Rubicon3

The Silent City

Beautifully expressed truth about a very ugly subject:

I think it fundamentally wrong to think that love and admiration for totalitarianism died in the Fuherbunker with Adolph Hitler. It almost immediately shifted its affections East to Uncle Joe. For him, no sacrifice was too great. Did America have atomic secrets? The highest duty of the most enlightened was to share them with Joseph Stalin in the interests of world peace.

Nothing can disguise the fact that six million Jews died, not in the Middle East, but in ovens which burned in the very heart of Europe. In countries that prided themselves in culture; that listened to Mozart; read books and vaunted their universities. When Golda Meir said with relief, on the occasion of the foundation of Israel that "For two thousand years we have waited for our deliverance. Now that it is here it is so great and wonderful that it surpasses human words" she was speaking of escape from a darkness within the very center of Western civilization.

Yet nothing great or wonderful is safe forever, and that darkness, that love for savagery, that admiration for the brutal, that was believed to have died beneath the ground in 1945 is on the march again. It is crawling out of books, lofty towers, places of culture in precisely the manner Camus warned us against. He said that the evil may be beaten, but it is rarely beaten forever; "that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

But we may not speak of it. And therefore it begins.

Read the whole thing.

He Had Me at "Tired Argument"

"Some people suggest that if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away," Bush said in his prepared address. "This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of our enemies, and America rejects it utterly. Israel's population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you."

"The killers claim the mantle of Islam, but they are not religious men," Bush said. "No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers."

Bush said that those who carry out such violent acts are serving only their own desire for power.

"They accept no God before themselves. And they reserve a special hatred for the most ardent defenders of liberty, including Americans and Israelis," Bush said. "That is why the founding charter of Hamas calls for the `elimination' of Israel. That is why the followers of Hezbollah chant `Death to Israel, Death to America!' That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that `the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties.' And that is why the president of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map."

- President George W. Bush

Renaming the Paradigm

Bookworm has written a brilliant post which recounts a conversation between herself and her mother. She comes to the conclusion that the labels "left" and "right" ought to be renamed. Highly recommended reading.

...And Just What is Judaism?

She Did Not Wish to Be Called a Hero

But what else could we call someone who cared enough to save 2500 children despite great danger to herself? Who, after escaping punishment which included imprisonment, torture and a death sentence, continued to help under a different identity?

Irena Sendler, Polish Woman Who Saved 2,500 Jewish Children in Warsaw, Dies at 98 (Telegraph-UK)

• Irena Sendler was a Polish Roman Catholic social worker with links to Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, and in December 1942 Zegota put her in charge of its children's department. Wearing nurses' uniforms, she and Irena Schultz were sent into the Warsaw ghetto with food, clothes and medicine, including a vaccine against typhoid. It soon became clear that the ultimate destination of many Jews was to be the Treblinka death camp, and Zegota decided to try to save as many children as possible.
• One baby was spirited away in a mechanic's toolbox. Some children were transported in coffins, suitcases and sacks; others escaped through the sewer system beneath the city. An ambulance driver smuggled infants beneath the stretchers in the back of his van The children who were taken by Irena Sendler were given new identities and placed with convents, sympathetic families, orphanages and hospitals.
• In later life Irena Sendler recalled the heartbreak of Jewish mothers having to part from their children: "We witnessed terrible scenes. Father agreed, but mother didn't. We sometimes had to leave those unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I'd go back there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to the death camps." Irena Sendler kept a list of the names of all the children she saved, in the hope that she could one day reunite them with their families.
• On October 20, 1943, her house was raided by the Gestapo and the Nazis took Sendler to the Pawiak prison, where she was tortured; although her legs and feet were broken, and her body left permanently scarred, she refused to betray her network of helpers or the children whom she had saved. Sentenced to death, she escaped thanks to Zegota, who bribed a guard to set her free. She immediately returned to her work using a new identity.
• In her later years Irena Sendler was cared for in a Warsaw nursing home by Elzbieta Ficowska, who - in July 1942, at six months old - had been smuggled out of the ghetto by Irena in a carpenter's workbox.
• In 2005 Irena Sendler reflected: "We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true - I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little. I could have done more. This regret will follow me to my death."

The History of Modern Israel

In the late 1940s, before the establishment of Israel as a modern state, Jewish leaders once dreamed of a "Jewish-Arab alliance." Over the years, we've traveled very far from that dream, to the point where it seems almost inconceivable. It is a crying shame that it is the Israelis who are condemned for its loss and for the Palestinian refugee problem by the international community.  This should not be.  Media bias, lies and propaganda have turned Israel's plight into a sorry travesty of justice. It is made that much more grievous by the thought that so many of the victims of hitler and their descendents suffer yet another iteration of antisemitism hiding in a new costume - - anti-Zionism.

Efraim Karsh documents the history of the establishment of the modern state of Israel based upon recently declassified documents from the period of 1920-1948. They have brought forth some new facts which shed light on how the conflict actually developed:

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.

This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950’s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation,[1] and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.[2]

The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paint a much more definitive picture of the historical record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.

_____________

Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early 1920’s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival. This campaign culminated in the violent attempt to abort the UN resolution of November 29, 1947, which called for the establishment of two states in Palestine. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the neighboring Arab states, accepted the UN resolution, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place.

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.”[3] The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”[4]

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”[5]

If this was the position of the more “militant” faction of the Jewish national movement, mainstream Zionism not only took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state but went out of its way to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence. In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann, then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a peace-and-cooperation agreement with the Hashemite emir Faisal ibn Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. From then until the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, Zionist spokesmen held hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels. These included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal’s elder brother and founder of the emirate of Transjordan (later the kingdom of Jordan), incumbent and former prime ministers in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (founder of Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian Arab elites of all hues.

As late as September 15, 1947, two months before the passing of the UN partition resolution, two senior Zionist envoys were still seeking to convince Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s secretary-general, that the Palestine conflict “was uselessly absorbing the best energies of the Arab League,” and that both Arabs and Jews would greatly benefit “from active policies of cooperation and development.”6 Behind this proposition lay an age-old Zionist hope: that the material progress resulting from Jewish settlement of Palestine would ease the path for the local Arab populace to become permanently reconciled, if not positively well disposed, to the project of Jewish national self-determination. As David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel’s first prime minister, argued in December 1947:

If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, . . . if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab alliance.[7]

On the face of it, Ben-Gurion’s hope rested on reasonable grounds. An inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after World War I had revived Palestine’s hitherto static condition and raised the standard of living of its Arab inhabitants well above that in the neighboring Arab states. The expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially in the field of citrus growing, was largely financed by the capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how did much to improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades between the world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew sixfold, as did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive groves quadrupled.[8]

No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from 37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in Egypt). The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a third.[9]

That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish contribution to Mandate Palestine’s socioeconomic well-being. The British authorities acknowledged as much in a 1937 report by a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel:

The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected by Jewish development. A comparison of the census returns in 1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase percent in Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 percent.[10]

Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices, they would most probably have been content to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them. This is evidenced by the fact that, throughout the Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.[11] Unfortunately for both Arabs and Jews, however, the hopes and wishes of ordinary people were not taken into account, as they rarely are in authoritarian communities hostile to the notions of civil society or liberal democracy. In the modern world, moreover, it has not been the poor and the oppressed who have led the great revolutions or carried out the worst deeds of violence, but rather militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed classes of society.

So it was with the Palestinians.

Read the rest.

McCain vs Obama on Israel

Jennifer Rubin writes that despite what Obama may be saying on the subject, there are definitive differences between his Israel policy and McCain's:

Part of Barack Obama’s expressed amazement over his difficulty in attracting Jewish support is his claim to adhere to positions identical to John McCain’s on Israel and Hamas. His willingness to hold direct talks with Hamas’s sponsor Iran without preconditions–and without insisting it renounce its policy of obliterating Israel–is one big difference. But it is not the only one.

Others have noted that Daniel Kurtzer, former ambassador to Israel and advisor to Obama, has stated that it “will be impossible to make progress on serious peace talks without putting the future of Jerusalem on the table.” In response to my asking whether this approach is “identical” to McCain’s, I received this response from McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann:

It is revealing that Senator Obama’s Middle East adviser is talking about the need for Israeli concessions on Jerusalem to be ‘on the table’ while making no reference to the need for Palestinians to meet basic roadmap obligations on countering terror and providing security. Senator McCain is not going to pressure Israel into making concessions that undermine its security.

It seems there are indeed major differences between the two. Might that have something to do with the level of support Obama is receiving from American Jews?

Just Sent This to My Daughter

You may find it interesting too:

Get your daughters off the couch: New research shows exercise during the teen years — starting as young as age 12 — can help protect girls from breast cancer when they're grown. Middle-aged women have long been advised to get active to lower their risk of breast cancer after menopause.

What's new: That starting so young pays off, too.

...Women who were physically active as teens and young adults were 23 percent less likely to develop premenopausal breast cancer than women who grew up sedentary, researchers report Wednesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Read the whole thing.

"The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism"

"The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism" is a short but valuable book written by Dennis Prager and Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. In it, I have found some very persuasive arguments on behalf of Jewish religious belief - - perhaps some of the most compelling I have seen anywhere. 

An excerpt:

God may have His own reasons for denying us certainty with regard to His existence and nature. One reason apparent to us is that man's certainty with regard to anything is poison to his soul. Who knows this better than moderns who have had to cope with dogmatic Fascists, Communists, and even scientists?

Emanuel Rackman, in The Condition of Jewish Belief

If the believer has his troubles with evil, the atheist has more and graver difficulties to contend with. Reality stumps him altogether, leaving him baffled not by one consideration but by many, from the existence of natural law through the instinctual cunning of the insect to the brain of the genius and heart of the prophet. This then is the intellectual reason for believing in God: That, though this belief is not flee from difficulties, it stands out, head and shoulders, as the best answer to the fiddle of the universe.

Milton steinberg, Anatomy of Faith

DOUBT

Does God exist? This is life's most crucial question. The implications of the conclusion have the most significant consequences for the meaning of human existence.

Yet, despite its overwhelming importance, serious discussion of Cod is usually confined to theologians and philosophers. The rest of us form simple opinions of belief, agnosticism, or atheism at a relatively early age and are content to retain them without questioning for the rest of our lives.

We must therefore begin our presentation of Judaism with a discussion about God. First, let us briefly note Judaism's attitude toward a most common contemporary sentiment about God: doubt.

Can you doubt God's existence and still be a good Jew? Yes.

Belief in God is often difficult. Crises of faith are to be expected, and acknowledging such crises is not an irreligious act for a Jew. There are four significant reasons why doubts about God's existence should not be an obstacle to your being a good Jew.

1. Judaism emphasizes deed over creed

Judaism stresses action far more than faith. The Talmud attributes to God a declaration which is probably unique among religious writings: "Better that they [the Jews] abandon Me, but follow My laws" (for, the Talmud adds, by practicing Judaism's laws, the Jews will return to God, Jerusalem Talmud Haggigah 1:7). According to Judaism, one can be a good Jew while doubting God's existence, so long as one acts in accordance with Jewish law. But the converse does not hold true, for a Jew who believes in God but acts contrary to Jewish law cannot be considered a good Jew.

It is not, of course, our intention to deny the centrality of God in Judaism, but merely to emphasize that Judaism can be appreciated and practiced independently of one's present level of belief in God. You can incorporate Judaism into your daily life through study and practice even while doubting God's existence, because Jewish study and practice in and of themselves are extraordinarily valuable to the individual and society.

Moreover, our experience has confirmed that once you begin to study and live Judaism, you will find belief in God much more feasible. As the Talmud notes, whereas a man or woman may begin to practice Judaism for reasons unrelated to God (such as rational and ethical conviction), he or she will eventually do so because of God (Pesahim 50b).

2. Absolute certainty in faith leads to fanaticism

In the words of Emanuel Rackman, one of the foremost Orthodox rabbis of our time: "Judaism encourages doubt even as it enjoins faith and commitment. A Jew dare not live with absolute certainty, because certainty is the hallmark of the fanatic and Judaism abhors fanaticism, [and] because doubt is good for the human soul, its humility....God may have had His own reasons for denying us certainty. with regard to His existence and nature. One apparent reason is that man's certainty with regard to anything is poison to his soul. Who knows this better than moderns who have had to cope with dogmatic Fascists, Communists, and even scientists?"

3. If God were known, moral choice would end

If we knew God existed and would punish us for evil acts, then good acts would be much less freely chosen. An element of unknowability about God is necessary so as to allow us to choose good. In order to choose good, we must feel free to do bad, and we would not feel this way if we had definite knowledge that God was present and recording our every action. (How much choice do we have to speed when we know a police car is present?)

4. Since God's existence is unprovable, doubt is natural

God cannot be known to exist in the sense that we know a table or a cat exists. Their existences can be physically demonstrated and verified through our senses. But God's existence cannot, since God possesses no physical qualities. One can prove the existence of the natural, the physical, the finite; God, however, is supernatural, metaphysical, infinite. The inability to prove God's existence reflects, then, only on the fact that God has no physical qualities, a position that Judaism has always maintained.

To have doubts about God is, then, normal, permissible, and consistent with being a good Jew. But a good Jew may not deny God's existence. Indeed, the primary task of the Jewish people since its inception has been to bring the idea of a universal God and morality, or ethical monotheism, to mankind. As we shall see below, the most important values of life are dependent upon positing the existence of God: morality, or good and evil as objective realities that transcend personal and national opinions, and ultimate purpose and meaning to human existence. To put it another way, if there is no God, then there can be no objective good and evil, and no ultimate purpose to our existence. For these reasons, among many others, a committed Jew (a) may not deny God's existence, (b) must struggle with his doubts about God (the name of the Jewish people, Israel, means "struggle with God"), and (c) must advocate ethical monotheism, the ideal of a universal God as the basis of a universal standard of ethical behavior. As Elie Wiesel stated it: "The Jew may love God, or he may fight with God, but he may not ignore God."

THE NEED TO POSIT GOD'S EXISTENCE

MORALITY

The first value whose existence is dependent upon positing God's existence is morality. If there is no God, there are no rights and wrongs that transcend personal preference. Gases and molecules, the laws of nature, are not "good" or "evil," "right" or "wrong." If the natural world is the one objective reality, and there is no moral source beyond nature, good and evil possess no objective reality. Moral judgments then become purely subjective. They are popular or personal opinions which are objectively meaningless and represent no reality. It is self-evident and acknowledged by the foremost atheist philosophers that if a moral God does not exist, neither does a universal morality. Without God, all we can have are opinions about morality, but our opinions about "good" and "evil" behavior are no more valid or binding than our opinions about "good" and "bad" ice cream.

This is why in secular societies morality is generally considered to be a matter of opinion. Moral relativism is the only possible consequence of the denial of God's existence; morality becomes a euphemism for personal opinion. As this century's most eloquent atheist philosopher, Bertrand Russell, wrote: "I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values but," Russell conceded, "I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it."

Russell's second point is our whole point. All that can possibly be wrong with wanton cruelty according to atheism and its moral relativism, is that we may personally not like it. Amorality is inherent to atheism.

To illustrate this point, assume there is no God and attempt to explain why Hitler was morally wrong. For the atheist and moral relativist, the only thing wrong with Nazi atrocities, as Russell said, "is that I don't like it."

One may answer that we know "deep down" that Hitler's mass murder and torture were wrong. But from where does this "deep down" feeling of right and wrong come? If there is no God, such feelings are just feelings, and objective morality must transcend subjective feelings. And if in fact we do possess "deep down" knowledge of good and evil, what source of morality put it within us?

Or, one may answer that Nazi-type murder is wrong for pragmatic reasons -- citing the argument that "if we kill them, they'll start to kill us and society will fall apart." This is not a moral argument, but merely a pragmatic one, and it is in any event invalid, since committing evil can be regarded as highly practical. In fact, pragmatic arguments usually favor committing the crime. The Nazis, for example, would have correctly dismissed the argument that "if we kill them, then they will kill us" by noting that "they" will not be able to kill "us." As in the rest of nature, only the weak will be destroyed. The pragmatic argument against committing evil is naive. If you can get away with a crime, there is no pragmatic argument against committing it -- only a moral argument, which is often quite impractical.

Take, for example, the relatively minor crime of tax evasion. The pragmatic argument again argues for, not against, committing the crime. The argument that "if everyone cheated on their tax returns, we would all suffer," understandably dissuades almost no one from cheating. On the contrary, tax evaders are quite certain that nearly everyone else is cheating, and it is precisely this fact that serves as their justification for doing the same. Precisely because one believes nearly everyone else is cheating, he, too, should cheat. Otherwise he loses. Pragmatism dictates immoral behavior at least as often as it dictates moral behavior.

You can purchase a used copy from Amazon for as little as 27 cents and read the whole thing.

"What You Create is Yours"

Israel's Right to a State - Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe)

• It is not unheard-of for a nation to vanish from the map and later reappear. Poland, for example, was partitioned out of existence in 1795 and regained its independence in 1918. But the restoration of Israel was unlike anything the world had ever seen.
• Through all the generations of dispersion that followed, the Jews never lost their self-awareness as a nation or their connection to the Land of Israel. By the 1860s, a majority of Jerusalem's population was Jewish once more. Zionism - an organized movement to renew Jewish independence in the Jewish homeland - was formally launched in 1897. Five decades later, against steep odds and every historical precedent, Israel was reborn.
• Under siege since the day it was born, Israel has never known a day of true peace. It is the only nation in the world whose legitimacy is routinely called into question. It still has enemies who want it wiped off the map. Uniquely, the Jewish state came into being with the imprimatur of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Few nations can present a birth certificate as storied as Israel's.
• Ultimately, the right of statehood accrues only to those who can fashion and sustain a nation. "Why does the United States belong to Americans?" Yale's David Gelernter wrote in 2002. "Because we built it. We conceived the idea and put it into practice bit by bit."
• For the same reason, the Land of Israel belongs to Israelis: "Because Israelis conceived and built it - and what you create is yours. If you want a homeland, you must create one. You drain swamps, lay out farms, build houses, schools, roads, hospitals." "That's how America got its homeland. And that is why Israel belongs to the Israelis."

The Happiest Place on Earth - Guess Where

Not Disneyworld, as it turns out:

Why Israel Is the World's Happiest Country - Spengler (Asia Times-Hong Kong)
    Envy surrounds no country on Earth like the State of Israel, and with good reason: by objective measures, Israel is the happiest nation on Earth.
    It is one of the wealthiest, freest and best-educated; and it enjoys a higher life expectancy than Germany or the Netherlands.
    But most remarkable is that Israelis appear to love life and hate death more than any other nation.
    As a simple index of life-preference, I plotted the fertility rate versus the suicide rate of 35 industrial countries - that is, the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. Israel stands alone at the top.
    "As much as you love life, we love death," Muslim clerics teach; the same formula is found in a Palestinian textbook for second graders.
    Apart from the fact that the Arabs are among the least free, least educated, and (apart from the oil states) poorest peoples in the world, they also are the unhappiest, even in their wealthiest kingdoms. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia ranks 171st on an international quality of life index, below Rwanda.
    The contrast of Israeli happiness and Arab despondency is what makes peace an elusive goal in the region.

...During 2,000 years of exile, Jews remained Jews despite forceful and often violent efforts to make them into Christians or Muslims. One has to suppose that they did not abandon Judaism because they liked being Jewish. With utmost sincerity, the Jews prayed thrice daily, "It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to acclaim the greatness of the One who forms all creation, for God did not make us like the nations of other lands, and did not make us the same as other families of the Earth. God did not place us in the same situations as others, and our destiny is not the same as anyone else's."

If the Israelis are the happiest country on Earth, as the numbers indicate, it seems possible that they will do what is required to keep their country, despite the odds against them. I do not know whether they will succeed. If Israel fails, however, the rest of the world will lose a unique gauge of the human capacity for happiness as well as faith. I cannot conceive of a sadder event.

Suicide Rate (per 100,000)	Fertility Rate
Israel	6.2	2.77
United States	11	2.1
France	18	1.98
Iceland	12	1.91
Ireland	9.7	1.85
Denmark	13.6	1.74
Finland	20.3	1.73
Serbia	19.3	1.69
Sweden	13.2	1.67
Netherlands	9.3	1.66
United Kingdom	7	1.66
Canada	11.6	1.57
Portugal	11	1.49
Switzerland	17.4	1.44
Estonia	20.3	1.42
Croatia	19.6	1.41
Germany	13	1.41
Bulgaria	13	1.4
Russia	34.3	1.4
Austria	16.9	1.38
Greece	3.2	1.36
Hungary	27.7	1.34
Slovakia	13.3	1.34
Italy	7.1	1.3
Spain	8.2	1.3
Poland	15.9	1.27
Slovenia	25.6	1.27
Ukraine	23.8	1.25
Bosnia	11.8	1.24
Belarus	35.1	1.23
Czech Republic	15.5	1.23
Japan	24	1.22
Lithuania	40.2	1.22
Singapore	10.1	1.08
Hong Kong	18.6	1

Haveil Havalim

Jack of Random Thoughts has posted the latest edition of Haveil Havalim, the weekly carnival of Jewish and Israeli issues.  There are tons of links for you to peruse on subjects such as Israel's 60th anniversary, Middle Eastern politics, US politics, Judaism and more. Highly recommended reading.

ManBabies

Those are some strange looking photos.

Note to Self

Never spray fixative* in unventilated room and then sit around inhaling it.  Remember: Gunk in lungs feels nasty and really, isn't one bout of cancer enough?

*Contains propane, butane, light aliphatic hydrocarbon solvent, ethyl benzene, xylenes, diacetone alcohol, among other yummy ingredients.

...I'll Get You, My Pretty

Why Hillary Lost

I think Don Surber has hit the nail on the head.

Charming

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday that the state of Israel is a "stinking corpse" that is destined to disappear, the French news agency AFP reported.

"Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken," the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as having said.

"Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation."

Ahmadinejad further stated that Israel "has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese" - referring to the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006.

I'm sorry, but when he talks about stinking corpses and annihilation, all I can think of is this:

                            Is this what he has in mind? 

Drawing Class

New pics up in my art diary.

Israel at 60

A video from the American Jewish Committee, with original footage of the 1947 UN partition vote:

From Front Page Magazine, a comparison of earlier Israel to the Israel of today:

Growing up in the Israel of the 1960’s meant experiencing a bonding intimacy of idealism grounded in the soil of this newly liberated Jewish homeland. The Holocaust was put behind us, and was perhaps even a taboo for discussion. But the lessons of the Holocaust remained fresh and real to young Israelis.

Self-reliance and sacrifice were the demands of the day. Israel in the early 1960’s was an idealistic society and nobody needed to be lectured on Zionism. Israelis resented anyone’s fulminations on idealistic Zionism, since it was practiced rather than discussed.

In today’s Israel, the leftist post-Zionists no longer see Zionism beyond a topic for discussion. Does it indicate the death of Zionism and an end to the idealism that made several generations of pioneers toil the soil and shed their blood to make the dream of a Jewish State a living reality? Not really!

The State of Israel is a reality cemented in established institutions, rooted in a strong and flourishing civil society that enjoys a free press, the rule of law, and a democratic government. Like all modern states, Israel is no longer a “developing country,” but part of the developed world with an average per capita income of $30,000. Its GNP is larger than that of all its Arab neighbors combined and it exports to other western countries some of the most sophisticated computer technology, optics, electronics, military hardware and software, and the best medical devices that high–tech can produce. While the lives of many of those living in the greater Tel Aviv and Haifa areas may resemble those of western Europeans and Americans, the pioneering spirit can still be found in the communities of Judea, Samaria, Golan, the Negev and Galilee and even in a few Jerusalem neighborhoods.

The intimacy of a small-beleaguered nation of the 1960’s has, in 2008, given way to great material expectations. The streets of Tel Aviv are a testament to such material changes. In the 1960’s, only two out of ten Israelis owned a motor vehicle. Today, it is about 9 out of 10. Israelis own the latest and the best gadgets, and the fashion leaders in New York, LA, Paris, or London can be assured that what’s “hip” in Soho is “cool” in Tel Aviv too.

Veteran Israelis who put their lives on the line in successive wars have sought more comfortable lives for their children. They have reasoned that if their sons and daughters must still depend on arms to preserve their country from attack, at least let them enjoy the luxuries of life. Israelis travel abroad more than virtually any other people per capita. Israelis can be found trekking the far corners of the earth in what has become a rite-of-passage following completion of their compulsory military service.

Link

Six decades of Israeli history as seen in photographs from private albums.

The European Jewish Press discusses commemoration plans:

Israel was founded on May 14, 1948, when its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared statehood as Britain's UN mandate over historic Palestine was expiring.

Holidays in Israel, however, are marked according to the Hebrew calender, so the celebrations are to begin on May 7, the eve of what in Israel is known as Independence Day.

As part of dozens of additional projects, children have begun collecting 1.5 million marbles, symbolizing the 1.5 Jewish children who died in the Nazi Holocaust. Artists plan to use these marbles to construct a memorial to them.

A highlight of the celebrations is a three-day international conference hosted by President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem.

Many of the world's leaders  are to attend the festivities, including US President George Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, former Soviet president Michael Gorbachev and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Like Bush, some of the other dozen presidents on the list have been to Israel before, but this will be a first visit for Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar, among others.

Other presidents to attend the conference include Victor Yushchenko of Ukraine, resident Lech Kaczynski of Poland, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Michael Saakashvili of Georgia, Stjepan Mesic of Croatia, Bamir Topi of Albania, Blaise Campoare of Burkina Faso, Danilo Türk of Slovenia and Valdis Zatlers of Latvia.

As a Nobel Prize winner, Peres invited other Nobel Prize laureates, at least seven of whom will be coming to Israel to share their views of the future.

Prominent figures from the private sector who will attend include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

The agenda for the conference covers a myriad of topics, including the future of the world economy, the content and meaning of a Jewish state, the extent to which Jewish tradition is relevant in tomorrow's world, whether a green Israel is possible, the tipping point of the geopolitical arena, Israel's ability to continue to be a leading contender in the world of science and cultivating future leaders of Israel and the Jewish people.

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Columnist David Brumer asks why Israel is cast as the obstacle to peace in the region when it has "said yes to virtually every partition plan put forth in modern times while the Palestinians have said no" :

For more than 3,000 years, Jews have been spiritually as well as corporeally bonded to the land of Israel. In 1921, Winston Churchill proclaimed, "It is manifestly right that the Jews, who are scattered all over the world, should have a national center and a national home. And where else could that be but in this land of Palestine, with which for more than 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated?" For French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the recreation of a sovereign Jewish state "is the most significant event of the 20th century." He described Israel's re-establishment as "the 20th century's miracle" and noted that "defending its existence is an international duty."

So why, 60 years later, or 3,060 years, if you will, is Israel living under such a barrage of existential threats? Why does Israel still have to prove itself worthy of being included in the family of nations? Why indeed is Israel singled out as the one nation on Earth whose very existence is questioned? Cynthia Ozick bristles at the "the scandal of calling into question a living nation's existence ... The Big Lie that demonizes Israel and contaminates the viler estuaries of what is nowadays dubbed 'the international community' ... ."

Yet among "progressive" intellectuals, especially in Europe, it is axiomatic that Israel is not merely "not doing enough to for peace in the Middle East," but is responsible for Islamist "outrage" against the West; that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains at the core of the Arab world's grievances, and, if only this conflict could be solved, peace would ensue. Leaving aside the illogical nature of this proposition (al-Qaida and other radical Islamists have as much a gripe against Christian nations whom they see as usurping their place in history), it is hard to find a country that has striven more for peaceful co-existence with its neighbors than Israel. No nation has taken more demonstrable risks for peace. Israel proved its intention to live in harmony with its neighbors when it enacted peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. Israel has shown its willingness to make painful sacrifices in the name of peace, withdrawing from all of Gaza in 2005 while evacuating more than 8,000 Israeli citizens from their homes.

Israel has said yes to virtually every partition plan put forth in modern times while the Palestinians have said no, starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, which would have given the Palestinians nearly 80 percent of the land between the "River and the Sea." In 1947, the Palestinians again rejected statehood on 45 percent of the land, while Israel agreed to the remaining 55 percent divided into three cantons (60 percent of which is desert). Finally, in 2000 Israel offered the Palestinians more than 96 percent of contiguous West Bank land and all of Gaza in the hopes that the century-old conflict could end. The Palestinian response to that offer was the Second Intifada, more aptly understood by Israelis as a Terror War unleashed against the Jewish State.

Yet Israel continues to be viewed as the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Link

Why we should support Israel:

The last living witness to the birth of Israel, at 93, recalls what it was like:

Arieh Handler participated in Israel's birth on two separate occasions. The lesser event, in his view, was on May 14, 1948, when he was among some 200 persons invited to the Tel Aviv hall where David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the state. Handler, 93 this month, is believed to be the only one of those present still alive.

"...The Arabs were quite strong and the British didn't like us," said Handler. "We didn't know whether we could oppose the British empire."

Some delegates favored accepting the American proposal for very different reasons; they believed that if the partition proposal were scrapped the Jewish state could expand beyond the territory allocated to it in the UN resolution.

The debate was stormy, Handler remembers, and lasted close to six hours. "It seemed at times that people might come to blows."

In the end, it was Ben-Gurion who decided the issue with a passionate speech. Despite the fact that neighboring Arab states had 40 times the population of the Yishuv, he said, and despite the abundance of weapons in the hands of the Arabs and the assistance they were receiving from the British, no Jewish settlement had yet been captured or abandoned. (This would change shortly.) The most difficult test still lay ahead, with the incursion of the Arab armies, he said, but the Yishuv would prevail if it summoned up the powers inherent in it.

When the issue was put to a vote, Ben-Gurion won a clear victory. "We have decided," said the concluding resolution, "relying on the authority of the Zionist movement and the support of the entire Jewish people, that upon the termination of the mandatory regime there shall be an end to foreign rule in Palestine and the governing body of the Jewish state shall come into being."

Says Handler: "This event was more important than the actual signing of the Declaration of Independence. We felt at the time very clearly that the meeting was decisive."

Long article - read the whole thing.

From the Jewish Chronicle (London), some Haiku:

Haiku Mania

By Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

To mark Israel’s upcoming 60th anniversary, we challenged JC readers to write a haiku —the traditional Japanese verse form — to sum up what the country means to you.

This obviously struck a chord, with over 100 readers taking on the tricky three-line, 17-syllable structure of the haiku to express views about Israel, from the poetic to the political.

A variety of themes emerged, with many entrants extolling Israel for providing oppressed Jews with a homeland, this example by Ruth Landsman being fairly typical:

Israel means to me
A safe haven for all Jews,
A place to call home

A sizeable number of readers chose to lament the enduring conflict with the Palestinians. Witness this entry from Hannah Hutchinson:

Jew and Muslim, sons
Each of Abraham — long-term
Sibling rivalry

Some opted for the humorous approach (which we said might win extra points), and found a rich source of amusement in the restrictions of the haiku form itself. This from Barry Hyman:

Eretz at sixty?
How can you do it justice
In just five syllab…?

Food, naturally enough, figured large, particularly falafel, as this example by 10-year-old Jasmine Sadlik demonstrates:

Feeding the people
Falafel in pitta bread
Ever so tasty!

Falafel was one attraction that inspired Adam Mizler to express his enthusiasm for Israel. There was another:

Beautiful women,
And the best fresh falafels…
Man, I love Israel!

Some, like Rose Abrahamson, simply strived to conjure up a memorable image:

The train was chugging
Through sweet-scented orange groves
To Jerusalem

A few more:

She-ma Yis-ra-el,
A-do-nai E-lo-hei-nu,
A-do-nai E-chad

Moshe Rabbennu

(sent in by
Jonathan Samuel)

Children of Israel;
Wandered for thousands of years.
Where were the adults?

Adam Grossman

Sixty years have passed
It’s about time we had peace
In the Middle East

Joseph Adams

Shalom Aleichem
Two brothers in God’s own house
Salaam Aleikum

David Ury

Sixty years ago
Israel became our homeland
But we’re still fighting

Laura Gold

Tattoos on bodies
Dent on cars. Cellphone clubbers
In non-kosher bars

Monty Goldin

I'm not reprinting them, but also included were some anti-Israel haikus.  The author of the article deplores them and so do I.

Some of you might be familiar with the fact that Israel has a long history.  There's an Ancient Book called, "The Bible" that tells the story. Jews read it in its original Hebrew, one section at a time, in temple throughout the year.

American Thinker has some of the background:

The nation of Israel is about to commemorate its 60th birthday. That's the official, politically correct, line. But to be truly accurate, a cake celebrating the milestone should have more candles than 60 -- thousands more.

While it is most certainly true that David Ben-Gurion stood in Tel Aviv in front of a portrait of Zionist Patriarch Theodor Herzl and proclaimed Israel's independence from Britain on May 14, 1948, (immediately after which the armies of five Arab nations attacked the Jewish state), this year's celebration would more accurately be "Israel 3,200" or perhaps even "Israel 3,400."

In other words, the popularly promoted notion that Israel was "founded", "created", or "established" just in 1948 to give the Jews a piece of land by the Western powers out of guilt over the Holocaust is not accurate. Israel's detractors use this claim to try to delegitimize the Middle East's only true democracy.

After all, Israel has really been in existence since at least 1200 BCE and some experts place the establishment of Israel as the home of the Jewish people as early as 1406 BCE.

It is dutifully recorded in Scripture (Book of Joshua, ArtScroll Edition) that after the Children of Israel had gathered on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, as instructed to do so by G-d, that "When the bearers of the Ark [of the Covenant] arrived at the Jordan and the feet of the Kohanim, the bearers of the Ark, were immersed in the edge of the water - and the Jordan was overflowing its banks all the days of the harvest season - the waters descending from upstream stood still and they rose up in one column ... and was cut off; and the people crossed opposite Jericho. ... [A]ll Israel crossing on dry land until the entire nation finished crossing the Jordan." Joshua 3:14-17

Next, G-d commanded Joshua to select 12 men - one from each Israelite tribe -- to each gather one stone from amidst the river bed, bring it into the land of Israel and erect a memorial "and these stones shall remain a remembrance for the children of Israel forever." Joshua 4:7.

Scripture chronicles the date of this miracle: "The people ascended from the Jordan on the tenth of the first month, and encamped at Gilgal at the eastern end of Jericho." Joshua 4:19.

Nisan is the first month of the Jewish calendar, and this year the 10^th of Nisan coincides with April 15 in the Gregorian calendar. [Note: Though Nisan is the first month, the Jewish New Year is marked in a different month.]

The Children of Israel -- better known today as the Jewish People -- has inhabited the land of Israel continuously ever since, despite a string of wars, conquests and expulsions.

Read the rest.

The Original Source.