen. Given the iciness between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu, there’s a good chance the U.S. president has prevailed upon his European allies to do some gentle nudging and needling of their own. Merkel’s statements are exactly in line with the main criterion put forth by both the European Union and American State Department. And if anyone on the continent is in a position to deflect an anti-Arab boor, surely it’s the part-Jewish head of state who wants the burka banned and the rioting “scum” of the Parisian banlieues brought to heel.

Merkel: Settlements Ruin Efforts for 2-state Solution [JPost]

Sarkozy Comments on Israeli Minister Make Waves [NYT]

Early in June, a bill that would have authorized civil unions, cosponsored by a host of Kadima and Labor representatives, was defeated in the Knesset due largely to a turnabout by Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu. The party—whose largest voting bloc is made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their first-generation children, many of whom the rabbinate does not consider halachically Jewish—had campaigned in this year’s national election on the promise of delivering a civil union bill. But, once in power, Lieberman changed his position to dovetail with that of the Orthodox and Haredi parties—including Shas, Agudat Yisrael and Bayit Yehudi—that make up Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government. (Calls and emails to the Yisrael Beiteinu Jerusalem headquarters went unanswered.)

Israel may be a modern democracy, but its marriage laws are moored to 19th-century empire—Ottoman, to be exact. The decision to grant the Israeli rabbinate complete control over Jewish matrimony derives from the Turkish millet system in which each confessional community—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—was unilaterally in charge of its own population’s marriage laws. This system was kept in place under British Mandate Palestine, which, operating under the assumption that monotheistic groups are best left to govern themselves, refused to recognize marriages conducted outside of these communities (excluding consular marriages for colonial officials, and civil divorces obtained in other countries).

Once Israel was founded, the law swung between insularity and inclusiveness. After the founding of the state, David Ben-Gurion, who did not want to alienate religious Jews eager to make aliyah, entered into the so-called status quo agreement, whereby confessional communities would continue to oversee the process of marriage registration. Membership in the Jewish community was determined by the “Knesset Israel” courts until 1953, when rabbinical courts assumed full jurisdiction over this and other arcane questions of Jewishness. The rabbis hewed to an Orthodox interpretation of halacha—according to which one needs to have been born to a Jewish mother or to have undergone an accepted Orthodox conversion—in deciding who is and is not “Jewish,” and thus fit for Israeli matrimony. Two Supreme Court cases liberalized the nuptial code somewhat: in 1951, the Court decided that marriages that took place outside of Israel and were conducted by a rabbinical court—with proven halachic legitimacy—should be recognized. And in 1961, it ruled that the Ministry of the Interior must register married couples who were joined in civil unions outside of Israel, regardless of whether one or both of the partners were Israeli citizens.

Unmarried cohabitating couples are granted certain tax, insurance, and inheritance benefits under the Israeli version of common-law marriage—known as rishum hazugiyut—but their unions, and the families that derive from them, are not formally recognized by the state. (In 2007, the Olmert government even passed a law that created a separate category of gentiles; these indisputable non-Jews were now allowed to marry each other in Israel, provided they didn’t try to marry Jews.) As a result, atheists, secular Jews, Reform Jews, and Jews who refuse to undergo Orthodox conversion rituals must travel outside Israel to a civil ceremony that will then be recognized by the Israeli government. Cyprus is the most popular destination given the proximity and lower cost of the proceedings.

Even Jews may be forbidden from marrying other Jews with higher pedigrees, if the rabbinate so decrees. Consider the case of Irina Plotkinov, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, who in 2005 was deemed Jewish by the same rabbinical court that also said she could not lawfully marry the man she fell in love with: native Israeli Shmuel Cohen. While the court determined Plotkinov was indeed Jewish and single, it prohibited her from marrying a kohen, or a man considered by Jewish custom to be a descendant of Aaron and the priests of the First Temple.

Some American converts to Orthodox Judaism have trouble navigating the caprices of the Israeli rabbinate, too. Avraham Elhiany, the son of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, underwent an Orthodox conversion in Metairie, Louisiana. He then met and fell for an Israeli woman and scheduled a lavish wedding ceremony in her hometown of Ma’alot. But when the pair presented themselves to the town’s rabbi, they were told that his conversion was not legitimate. According to San Francisco’s J Weekly, which first reported the story, the rabbi’s complaint was that Elhiany’s conversion certificate was handwritten instead of typed (and never mind that a typewriter with Hebrew typesetting was unavailable in Metairie); that it was also signed by three rabbis in the town’s Orthodox Congregation Beth Israel meant little in terms of state recognition.

Adding to the confusion are countervailing definitions of what it means to be “Jewish” under Israeli  citizenship laws. In 1970, Prime Minister Golda Meir and her Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira acceded to mounting Orthodox pressures to stipulate that while the Israeli Law of Return would still apply to a person who only had one Jewish parent or grandparent, and to that person’s spouse, the civil definition of a Jew would be narrowly defined as “someone who was born to a Jewish mother, or who converted and is not a member of another religion.” This created a kind of limbo realm within the greater Zionist project: technically speaking, a Diaspora Jew may make aliyah and live the rest of his life as a full citizen in Israel, but not be able to obtain a marriage license.

According to Rabbi Seth Farber, head of the Jerusalem-based Jewish-Life Information Center, which helps recent and would-be converts navigate the country’s conversion laws, this seeming contradiction is actually rooted in the fact that the Jewish state was founded not just as a bulwark against anti-Semitism, but as a check on assimilation. “In the infancy of the state, the marriage issue never really came up,” Farber says. “Pretty much everybody identified with the Jewish religious community. But in an era in which the rabbinate refuses to certify plenty of well-meaning and observant Jews as eligible for marriage, it ought to take the lead in creating a civil alternative for people.” The rabbinate, Farber explains, understands that it has a mounting social problem on its hands but worries that by lowering its criteria, it will inch ever closer to the legitimization of intermarriage in Israel. Nevertheless, Farber argues, “the threshold for proving one’s Jewishness in this country will come down the moment there is a civil marriage alternative. The rabbinate will want to stay relevant, and it’ll have to adapt.” Changing internal demographics might accelerate that adaptation. If Arab Israelis outnumber Jewish Israelis in the coming decades, as forecasts suggests they will, then the state should want to do everything it can to encourage sanctioned marriages, even at the expense of defining down eligibility—and Jewishness.

To get a sense of how at odds Israel is with itself on this question, one need only look at one of the lesser-studied clauses of Netanyahu’s coalition government agreement. As reported by Rabbi Farber in a Hebrew-language article for Haaretz, the current administration mandates that any future civil union bill that is passed will still grant full authority to the Chief Rabbinate to determine who is not Jewish enough for a religious marriage and therefore eligible for a civil union. In this Kafkaesque scenario, a person turned away by a rabbi for not being Jewish enough may then be turned away again for not being able to prove it.

“You’re not going to get the Haredim to say, yes, civil marriage is okay,” says Shmarya Rosenberg, the proprietor of the Failed Messiah blog, which monitors the American and Israeli Orthodox community. He adds that the entire Israeli electoral system—the entire nation votes as a whole for a party list, not as constituents from separate districts for individual candidates—would have to be overhauled in order to reduce the power of the Orthodox parties and their mainstream allies, like Netanyahu’s Likud.

So will things change? While these conditions are no doubt unpleasant for people who can’t legally say “I do,” yet may not be able to afford overseas nuptials, they are not dire yet enough warrant substantive reform. “If you’re Jewish and you were married five years ago, you have not confronted the problem that exists today,” Rosenberg says. “The problem is much worse for anyone who isn’t Orthodox. As the Haredi strength grows and their control grows, that’ll become clearer.” Rosenberg adds that because an influential party like Shas is founded as much on Sephardic pride as it is on Orthodox religiosity, there’s an added ethnic component to this debate, which complicates it further. “Lots of non-religious voters vote for Shas, and while they may be for civil unions in theory, there’s enormous social pressure to practically oppose civil unions in opinion polls and at the ballot box.”

At a time when U.S.-Israeli comity looks to be flagging, in large part due to the fundamental disagreements between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu over settlements and the two-state solution, is there a chance that Israel, with a right-wing Russian as its face to the world, will grow closer to a country from whose soil so many of its citizens came and that has never shied from finding new strategic partners in the Middle East?

Lieberman ‘Deeply Disappointed’ Over Russia-Hamas Contacts [Jerusalem Post]