Is he or she a good or a bad Jew? This is up to the next Jew to say…
The Rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz, had called for calm, but in the end the scene at Women of the Wall’s monthly visit on Friday morning was far from it. As Judy Maltz and Yair Ettinger report in Ha’aretz, thousands of ultra-Orthodox demonstrators turned up to picket and try and block Women of the Wall from worshipping as they deem fit:
The demonstrators jeered at the women as they prayed, some throwing water bottles and chairs in their direction. Dozens of riot police were on hand to separate them from the women’s prayer group and they grew increasingly violent. After the women exited Dung Gate, ultra-Orthodox demonstrators ambushed them with rocks.
…Several young seminary girls questioned by Ha’aretz said that they had come to the Western Wall because they were told to do so. One young woman, named Rachel, who refused to provide her last name or the name of her seminary, said she had come to protest women praying in the men’s section. Women of the Wall, however, do not pray in the men’s section, but in the women’s section.
Rabbi Aaron Frank, the principal of Beth Tefiloh, a modern Orthodox day school in Baltimore, said he had just “come to daven” at the Western Wall with a few of his students. But when a group of ultra-Orthodox noticed him being interviewed by a foreign TV crew, they began shouting in his direction: “You are a Reform Christian. You are a Muslim. You are the pope.”
This is shameful. The Western Wall belongs not to one Jew, nor one strand of Judaism — it is the collective property of all Jews: secular, Liberal, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and ultra-Orthodox. It must be possible for haredi Jews to pray as they wish, and for Women of the Wall to do the same, without the two coming into conflict.
The onus, in this instance, is on the haredim: it is about time they acknowledge, at least in the public sphere, that there more than one way to be Jew. This begins with refraining from calling Jews who aren’t ultra-Orthodox goyim, and ending these brash displays of verbal and physical intimidation at the Wall and on the street. At the moment, their words and actions not only undermine religious pluralism in Israel, but the few gathered at the Wall today threaten the haredi community more widely, particularly given that their privileged position is evermore being called into question. The haredi community — known for its charity and dedication to study — is better than this.
Perhaps to clarify: It is not that one Jew does not have the right to tell the other how to be a Jew from time to time. To assert to the contrary would be a threat to discourse and argumentation, and evolution of thought and religious practice. Better to say, then, that while it is fine for one to Jew tell the another how to be a good Jew, they do not have to heed that advice, and should not be forced to do so, either.
We will not forget, even for a moment.
— Shimon Peres
(All photographs are the sole property of the author.)
What Barack Obama said about peace
President Obama made the fullest and most complete case for peace and the two-state solution that I have heard from any world leader today in his speech in Jerusalem. Touching on the legacies of Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin, and drawing on the work of Ariel Sharon and the novelist David Grossman, Obama told Israeli students that peace is necessary, peace is just, and peace is possible.
On the necessity of peace:
I believe that peace is the only path to true security. You have the opportunity to be the generation that permanently secures the Zionist dream, or you can face a growing challenge to its future. Given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.
There are other factors involved. Given the frustration in the international community about this conflict, Israel needs to reverse an undertow of isolation. And given the march of technology, the only way to truly protect the Israeli people over the long term is through the absence of war, because no wall is high enough and no Iron Dome is strong enough or perfect enough to stop every enemy that is intent on doing so from inflicting harm.
And this truth is more pronounced given the changes sweeping the Arab world. I understand that with the uncertainty in the region, people in the streets, changes in leadership, the rise of nonsecular parties in politics, it’s tempting to turn inward because the situation outside of Israel seems so chaotic. But this is precisely the time to respond to the wave of revolution with a resolve and commitment for peace, because as more governments respond to popular will, the days when Israel could seek peace simply with a handful of autocratic leaders — those days are over.
President Obama goes to Israel
President Obama will land in at Ben Gurion International Airport at around noon on Wednesday, March 20, where he will be greeted by President Peres and Prime Minister Netanyahu prior to an official welcome at the president’s residence. Hereafter, he will go to Yad Vashem in order to lay a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance.
Thereafter, Obama will visit Mount Herzl, where he will lay wreathes on the tombs of Theodor Herzl and Yitzhak Rabin.
In the afternoon, Obama will conduct meetings with Netanyahu and various delegations in order to discuss the security situation in the region as well as the peace process. After a press conference, Obama and Netanyahu will take supper together, along with their staffs.
(Source: ynetnews.com)
Mondoweiss, The Gift That Keeps On Giving
It is important from time to time to check in Mondoweiss just to confirm my suspicions. It is necessary to make sure that it is still, as someone put it to me the other day, the Washington Free Beacon of the left: an ideological organ masquerading as a news organisation. After all, just because Mondoweiss has suggested in the recent past that Tel Aviv is a ghetto and the embodiment of the failed Zionist dream, that Hanukkah celebrates murder and blood lust, and that the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel is a Court Jew, doesn’t mean they will go on saying these outrageous things forever, right?
I needn’t have worried. Thankfully, Mondoweiss remains a kind of gift that keeps on giving — or, a foul-tasting dinner that keeps on repeating. First, on January 10, Tom Suarez wrote what was supposed, I imagine, to be a cartographic history of the conflict over Jerusalem. Not that it worked out that way:
The capital of Israel is and always has been Tel Aviv.
Hardly a good note to begin on. The seat of government has been in the west of Jerusalem since December 1949 and thus is the de facto capital of Israel. Tel Aviv was the seat of power for a brief period between May 1948 and December 1949 until the shift towards Jerusalem. That said, it remains host to the world’s embassies and consulates, until such a time as the final status of Jerusalem is resolved through negotiations with the Palestinians (who will receive the Arab neighbourhoods as their capital). But, do carry on:
The 1947 UN Partition Resolution that created the Israeli state stipulated that Jerusalem would be an open, international city administered by the UN. But like the Partition itself, this was not to be: Zionist forces quickly seized most of the city, with both David Ben-Gurion and his political nemesis Menachem Begin vowing never to relinquish it, and Jordan’s Abdullah I taking East Jerusalem and the West Bank in exchange for delaying any Arab defense.
I’m always concerned by people who use the formulation “Zionist forces” as opposed to, say, Israeli troops or in this context the Haganah, but that isn’t the most egregious error here. As Suarez wilfully ignores, the implementation of the United Nations’ Partition Plan was made impossible by Arab nations’ refusal to recognise it as valid. Israeli forces did indeed push eastward towards Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli War, a conflict initiated by an attempt by five Arab states, Palestinian forces, and other mercenaries and volunteers from across the Middle East to destroy the Yishuv and the nascent State of Israel.
Panic in Jerusalem
by Menachem Kaiser, Tablet, November 29, 2012
A community in the grips of a moral panic will, as a rule, first target its misfits. All who have been arrested or questioned by police in Nahlaot are very clearly outsiders in the community. They were, a neighbor told me, “atypical, easy to accuse, misfit, single older men.” Many, like Satz and Primashelanu, are mentally handicapped. Noach Friedman, who was institutionalized after being released, would barge into homes and break plates and has had to be rescued from his studio apartment twice after setting his bed on fire. Naftali Zilberman and Yaakov Weissfish, who were both arrested and released, are also mentally handicapped. Zalman Cohen is a belligerent South African immigrant married to a convert who used to interrupt walking tours of the neighborhood. Skippy is a non-Haredi senior citizen with a ponytail who was repeatedly described to me with terms like “obnoxious” or “asshole,” and is an exercise fanatic. (He was originally identified, I was told by a parent, after the kids said they were forced to do calisthenics. “These retarded guys were forcing the kids, as part of the molestation, to do exercise,” the parent told me.) Missionary Christians, of course, are the ultimate “other” in a Haredi community.
This is the reality that the Nahlaot community now finds itself in. There is no room for skepticism. Even the accused pedophiles whom I have communicated with believe there are pedophiles in Nahlaot—it’s just not them. But the required logistics of a secret pedophile ring this size—the organization necessary to continually and extensively abuse an entire demographic of a whole neighborhood without being discovered—remains the least credible aspect of the allegations. The difficulty of keeping a conspiracy a secret increases exponentially with each additional member, and with as many as 70 it’s virtually impossible. “You cannot be engaged in this kind of activity for this long and leave behind little or no corroborative evidence,” Lanning said. “The more people involved in a crime, the greater the crime, the greater the likelihood that there’s going to be some kind of corroborative evidence left behind, physical evidence.”
After expressing the findings of my early research, I told Steinherz, the therapist, that I needed corroborative evidence aside from the children’s testimony in order to report that there was indeed a pedophile ring in Nahlaot. The evidence I was ultimately provided or made aware of included: court documentation that strongly suggested police incompetence or corruption; archived web pages that showed that some of the accused had lied about not knowing each other; medical records of various ailments; pictures the children drew; the detailed account of a therapist named Levana Khalili, a witness for the prosecution; and stories of corroboration among the children. None was evidence of a pedophile ring; all was material that reinforced an already assumed narrative. Yet in all my conversations with Steinherz, parents, rabbis, therapists, and community organizers, not once was it acknowledged that these might be the products of a child’s imagination.
Jerusalem, In Brief
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
Jerusalem has been essential to the Jewish people as the centre of spiritual life since the construction of the First Temple in 957 BC and the gradual transition from polytheism to monotheism codified under the age of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Jerusalem is also a political centre, the City of David and the seat of kings, and since 1949 it has been home to the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and the other organs of the world’s one and only democratic and Jewish state.As David Ben-Gurion stated in December 1949:
We see fit to state that Jewish Jerusalem is an organic, inseparable part of the State of Israel, just as it is an integral part of Jewish history and belief….Jerusalem is the heart of the State of Israel.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, it is essential that the United States government does not recognise this to be so via a relocation of their embassy until the final status of Jerusalem under international law has been resolved. For just as the Palestinian people make a good claim to part of the Land of Israel, so too do they wish to make their capital one day in the sector of Jerusalem east of the Green Line that was occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1980. Palestinian families with property deeds can trace their claim to homes in Sheikh Jarrah and Abu Tor to even before the beginning of the British Mandate.
Pictures from a Small Country
After three months in Israel, see below a compendium of the photographs I blogged for your consumption:-
- Jerusalem (April 9, 2012)
- Tel Aviv (April 14, 2012)
- Kibbutz Ein Hashofet (April 16, 2012)
- Nazareth (April 27, 2012)
- Ma’ale Adumim (May 20, 2012)
- Kibbutz Ein Gev (June 5, 2012)
- Jaffa (June 8, 2012)
- Nimrod Fortress, Golan Heights (June 14, 2012)
- Hermon Stream (June 14, 2012)
- Tel Dan (June 15, 2012)
- Metula (June 16, 2012)
- The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem (June 24, 2012)
- Masada (June 25, 2012)
The Dome of the Rock, Temple Mount, Jerusalem
(June 24, 2012)
Whither Ma’ale Adumim?
MA’ALE ADUMIM, Palestinian Territories – After the bus from Jerusalem exits the tunnel which runs underneath the university at Mount Scopus, any connection to the city is shredded and disposed of, as the landscape shifts from urban jungle to arid hilltops speckled with deep green pine trees and puddles of concrete. Yet while the physical environment dramatically alters, it feels as though no political boundary has been crossed, in spite of the fact that the bus has, technically speaking, driven straight across the Green Line.
The other thing to note when visiting Ma’ale Adumim on a weekday morning is its stillness, its ghostly aura. Settlements on the West Bank are often spoken of in the abstract, as if the towns have no residents or perhaps more accurately as if ‘the settlers’ are one homogenous block with no distinct characteristics or fault lines.
In Ma’ale Adumim at least, while the residents have taken an active decision to reside in this most controversial of settings, a good proportion of the city’s inhabitants are merely commuters who work in Jerusalem by day and travel back to their homes and families on the E1 highway as the sun sets. They live, as it were, a normal existence in a most extraordinary setting.
Ma’ale Adumim has the dishonour of competing with Ariel – “the heart of Israel”, according to Benjamin Netanyahu – to be the most controversial Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Established by a few families in 1975, it has grown with tremendous encouragement from the central government into a city of nearly 40,000 people, complete with shopping mall, library, schools, sports facilities, parks, and playgrounds. The quality of life and subsided cost of housing and living attracts olim from the United States and the former Soviet Union in particular.
