View from the booth: Well, well. What have we here? What this discussion portends for the future depends upon the level of sway that moderates in both Fatah and Hamas hold over the types cast amongst Fatah of "eradicateurs" - those within Fatah who think that Israel will invade Gaza, get rid of Hamas and hand the whole thing over to Fatah (and like obverse thinkers among Hamas). It isn't going to happen that way. If Israel invades Gaza, the price to pay for Fatah, Hamas and the rest of the involved Arab world will be quite large and is probably, from an Arab viewpoint, too high a price to pay to Israel to take care of this internal matter. In the end, any stable, reasonably powerful (that is, enough to control its own people without worrying overly so about radical factions) and responsible government with which Israel can negotiate a peace between itself and the Palestinians, is a good thing.
Randy Shiner
Taking a cue from Israel
Fatah's change of tune is better late than never, reports Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite continued blame-casting, Hamas and Fatah are getting themselves ready for Arab-mediated reconciliation talks aimed at restoring Palestinian national unity and ending the year-long rift between the two largest political factions in the occupied Palestinian territories.
No concrete date has been designated for the intensive talks, but reliable sources in the Gaza Strip have intimated that Egypt is about to extend the invitations to both Hamas and Fatah for the resumption of the inter-Palestinian dialogue. The sources said the commencement of the talks was only a matter of days or one week at the maximum.
Efforts to end the enduring crisis between Fatah and Hamas acquired a new momentum recently when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced his willingness to restart reconciliation talks with Hamas without any preconditions. Hamas welcomed the announcement, made on 6 June, saying it was willing and ready to sit down with Fatah any time and in any place to end the long-standing rift between the two sides.
Moreover, the recent Egyptian- brokered ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip is having a positive impact on the prospects of restoring Palestinian national unity.
There have been some tangible signs indicating that the thick fog separating Gaza and Ramallah is beginning to dissipate, slowly but surely. Last week, a high-level Fatah delegation headed by former PA minister Hikmat Zeid visited the Gaza Strip and met with Fatah leaders and some low-level Hamas operatives. The delegation was welcomed by the authorities in Gaza and full security escorts were provided to facilitate its meetings and lodgings. And while the delegation didn't meet with the Hamas government Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh or any high-ranking official, the visit itself was viewed as a step in the right direction.
More to the point, the PA security agencies, apparently acting on orders from Abbas, released dozens of suspected Hamas sympathisers from jail. This coincided with a significant reduction in the number of Hamas sympathisers being detained in PA custody.
On Tuesday, a representative of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), which is making its own mediation efforts between Fatah and Hamas, said he had received a list of 54 Hamas detainees in PA jails in the West Bank and 44 Fatah detainees in Hamas custody in the Gaza Strip. The DFLP representative, Talal Abu Afifeh, said he would press both sides to release all political prisoners in the coming days or weeks and turn the page on a shameful episode of Palestinian history under the Israeli occupation. If the DFLP succeeds, it will have removed one of the most contentious problems generating ill-will between Gaza and Ramallah.
Concomitantly, there has been a noticeable de-escalation in the propaganda war between Hamas and Fatah, with the respective media of each side generally refraining from using harsh epithets to describe the other.
Furthermore, there are unconfirmed reports that Abbas will meet with the Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. Abbas is slated to visit the Syrian capital next month. While the prospective meeting won't necessarily be a breakthrough in itself, it would be the strongest and clearest sign that the ice between the two erstwhile enemies was beginning to melt.
Moreover, PA officials in Ramallah confirmed that Abbas was planning to visit the Gaza Strip. Ahmed Abdul- Rahman, a senior Fatah spokesman, was quoted as saying that, "the visit might take place soon because the president is determined to put an end to the state of division in the Palestinian arena."
According to Hassan Khreishe, an independent lawmaker who heads the Popular Committee for National Reconciliation (PCNC), both Hamas and Fatah as well as a host of Arab mediators including the Arab League, Egypt and Qatar, have already accepted the general outlines of a prospective agreement between the two Palestinian factions.
Khreishe said the PCNC initiative consists of two parts; the first calls for ceasing mutual incitement and releasing all political detainees, followed by the formation of a transitional government made up of technocrats and independents, whose main task would be to prepare for the organisation of early presidential and legislative elections. The second part deals with the "hard files" including reforming and reconstructing the Palestinian political system, the security agencies and the PLO.
It is likely that any prospective agreement between Fatah and Hamas will be based on the National Reconciliation Accord reached between the two sides two years ago. The accord was based on a carefully-worded document prepared by the leaders of Palestinian political and resistance prisoners in Israeli jails. It calls, inter alia, for the creation of a Palestinian state on 100 per cent of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967 with all of East Jerusalem as its capital as well as a just resolution of the refugee plight pursuant to UN Resolution 194. The agreement also called for the rebuilding of the Palestinian security forces on a national rather than factional basis.
The ceasefire agreement in Gaza, however fragile and uncertain it may be, is generally perceived to have enhanced the overall position of Hamas vis-à-vis Fatah. Many within the Fatah camp and its allies, especially the so-called eradicateurs wing, had hoped that Israel would eventually overrun the Gaza Strip, destroy Hamas and hand the coastal territory over to Fatah on a silver platter.
Now, the more pragmatic Fatah leadership, especially elements loyal to imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Al-Barghouti, who advocates national unity with Hamas, seems to be resigned to the fact that Fatah has no choice but to talk to Hamas. The Gaza tahdia (calm) also seems to be changing minds within the erstwhile enemies of Hamas.
A member of the ultra- secular party, Feda, has privately accused the United States and Israel of betraying the Palestinian Authority. "They wanted us to be more American than the Americans by insisting that we boycott and fight Hamas. Well, if Israel could hold talks and reach a ceasefire agreement with it, why should the PLO continue to adopt a hostile attitude towards Hamas. We can't be more Israeli than the Israelis," said the man who asked that his name not be mentioned.
Such disappointment, observers suggest, is likely to be rife among many Fatah and PLO hawks who until recently adopted a gung-ho attitude towards Hamas.
Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts
28 June 2008
05 June 2008
Obama Departs From U.S. Policy on Jerusalem
As I have written, Obama is the perfect messenger to the Arabs that their meshugas and ridiculous demands will not receive a warm welcome simply by virtue of his middle name. If we have to resort to Biblical argumentation that Israel is more important to Judaism than Islam, let us have that discussion, because the Jewish argument is the winner by a longshot. I can't count the number of times that Jerusalem is mentioned in Torah and that it forms the center of Jewish redemptive theology. Islam, on the other hand, places Jerusalem third in importance in the Muslim world - the Dome of the Rock is where Muhammed was alleged to ascend to heaven. But the unquestioned center of Islam is Mecca. The Jewish Mecca is Jerusalem.
Randy Shiner
Obama Departs From U.S. Policy on Jerusalem
By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
June 05, 2008
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - In his quest for Jewish votes on Wednesday -- the day after he claimed the Democratic presidential nomination -- Sen. Barak Obama went beyond U.S. policy on the issue of Jerusalem when he said the city would remain the united capital of Israel.
"Let me be clear," Obama told America's largest pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, on Wednesday. "Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive and that allows them to prosper. But any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," he said in comments widely viewed as intended to win the hearts of Jewish voters.
While Israelis applauded such a notion, the Palestinians were not pleased.
"This statement is totally rejected," Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was quoted as saying.
"The whole world knows that holy Jerusalem was occupied in 1967 and we will not accept a Palestinian state without having Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state," Abbas said.
Current U.S. policy maintains that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be decided by the Israelis and Palestinians themselves.
Until recently, Israel insisted that Jerusalem would be its undivided capital forever. Palestinians want the eastern part of the city for the capital of a future state.
Israel reunited the city after 19 years as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War and declared the city to be its capital, prompting international embassies to leave the city in protest.
No country in the world maintains an embassy in Jerusalem. The U.S. has two consulates there, but its embassy is in Tel Aviv.
Dr. Eran Lerman, director of Israel/Middle East office of The American Jewish Committee told Cybercast News Service that Obama's speech was good in that it disabused the Palestinians of the notion that all they have to do is wait until the next president takes office and they'll have everything they want "delivered to them on a platter."
They now know that would never happen.
In his speech, Obama also called for the isolation of Hamas -- "unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and abide by past agreements." That is in line with current U.S. policy. "There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations," he added.
In April, a top Hamas official Ahmed Yousef said that Hamas liked Obama and hoped he would become the next U.S. president. But a Hamas spokesman in Gaza has now retracted that support.
Sami Abu Zuhri was quoted by Reuters as saying that Obama's comments now confirm that there would be "no change in the U.S. administration's foreign policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Both the Democratic and Republican Parties support what Zuhri called "the Israeli occupation at the expense of the interests and rights of Arabs and Palestinians."
He said that Hamas does not differentiate between presidential candidates Obama and Arizona Senator John McCain and had no preference as to who wins because "their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us."
Israelis liked it
"Without any doubt it was a great speech. He hit all the right notes," said former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Zalman Shoval. "Whoever gave him advice was well acquainted with the issues," he said, from Israel being a Jewish State to Jerusalem to security.
It was good that such a speech was made by a presidential candidate. Even if he loses, he's still an important person, Shoval told Cybercast News Service.
In general, Shoval said, a politician's long-term voting record counts more than campaign speeches.
Shoval said he can't remember any candidate who has not promised to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
In an analysis in Thursday's Jerusalem Post, Herb Keinon wrote that Israelis' "lack of enthusiasm" can be attributed to the fact that he's "an unknown" to Israelis and secondly because there is skepticism about who Obama will surround himself with.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200806/FOR20080605d.html
Randy Shiner
Obama Departs From U.S. Policy on Jerusalem
By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
June 05, 2008
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - In his quest for Jewish votes on Wednesday -- the day after he claimed the Democratic presidential nomination -- Sen. Barak Obama went beyond U.S. policy on the issue of Jerusalem when he said the city would remain the united capital of Israel.
"Let me be clear," Obama told America's largest pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, on Wednesday. "Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive and that allows them to prosper. But any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," he said in comments widely viewed as intended to win the hearts of Jewish voters.
While Israelis applauded such a notion, the Palestinians were not pleased.
"This statement is totally rejected," Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was quoted as saying.
"The whole world knows that holy Jerusalem was occupied in 1967 and we will not accept a Palestinian state without having Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state," Abbas said.
Current U.S. policy maintains that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be decided by the Israelis and Palestinians themselves.
Until recently, Israel insisted that Jerusalem would be its undivided capital forever. Palestinians want the eastern part of the city for the capital of a future state.
Israel reunited the city after 19 years as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War and declared the city to be its capital, prompting international embassies to leave the city in protest.
No country in the world maintains an embassy in Jerusalem. The U.S. has two consulates there, but its embassy is in Tel Aviv.
Dr. Eran Lerman, director of Israel/Middle East office of The American Jewish Committee told Cybercast News Service that Obama's speech was good in that it disabused the Palestinians of the notion that all they have to do is wait until the next president takes office and they'll have everything they want "delivered to them on a platter."
They now know that would never happen.
In his speech, Obama also called for the isolation of Hamas -- "unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and abide by past agreements." That is in line with current U.S. policy. "There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations," he added.
In April, a top Hamas official Ahmed Yousef said that Hamas liked Obama and hoped he would become the next U.S. president. But a Hamas spokesman in Gaza has now retracted that support.
Sami Abu Zuhri was quoted by Reuters as saying that Obama's comments now confirm that there would be "no change in the U.S. administration's foreign policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Both the Democratic and Republican Parties support what Zuhri called "the Israeli occupation at the expense of the interests and rights of Arabs and Palestinians."
He said that Hamas does not differentiate between presidential candidates Obama and Arizona Senator John McCain and had no preference as to who wins because "their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us."
Israelis liked it
"Without any doubt it was a great speech. He hit all the right notes," said former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Zalman Shoval. "Whoever gave him advice was well acquainted with the issues," he said, from Israel being a Jewish State to Jerusalem to security.
It was good that such a speech was made by a presidential candidate. Even if he loses, he's still an important person, Shoval told Cybercast News Service.
In general, Shoval said, a politician's long-term voting record counts more than campaign speeches.
Shoval said he can't remember any candidate who has not promised to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
In an analysis in Thursday's Jerusalem Post, Herb Keinon wrote that Israelis' "lack of enthusiasm" can be attributed to the fact that he's "an unknown" to Israelis and secondly because there is skepticism about who Obama will surround himself with.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200806/FOR20080605d.html
Iran's Rafsanjani: US trying to "enslave" Iraq with security agreement
Rafsanjani's reference to "the Islamic world" not allowing the US to stay in Iraq is farcical. It is redolent of the "pan-Arabism" once espoused by Gamel Abdul Nasser and which was destroyed in theory and practice after the Israeli clobbering of 5 different Arab armies in 1967. That Saudi Arabia, Sunni Capitol of the world is holding a summit on Islam, Christianity and Judaism should tell you something about Islamic unity. The Sunni hate the Shia and vice-versa. Each has different agendas. The only reason that Iran is at all concerned is that Iraq could be used as a launching pad for military action into Iran, should circumstances warrant. And that is an option that, for diplomatic purposes, like the Queen in a chess game, has to remain on the table to make sure that Iran knows that we, the US and the rest of the world, mean business when we say that we will not allow a nuclear weapon or the systems to deliver one.
Randy Shiner
Iran's Rafsanjani: US trying to "enslave" Iraq with security agreement
The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia: One of Iran's most powerful cleric-politicians said Wednesday the United States is trying to "enslave" Iraqis through a long-term security agreement being negotiated between Washington and Baghdad, and he vowed the Islamic world would stop the deal.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told a gathering of Muslim figures in the holy city of Mecca that the U.S. "occupation of Iraq represents a danger to all nations of the region" and warned that the security deal would create a "permanent occupation."
The comments were the strongest and most high-level public condemnations of the potential security deal by an Iranian official. Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, heads two of the country's most powerful clerical governing bodies, the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts.
"The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves before the Americans, if it is sealed. This will not happen. The Iraqi people, the Iraqi government and the Islamic nation will not allow it," Rafsanjani said.
Rafsanjani was speaking at a Saudi-sponsored conference aimed at unifying Muslim voices before an interfaith dialogue that Saudi King Abdullah wants to launch with Christian and Jewish religious figures.
Iran has been critical of the security agreement, largely in private talks with Iraqi officials. The deal, which the Iraqis and Americans hope to finish in mid-summer, would establish a long-term security relationship between Iraq and the United States, and a parallel agreement would provide a legal basis to keep U.S. troops in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.
Supporters believe the deal would help assure Iraq's Arab neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, that Iraq's Shiite-led government would not become a satellite of Shiite-dominated Iran as American military role here fades.
But public critics in Iraq worry the deal will lock in American military, economic and political domination of the country. Some Iraqi politicians have attacked the deal, especially those loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric whose militiamen fought U.S. and Iraqi troops in Baghdad until a May truce ended seven weeks of fighting.
The agreement is likely to be among the issues discussed this weekend when Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is due to visit Iran — his second trip there in a year.
Ahead of the visit, his party sought to calm worries by insisting that the deal would not allow foreign troops to use Iraq as a ground to invade another country — a clear reference to Iranian fears of a U.S. attack.
Randy Shiner
Iran's Rafsanjani: US trying to "enslave" Iraq with security agreement
The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia: One of Iran's most powerful cleric-politicians said Wednesday the United States is trying to "enslave" Iraqis through a long-term security agreement being negotiated between Washington and Baghdad, and he vowed the Islamic world would stop the deal.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told a gathering of Muslim figures in the holy city of Mecca that the U.S. "occupation of Iraq represents a danger to all nations of the region" and warned that the security deal would create a "permanent occupation."
The comments were the strongest and most high-level public condemnations of the potential security deal by an Iranian official. Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, heads two of the country's most powerful clerical governing bodies, the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts.
"The essence of this agreement is to turn the Iraqis into slaves before the Americans, if it is sealed. This will not happen. The Iraqi people, the Iraqi government and the Islamic nation will not allow it," Rafsanjani said.
Rafsanjani was speaking at a Saudi-sponsored conference aimed at unifying Muslim voices before an interfaith dialogue that Saudi King Abdullah wants to launch with Christian and Jewish religious figures.
Iran has been critical of the security agreement, largely in private talks with Iraqi officials. The deal, which the Iraqis and Americans hope to finish in mid-summer, would establish a long-term security relationship between Iraq and the United States, and a parallel agreement would provide a legal basis to keep U.S. troops in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.
Supporters believe the deal would help assure Iraq's Arab neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, that Iraq's Shiite-led government would not become a satellite of Shiite-dominated Iran as American military role here fades.
But public critics in Iraq worry the deal will lock in American military, economic and political domination of the country. Some Iraqi politicians have attacked the deal, especially those loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric whose militiamen fought U.S. and Iraqi troops in Baghdad until a May truce ended seven weeks of fighting.
The agreement is likely to be among the issues discussed this weekend when Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is due to visit Iran — his second trip there in a year.
Ahead of the visit, his party sought to calm worries by insisting that the deal would not allow foreign troops to use Iraq as a ground to invade another country — a clear reference to Iranian fears of a U.S. attack.
29 May 2008
U.S. Withdraws Fulbright Grants to Gaza
Regardless of US Government infighting, the ultimate problem rests upon the people under Hamas' rule. 40 years ago, students all over Europe, while not starting revolution, started a change to open Europe to new ways of thinking and living after WWII. It is the responsibility of those who are suffering directly and exactly because of the actions of Hamas against Israel who are ultimately at fault. It is a pity that they do not have their own people's true interests in mind when they launch rockets at Israel and perpetuate an ideology and way of life that has no future. As was pointed out by the commentator yesterday in the Beirut Daily Star with respect to Hezb'Allah, Hamas likewise has no raison d'etre once peace is hopefully and finally attained. At present, as long as they have a compliant, subjugated and timid people under their violent thumbs, Hamas will stay in power. The sooner students and others who are denied the things that come with freedom - responsibility - decide that enough is enough and revolt against Hamas, the better.
U.S. Withdraws Fulbright Grants to Gaza
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: May 30, 2008
GAZA — The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.
Ali Ali/European Pressphoto Agency, for The New York Times
Hadeel Abukwaik, standing, an engineering software instructor in Gaza, was in disbelief over losing her Fulbright grant.
Ali Ali/European Pressphoto Agency
Abdulrahman Abdullah, a Palestinian Fulbright candidate, in Al Deira hotel in Gaza City.
Israel has isolated this coastal strip, which is run by the militant group Hamas. Given that policy, the United States Consulate in Jerusalem said the grant money had been “redirected” to students elsewhere out of concern that it would go to waste if the Palestinian students were forced to remain in Gaza.
A letter was sent by e-mail to the students on Thursday telling them of the cancellation. Abdulrahman Abdullah, 30, who had been hoping to study for an M.B.A. at one of several American universities on his Fulbright, was in shock when he read it.
“If we are talking about peace and mutual understanding, it means investing in people who will later contribute to Palestinian society,” he said. “I am against Hamas. Their acts and policies are wrong. Israel talks about a Palestinian state. But who will build that state if we can get no training?”
Some Israeli lawmakers, who held a hearing on the issue of student movement out of Gaza on Wednesday, expressed anger that their government was failing to promote educational and civil development in a future Palestine given the hundreds of students who had been offered grants by the United States and other Western governments.
“This could be interpreted as collective punishment,” complained Rabbi Michael Melchior, chairman of the Parliament’s education committee, during the hearing. “This policy is not in keeping with international standards or with the moral standards of Jews, who have been subjected to the deprivation of higher education in the past. Even in war, there are rules.” Rabbi Melchior is from the Meimad Party, allied with Labor.
The committee asked the government and military to reconsider the policy and get back to it within two weeks. But even if the policy is changed, the seven Fulbright grantees in Gaza are out of luck for this year. Their letters urged them to reapply next year.
Israel’s policy appears to be in flux. At the parliamentary hearing on Wednesday, a Defense Ministry official recalled that the cabinet had declared Gaza “hostile territory” and decided that the safety of Israeli soldiers and civilians at or near the border should be risked only to facilitate the movement out of Gaza for humanitarian concerns, like medical treatment. Higher education, he said, was not a humanitarian concern.
But when a query about the canceled Fulbrights was made to the prime minister’s office on Thursday, senior officials expressed surprise. They said they did, in fact, consider study abroad to be a humanitarian necessity and that when cases were appealed to them, they would facilitate them.
They suggested that American officials never brought the Fulbright cases to their attention. The State Department and American officials in Israel refused to discuss the matter. But the failure to persuade the Israelis may have stemmed from longstanding tensions between the consulate in Jerusalem, which handles Palestinian affairs, and the embassy in Tel Aviv, which manages relations with the Israeli government.
The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas’s ability to rule because of the hardships of life.
Since Hamas, a radical Islamist group that opposes Israel’s existence, carried out what amounted to a coup d’état in Gaza against the more secular Fatah party a year ago, hundreds of rockets and mortar shells have been launched from here at Israeli civilians, truck and car bombs have gone off and numerous attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers have taken place.
While Hamas says the attacks are in response to Israeli military incursions into Gaza, it also says it will never recognize Israel.
“We are using the rockets to shake the conscience of the world about Israeli aggression,” argued Ahmed Yusef, political adviser to the Hamas foreign minister in an interview in his office here. “All our rockets are a reaction to Israeli aggression.”
The Israeli closing of Gaza has added markedly to the difficulty of daily life here, with long lines for cooking gas and a sense across the population of being under siege. Israel does send in about 70 truckloads per day of wheat, dairy products and medical equipment as well as some fuel, and it permits some medical cases out.
But Israel’s stated goal is to support moderates among the Palestinians so that Hamas will lose power, and even some security-conscious Israeli hard-liners say that the policy of barring students with grants abroad is counterproductive.
“We correctly complain that the Palestinian Authority is not building civil society, but when we don’t help build civil society this plays into the hands of Hamas,” said Natan Sharansky, a former government official. “The Fulbright is administered independently, and people are chosen for it due to their talents.”
The State Department Web site describes the Fulbright, the American government’s flagship program in international educational exchange, as “an integral part of U.S. foreign relations.” It adds, “the Fulbright Program creates a context to provide a better understanding of U.S. views and values, promotes more effective binational cooperation and nurtures open-minded, thoughtful leaders, both in the U.S. and abroad, who can work together to address common concerns.”
Sari Bashi, who directs Gisha, an Israeli organization devoted to monitoring and increasing the free movement of Palestinians, said, “The fact that the U.S. cannot even get taxpayer-funded Fulbright students out of Gaza demonstrates the injustice and short-sightedness of a closure policy that arbitrarily traps 1.5 million people, including hundreds of Palestinian students accepted to universities abroad.” She said that their education was good not just for Palestinian society, but for Israel as well.
Some Israelis disagree strongly.
“We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges,” said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. “So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior.”
Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.
“I stayed to get my scholarship,” she said. “Now I am desperate.”
She, like her six colleagues, was in disbelief. Mr. Abdullah, who called the consulate in Jerusalem for further explanation after receiving his letter, said to the official on the other end, “I still cannot believe that the American administration is not able to convince the Israelis to let seven Palestinians out of Gaza.”
Taghreed el-Khodary contributed reporting.
U.S. Withdraws Fulbright Grants to Gaza
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: May 30, 2008
GAZA — The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.
Ali Ali/European Pressphoto Agency, for The New York Times
Hadeel Abukwaik, standing, an engineering software instructor in Gaza, was in disbelief over losing her Fulbright grant.
Ali Ali/European Pressphoto Agency
Abdulrahman Abdullah, a Palestinian Fulbright candidate, in Al Deira hotel in Gaza City.
Israel has isolated this coastal strip, which is run by the militant group Hamas. Given that policy, the United States Consulate in Jerusalem said the grant money had been “redirected” to students elsewhere out of concern that it would go to waste if the Palestinian students were forced to remain in Gaza.
A letter was sent by e-mail to the students on Thursday telling them of the cancellation. Abdulrahman Abdullah, 30, who had been hoping to study for an M.B.A. at one of several American universities on his Fulbright, was in shock when he read it.
“If we are talking about peace and mutual understanding, it means investing in people who will later contribute to Palestinian society,” he said. “I am against Hamas. Their acts and policies are wrong. Israel talks about a Palestinian state. But who will build that state if we can get no training?”
Some Israeli lawmakers, who held a hearing on the issue of student movement out of Gaza on Wednesday, expressed anger that their government was failing to promote educational and civil development in a future Palestine given the hundreds of students who had been offered grants by the United States and other Western governments.
“This could be interpreted as collective punishment,” complained Rabbi Michael Melchior, chairman of the Parliament’s education committee, during the hearing. “This policy is not in keeping with international standards or with the moral standards of Jews, who have been subjected to the deprivation of higher education in the past. Even in war, there are rules.” Rabbi Melchior is from the Meimad Party, allied with Labor.
The committee asked the government and military to reconsider the policy and get back to it within two weeks. But even if the policy is changed, the seven Fulbright grantees in Gaza are out of luck for this year. Their letters urged them to reapply next year.
Israel’s policy appears to be in flux. At the parliamentary hearing on Wednesday, a Defense Ministry official recalled that the cabinet had declared Gaza “hostile territory” and decided that the safety of Israeli soldiers and civilians at or near the border should be risked only to facilitate the movement out of Gaza for humanitarian concerns, like medical treatment. Higher education, he said, was not a humanitarian concern.
But when a query about the canceled Fulbrights was made to the prime minister’s office on Thursday, senior officials expressed surprise. They said they did, in fact, consider study abroad to be a humanitarian necessity and that when cases were appealed to them, they would facilitate them.
They suggested that American officials never brought the Fulbright cases to their attention. The State Department and American officials in Israel refused to discuss the matter. But the failure to persuade the Israelis may have stemmed from longstanding tensions between the consulate in Jerusalem, which handles Palestinian affairs, and the embassy in Tel Aviv, which manages relations with the Israeli government.
The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas’s ability to rule because of the hardships of life.
Since Hamas, a radical Islamist group that opposes Israel’s existence, carried out what amounted to a coup d’état in Gaza against the more secular Fatah party a year ago, hundreds of rockets and mortar shells have been launched from here at Israeli civilians, truck and car bombs have gone off and numerous attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers have taken place.
While Hamas says the attacks are in response to Israeli military incursions into Gaza, it also says it will never recognize Israel.
“We are using the rockets to shake the conscience of the world about Israeli aggression,” argued Ahmed Yusef, political adviser to the Hamas foreign minister in an interview in his office here. “All our rockets are a reaction to Israeli aggression.”
The Israeli closing of Gaza has added markedly to the difficulty of daily life here, with long lines for cooking gas and a sense across the population of being under siege. Israel does send in about 70 truckloads per day of wheat, dairy products and medical equipment as well as some fuel, and it permits some medical cases out.
But Israel’s stated goal is to support moderates among the Palestinians so that Hamas will lose power, and even some security-conscious Israeli hard-liners say that the policy of barring students with grants abroad is counterproductive.
“We correctly complain that the Palestinian Authority is not building civil society, but when we don’t help build civil society this plays into the hands of Hamas,” said Natan Sharansky, a former government official. “The Fulbright is administered independently, and people are chosen for it due to their talents.”
The State Department Web site describes the Fulbright, the American government’s flagship program in international educational exchange, as “an integral part of U.S. foreign relations.” It adds, “the Fulbright Program creates a context to provide a better understanding of U.S. views and values, promotes more effective binational cooperation and nurtures open-minded, thoughtful leaders, both in the U.S. and abroad, who can work together to address common concerns.”
Sari Bashi, who directs Gisha, an Israeli organization devoted to monitoring and increasing the free movement of Palestinians, said, “The fact that the U.S. cannot even get taxpayer-funded Fulbright students out of Gaza demonstrates the injustice and short-sightedness of a closure policy that arbitrarily traps 1.5 million people, including hundreds of Palestinian students accepted to universities abroad.” She said that their education was good not just for Palestinian society, but for Israel as well.
Some Israelis disagree strongly.
“We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges,” said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. “So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior.”
Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.
“I stayed to get my scholarship,” she said. “Now I am desperate.”
She, like her six colleagues, was in disbelief. Mr. Abdullah, who called the consulate in Jerusalem for further explanation after receiving his letter, said to the official on the other end, “I still cannot believe that the American administration is not able to convince the Israelis to let seven Palestinians out of Gaza.”
Taghreed el-Khodary contributed reporting.
Who gets the Golan?
Who gets the Golan?
Israel has no reason to trust Syria in talks over that strategic area.
By Yossi Klein Halevi
May 28, 2008
JERUSALEM -- The Israeli mainstream, so the truism here goes, is so desperate for peace that, in the end, it will overcome misgivings over relinquishing territory and mistrust of Arab intentions and endorse any diplomatic initiative aimed at solving the Middle East conflict. After all, the majority of Israelis have supported every withdrawal so far -- from the Sinai desert in 1982 to the pullout from Gaza in 2005. And according to polls, a majority of Israelis are prepared to leave most of the West Bank and create a Palestinian state.
But that willingness to relinquish territory for peace -- or even a respite -- ends with the Golan Heights, which Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War and whose fate Israel and Syria are negotiating. By an overwhelming majority, Israelis oppose ceding the Golan to Syria, even in exchange for a promise of peace from Damascus. So does a majority of the Israeli parliament, along with most Cabinet members from the governing party, Kadima.
One reason is that few here believe that the regime of Bashar Assad will honor an agreement. No Arab state has consistently shown greater hostility to Israel than Syria. The Palestinian terrorist movement Hamas is headquartered in Damascus; Syria is Iran's leading Arab ally. Without a Syrian attempt to convince the Israeli public of its benign intentions, domestic opposition will stymie any attempt by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to cede the Golan to Assad. And the prospects for a convincing Syrian overture are almost nonexistent.
The Middle East conflict has produced two models of Arab peacemakers. The first was former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who realized that the key to resolving the conflict was psychological. The Israeli public needed to be convinced that, in exchange for concrete concessions, it would win legitimacy from the Arab world. And so Sadat flew to Jerusalem, addressed the Israeli parliament and announced that Egypt welcomed Israel into the Middle East. The result was an Israeli pullback from every last inch of Sinai.
The second model was former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, who, rather than prepare his people for peace, assured them that Israel was an illegitimate state destined to disappear. And when Israel offered the Palestinians a state, Arafat's response was a war of suicide bombings. The result was an indefinite deferment of statehood.
Grudging and suspicious, Assad reminds Israelis far more of Arafat than of Sadat. So far, Assad has refused even to hold direct negotiations with Israel, preferring Turkish interlocutors. Give me the Golan, he is in effect saying, and then we'll see what kind of peace develops between us.
But Israelis are hardly in a rush to part with one of the most beloved areas of their country. For Israelis, the Golan Heights, with its empty hills and vineyards, is more Provence than Gaza. Unlike the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan poses no moral or demographic dilemmas. Here there is no occupation of another people; barely 20,000 Druze, and an equal number of Jews, share the nearly 700-square-mile area.
Under Syrian control before the 1967 war, the Golan was Israel's most volatile border. Many here still recall the years when Syrian soldiers on the Golan routinely shot at Israeli civilians in the Galilee below. After 1967, though, the Golan became Israel's most placid border. Israelis sense that, for the sake of quiet if not formal peace, it is far better to have their soldiers overlooking Syria than for Syrian soldiers to be once again looking down on the Galilee.
Israeli advocates of a Golan withdrawal argue that Syria may be enticed to sever its ties with Iran as part of a peace agreement. Neutralizing a potential Syrian front in a future Middle East war -- with Iran, say -- would be a major gain for Israel, which is why much of the Israeli strategic community supports negotiations. Syria, though, continues to affirm the primacy of its alliance with Iran. And, during a visit this week to Tehran, Syrian Defense Minister Hassan Turkmany reinforced that message by signing a security agreement with Iran.
Two Israeli leaders, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, tried and failed in the 1990s to reach an agreement with Bashar's father, the late Syrian leader Hafez Assad. Though both Rabin and Barak agreed to a full withdrawal from the Golan, the Syrians demanded more: several hundred yards of shorefront on the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main freshwater source, which the Syrians had seized from Israel before 1967. When Rabin and Barak refused to allow Hafez Assad to fulfill his stated dream of again dipping his feet into the Sea of Galilee, negotiations collapsed.
The current negotiations will almost certainly fail too. In fact, possessing the Golan is hardly Assad's top priority. Instead, Assad has two more pressing interests: evading an international tribunal investigating the Syrian government's complicity in the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and deflecting attention from the intensifying domination of Lebanon by the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah alliance. Negotiations with Israel -- regardless of whether they actually succeed -- help Assad achieve both goals, by deflecting world attention from the destruction of Lebanese sovereignty and by transforming him from pariah to peacemaker.
Israel's Olmert hopes that peace negotiations will deflect attention from his own woes -- allegations of corruption dating in part from his days as Jerusalem's mayor. Other Israelis, though, are wondering how helping Assad destroy Lebanon and escape justice can possibly be confused for Israel's national interest, let alone for a peace process.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the Israel correspondent for the New Republic.
Israel has no reason to trust Syria in talks over that strategic area.
By Yossi Klein Halevi
May 28, 2008
JERUSALEM -- The Israeli mainstream, so the truism here goes, is so desperate for peace that, in the end, it will overcome misgivings over relinquishing territory and mistrust of Arab intentions and endorse any diplomatic initiative aimed at solving the Middle East conflict. After all, the majority of Israelis have supported every withdrawal so far -- from the Sinai desert in 1982 to the pullout from Gaza in 2005. And according to polls, a majority of Israelis are prepared to leave most of the West Bank and create a Palestinian state.
But that willingness to relinquish territory for peace -- or even a respite -- ends with the Golan Heights, which Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War and whose fate Israel and Syria are negotiating. By an overwhelming majority, Israelis oppose ceding the Golan to Syria, even in exchange for a promise of peace from Damascus. So does a majority of the Israeli parliament, along with most Cabinet members from the governing party, Kadima.
One reason is that few here believe that the regime of Bashar Assad will honor an agreement. No Arab state has consistently shown greater hostility to Israel than Syria. The Palestinian terrorist movement Hamas is headquartered in Damascus; Syria is Iran's leading Arab ally. Without a Syrian attempt to convince the Israeli public of its benign intentions, domestic opposition will stymie any attempt by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to cede the Golan to Assad. And the prospects for a convincing Syrian overture are almost nonexistent.
The Middle East conflict has produced two models of Arab peacemakers. The first was former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who realized that the key to resolving the conflict was psychological. The Israeli public needed to be convinced that, in exchange for concrete concessions, it would win legitimacy from the Arab world. And so Sadat flew to Jerusalem, addressed the Israeli parliament and announced that Egypt welcomed Israel into the Middle East. The result was an Israeli pullback from every last inch of Sinai.
The second model was former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, who, rather than prepare his people for peace, assured them that Israel was an illegitimate state destined to disappear. And when Israel offered the Palestinians a state, Arafat's response was a war of suicide bombings. The result was an indefinite deferment of statehood.
Grudging and suspicious, Assad reminds Israelis far more of Arafat than of Sadat. So far, Assad has refused even to hold direct negotiations with Israel, preferring Turkish interlocutors. Give me the Golan, he is in effect saying, and then we'll see what kind of peace develops between us.
But Israelis are hardly in a rush to part with one of the most beloved areas of their country. For Israelis, the Golan Heights, with its empty hills and vineyards, is more Provence than Gaza. Unlike the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan poses no moral or demographic dilemmas. Here there is no occupation of another people; barely 20,000 Druze, and an equal number of Jews, share the nearly 700-square-mile area.
Under Syrian control before the 1967 war, the Golan was Israel's most volatile border. Many here still recall the years when Syrian soldiers on the Golan routinely shot at Israeli civilians in the Galilee below. After 1967, though, the Golan became Israel's most placid border. Israelis sense that, for the sake of quiet if not formal peace, it is far better to have their soldiers overlooking Syria than for Syrian soldiers to be once again looking down on the Galilee.
Israeli advocates of a Golan withdrawal argue that Syria may be enticed to sever its ties with Iran as part of a peace agreement. Neutralizing a potential Syrian front in a future Middle East war -- with Iran, say -- would be a major gain for Israel, which is why much of the Israeli strategic community supports negotiations. Syria, though, continues to affirm the primacy of its alliance with Iran. And, during a visit this week to Tehran, Syrian Defense Minister Hassan Turkmany reinforced that message by signing a security agreement with Iran.
Two Israeli leaders, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, tried and failed in the 1990s to reach an agreement with Bashar's father, the late Syrian leader Hafez Assad. Though both Rabin and Barak agreed to a full withdrawal from the Golan, the Syrians demanded more: several hundred yards of shorefront on the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main freshwater source, which the Syrians had seized from Israel before 1967. When Rabin and Barak refused to allow Hafez Assad to fulfill his stated dream of again dipping his feet into the Sea of Galilee, negotiations collapsed.
The current negotiations will almost certainly fail too. In fact, possessing the Golan is hardly Assad's top priority. Instead, Assad has two more pressing interests: evading an international tribunal investigating the Syrian government's complicity in the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and deflecting attention from the intensifying domination of Lebanon by the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah alliance. Negotiations with Israel -- regardless of whether they actually succeed -- help Assad achieve both goals, by deflecting world attention from the destruction of Lebanese sovereignty and by transforming him from pariah to peacemaker.
Israel's Olmert hopes that peace negotiations will deflect attention from his own woes -- allegations of corruption dating in part from his days as Jerusalem's mayor. Other Israelis, though, are wondering how helping Assad destroy Lebanon and escape justice can possibly be confused for Israel's national interest, let alone for a peace process.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the Israel correspondent for the New Republic.
28 May 2008
Is a post-America Israel beginning to take shape?
Is there a question? This is the emes, as my mother (zt'l) used to say. As I've said consistently, in the end, Israel will take care of Israel, and if the CEO of India's major steel manufacturer was in Jerusalem at the same time as Bush, it got NO play in any media of which I am aware. The Daily Star is publishing some sense. RS
Is a post-America Israel beginning to take shape?
By Dominique Moisi
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Israel is one of the only places in the world where US President Georges W. Bush can be greeted with real enthusiasm and even affection. The most unpopular American president in recent history thus relished his recent triumphal welcome in Jerusalem, where he was the guest of honor of the International Conference planned and devised by Israeli President Shimon Peres on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Jewish state.
Historical revisionism was near the top of the agenda, with the United States portrayed as Israel's most faithful supporter and ally since 1948. But in fact, George C. Marshall, the US secretary of state in 1948, sought to prevent President Harry Truman from recognizing Israel. Likewise, the Suez crisis of 1956, when the US thwarted a joint French, British, and Israeli plan to seize the Suez Canal, was presented in a politically correct light, as were Henry Kissinger's complex diplomacy during the October war of 1973.
The hugging and kissing between Bush, Peres and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were undeniably moving, but they were also troubling - and not only because serious references to the Palestinians were, for the most part, not on the agenda. One had the feeling that this was something akin to dancing on the Titanic - the culmination of a privileged partnership at its tipping point, a grand gala for something that was about to disappear.
This is not only a matter of leaders - Bush and Olmert - on their way out. Beyond the celebration of eight exceptional years of "unique friendship" under Bush, it also seemed clear that the 41-year-old special relationship inaugurated by the 1967 war, when the US became Israel's main backer, might be coming to an end.
The next US president, whether he is Barack Obama or John McCain, will certainly maintain the close bilateral alliance. But it will not be the same: Even if America remains an indispensable nation, it will no longer be the only one. While Bush was in Jerusalem, so too was India's Lakmar Mittal, the king of the world's steel industry. If Bush was the departing present, Mittal represents the incipient future, in which America will have to share influence with emerging powers such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, and eventually, if its members get their act together, the European Union.
In fact, Israelis are already debating the meaning of the emerging post-American "multipolar world" for their country's security. Will it really be such a bad thing, or might it hold some redeeming value?
The close bond between Israel and Bush's America can in retrospect be seen as a mixed blessing: a special relationship that contributed to the declining attractiveness of both countries. Israel, rightly, may not be ready to exchange US support for that of any other power, but Israeli leaders, having kept all their eggs in one basket for so long, will now have to factor not only American concerns and interests into their decision-making, but those of the other powers as well.
Thus, the problem for Israel is not to replace the backing provided by "300 million Americans," as Bush put it in Jerusalem, but to add to it the sympathetic interest of more than 3 billion Chinese, Indians, Russians and others in Israel's future in a pacified Middle East. The question is not so much one of substituting alliances, but of creating a complementary system of security.
In their effort to achieve international respect and legitimacy as stakeholders in today's evolving international system, countries such as China, India, and even Russia have a greater interest in stability than in global confusion. For them, a nuclear Iran led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is seen more as a threat than as a card they can play, even if their actions thus far in regard to Iran do not always match their long-term strategic interests.
In fact, when it comes to deterring Iran from developing nuclear weapons - or, for that matter, exerting pressure on Israel and the Palestinians (including Hamas) to reach a compromise - a group of powers such as the US, China, India, and Russia might produce better results than a sole superpower imprisoned by its own contradictions and limitations.
Israel's nimble society and economy seem perfectly designed for the post-American era of political and economic globalization. Equally important, Israel will be forced to confront the reality of Palestinian despair, which the unique relationship with America has allowed it to obfuscate and evade for too long.
Dominique Moisi, a founder and senior adviser the French Institute for International Relations, is currently a professor at the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate (c) (www.project-syndicate.org).
Is a post-America Israel beginning to take shape?
By Dominique Moisi
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Israel is one of the only places in the world where US President Georges W. Bush can be greeted with real enthusiasm and even affection. The most unpopular American president in recent history thus relished his recent triumphal welcome in Jerusalem, where he was the guest of honor of the International Conference planned and devised by Israeli President Shimon Peres on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Jewish state.
Historical revisionism was near the top of the agenda, with the United States portrayed as Israel's most faithful supporter and ally since 1948. But in fact, George C. Marshall, the US secretary of state in 1948, sought to prevent President Harry Truman from recognizing Israel. Likewise, the Suez crisis of 1956, when the US thwarted a joint French, British, and Israeli plan to seize the Suez Canal, was presented in a politically correct light, as were Henry Kissinger's complex diplomacy during the October war of 1973.
The hugging and kissing between Bush, Peres and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were undeniably moving, but they were also troubling - and not only because serious references to the Palestinians were, for the most part, not on the agenda. One had the feeling that this was something akin to dancing on the Titanic - the culmination of a privileged partnership at its tipping point, a grand gala for something that was about to disappear.
This is not only a matter of leaders - Bush and Olmert - on their way out. Beyond the celebration of eight exceptional years of "unique friendship" under Bush, it also seemed clear that the 41-year-old special relationship inaugurated by the 1967 war, when the US became Israel's main backer, might be coming to an end.
The next US president, whether he is Barack Obama or John McCain, will certainly maintain the close bilateral alliance. But it will not be the same: Even if America remains an indispensable nation, it will no longer be the only one. While Bush was in Jerusalem, so too was India's Lakmar Mittal, the king of the world's steel industry. If Bush was the departing present, Mittal represents the incipient future, in which America will have to share influence with emerging powers such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, and eventually, if its members get their act together, the European Union.
In fact, Israelis are already debating the meaning of the emerging post-American "multipolar world" for their country's security. Will it really be such a bad thing, or might it hold some redeeming value?
The close bond between Israel and Bush's America can in retrospect be seen as a mixed blessing: a special relationship that contributed to the declining attractiveness of both countries. Israel, rightly, may not be ready to exchange US support for that of any other power, but Israeli leaders, having kept all their eggs in one basket for so long, will now have to factor not only American concerns and interests into their decision-making, but those of the other powers as well.
Thus, the problem for Israel is not to replace the backing provided by "300 million Americans," as Bush put it in Jerusalem, but to add to it the sympathetic interest of more than 3 billion Chinese, Indians, Russians and others in Israel's future in a pacified Middle East. The question is not so much one of substituting alliances, but of creating a complementary system of security.
In their effort to achieve international respect and legitimacy as stakeholders in today's evolving international system, countries such as China, India, and even Russia have a greater interest in stability than in global confusion. For them, a nuclear Iran led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is seen more as a threat than as a card they can play, even if their actions thus far in regard to Iran do not always match their long-term strategic interests.
In fact, when it comes to deterring Iran from developing nuclear weapons - or, for that matter, exerting pressure on Israel and the Palestinians (including Hamas) to reach a compromise - a group of powers such as the US, China, India, and Russia might produce better results than a sole superpower imprisoned by its own contradictions and limitations.
Israel's nimble society and economy seem perfectly designed for the post-American era of political and economic globalization. Equally important, Israel will be forced to confront the reality of Palestinian despair, which the unique relationship with America has allowed it to obfuscate and evade for too long.
Dominique Moisi, a founder and senior adviser the French Institute for International Relations, is currently a professor at the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate (c) (www.project-syndicate.org).
Hassan Nasrallah is trapping himself
This is from Lebanon's Beirut Daily Star - an interesting analyis. Comments?
Hassan Nasrallah is trapping himself
By Michael Young Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Listening to the speeches of President Michel Suleiman and Hizbullah's Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah earlier this week, it is becoming apparent that there are really only two projects in Lebanon today: There is the project of the state, which Suleiman and the parliamentary majority embody, assuming the president abides by his public statements; and there is the project of a non-state, supported by Hizbullah and its allies.
If that wasn't plain enough, then consider what happened on Monday night, after Suleiman had spent his first day at the Baabda Palace. Hizbullah and Amal partisans, as has become their habit lately, fired in the air to celebrate Nasrallah's speech, then took to the streets and began firing at their political adversaries. In the Bekaa Valley much the same thing happened. There was a message there, perhaps more a Syrian than an Iranian one this time around, and it was that the new president should not imagine he will be able to build up a state against Hizbullah.
Thanks to the Israelis, who may soon hand a grand prisoner exchange to Hizbullah, Nasrallah may earn a brief reprieve for his "resistance." It's funny how Hizbullah and Syria, always the loudest in accusing others of being Israeli agents, are the ones who, when under pressure, look toward negotiations with Israel for an exit. Hizbullah has again done so to show that its "defense strategy" works and to deflect growing domestic insistence that the party place its weapons at the disposal of the state.
Nasrallah has started peddling what he thinks Lebanon's defense strategy should be. Hizbullah's model is the summer 2006 war, he explained this week. But if the defense strategy Hizbullah wants us to adopt is one that hands Israel an excuse to kill over 1,200 people, turn almost 1 million civilians out into the streets for weeks on end while their villages are bombed and their fields are saturated with fragmentation bomblets; if Nasrallah's strategy is one that will lead to the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure, the ruin of its economy, the emigration of its youths, the isolation of the Shiites in a society infuriated with Hizbullah's pursuit of lasting conflict; if that's his defense strategy, then Nasrallah needs to get out of his bunker more and see what is really going on in Lebanon.
The only good thing that came out of the 2006 war, the only thing that both a majority of Lebanese and the Shiite community together approved of, was the deployment of the Lebanese Army to the South, the strengthening of UNIFIL, and the pacification of the border area. The Lebanese approved of this because it made less likely a return to Nasrallah's inane defense strategy. Unless of course the Hizbullah leader is now telling us that the neutralization of Hizbullah's military activities along the frontier with Israel was also a part of that strategy, because in practical terms it too was a result of the 2006 war.
Nasrallah's speech only reaffirmed that Hizbullah cannot find an exit to its existential dilemma, other than to coerce its hostile countrymen into accepting its armed mini-state. Very simply, the days of the national resistance are over. The liberation of the Shebaa Farms does not justify Hizbullah's existence as a parallel force to the army, and it does not justify initiating a new war with Israel. After all, the Syrians have a much larger territory under occupation and have preferred negotiations to conflict in order to win it back. As Suleiman implied, the best thing that can happen now is for Hizbullah to share with the state its resistance expertise, which was a gentle way of saying that the party must integrate into the state.
Nasrallah's defensiveness also revealed something else, almost as worrying as his untenable position on Hizbullah's defense strategy. It revealed that the party views Doha as a setback. Nasrallah is right in that respect. The agreement negotiated by the Qataris was several things. It was, above all, a line drawn in the sand by the Sunni Arab world against Iran and Syria, telling them that Lebanon would not fall into their lap. In this the Qataris were part of an Arab consensus, and the Iranians, always pragmatic, backtracked when seeing how resolute the Arabs were.
But the Doha agreement was mainly a failure for Syria. Damascus had planned to use the open-ended political vacuum in Beirut as leverage to bring in a new president and government on its conditions, to negotiate Syria's return to the Arab fold from a position of strength, to torpedo the Hariri tribunal, and to prepare an eventual Syrian military return to Lebanon. The Qataris thwarted this, and in a conversation between Syrian President Bashar Assad and Qatar's Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Assad was pushed into approving Suleiman's election. As a last measure he tried to prevent the granting of 16 ministerial portfolios to the March 14 coalition - a simple majority in the 30-minister government allowing the coalition to have a quorum for regular Cabinet sessions. Sheikh Hamad rejected this and Assad had no choice but to relent, before instructing Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri to accept the Qatari plan.
Hizbullah's plan was little different than that of the Syrians, so the Qataris substantially complicated Nasrallah's calculations as well. Suleiman is still an unknown quantity, but if he sticks to the principles highlighted in his inauguration speech, Hizbullah will be squeezed. Unlike the time when Emile Lahoud was still around and formed, with Berri, an alliance against Siniora, if the next prime minister and Suleiman can craft a joint strategy to strengthen the authority of the state, it is Berri, as the senior opposition figure and Shiite in office, who may find himself out on a limb.
Speaking of Berri, Hizbullah's bloc may have made a grave mistake in choosing yesterday to name no favorite as prime minister. That means that the bloc is ignoring the wishes of the Sunni community to bring back Siniora. Recall that when Berri was elected as Parliament speaker in 2005, those parliamentarians voting for him defended the choice on the grounds that "the Shiites want him." By inference, in not naming Siniora yesterday, mainly because the Syrians oppose him, the opposition has given the future majority in Parliament, if it happens to be a majority opposed to Hizbullah and Amal, an opening to reject Berri's re-election as speaker in 2009, regardless of whether the Shiites want him.
The ink on the Doha agreement is barely dry, but already Hizbullah and Syria are trying to water down its terms. Nasrallah's speech showed that he has no intention of entering into a substantive discussion on his party's weaponry. His promise not to use his guns in the pursuit of domestic political goals was meaningless, as he has already done so. In fact, his reading of what he can do with his weapons is much more advantageous to Hizbullah than what the Doha agreement stipulates. But Nasrallah has a problem. Most Lebanese want a real state and most Shiites don't want another war with Israel. Hizbullah, in contrast, doesn't want a real state but needs permanent war to remain relevant. That's Nasrallah's trap.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.
Hassan Nasrallah is trapping himself
By Michael Young Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Listening to the speeches of President Michel Suleiman and Hizbullah's Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah earlier this week, it is becoming apparent that there are really only two projects in Lebanon today: There is the project of the state, which Suleiman and the parliamentary majority embody, assuming the president abides by his public statements; and there is the project of a non-state, supported by Hizbullah and its allies.
If that wasn't plain enough, then consider what happened on Monday night, after Suleiman had spent his first day at the Baabda Palace. Hizbullah and Amal partisans, as has become their habit lately, fired in the air to celebrate Nasrallah's speech, then took to the streets and began firing at their political adversaries. In the Bekaa Valley much the same thing happened. There was a message there, perhaps more a Syrian than an Iranian one this time around, and it was that the new president should not imagine he will be able to build up a state against Hizbullah.
Thanks to the Israelis, who may soon hand a grand prisoner exchange to Hizbullah, Nasrallah may earn a brief reprieve for his "resistance." It's funny how Hizbullah and Syria, always the loudest in accusing others of being Israeli agents, are the ones who, when under pressure, look toward negotiations with Israel for an exit. Hizbullah has again done so to show that its "defense strategy" works and to deflect growing domestic insistence that the party place its weapons at the disposal of the state.
Nasrallah has started peddling what he thinks Lebanon's defense strategy should be. Hizbullah's model is the summer 2006 war, he explained this week. But if the defense strategy Hizbullah wants us to adopt is one that hands Israel an excuse to kill over 1,200 people, turn almost 1 million civilians out into the streets for weeks on end while their villages are bombed and their fields are saturated with fragmentation bomblets; if Nasrallah's strategy is one that will lead to the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure, the ruin of its economy, the emigration of its youths, the isolation of the Shiites in a society infuriated with Hizbullah's pursuit of lasting conflict; if that's his defense strategy, then Nasrallah needs to get out of his bunker more and see what is really going on in Lebanon.
The only good thing that came out of the 2006 war, the only thing that both a majority of Lebanese and the Shiite community together approved of, was the deployment of the Lebanese Army to the South, the strengthening of UNIFIL, and the pacification of the border area. The Lebanese approved of this because it made less likely a return to Nasrallah's inane defense strategy. Unless of course the Hizbullah leader is now telling us that the neutralization of Hizbullah's military activities along the frontier with Israel was also a part of that strategy, because in practical terms it too was a result of the 2006 war.
Nasrallah's speech only reaffirmed that Hizbullah cannot find an exit to its existential dilemma, other than to coerce its hostile countrymen into accepting its armed mini-state. Very simply, the days of the national resistance are over. The liberation of the Shebaa Farms does not justify Hizbullah's existence as a parallel force to the army, and it does not justify initiating a new war with Israel. After all, the Syrians have a much larger territory under occupation and have preferred negotiations to conflict in order to win it back. As Suleiman implied, the best thing that can happen now is for Hizbullah to share with the state its resistance expertise, which was a gentle way of saying that the party must integrate into the state.
Nasrallah's defensiveness also revealed something else, almost as worrying as his untenable position on Hizbullah's defense strategy. It revealed that the party views Doha as a setback. Nasrallah is right in that respect. The agreement negotiated by the Qataris was several things. It was, above all, a line drawn in the sand by the Sunni Arab world against Iran and Syria, telling them that Lebanon would not fall into their lap. In this the Qataris were part of an Arab consensus, and the Iranians, always pragmatic, backtracked when seeing how resolute the Arabs were.
But the Doha agreement was mainly a failure for Syria. Damascus had planned to use the open-ended political vacuum in Beirut as leverage to bring in a new president and government on its conditions, to negotiate Syria's return to the Arab fold from a position of strength, to torpedo the Hariri tribunal, and to prepare an eventual Syrian military return to Lebanon. The Qataris thwarted this, and in a conversation between Syrian President Bashar Assad and Qatar's Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Assad was pushed into approving Suleiman's election. As a last measure he tried to prevent the granting of 16 ministerial portfolios to the March 14 coalition - a simple majority in the 30-minister government allowing the coalition to have a quorum for regular Cabinet sessions. Sheikh Hamad rejected this and Assad had no choice but to relent, before instructing Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri to accept the Qatari plan.
Hizbullah's plan was little different than that of the Syrians, so the Qataris substantially complicated Nasrallah's calculations as well. Suleiman is still an unknown quantity, but if he sticks to the principles highlighted in his inauguration speech, Hizbullah will be squeezed. Unlike the time when Emile Lahoud was still around and formed, with Berri, an alliance against Siniora, if the next prime minister and Suleiman can craft a joint strategy to strengthen the authority of the state, it is Berri, as the senior opposition figure and Shiite in office, who may find himself out on a limb.
Speaking of Berri, Hizbullah's bloc may have made a grave mistake in choosing yesterday to name no favorite as prime minister. That means that the bloc is ignoring the wishes of the Sunni community to bring back Siniora. Recall that when Berri was elected as Parliament speaker in 2005, those parliamentarians voting for him defended the choice on the grounds that "the Shiites want him." By inference, in not naming Siniora yesterday, mainly because the Syrians oppose him, the opposition has given the future majority in Parliament, if it happens to be a majority opposed to Hizbullah and Amal, an opening to reject Berri's re-election as speaker in 2009, regardless of whether the Shiites want him.
The ink on the Doha agreement is barely dry, but already Hizbullah and Syria are trying to water down its terms. Nasrallah's speech showed that he has no intention of entering into a substantive discussion on his party's weaponry. His promise not to use his guns in the pursuit of domestic political goals was meaningless, as he has already done so. In fact, his reading of what he can do with his weapons is much more advantageous to Hizbullah than what the Doha agreement stipulates. But Nasrallah has a problem. Most Lebanese want a real state and most Shiites don't want another war with Israel. Hizbullah, in contrast, doesn't want a real state but needs permanent war to remain relevant. That's Nasrallah's trap.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.
24 May 2008
Israelis and Arabs Walk Into a Film...
View from the red naugahide booth: Maybe I've gotten too wrapped up in the whole killing thing in the Mideast, but I don't see how a movie like this is going to make back the $90 million it cost. To make jokes out of a situation in which I know of people who know people who have died there (that's only three degrees of separation...) is just not comic material, though I kind of like the idea of an Israeli assassin turned hairdresser. Sandler would have been better off doing a Steven Segal sendup. The writer lost me at "cycle of violence" -- it's not a cycle. If Hamas, Hezbollah and the rest of the hater-Arabs would stop killing people, does the writer think that Israel would continue to lauch retaliatory or any attacks? There's PC, then there's PC. Afraid to piss off the Arab world by telling the truth through satire, they end up losing their own integrity as artists. And their asses at the box office.
Randy Shiner
Randy Shiner
Israelis and Arabs Walk Into a Film...
Tracy Bennett/Columbia Pictures
Adam Sandler is a former Israeli assassin with a new calling in “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” written by Mr. Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow. More Photos >
:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/movies/25itzk.html
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: May 25, 2008
ADAM SANDLER’S comedies can usually be distinguished — if that’s the right word — by setups so improbable that they border on the ridiculous, from the re-education of a man forced to complete grades 1 through 12 (“Billy Madison”) to the sham gay marriage of two heterosexual firefighters (“I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry”). Yet his latest movie places him in what may be his most improbable scenario to date.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Slide Show
Men Will Be Boys
Related Trailer: 'You Don't Mess With the Zohan'
In “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (opening June 6), Mr. Sandler plays an Israeli assassin who flees to the United States to become a hairdresser. Trailers for the film promise plenty of broad farce, physical comedy and at least one lewd dance routine. What the ad campaign for “Zohan” does not emphasize is that the film also attempts to satirize the continuing tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and provide humorous commentary on one of the least funny topics of modern times with a comedian who is not exactly known for incisive political wit.
If you’re already wondering what gives the “Zohan” crew the right to tackle such sensitive subject matter, well, so are they.
“I’m not sure we do have permission,” said Robert Smigel, one of the screenwriters and a longtime friend of Mr. Sandler’s. “But we thought it would be a funny idea.”
About eight years ago Mr. Sandler conceived of the Zohan character, an Israeli assassin who has been trained to hate and kill Arabs; exhausted by the ceaseless bloodshed, he fakes his own death and flees to New York to become a hairdresser. There he finds Jews and Arabs living together in grudging if not quite harmonious tolerance.
At the time, Mr. Sandler (who rarely if ever gives interviews to the print news media) delegated the script to Mr. Smigel, who had frequently written for him on “Saturday Night Live,” and Judd Apatow, a former roommate of Mr. Sandler’s, who was not yet the one-man comedy juggernaut of “Knocked Up” and “40-Year-Old Virgin” fame.
Both writers found “Zohan” a subversive, somewhat improbable assignment. “There was always this question of, can you make this movie?” Mr. Apatow said in a phone interview. “Because it is making fun of the fact that people are so mad at each other.”
After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Sandler and his screenwriters shelved the first draft of the script, which so mercilessly sent up stereotypes of its characters that, Mr. Apatow said, “it’s like a Don Rickles routine: no one doesn’t get hurt.” But in the months that followed, as they saw popular culture address the aftermath of 9/11 on comedy shows like “SNL” and dramatic series like “24,” they were gradually persuaded to revive the project.
In revisions of “Zohan,” the Mideast nations cited in the script were given fictitious names, and their ancient territorial feud became a dispute over orange groves.
However, Mr. Sandler and his team ultimately returned to a draft that did not disguise the political subject matter, believing that some filmgoers would be upset by it no matter how subtle their approach.
“Any time you do any version of comedy that has anything to do with race or prejudice, you’re always going to make some people mad,” Mr. Smigel said. “Whether your intention is pure or not, they’re going to find something to be angry about.”
To the extent that “Zohan” deals with the intractable cycle of violence in the Middle East, it is careful not to take sides, and mocks itself for making such perilous source material a subject for comedy. In the midst of elaborate fight sequences, its characters debate the region’s complex history of aggression and retribution, even as they continue to act it out. (“I’m just saying, it’s not so cut and dried!” an assailant shouts as he falls off a balcony.)
The movie does not dare to suggest solutions to these conflicts, or to offer false hope that they will soon be resolved: in one scene, three Arab New Yorkers attempting to take down Zohan call the “Hezbollah Phone Line” for instructions on how to make a bomb. In a recorded message, they are told the information is not currently available during peace talks with Israel, and are instructed to call back “as soon as negotiations break down.”
(“I’m sure a joke like that will irritate some people,” Mr. Smigel said.)
“Zohan” was divisive before a single frame was shot, when it was known in Mr. Sandler’s camp and around Hollywood as “the Israeli movie.” “Some people told me, ‘Don’t do it,’ just knowing the log line that they had heard,” said Dennis Dugan, the movie’s director, who directed Mr. Sandler in “Happy Gilmore,” “Big Daddy” and “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry”).
In hopes of forestalling criticism, the filmmakers sought actors of Israeli and Arab descent to play the many Mideastern characters in “Zohan,” and even opened a casting office in Israel.
Not surprising, they had little difficulty recruiting Israelis to play opposite Mr. Sandler. But finding Arab actors who would even audition for “Zohan” proved challenging, and some who worked on the film said they had initially been leery of appearing with Mr. Sandler, who is Jewish and supports Jewish charities and causes.
“Adam Sandler, in the Arab and Muslim communities, is not having a good reputation,” said Sayed Badreya, an Egyptian-born actor who plays one of Zohan’s adversaries in New York. “When it came to working with Adam, I was like, ‘Eh, well, I don’t know.’ My prejudice was bigger than me.” Mr. Badreya said he had been persuaded to reconsider, in part, by his teenage daughter, a huge fan of Mr. Sandler’s films.
Mr. Sandler attempted to ease any discomfort during filming by encouraging his co-stars to gather outside his trailer at an area furnished with tables and lawn chairs, where they would smoke cigars and talk shop during breaks. Inevitably, some heated debates about Mideast politics occurred during these conversations. (“Don’t think it was always nicey-nicey,” Mr. Badreya said.) But the talks also yielded at least one spontaneous trip to Las Vegas, attended by Arab and Israeli actors alike.
It is hard to predict if viewers will similarly rally around “Zohan” and its modest moral that Israelis and Arabs are more alike than dissimilar. The fact that the film was made at all — and is scheduled to be the first major release of Sony’s Columbia Pictures division in a summer crowded with comedies — would seem to be a huge bet that Mr. Sandler’s proven ability to draw large audiences will outweigh political content that could repel moviegoers.
“The only people who you could imagine being attracted to the Israeli-in-New York, complexity-of-the-Middle East dimensions are adults, and they don’t go to the movies,” said Marty Kaplan, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and a former film executive at Disney. “This entire campaign, as always, is targeted at boys from 13 to 18.”
While overt political messages have driven viewers away from many movies in recent years, Mr. Kaplan said, the prospect of “the latest Adam Sandler comedy — which is what this movie promises to be — is the thing that’s going to entice them.”
Representatives for Sony declined to discuss whether the weighty overtones of “Zohan,” a film estimated to have cost $90 million, might hurt ticket sales or affect how the movie was being promoted, except to say that it was being marketed as a character-driven Adam Sandler comedy. The anxiety of how the film might be received seemed to weigh heavily on Mr. Smigel, a self-identified liberal whose politically pointed sketches for “SNL.” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” have drawn the ire of everyone from the Anti-Defamation League to the left-leaning blog Daily Kos to the Canadian House of Commons. Mr. Smigel said such criticism had taught him to be more careful with his comedy. “If there are people who are genuinely hurt by it on some level, no matter what my intention was, I have to pay attention to that,” he said.
Even in satirical discussions of race and ethnicity, Mr. Smigel said, a certain amount of self-censorship might be prudent. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that people can’t freely call me a dirty Jew, like they might have been able to 30 years ago,” he said.
For now, advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations are taking a wait-and-see attitude with “Zohan.” Given Mr. Sandler’s previous work, “I would say I’m a little worried,” said Ahmed Rehab, that organization’s national strategic communications director. He added that Mr. Sandler, like all artists, has a right to freedom of expression.
Mr. Badreya, who was recently seen playing an Afghan terrorist in “Iron Man,” said that by offering Arab or Muslim characters that are in any way divergent from the usual Hollywood stereotypes, “Zohan” is a step in the right direction.
“The movie presents what happened to me,” said Mr. Badreya, who grew up in Port Said, Egypt, during the 1967 and 1973 wars and emigrated to the United States in 1979. “Since it happened to me, it will work for someone like me.”
Mr. Badreya said that the comedy in “Zohan” was not quite evenly divided between ridiculing Arabs and ridiculing Jews. “The jokes are not 50-50,” he said. “It’s 70-30. Which is great. We haven’t had 30 for a long time. We’ve been getting zero. So it’s good.”
Adam Sandler is a former Israeli assassin with a new calling in “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” written by Mr. Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow. More Photos >
:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/movies/25itzk.html
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: May 25, 2008
ADAM SANDLER’S comedies can usually be distinguished — if that’s the right word — by setups so improbable that they border on the ridiculous, from the re-education of a man forced to complete grades 1 through 12 (“Billy Madison”) to the sham gay marriage of two heterosexual firefighters (“I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry”). Yet his latest movie places him in what may be his most improbable scenario to date.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Slide Show
Men Will Be Boys
Related Trailer: 'You Don't Mess With the Zohan'
In “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (opening June 6), Mr. Sandler plays an Israeli assassin who flees to the United States to become a hairdresser. Trailers for the film promise plenty of broad farce, physical comedy and at least one lewd dance routine. What the ad campaign for “Zohan” does not emphasize is that the film also attempts to satirize the continuing tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and provide humorous commentary on one of the least funny topics of modern times with a comedian who is not exactly known for incisive political wit.
If you’re already wondering what gives the “Zohan” crew the right to tackle such sensitive subject matter, well, so are they.
“I’m not sure we do have permission,” said Robert Smigel, one of the screenwriters and a longtime friend of Mr. Sandler’s. “But we thought it would be a funny idea.”
About eight years ago Mr. Sandler conceived of the Zohan character, an Israeli assassin who has been trained to hate and kill Arabs; exhausted by the ceaseless bloodshed, he fakes his own death and flees to New York to become a hairdresser. There he finds Jews and Arabs living together in grudging if not quite harmonious tolerance.
At the time, Mr. Sandler (who rarely if ever gives interviews to the print news media) delegated the script to Mr. Smigel, who had frequently written for him on “Saturday Night Live,” and Judd Apatow, a former roommate of Mr. Sandler’s, who was not yet the one-man comedy juggernaut of “Knocked Up” and “40-Year-Old Virgin” fame.
Both writers found “Zohan” a subversive, somewhat improbable assignment. “There was always this question of, can you make this movie?” Mr. Apatow said in a phone interview. “Because it is making fun of the fact that people are so mad at each other.”
After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Sandler and his screenwriters shelved the first draft of the script, which so mercilessly sent up stereotypes of its characters that, Mr. Apatow said, “it’s like a Don Rickles routine: no one doesn’t get hurt.” But in the months that followed, as they saw popular culture address the aftermath of 9/11 on comedy shows like “SNL” and dramatic series like “24,” they were gradually persuaded to revive the project.
In revisions of “Zohan,” the Mideast nations cited in the script were given fictitious names, and their ancient territorial feud became a dispute over orange groves.
However, Mr. Sandler and his team ultimately returned to a draft that did not disguise the political subject matter, believing that some filmgoers would be upset by it no matter how subtle their approach.
“Any time you do any version of comedy that has anything to do with race or prejudice, you’re always going to make some people mad,” Mr. Smigel said. “Whether your intention is pure or not, they’re going to find something to be angry about.”
To the extent that “Zohan” deals with the intractable cycle of violence in the Middle East, it is careful not to take sides, and mocks itself for making such perilous source material a subject for comedy. In the midst of elaborate fight sequences, its characters debate the region’s complex history of aggression and retribution, even as they continue to act it out. (“I’m just saying, it’s not so cut and dried!” an assailant shouts as he falls off a balcony.)
The movie does not dare to suggest solutions to these conflicts, or to offer false hope that they will soon be resolved: in one scene, three Arab New Yorkers attempting to take down Zohan call the “Hezbollah Phone Line” for instructions on how to make a bomb. In a recorded message, they are told the information is not currently available during peace talks with Israel, and are instructed to call back “as soon as negotiations break down.”
(“I’m sure a joke like that will irritate some people,” Mr. Smigel said.)
“Zohan” was divisive before a single frame was shot, when it was known in Mr. Sandler’s camp and around Hollywood as “the Israeli movie.” “Some people told me, ‘Don’t do it,’ just knowing the log line that they had heard,” said Dennis Dugan, the movie’s director, who directed Mr. Sandler in “Happy Gilmore,” “Big Daddy” and “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry”).
In hopes of forestalling criticism, the filmmakers sought actors of Israeli and Arab descent to play the many Mideastern characters in “Zohan,” and even opened a casting office in Israel.
Not surprising, they had little difficulty recruiting Israelis to play opposite Mr. Sandler. But finding Arab actors who would even audition for “Zohan” proved challenging, and some who worked on the film said they had initially been leery of appearing with Mr. Sandler, who is Jewish and supports Jewish charities and causes.
“Adam Sandler, in the Arab and Muslim communities, is not having a good reputation,” said Sayed Badreya, an Egyptian-born actor who plays one of Zohan’s adversaries in New York. “When it came to working with Adam, I was like, ‘Eh, well, I don’t know.’ My prejudice was bigger than me.” Mr. Badreya said he had been persuaded to reconsider, in part, by his teenage daughter, a huge fan of Mr. Sandler’s films.
Mr. Sandler attempted to ease any discomfort during filming by encouraging his co-stars to gather outside his trailer at an area furnished with tables and lawn chairs, where they would smoke cigars and talk shop during breaks. Inevitably, some heated debates about Mideast politics occurred during these conversations. (“Don’t think it was always nicey-nicey,” Mr. Badreya said.) But the talks also yielded at least one spontaneous trip to Las Vegas, attended by Arab and Israeli actors alike.
It is hard to predict if viewers will similarly rally around “Zohan” and its modest moral that Israelis and Arabs are more alike than dissimilar. The fact that the film was made at all — and is scheduled to be the first major release of Sony’s Columbia Pictures division in a summer crowded with comedies — would seem to be a huge bet that Mr. Sandler’s proven ability to draw large audiences will outweigh political content that could repel moviegoers.
“The only people who you could imagine being attracted to the Israeli-in-New York, complexity-of-the-Middle East dimensions are adults, and they don’t go to the movies,” said Marty Kaplan, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and a former film executive at Disney. “This entire campaign, as always, is targeted at boys from 13 to 18.”
While overt political messages have driven viewers away from many movies in recent years, Mr. Kaplan said, the prospect of “the latest Adam Sandler comedy — which is what this movie promises to be — is the thing that’s going to entice them.”
Representatives for Sony declined to discuss whether the weighty overtones of “Zohan,” a film estimated to have cost $90 million, might hurt ticket sales or affect how the movie was being promoted, except to say that it was being marketed as a character-driven Adam Sandler comedy. The anxiety of how the film might be received seemed to weigh heavily on Mr. Smigel, a self-identified liberal whose politically pointed sketches for “SNL.” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” have drawn the ire of everyone from the Anti-Defamation League to the left-leaning blog Daily Kos to the Canadian House of Commons. Mr. Smigel said such criticism had taught him to be more careful with his comedy. “If there are people who are genuinely hurt by it on some level, no matter what my intention was, I have to pay attention to that,” he said.
Even in satirical discussions of race and ethnicity, Mr. Smigel said, a certain amount of self-censorship might be prudent. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that people can’t freely call me a dirty Jew, like they might have been able to 30 years ago,” he said.
For now, advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations are taking a wait-and-see attitude with “Zohan.” Given Mr. Sandler’s previous work, “I would say I’m a little worried,” said Ahmed Rehab, that organization’s national strategic communications director. He added that Mr. Sandler, like all artists, has a right to freedom of expression.
Mr. Badreya, who was recently seen playing an Afghan terrorist in “Iron Man,” said that by offering Arab or Muslim characters that are in any way divergent from the usual Hollywood stereotypes, “Zohan” is a step in the right direction.
“The movie presents what happened to me,” said Mr. Badreya, who grew up in Port Said, Egypt, during the 1967 and 1973 wars and emigrated to the United States in 1979. “Since it happened to me, it will work for someone like me.”
Mr. Badreya said that the comedy in “Zohan” was not quite evenly divided between ridiculing Arabs and ridiculing Jews. “The jokes are not 50-50,” he said. “It’s 70-30. Which is great. We haven’t had 30 for a long time. We’ve been getting zero. So it’s good.”
22 May 2008
Suicide, the path to national salvation
View from the booth: this makes too much sense logically and historically. The core issue of "nakba" and all the lost wars is one of a stain on the honor - the humiliation -- of all Arabs involved and the demise of Nasser's "pan-Arabism" too many of whom still cannot, will not, accept a future for themselves living in peace with Israel. They would rather die. If national suicide is the ultimate goal for Hamas and the Palestinian Authority under Abbas (who does not enjoy popular support) who have poisoned the minds of so many young people who are growing up to hate Israel, the possibilities for peace with a responsible government by, of and for the Palestinian people in any near term future will remain elusive until someone in Israel says "dayenu" and will have to deal in a calculus much like Harry Truman had to in 1945 before he decided that it was either killing a whole lot of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or allowing an estimated 500,000 American boys (citizen soldiers - mainly not professionals) to die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland. In the end, this is about the survival of the Jewish state and the nerve of Israel to adopt, as a last resort, the irrational to fight for the rational, and view the matter much as Kubrick entitled his classic film, "Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb." It's perverse, but it is certainly within the Jewish tradition to fight, violently when necessary, for our lives. And that is what Israel is doing and what she will, at some point, have to decide: is it us or them? I would choose "us" when dealing with today's "banzai" soldiers from Hamas and like-thinkers/actors. If they want to die, and insist on killing civilian Israelis -- not that these thugs make a distinction -- and calling for the destruction of Israel, then it will become incumbent upon the Israeli government, IDF and its constituents to assist them in their terrible endeavor. The only question will be what means/methods will be used to achieve the goal of survival and peace. Who can live in a country when a father takes his little one to the bus for his/her first day of school not knowing if he will see his little one again? It's not tolerable on a long term basis. Israel is worried about brain drain? Make people with brains feel secure, and perhaps the leakage of the phenomenal talent that has built Israel into what she is now will slow. That Israel continues to prosper despite all of the madness is in itself a miracle, like Israel herself. No-one handed Israel to Israelis. They had to take it and fight for it. They will have to take back peace. Nobody is going to hand it to them, especially people who would sooner die than live together with, God forbid, an Israeli or a Jew.
Randy Shiner
Randy Shiner
Suicide, the path to national salvation
Amnon Rubinstein , THE JERUSALEM POST
May. 21, 2008
Gaza is becoming a symbol. We rightly emphasize Israel's need to put an end to the daily, ever-widening, shelling of our civilians; indeed, it is obvious that Israel will eventually have to take military action - no country could act otherwise - to silence the guns and missile-launchers.
Another aspect is equally significant and concerns the attitude of Hamas's rulers to the mounting tension: On the one hand, they are negotiating - with Egypt, not with the illegitimate Zionist entity - on a temporary cessation of hostilities. On the other hand, they authorize extending the range of their missile attacks, knowing full well that this will hasten the day in which Israel, under any government, will have to order its army to march into Gaza and strip Hamas of its power.
Such is the Hamas policy: not only an endless blood-letting war against the Zionist entity, but also a readiness to lose their hold over Gaza as part of this war. This signifies a readiness not only to sacrifice the lives of men, women and children, but also a readiness to sacrifice the very regime they established not long ago through a violent coup. In other words, it is a process of political suicide writ large: The shahid is not only the individual, but the regime itself.
THIS MAY sound like an extreme conclusion but, as Ari Bar Yossef, retired lieutenant-colonel and administrator of the Knesset's Security Committee, writes in the army journal Ma'arachot, such cases of Islamist national suicide are not uncommon. He cites three such examples of Arab-Muslim regimes irrationally sacrificing their very existence, overriding their instinct of self-preservation, to fight the perceived enemy to the bitter end.
• The first case is that of Saddam Hussein, who in 2003 could have avoided war and conquest by allowing UN inspectors to search for (the apparently non-existent) weapons of mass destruction wherever they wanted. Yet Iraq's ruler opted for war, knowing full well that he would have to face the might of the US.
• The second case is that of Yasser Arafat in 2000, who after the failure of the Camp David and Taba talks had two options: continue talking to Israel - under the leadership of Ehud Barak, this country's most moderate and flexible government ever - or resort to violence. He chose the latter, with the result that all progress toward Palestinian independence was blocked. The ensuing loss of life, on both sides, testified to Arafat's preference for suicide over compromise.
• The third case is that of the Taliban. Post-9/11, their leadership had two options: to enter into negotiations with the US, with a view to extraditing Osama bin Laden, or to risk war and destruction. The choice they made was obvious: Better to die fighting than to give up an inch.
IN ALL three cases, the conclusion is plain: prolonged war, death, destruction and national suicide are preferable to peaceful solutions of conflicts: Dying is preferable to negotiating with infidels. The same conclusion, of course, is applicable to the Palestinians voting for Hamas and its suicidal path, and to Iran's decision to confront the Security Council in its insistence on acquiring nuclear weapons.
These cases, while unprecedented in the annals of history, should not be that surprising. If you glorify individual suicide, if death is the key to a happy afterlife, if war itself is sanctified, why not extend these ideas from the individual to the collective? To the regime itself ? Suicide is the path to both individual and national salvation.
Luckily, not all Arab or Muslim regimes are like that. The vast majority of Arabs seek life, liberty and happiness. But when it comes to the hated Israel, madness rules, and not only the Iranians. It is a fact that Iran's explicit aim "to wipe Israel off the map" and its implicit threat to use nuclear weapons for this purpose are supported by many Palestinians - even though they too would be "wiped off" in the process.
Suicide in the struggle against Israel has acquired a degree of legitimacy the West cannot even fathom.
This unpalatable conclusion must be confronted. On the one hand, it should drive us to increase our efforts to reach some sort of modus vivendi with the PLO to decrease the impact of the fanatics (despite the fact that any such compromise will be rejected by Iran and its cohorts); while on the other hand, Israel, as well as the West, should be prepared for a long, irrational and costly war, unlike any other fought in the past.
The writer is a professor of law at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, a former minister of education and MK as well as the recipient of the 2006 Israel Prize.
20 April 2008
The Mufti and the Holocaust
BOOKS:
The Mufti and the Holocaust
By John Rosenthal
John Rosenthal on Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten by Klaus Gensicke
________________________________________
KLAUS GENSICKE. Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten. WISSENSCHAFTLICHE BUCHGESELLSCHAFT. 247 PAGES. €49.90
Germany stands for an uncompromising struggle against the Jews. It is self-evident that the struggle against the Jewish national homeland in Palestine forms part of this struggle, since such a national homeland would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests. Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie. Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews. Germany is determined to call on the European nations one by one to solve the Jewish problem and, at the proper moment, to address the same appeal to non-European peoples.
—Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, November 28, 1941 1
THE PERSISTENCE OF widespread Judeophobia in the Muslim world is hardly a matter of dispute, even if many commentators are inclined to dismiss it as merely an “understandable” reaction to Israeli “oppression.” Among those who take the phenomenon seriously, however, a debate has been taking place of late about its origins. The debate has been spurred on, notably, by the publication in English translation of the German political scientist Matthias Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. The central thesis of Küntzel’s book is that anti-Semitism — or, more precisely, modern anti-Semitism as crystallized in the “Jewish world conspiracy” theory — was largely imported into the Muslim world from Nazi Germany.
Now, one might have expected that opponents of Islamism would welcome a book showing the direct influence of the Third Reich upon the development of the Islamist movement and, most notably, on the Muslim Brotherhood, the pivotal organization in its history. In normal political discourse, after all, pointing out the links of an organization or movement to National Socialism does not exactly constitute an endorsement. Ironically, however, Küntzel’s book has been most roundly criticized — indeed outright denounced — by precisely the most adamant foes of Islamic extremism.
For the most part self-styled experts in Islam, the latter have insisted, as against Küntzel’s thesis, that Muslim anti-Semitism is, in effect, a strictly Muslim affair.
The Gensicke volume provides considerable support for the thesis that “native” Islamic sources of anti-Semitism are primordial in Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism.
Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and the “father” of Palestinian radicalism, is obviously a key figure for such debates. As is well known, from 1941 to 1945 Husseini lived in Berlin as the honored guest of Nazi Germany. During this time, he notably collaborated with the Nazis in assembling the Muslim SS division “Handzar” in Bosnia, as well as in numerous propaganda activities aimed at Arab speakers. Whereas the facts of Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis are widely known, what is less know, however, is the degree to which the mufti was influenced by or indeed himself influenced his hosts on an ideological and programmatic level. But a new book by German historian Klaus Gensicke titled Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten — “The Mufti of Jerusalem and the National Socialists” — sheds light on precisely this question. Based largely on primary source materials from the German archives, Gensicke’s volume provides unparalleled insight into the details of the mufti’s relationship to his Nazi hosts: at least as seen from the German side.
Gensicke’s 1988 doctoral dissertation is one of the principal sources for Küntzel’s discussion of the mufti in Jihad and Jew-Hatred and Küntzel himself wrote the preface for Gensicke’s new book: an updated version of the dissertation.
Nonetheless, the Gensicke volume also provides considerable support for the thesis that, so to say, “native” Islamic sources of anti-Semitism are primordial in Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism. At the very least, Gensicke’s account shows the relation between the mufti and the Nazis to have been very much a two-way street: even — or indeed especially — as concerns the notorious “Jewish Question.”
THUS, IN MARCH 1933, only two months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, it was in fact the mufti who sought contact to the new German authorities and not vice-versa. In a March 31 telegram to Berlin, the German general consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, reported on his meeting with Husseini:
The Mufti explained to me today at length that Muslims both within Palestine and without welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, anti-democratic forms of government to other countries. Current Jewish economic and political influence is harmful everywhere and has to be combated. In order to be able to hit the standard of living of Jews, Muslims are hoping for Germany to declare a boycott [of “Jewish” goods], which they would then enthusiastically join throughout the Muslim world.
As Gensicke explains, however, the initial German response to the mufti’s advances was cool. Indeed, the German attitude toward the mufti would remain reserved throughout the first years of Nazi rule. At the time, the Nazi leadership still hoped to come to an understanding with Great Britain that would allow it to pursue unhindered its expansionist goals in Eastern Europe. In return for British acquiescence, it was prepared to treat the Middle East as part of the British sphere of influence.
Moreover, for at least part of the Nazi leadership — Gensicke points in particular to Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker — the immigration of German Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to Germany’s supposed “Jewish problem.”
This attitude was obviously inimical to the plans of the mufti, who pleaded with German authorities to restrict Jewish immigration. Starting in August 1933, however, they did the opposite: in effect, facilitating Jewish immigration under the complex terms of the so-called Haavara or “Transfer” Agreement. The Haavara Agreement simultaneously permitted German Jews to transfer part of their wealth to Palestine and favored German exports to the region — the latter aspect earning it the support also of the Economics Ministry. “It cannot be denied that the Haavara Transfer made a considerable contribution to the development of Jewish settlement in Palestine,” Gensicke writes.
The immigration of Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to some in the Nazi leadership, but it was inimical to the mufti’s plans.
By August 1940, however, the situation had radically changed. The outbreak of the war had brought the Haavara Agreement to an end. Even while it was still at least formally in effect, moreover, the Germans had already been quietly providing financial and material support to the mufti-led “Arab Revolt” in Palestine from 1936 to 1939. The aim of the revolt was precisely to stop Jewish immigration. After guiding the Arab Revolt from exile in Beirut, the mufti had in the meanwhile taken refuge in Iraq. There he allied himself with the pro-Axis circle around new Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gailani, who had recently replaced the pro-British Nuri as-Said. On August 26, an emissary of the mufti by the name of Osman Kemal Haddad met with Fritz Grobba of the German Foreign Office in Berlin. According to Grobba’s notes, Haddad asked for a declaration from Germany and Italy recognizing the right of the Arab countries to independence and “self-determination” and that they might resolve the “question of the Jewish element” just as Germany and Italy had done. In return, Haddad promised that Iraq would accord Germany and Italy “a privileged place” in its foreign relations: notably as concerns the “exploitation of Iraq’s mineral resources and in particular its oil reserves.”
Only the defeat of Rommel at the second Battle of El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out operations against the Jewish population.
Gailani would resign his post in January 1941 and then be returned to power by a coup d’état four months later. The British military intervention that followed would bring a provisional end to the mufti’s plans of transforming Iraq into a pro-Axis beachhead in the Middle East. “Sonderkommando Junck,” a somewhat perfunctory German Luftwaffe mission dispatched by the Reich to support its allies in Iraq, could not reverse the trend. Both the mufti and Gailani fled to Tehran toward the end of May.
Even after their departure, Gensicke writes, “a wave of acts of intimidation and terror on the part of the pro-Axis forces continued.” These included a major anti-Jewish pogrom, known as the “Farhud,” in which some 179 Iraqi Jews were killed.
As Gensicke’s account makes clear, moreover, the Nazi leadership would continue to accord central importance to the Iraqi “liberation struggle.” The deposed Iraqi Prime Minister Gailani followed the mufti to Berlin, where he, too, would take up residence starting in November 1941. For the remainder of the war years, the two Arab leaders would compete jealously for the Nazis’ favor. In light of the obvious parallels between the anti-British Iraqi “liberation struggle” of the early 1940s and the anti-American Iraqi “liberation struggle” of today, it is curious that Nazi Germany’s involvement in the former has not received greater public attention. A separate study of Gailani’s collaboration with the Nazis would undoubtedly be rich in historical lessons.
Hitler appears to have made German plans for a more muscular intervention to “liberate” Iraq merely contingent upon the successful conclusion of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Once the Wehrmacht had taken control of the southern Caucasus region, German troops were to sweep down into Iraq. The German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 definitively put an end to such plans.
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1941, three weeks after his arrival in Berlin, the mufti was received by Hitler. As recorded in the minutes of the meeting, Hitler urged his guest to remain patient:
At some not yet precisely known, but in any case not very distant point in time, the German armies will reach the southern edge of the Caucasus. As soon as this is the case, the Führer will himself give the Arab world his assurance that the hour of liberation has arrived. At this point, the sole German aim will be the destruction of the Jews living in the Arab space under the protection of British power.
In the same meeting, Hitler likewise assured the mufti of his opposition to the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, which, he said, “would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests.” More than 15 years earlier, Hitler had expressed the same thought in more colorful terms in Mein Kampf: “They are not at all thinking of building a Jewish state in Palestine in order, for instance, to live there; but rather they only hope to have a headquarters for their international swindling operations that is furnished with sovereign powers and removed from the influence of other states.”2
When the right time had come, Hitler told the mufti, the Arabs and other “non-European peoples” would be called on to “solve the Jewish problem” just as the “European nations” had done. The chilling remark suggests plans to exterminate even those Jews that the Nazi leadership had earlier permitted to immigrate to Palestine. As so happens, historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have recently uncovered evidence that such plans did indeed exist. A special SS commando unit was formed in 1942 and attached to Rommel’s African Panzer Army. Its writ was in large part identical to that of the infamous Einsatzgruppen that accompanied the Wehrmacht during the invasion of the Soviet Union and that were responsible for the murder of upwards of one million Soviet Jews. On Mallmann and Cüppers’s account, only the defeat of Rommel at the second Battle of El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out similar operations against the Jewish population there.3
Among his other activities in Berlin, the mufti served as honorary chair of a newly founded “Islamic Central Institute” The institute was officially opened on December 18, 1942: during Eid al-Adha, the Islamic “Festival of Sacrifice.” In a letter to Hitler on the occasion, the mufti expressed the hope that “thousands of Muslims around the world” would cooperate with Germany in the fight against “the common enemies”: “Jews, Bolsheviks and Anglo-Saxons.” The speech given by the mufti at the opening ceremony provides perhaps the clearest evidence that he required no lessons from the Nazis in anti-Semitism — or, at any rate, that if he did, he had by this time successfully assimilated those lessons into a remarkable synthesis of “traditional” Quranic and “modern” European Judeophobia:
The Jews and their accomplices are to be counted among the bitterest enemies of the Muslims, who made known . . . their hostility since ancient times and have everywhere and always . . . treated them [Muslims] with guile. Every Muslim knows all too well how the Jews afflicted him and his faith in the first days of Islam and what hatefulness they displayed toward the great Prophet — what hardship and trouble they caused him, how many intrigues they launched, how many conspiracies against him they brought about — such that the Quran judged them to be the most irreconcilable enemies of the Muslims. . . . They will always remain a divisive element in the world: an element that is committed to devising schemes, provoking wars and playing peoples off against one another. . . . In England as in America, it is the Jewish influence alone that rules; and it is the same Jewish influence that is behind godless Communism. . . . And it is also this Jewish influence that has incited the nations into this grueling war. It is only the Jews who benefit from the tragic fate that they [the nations] suffer. . . .
In a subsequent talk at the Islamic Central Institute on November 2, 1943, the mufti called on Muslims to follow the example of National Socialist Germany, since the latter “knew how to save itself from the evil [Unheil] done by the Jews. . . . It had precisely identified the Jews and decided to find a definitive solution to the Jewish menace, in order to eliminate their evildoing [Unheil] from the world.” Gensicke points to the latter remark as evidence that the mufti was “well informed” about the extermination program that was by this time long underway in the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.4
INDEED, PERHAPS THE most shocking finding of Gensicke’s research concerns the repeated efforts of the mufti after 1943 to ensure that no European Jews should elude the camps: this during a period when it was becoming increasingly obvious even to the Nazi leadership that Germany would lose the war. Thus, for example, Bulgarian plans to permit some 4,000 Jewish children and 500 adult companions to immigrate to Palestine provoked a letter from the mufti to the Bulgarian foreign minister, pleading for the operation to be stopped. In the letter, dated May 6, 1943, Husseini invoked a “Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live.” “If I may be permitted,” the mufti continued,
I would like to call your attention to the fact that it would be very appropriate and more advantageous to prevent the Jews from emigrating from your country and instead to send them where they will be placed under strict control: e.g. to Poland. Thus one can avoid the danger they represent and do a good deed vis-à-vis the Arab peoples that will be appreciated.
One week later, the mufti sent additional “protest letters” to both the Italian and German Foreign Ministries, appealing for them to intervene in the matter. The German Foreign Ministry promptly sent off a cable to the German ambassador in Sofia stressing “the common German-Arab interest in preventing the rescue operation.” Indeed, according to the post-War recollections of a Foreign Ministry official, “The Mufti turned up all over the place making protests: in the Minister’s office, in the waiting room of the Deputy Minister and in other sections: for example, Interior, the Press Office, the Broadcast service, and also the SS.” “The Mufti was a sworn enemy of the Jews,” the official concluded, “and he made no secret of the fact that he would have preferred to see them all killed.”
As Gensicke points out, the mufti’s hyperactivity is particularly notable in light of the fact that the Foreign Ministry — and even indeed Heinrich Himmler’s Reich Security Central Office (RSHA), which was directly responsible for implementing the Final Solution — had shown signs of being willing to tolerate the Bulgarian rescue action: at any rate, for a price. The RSHA demanded the release of some 20,000 Germans interred by the Allies in exchange for the Jewish children.
In the nearly 800 pages of the two volumes of Hitler’s would-be magnum opus, Arabs are not mentioned at all as such and Islam is mentioned just once.
In late June, both the Romanian and Hungarian Foreign Ministers would be recipients of similar appeals from the mufti. The Romanian government had been planning to allow some 75,000 to 80,000 Jews to immigrate to the Middle East, and Hungary — which had become a refuge for Jews escaping persecution elsewhere in Europe — was reportedly preparing to allow some 900 Jewish children and their parents to immigrate as well. The mufti repeated his counsel that the Jews should be sent rather to Poland, where they could be kept under “active surveillance.” “It is especially monstrous,” Gensicke concludes, “that el-Husseini objected to even those few cases in which the National Socialists were prepared, for whatever reasons, to permit Jews to emigrate. . . . For him, only deportation to Poland was acceptable, since he knew fully well that there would be no escape for the Jews from there.”
SELF-PROFESSED Islamophobes — whose insistence that Islamism has something to do with Islam is, of course, not unreasonable in itself — will undoubtedly be tempted to see in Gensicke’s research support also for far more extravagant propositions.
Pointing to the alleged admiration for Islam of this or that Nazi luminary or of the Führer himself, the most hysterical reactions to Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred seem even to want to suggest that it is not, after all, National Socialism that is the source of rampant anti-Semitism in the Muslim World, but rather Islam that was perhaps the source or inspiration of the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists! Thus, for example, in a review of Küntzel’s volume on the Frontpage website,5 Andrew Bostom accuses Küntzel of “selective citation” and triumphantly adduces a passage from Albert Speer’s memoirs in which Speer describes Hitler expressing his regrets that Arabs had failed to conquer Europe in the early Middle Ages, since their warlike Muslim religion was “perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.”
Let it be noted in passing that it is at least odd for Bostom to accuse Küntzel of having, in his words, “omitted” this passage, given that Küntzel’s own citation of Speer concerns a different topic (Hitler’s alleged fantasies about the destruction of New York) and is drawn indeed from an entirely different book. The eccentricity of such a procedure, moreover, appears less innocent when one considers that Bostom himself — in a 10,000-word screed replete with lengthy citations — has taken the trouble to suppress the following words from the very middle of his own Speer passage: “Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives. . . . ”6
Gensicke, citing a similarly anecdotal source, suggests that it was precisely Hitler’s belief in the racial inferiority of Arabs that prevented him from fully utilizing the support that the mufti and his Arab nationalist allies could have provided the Nazi cause. More generally, Gensicke notes that “on account of their racial ideology, it was impossible for the National Socialists to advocate the idea of Arab independence.” For the Nazis, he concludes, “the Semitic Arabs were as incapable of successfully running a state as were the Jews.” Even leaving aside the biographies of Nazis who would convert to Islam after the War or Himmler’s well-documented (though seemingly rather superficial) enthusiasm for Islam, this well-meaning caveat is contradicted by archival evidence adduced by Gensicke elsewhere in his volume.7
If, however, instead of turning to more or less reliable recollections of third parties,8 one returns to the source — namely, the undisputed bible of the National Socialist movement, Hitler’s Mein Kampf — one discovers that Hitler’s own views on Islam and Arabs were almost nonexistent. In the nearly 800 pages of the two volumes of his would-be magnum opus, Arabs are not mentioned a single time as such and Islam is mentioned just once, in a neutral remark on the relative appeal of Islam and Christianity in Africa. The fevered mental universe of the discharged corporal and aspiring “race theorist” was amply populated by different varieties of Slavs, the occasional “Negro” [Neger], and, of course, always and everywhere the conniving and threatening Jew: the racial antipode of the honest “Aryan.” But Arabs and the “Muslim world” seem barely to have crossed his radar. Only once does Hitler implicitly offer his “racial” assessment of the latter: this in considering the prospect of German National Socialists forming an alliance with Egyptian insurgents fighting against British colonial rule. Hitler even alludes tantalizingly to the insurgents’ “Holy War” — in scare quotes, suggesting his clear disdain for the idea. “As [someone] who assesses the value of humanity according to racial criteria,” Hitler writes, “the knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ forbids me from linking the fate of my own people with theirs.”9
It was only during the war that Hitler would, in effect, be confronted in a far more practical and urgent form by the very same question of “linking” the Nazi cause to religiously-tinged Arab nationalism. And when he was, as Gensicke’s volume shows, he would find not only a willing ally, but also a kindred spirit, in Haj Amin Al-Husseini.
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John Rosenthal writes on European politics, with a special focus on Germany and France. His work has appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, the Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes, and Merkur. He is a contributing editor for World Politics Review.
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1 Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 60-61. Author’s translation.
2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1943), 356. Author’s translation.
3 See Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cüppers, “‘Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine’: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942” in Yad Vashem Studies XXV (available online at http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/studies/vol35/Mallmann-Cuppers2.pdf, accessed February 29, 2008). Mallmann and Cüppers have published the results of their research in book-length form in Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).
4 Citing documents from the Nuremberg Trials, Gensicke also notes that in mid-1942 members of Husseini’s and Gailani’s respective entourages visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin. It is perhaps exaggerated to conclude from this fact that the mufti was aware of what was transpiring in the camps further to the East. According to the commonly accepted classification, Sachsenhausen was not a “death camp,” but merely a “normal” concentration camp. This is not to say that tens of thousands were not executed there: above all, Soviet prisoners. In any case, the Jewish inmates at Sachsenhausen were supposed to have “particularly interested” the visitors, who came away from their visit with “a very positive impression.” Gensicke, 206, note >55.
5 http: //www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E352185E-D91E-4773-B4AE-9A5C3EA4949B (accessed February 29, 2008).
6 Lest I myself be accused of “selective citation,” I should mention that in a more recent blog post — discovered thanks to a fortuitous Google search rather than comprehensive familiarity with the author’s output — Bostom cites the full Speer passage and now allows that Hitler’s views of Arabs and Islam were “ambivalent.” See http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/01/25/verboten-discussion—hitler-muhammad-and-islam/ (accessed February 29, 2008).
7 Thus in a letter of March 11, 1941, Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker assured the mufti that Germany was “of the opinion that the Arabs are an ancient cultured nation [ein altes Kulturvolk] that has proven its aptitude for administration and its military virtues and that is fully capable of governing itself.”
8 Speer in particular was a notorious fabulist and his often farfetched inventions have been the subject of several books: such as Matthias Schmidt’s Albert Speer: the End of a Myth and Dan van der Vat’s The Good Nazi: the Life and Lies of Albert Speer. In a particularly craven and macabre instance, at one point during questioning at the main Nuremberg trial, Speer claimed to have been planning to assassinate Hitler by dropping poison gas through a ventilation pipe at the Reich Chancellery, a plan that only failed to come to fruition, he said, because the opening of the pipe was too high for him to reach.
9 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 747. Author’s translation.
The Mufti and the Holocaust
By John Rosenthal
John Rosenthal on Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten by Klaus Gensicke
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KLAUS GENSICKE. Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten. WISSENSCHAFTLICHE BUCHGESELLSCHAFT. 247 PAGES. €49.90
Germany stands for an uncompromising struggle against the Jews. It is self-evident that the struggle against the Jewish national homeland in Palestine forms part of this struggle, since such a national homeland would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests. Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie. Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews. Germany is determined to call on the European nations one by one to solve the Jewish problem and, at the proper moment, to address the same appeal to non-European peoples.
—Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, November 28, 1941 1
THE PERSISTENCE OF widespread Judeophobia in the Muslim world is hardly a matter of dispute, even if many commentators are inclined to dismiss it as merely an “understandable” reaction to Israeli “oppression.” Among those who take the phenomenon seriously, however, a debate has been taking place of late about its origins. The debate has been spurred on, notably, by the publication in English translation of the German political scientist Matthias Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. The central thesis of Küntzel’s book is that anti-Semitism — or, more precisely, modern anti-Semitism as crystallized in the “Jewish world conspiracy” theory — was largely imported into the Muslim world from Nazi Germany.
Now, one might have expected that opponents of Islamism would welcome a book showing the direct influence of the Third Reich upon the development of the Islamist movement and, most notably, on the Muslim Brotherhood, the pivotal organization in its history. In normal political discourse, after all, pointing out the links of an organization or movement to National Socialism does not exactly constitute an endorsement. Ironically, however, Küntzel’s book has been most roundly criticized — indeed outright denounced — by precisely the most adamant foes of Islamic extremism.
For the most part self-styled experts in Islam, the latter have insisted, as against Küntzel’s thesis, that Muslim anti-Semitism is, in effect, a strictly Muslim affair.
The Gensicke volume provides considerable support for the thesis that “native” Islamic sources of anti-Semitism are primordial in Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism.
Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and the “father” of Palestinian radicalism, is obviously a key figure for such debates. As is well known, from 1941 to 1945 Husseini lived in Berlin as the honored guest of Nazi Germany. During this time, he notably collaborated with the Nazis in assembling the Muslim SS division “Handzar” in Bosnia, as well as in numerous propaganda activities aimed at Arab speakers. Whereas the facts of Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis are widely known, what is less know, however, is the degree to which the mufti was influenced by or indeed himself influenced his hosts on an ideological and programmatic level. But a new book by German historian Klaus Gensicke titled Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten — “The Mufti of Jerusalem and the National Socialists” — sheds light on precisely this question. Based largely on primary source materials from the German archives, Gensicke’s volume provides unparalleled insight into the details of the mufti’s relationship to his Nazi hosts: at least as seen from the German side.
Gensicke’s 1988 doctoral dissertation is one of the principal sources for Küntzel’s discussion of the mufti in Jihad and Jew-Hatred and Küntzel himself wrote the preface for Gensicke’s new book: an updated version of the dissertation.
Nonetheless, the Gensicke volume also provides considerable support for the thesis that, so to say, “native” Islamic sources of anti-Semitism are primordial in Muslim or Arab anti-Semitism. At the very least, Gensicke’s account shows the relation between the mufti and the Nazis to have been very much a two-way street: even — or indeed especially — as concerns the notorious “Jewish Question.”
THUS, IN MARCH 1933, only two months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, it was in fact the mufti who sought contact to the new German authorities and not vice-versa. In a March 31 telegram to Berlin, the German general consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, reported on his meeting with Husseini:
The Mufti explained to me today at length that Muslims both within Palestine and without welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, anti-democratic forms of government to other countries. Current Jewish economic and political influence is harmful everywhere and has to be combated. In order to be able to hit the standard of living of Jews, Muslims are hoping for Germany to declare a boycott [of “Jewish” goods], which they would then enthusiastically join throughout the Muslim world.
As Gensicke explains, however, the initial German response to the mufti’s advances was cool. Indeed, the German attitude toward the mufti would remain reserved throughout the first years of Nazi rule. At the time, the Nazi leadership still hoped to come to an understanding with Great Britain that would allow it to pursue unhindered its expansionist goals in Eastern Europe. In return for British acquiescence, it was prepared to treat the Middle East as part of the British sphere of influence.
Moreover, for at least part of the Nazi leadership — Gensicke points in particular to Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker — the immigration of German Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to Germany’s supposed “Jewish problem.”
This attitude was obviously inimical to the plans of the mufti, who pleaded with German authorities to restrict Jewish immigration. Starting in August 1933, however, they did the opposite: in effect, facilitating Jewish immigration under the complex terms of the so-called Haavara or “Transfer” Agreement. The Haavara Agreement simultaneously permitted German Jews to transfer part of their wealth to Palestine and favored German exports to the region — the latter aspect earning it the support also of the Economics Ministry. “It cannot be denied that the Haavara Transfer made a considerable contribution to the development of Jewish settlement in Palestine,” Gensicke writes.
The immigration of Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to some in the Nazi leadership, but it was inimical to the mufti’s plans.
By August 1940, however, the situation had radically changed. The outbreak of the war had brought the Haavara Agreement to an end. Even while it was still at least formally in effect, moreover, the Germans had already been quietly providing financial and material support to the mufti-led “Arab Revolt” in Palestine from 1936 to 1939. The aim of the revolt was precisely to stop Jewish immigration. After guiding the Arab Revolt from exile in Beirut, the mufti had in the meanwhile taken refuge in Iraq. There he allied himself with the pro-Axis circle around new Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gailani, who had recently replaced the pro-British Nuri as-Said. On August 26, an emissary of the mufti by the name of Osman Kemal Haddad met with Fritz Grobba of the German Foreign Office in Berlin. According to Grobba’s notes, Haddad asked for a declaration from Germany and Italy recognizing the right of the Arab countries to independence and “self-determination” and that they might resolve the “question of the Jewish element” just as Germany and Italy had done. In return, Haddad promised that Iraq would accord Germany and Italy “a privileged place” in its foreign relations: notably as concerns the “exploitation of Iraq’s mineral resources and in particular its oil reserves.”
Only the defeat of Rommel at the second Battle of El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out operations against the Jewish population.
Gailani would resign his post in January 1941 and then be returned to power by a coup d’état four months later. The British military intervention that followed would bring a provisional end to the mufti’s plans of transforming Iraq into a pro-Axis beachhead in the Middle East. “Sonderkommando Junck,” a somewhat perfunctory German Luftwaffe mission dispatched by the Reich to support its allies in Iraq, could not reverse the trend. Both the mufti and Gailani fled to Tehran toward the end of May.
Even after their departure, Gensicke writes, “a wave of acts of intimidation and terror on the part of the pro-Axis forces continued.” These included a major anti-Jewish pogrom, known as the “Farhud,” in which some 179 Iraqi Jews were killed.
As Gensicke’s account makes clear, moreover, the Nazi leadership would continue to accord central importance to the Iraqi “liberation struggle.” The deposed Iraqi Prime Minister Gailani followed the mufti to Berlin, where he, too, would take up residence starting in November 1941. For the remainder of the war years, the two Arab leaders would compete jealously for the Nazis’ favor. In light of the obvious parallels between the anti-British Iraqi “liberation struggle” of the early 1940s and the anti-American Iraqi “liberation struggle” of today, it is curious that Nazi Germany’s involvement in the former has not received greater public attention. A separate study of Gailani’s collaboration with the Nazis would undoubtedly be rich in historical lessons.
Hitler appears to have made German plans for a more muscular intervention to “liberate” Iraq merely contingent upon the successful conclusion of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Once the Wehrmacht had taken control of the southern Caucasus region, German troops were to sweep down into Iraq. The German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 definitively put an end to such plans.
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1941, three weeks after his arrival in Berlin, the mufti was received by Hitler. As recorded in the minutes of the meeting, Hitler urged his guest to remain patient:
At some not yet precisely known, but in any case not very distant point in time, the German armies will reach the southern edge of the Caucasus. As soon as this is the case, the Führer will himself give the Arab world his assurance that the hour of liberation has arrived. At this point, the sole German aim will be the destruction of the Jews living in the Arab space under the protection of British power.
In the same meeting, Hitler likewise assured the mufti of his opposition to the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, which, he said, “would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests.” More than 15 years earlier, Hitler had expressed the same thought in more colorful terms in Mein Kampf: “They are not at all thinking of building a Jewish state in Palestine in order, for instance, to live there; but rather they only hope to have a headquarters for their international swindling operations that is furnished with sovereign powers and removed from the influence of other states.”2
When the right time had come, Hitler told the mufti, the Arabs and other “non-European peoples” would be called on to “solve the Jewish problem” just as the “European nations” had done. The chilling remark suggests plans to exterminate even those Jews that the Nazi leadership had earlier permitted to immigrate to Palestine. As so happens, historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have recently uncovered evidence that such plans did indeed exist. A special SS commando unit was formed in 1942 and attached to Rommel’s African Panzer Army. Its writ was in large part identical to that of the infamous Einsatzgruppen that accompanied the Wehrmacht during the invasion of the Soviet Union and that were responsible for the murder of upwards of one million Soviet Jews. On Mallmann and Cüppers’s account, only the defeat of Rommel at the second Battle of El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out similar operations against the Jewish population there.3
Among his other activities in Berlin, the mufti served as honorary chair of a newly founded “Islamic Central Institute” The institute was officially opened on December 18, 1942: during Eid al-Adha, the Islamic “Festival of Sacrifice.” In a letter to Hitler on the occasion, the mufti expressed the hope that “thousands of Muslims around the world” would cooperate with Germany in the fight against “the common enemies”: “Jews, Bolsheviks and Anglo-Saxons.” The speech given by the mufti at the opening ceremony provides perhaps the clearest evidence that he required no lessons from the Nazis in anti-Semitism — or, at any rate, that if he did, he had by this time successfully assimilated those lessons into a remarkable synthesis of “traditional” Quranic and “modern” European Judeophobia:
The Jews and their accomplices are to be counted among the bitterest enemies of the Muslims, who made known . . . their hostility since ancient times and have everywhere and always . . . treated them [Muslims] with guile. Every Muslim knows all too well how the Jews afflicted him and his faith in the first days of Islam and what hatefulness they displayed toward the great Prophet — what hardship and trouble they caused him, how many intrigues they launched, how many conspiracies against him they brought about — such that the Quran judged them to be the most irreconcilable enemies of the Muslims. . . . They will always remain a divisive element in the world: an element that is committed to devising schemes, provoking wars and playing peoples off against one another. . . . In England as in America, it is the Jewish influence alone that rules; and it is the same Jewish influence that is behind godless Communism. . . . And it is also this Jewish influence that has incited the nations into this grueling war. It is only the Jews who benefit from the tragic fate that they [the nations] suffer. . . .
In a subsequent talk at the Islamic Central Institute on November 2, 1943, the mufti called on Muslims to follow the example of National Socialist Germany, since the latter “knew how to save itself from the evil [Unheil] done by the Jews. . . . It had precisely identified the Jews and decided to find a definitive solution to the Jewish menace, in order to eliminate their evildoing [Unheil] from the world.” Gensicke points to the latter remark as evidence that the mufti was “well informed” about the extermination program that was by this time long underway in the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.4
INDEED, PERHAPS THE most shocking finding of Gensicke’s research concerns the repeated efforts of the mufti after 1943 to ensure that no European Jews should elude the camps: this during a period when it was becoming increasingly obvious even to the Nazi leadership that Germany would lose the war. Thus, for example, Bulgarian plans to permit some 4,000 Jewish children and 500 adult companions to immigrate to Palestine provoked a letter from the mufti to the Bulgarian foreign minister, pleading for the operation to be stopped. In the letter, dated May 6, 1943, Husseini invoked a “Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live.” “If I may be permitted,” the mufti continued,
I would like to call your attention to the fact that it would be very appropriate and more advantageous to prevent the Jews from emigrating from your country and instead to send them where they will be placed under strict control: e.g. to Poland. Thus one can avoid the danger they represent and do a good deed vis-à-vis the Arab peoples that will be appreciated.
One week later, the mufti sent additional “protest letters” to both the Italian and German Foreign Ministries, appealing for them to intervene in the matter. The German Foreign Ministry promptly sent off a cable to the German ambassador in Sofia stressing “the common German-Arab interest in preventing the rescue operation.” Indeed, according to the post-War recollections of a Foreign Ministry official, “The Mufti turned up all over the place making protests: in the Minister’s office, in the waiting room of the Deputy Minister and in other sections: for example, Interior, the Press Office, the Broadcast service, and also the SS.” “The Mufti was a sworn enemy of the Jews,” the official concluded, “and he made no secret of the fact that he would have preferred to see them all killed.”
As Gensicke points out, the mufti’s hyperactivity is particularly notable in light of the fact that the Foreign Ministry — and even indeed Heinrich Himmler’s Reich Security Central Office (RSHA), which was directly responsible for implementing the Final Solution — had shown signs of being willing to tolerate the Bulgarian rescue action: at any rate, for a price. The RSHA demanded the release of some 20,000 Germans interred by the Allies in exchange for the Jewish children.
In the nearly 800 pages of the two volumes of Hitler’s would-be magnum opus, Arabs are not mentioned at all as such and Islam is mentioned just once.
In late June, both the Romanian and Hungarian Foreign Ministers would be recipients of similar appeals from the mufti. The Romanian government had been planning to allow some 75,000 to 80,000 Jews to immigrate to the Middle East, and Hungary — which had become a refuge for Jews escaping persecution elsewhere in Europe — was reportedly preparing to allow some 900 Jewish children and their parents to immigrate as well. The mufti repeated his counsel that the Jews should be sent rather to Poland, where they could be kept under “active surveillance.” “It is especially monstrous,” Gensicke concludes, “that el-Husseini objected to even those few cases in which the National Socialists were prepared, for whatever reasons, to permit Jews to emigrate. . . . For him, only deportation to Poland was acceptable, since he knew fully well that there would be no escape for the Jews from there.”
SELF-PROFESSED Islamophobes — whose insistence that Islamism has something to do with Islam is, of course, not unreasonable in itself — will undoubtedly be tempted to see in Gensicke’s research support also for far more extravagant propositions.
Pointing to the alleged admiration for Islam of this or that Nazi luminary or of the Führer himself, the most hysterical reactions to Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred seem even to want to suggest that it is not, after all, National Socialism that is the source of rampant anti-Semitism in the Muslim World, but rather Islam that was perhaps the source or inspiration of the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists! Thus, for example, in a review of Küntzel’s volume on the Frontpage website,5 Andrew Bostom accuses Küntzel of “selective citation” and triumphantly adduces a passage from Albert Speer’s memoirs in which Speer describes Hitler expressing his regrets that Arabs had failed to conquer Europe in the early Middle Ages, since their warlike Muslim religion was “perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.”
Let it be noted in passing that it is at least odd for Bostom to accuse Küntzel of having, in his words, “omitted” this passage, given that Küntzel’s own citation of Speer concerns a different topic (Hitler’s alleged fantasies about the destruction of New York) and is drawn indeed from an entirely different book. The eccentricity of such a procedure, moreover, appears less innocent when one considers that Bostom himself — in a 10,000-word screed replete with lengthy citations — has taken the trouble to suppress the following words from the very middle of his own Speer passage: “Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives. . . . ”6
Gensicke, citing a similarly anecdotal source, suggests that it was precisely Hitler’s belief in the racial inferiority of Arabs that prevented him from fully utilizing the support that the mufti and his Arab nationalist allies could have provided the Nazi cause. More generally, Gensicke notes that “on account of their racial ideology, it was impossible for the National Socialists to advocate the idea of Arab independence.” For the Nazis, he concludes, “the Semitic Arabs were as incapable of successfully running a state as were the Jews.” Even leaving aside the biographies of Nazis who would convert to Islam after the War or Himmler’s well-documented (though seemingly rather superficial) enthusiasm for Islam, this well-meaning caveat is contradicted by archival evidence adduced by Gensicke elsewhere in his volume.7
If, however, instead of turning to more or less reliable recollections of third parties,8 one returns to the source — namely, the undisputed bible of the National Socialist movement, Hitler’s Mein Kampf — one discovers that Hitler’s own views on Islam and Arabs were almost nonexistent. In the nearly 800 pages of the two volumes of his would-be magnum opus, Arabs are not mentioned a single time as such and Islam is mentioned just once, in a neutral remark on the relative appeal of Islam and Christianity in Africa. The fevered mental universe of the discharged corporal and aspiring “race theorist” was amply populated by different varieties of Slavs, the occasional “Negro” [Neger], and, of course, always and everywhere the conniving and threatening Jew: the racial antipode of the honest “Aryan.” But Arabs and the “Muslim world” seem barely to have crossed his radar. Only once does Hitler implicitly offer his “racial” assessment of the latter: this in considering the prospect of German National Socialists forming an alliance with Egyptian insurgents fighting against British colonial rule. Hitler even alludes tantalizingly to the insurgents’ “Holy War” — in scare quotes, suggesting his clear disdain for the idea. “As [someone] who assesses the value of humanity according to racial criteria,” Hitler writes, “the knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ forbids me from linking the fate of my own people with theirs.”9
It was only during the war that Hitler would, in effect, be confronted in a far more practical and urgent form by the very same question of “linking” the Nazi cause to religiously-tinged Arab nationalism. And when he was, as Gensicke’s volume shows, he would find not only a willing ally, but also a kindred spirit, in Haj Amin Al-Husseini.
________________________________________
John Rosenthal writes on European politics, with a special focus on Germany and France. His work has appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, the Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes, and Merkur. He is a contributing editor for World Politics Review.
________________________________________
1 Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 60-61. Author’s translation.
2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1943), 356. Author’s translation.
3 See Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cüppers, “‘Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine’: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942” in Yad Vashem Studies XXV (available online at http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/studies/vol35/Mallmann-Cuppers2.pdf, accessed February 29, 2008). Mallmann and Cüppers have published the results of their research in book-length form in Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).
4 Citing documents from the Nuremberg Trials, Gensicke also notes that in mid-1942 members of Husseini’s and Gailani’s respective entourages visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin. It is perhaps exaggerated to conclude from this fact that the mufti was aware of what was transpiring in the camps further to the East. According to the commonly accepted classification, Sachsenhausen was not a “death camp,” but merely a “normal” concentration camp. This is not to say that tens of thousands were not executed there: above all, Soviet prisoners. In any case, the Jewish inmates at Sachsenhausen were supposed to have “particularly interested” the visitors, who came away from their visit with “a very positive impression.” Gensicke, 206, note >55.
5 http: //www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E352185E-D91E-4773-B4AE-9A5C3EA4949B (accessed February 29, 2008).
6 Lest I myself be accused of “selective citation,” I should mention that in a more recent blog post — discovered thanks to a fortuitous Google search rather than comprehensive familiarity with the author’s output — Bostom cites the full Speer passage and now allows that Hitler’s views of Arabs and Islam were “ambivalent.” See http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/01/25/verboten-discussion—hitler-muhammad-and-islam/ (accessed February 29, 2008).
7 Thus in a letter of March 11, 1941, Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker assured the mufti that Germany was “of the opinion that the Arabs are an ancient cultured nation [ein altes Kulturvolk] that has proven its aptitude for administration and its military virtues and that is fully capable of governing itself.”
8 Speer in particular was a notorious fabulist and his often farfetched inventions have been the subject of several books: such as Matthias Schmidt’s Albert Speer: the End of a Myth and Dan van der Vat’s The Good Nazi: the Life and Lies of Albert Speer. In a particularly craven and macabre instance, at one point during questioning at the main Nuremberg trial, Speer claimed to have been planning to assassinate Hitler by dropping poison gas through a ventilation pipe at the Reich Chancellery, a plan that only failed to come to fruition, he said, because the opening of the pipe was too high for him to reach.
9 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 747. Author’s translation.
01 March 2008
Thoughts on the Future of Israel and the Middle East
Dear Readers:
In my limited interaction with Israelis, I can tell you that the bombings, rockets, and other sorts of terrorist attacks have already, in large measure, already succeeded, according to an article I read yesterday. Though the reasons for it are certainly not stated so (with the exception of the ability to earn more money), it indicated that >40% of all PhDs from Israeli universities are now elsewhere, mainly in the US and Canada, despite the fact that Israel’s seven major universities more students than they can handle. In Los Angeles, 100 miles up the road, there is a huge Israeli population in excess of 40,000, complete with a Hebrew newspaper. When I asked an Israeli friend of mine why he moved to LA, he stated to me quite unequivocally that they didn't want to live in an atmosphere where even those engaged in innocent activities (e.g., parking your car) are subject to the potential of getting killed.
As far as I can see, there are only a few choices for Israel and none of them is without cost in blood and treasure, and none of them is particularly attractive nor guaranteed to work given the religious fervor with which its present day enemies (e.g, Hezb'Allah) is operating under. To my mind, Israel must somehow re-energize itself existentially, away from the notion that it can live in peace with people who live only to hate and die, unlike themselves and us, people who live to love (with some notable exceptions, of course...)
They are not unlike the Japanese under the militarists who encouraged martyrdom for the emperor. I have read quite a lot of personal accounts of battles in the jungles of the South Pacific by US Marines and remember a conversation I had with my hard-drinking ex-Marine Sgt. and great-uncle Jack Diamond. At first, they were scared to death of the "banzai charges". But after awhile, they took the attitude that if they wanted to die so much, then they had an obligation to themselves and their country to assist them in that regard.
Japan was, after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, able to be pacified because of only two things: 1) the possibility that a third (nonexistent) atomic bomb would be dropped on them and 2) the feeling on the part of the Japanese populace that their leaders had been instrumental in the devastation wreaked on them by the US Army Air Corps, which bombed Japan until they ran out of targets.
Islamic radicals continue to cause Israel and its civilians harm. The intentional targeting of civilians is by any measure, a crime. These animals only understand the voices that come out of gun-barrels and from under the wings of F/A 18s and the like and unfortunately are sometimes even tone deaf to those measures. Do you suppose there is a reason why Hamas put their headquarters smack-dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood? Because they expect retaliation from Israel and want Israel to (albeit inadvertently -- on Israel's part) to cause as much "collateral damage" as possible.
It must get into the minds of the Arab/Muslim general public that their so-called leadership are nothing but cowards and criminals. They have to understand that they are being used as bait by their so-called leaders for their own ends.
My basic faith in the goodness of human nature, naïve as that may be, tells me that the bulk of the so-called "Arab street" has to be made up of people who just want reasonably normal lives where they can get up in the morning and go about their business to improve themselves and their lot, something that their leadership (and the rest of the Arab world) has cynically and purposefully prevented in order to keep the Palestinian refugee crisis alive and "in play" for 60 years as if they were pawns in a game of chess.
Until they are empowered with the gut-level understanding and the ability to actually live their lives free of violence, of at least all of the foregoing, I am afraid that the choices that Israel faces are in part quite similar to those that the US government faced against the Japanese in the 40s: 1) a bunch of little wars (e.g., aid to Britain to protect her empire) vs. periodic incursions into hostile territory to quell particular outrages and criminal acts such as those that have been visited on Sderot and now Ashkelon and 2) a war that devastates whole cities and towns until the people in them (those that are left) wake up and see that their leaders' (and their own, I am sure in many cases) idea that Islam is destined to and must rule the world is, like the belief in the invincibility of the Showa Empire, doomed to failure. Perhaps, like a drug addict, they will have to "bottom out" before they seek treatment. Until then, they will do anything for a "score".
I have not commented on the powerful role that the media play in this complicated and tragic calculus, especially post 1995 or so with the advent and the penetration of the Internet where so much trash is instantly disseminated and believed (I spoke with a Jewish friend of mine in France about the US elections on Thursday, and she believed the canard that Barack Obama was a Muslim) and public focus is guided by a 24-hour news cycle. To the extent that Obama's message is resonating so loudly here in the US, it is because he is trying to empower people simply to do the right thing; to look inside themselves (us) and understand what is right. This is the reason why he could get up in front of Black leadership at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (former home to Martin Luther King Jr.) and tell them that the anti-Semitism in the Black community has got to stop. He reminded them that it was Jews who were by their side in the South in the early 60s. He was, from accounts that I have read, met with icy silence; he did not care. Sometimes people have to hear what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. This is a man running for high office who seemingly has an idea of what personal integrity is, though I am sure that by the time the elections are over, that will come into question in some way.
The media have a different agenda: to sell airtime, a goal which is oft-times in complete contradiction to their so-called "journalistic integrity". The more controversy they can generate, the more space they can sell. They don't, as readers know, only "report" the news; they are opinion-makers. People have an obligation to inform themselves and to act accordingly. To the extent that they do not, the problems that ensue are entirely their own fault. And inasmuch as the media do not have Israel's existence at heart, Israel must do what she must do in order to ensure that their existence is not forever chipped away at by criminals who have commandeered the minds and lives of their followers, who, if they do not soon realize that their leaders are leading them to a place they do not want to go, will receive exactly what my great-Uncle Jack gave to the banzai warriors with his Thompson sub-machine gun on Guadalcanal: a one-way ticket to what they call "paradise". Threats and criminal acts against Israel and the diseases of anti-Semitism and radical Islam which support them should be losing propositions. I am sure that Israeli leadership understands this far better than I.
In my limited interaction with Israelis, I can tell you that the bombings, rockets, and other sorts of terrorist attacks have already, in large measure, already succeeded, according to an article I read yesterday. Though the reasons for it are certainly not stated so (with the exception of the ability to earn more money), it indicated that >40% of all PhDs from Israeli universities are now elsewhere, mainly in the US and Canada, despite the fact that Israel’s seven major universities more students than they can handle. In Los Angeles, 100 miles up the road, there is a huge Israeli population in excess of 40,000, complete with a Hebrew newspaper. When I asked an Israeli friend of mine why he moved to LA, he stated to me quite unequivocally that they didn't want to live in an atmosphere where even those engaged in innocent activities (e.g., parking your car) are subject to the potential of getting killed.
As far as I can see, there are only a few choices for Israel and none of them is without cost in blood and treasure, and none of them is particularly attractive nor guaranteed to work given the religious fervor with which its present day enemies (e.g, Hezb'Allah) is operating under. To my mind, Israel must somehow re-energize itself existentially, away from the notion that it can live in peace with people who live only to hate and die, unlike themselves and us, people who live to love (with some notable exceptions, of course...)
They are not unlike the Japanese under the militarists who encouraged martyrdom for the emperor. I have read quite a lot of personal accounts of battles in the jungles of the South Pacific by US Marines and remember a conversation I had with my hard-drinking ex-Marine Sgt. and great-uncle Jack Diamond. At first, they were scared to death of the "banzai charges". But after awhile, they took the attitude that if they wanted to die so much, then they had an obligation to themselves and their country to assist them in that regard.
Japan was, after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, able to be pacified because of only two things: 1) the possibility that a third (nonexistent) atomic bomb would be dropped on them and 2) the feeling on the part of the Japanese populace that their leaders had been instrumental in the devastation wreaked on them by the US Army Air Corps, which bombed Japan until they ran out of targets.
Islamic radicals continue to cause Israel and its civilians harm. The intentional targeting of civilians is by any measure, a crime. These animals only understand the voices that come out of gun-barrels and from under the wings of F/A 18s and the like and unfortunately are sometimes even tone deaf to those measures. Do you suppose there is a reason why Hamas put their headquarters smack-dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood? Because they expect retaliation from Israel and want Israel to (albeit inadvertently -- on Israel's part) to cause as much "collateral damage" as possible.
It must get into the minds of the Arab/Muslim general public that their so-called leadership are nothing but cowards and criminals. They have to understand that they are being used as bait by their so-called leaders for their own ends.
My basic faith in the goodness of human nature, naïve as that may be, tells me that the bulk of the so-called "Arab street" has to be made up of people who just want reasonably normal lives where they can get up in the morning and go about their business to improve themselves and their lot, something that their leadership (and the rest of the Arab world) has cynically and purposefully prevented in order to keep the Palestinian refugee crisis alive and "in play" for 60 years as if they were pawns in a game of chess.
Until they are empowered with the gut-level understanding and the ability to actually live their lives free of violence, of at least all of the foregoing, I am afraid that the choices that Israel faces are in part quite similar to those that the US government faced against the Japanese in the 40s: 1) a bunch of little wars (e.g., aid to Britain to protect her empire) vs. periodic incursions into hostile territory to quell particular outrages and criminal acts such as those that have been visited on Sderot and now Ashkelon and 2) a war that devastates whole cities and towns until the people in them (those that are left) wake up and see that their leaders' (and their own, I am sure in many cases) idea that Islam is destined to and must rule the world is, like the belief in the invincibility of the Showa Empire, doomed to failure. Perhaps, like a drug addict, they will have to "bottom out" before they seek treatment. Until then, they will do anything for a "score".
I have not commented on the powerful role that the media play in this complicated and tragic calculus, especially post 1995 or so with the advent and the penetration of the Internet where so much trash is instantly disseminated and believed (I spoke with a Jewish friend of mine in France about the US elections on Thursday, and she believed the canard that Barack Obama was a Muslim) and public focus is guided by a 24-hour news cycle. To the extent that Obama's message is resonating so loudly here in the US, it is because he is trying to empower people simply to do the right thing; to look inside themselves (us) and understand what is right. This is the reason why he could get up in front of Black leadership at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (former home to Martin Luther King Jr.) and tell them that the anti-Semitism in the Black community has got to stop. He reminded them that it was Jews who were by their side in the South in the early 60s. He was, from accounts that I have read, met with icy silence; he did not care. Sometimes people have to hear what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. This is a man running for high office who seemingly has an idea of what personal integrity is, though I am sure that by the time the elections are over, that will come into question in some way.
The media have a different agenda: to sell airtime, a goal which is oft-times in complete contradiction to their so-called "journalistic integrity". The more controversy they can generate, the more space they can sell. They don't, as readers know, only "report" the news; they are opinion-makers. People have an obligation to inform themselves and to act accordingly. To the extent that they do not, the problems that ensue are entirely their own fault. And inasmuch as the media do not have Israel's existence at heart, Israel must do what she must do in order to ensure that their existence is not forever chipped away at by criminals who have commandeered the minds and lives of their followers, who, if they do not soon realize that their leaders are leading them to a place they do not want to go, will receive exactly what my great-Uncle Jack gave to the banzai warriors with his Thompson sub-machine gun on Guadalcanal: a one-way ticket to what they call "paradise". Threats and criminal acts against Israel and the diseases of anti-Semitism and radical Islam which support them should be losing propositions. I am sure that Israeli leadership understands this far better than I.
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