We have far more that unites us than separates us. If we focus on this, there is no force either within or without our society that can defeat us.

On balance, Israeli society is extremely healthy.

Unemployment is at record lows. At a time of global recession, the Israeli economy is growing steadily.

Israeli Jewish women have the highest fertility rate in the Western world with an average of three children per woman. Education levels have risen dramatically across the board over the past decade with dozens of private colleges opening their doors to more and more sectors of the population.

Israel’s diverse Jewish population is becoming more integrated. Sephardic and Ashkenazi intermarriage has long been a norm. Secular Jews are becoming more religious. A new educational trend that received significant media attention in recent months involves secular parents who send their children to national religious schools to ensure that they receive strong educational grounding in Judaism.

And as secular Jews become more religious, both the national religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors are becoming increasingly integrated in nonreligious neighborhoods and institutions. Ultra-Orthodox conscription rates have increased seven-fold in the past four years. In 2010, 50 percent of ultra-Orthodox male highschool graduates were conscripted.

The IDF assesses that by 2015, the rate of conscription will rise to 65%.

While this is still below the general conscription rate of 75% among male 18-year-olds, the rapid rise in ultra- Orthodox military service is a revolutionary development for the sector.

With military service comes entrée to the job market. The trend towards employment integration was blazed by ultra-Orthodox women. Over the past decade, ultra-Orthodox women have matriculated en masse in vocational schools that have trained them in hi-tech and other marketable professions and so enabled them to raise their families out of poverty.

These ultra-Orthodox women, who are now being followed by their IDF veteran husbands, are part of a general trend that has seen women fully integrated in almost every sector of society and the economy. The fact that women make up the senior leadership echelons in both business and government is not a fluke. Rather it is a product of the largely egalitarian nature of Israeli society.

True, as is the case everywhere, Israeli women suffer from male chauvinism.

And like the rest of the world, Israel has its share of sexual abusers, rapists, and criminal and social misogynists. But imperfection does not detract from the fact that women in Israel are free, educated, empowered and advancing on all fronts.

As for the national religious community, its youth remain committed to serving as pioneers in strengthening Israel as a Jewish democracy. Not content to limit themselves to national religious communities in Judea and Samaria, more and more young national religious families are moving to poor towns and communities from Dimona to Ramle to Kiryat Shmona to strengthen their educational, economic and social underpinnings.

Modern Orthodox women are taking on expanded roles in religious councils, synagogues, religious courts and other bodies. Soldiers from the national religious sector remain overrepresented in all IDF combat units and in the officer corps.

Israel’s growing social cohesion and prosperity is all the more notable as we witness neighboring states aflame with rebellion and revolution, extremist Islamist forces voted to power from Morocco to Egypt and economic forecasts promising mass privation.

And in the Age of Obama, with cleavages between liberals and conservatives growing ever wider in America, and with the future of the European Union hanging in the balance as the euro zone teeters on the edge of an abyss, the fact that Israeli society is becoming increasingly fortified is simply extraordinary.

In light of these integrationist trends, the media circus in recent weeks that has portrayed Israeli society as frayed through and through has been startling. With women in Israel presented as underprivileged victims, national religious youth presented as terrorists and the ultra-Orthodox community presented as a gang of misogynist, violent crazies set to transform Israel – in the words of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – into another Iran, an average news consumer can be forgiven for wondering how he missed his country’s demise.

What explains this sudden flood of gloom and doom stories? Certainly it is true that in a highly competitive news environment, media coverage tends to over represent marginal social forces. Sensational stories make for banner headlines. And it is at the margins of society that a reporter is most likely to find sensational stories.

So it is that when reporters wish to push a socialist agenda, they descend on urban slums and talk to people hanging out on the street doing nothing. As a rule, these stories will not feature visits to vocational training schools that are educating poor people out of poverty.

Just as poor, uneducated single mothers in Lod can be depended on to blame their troubles on an insensitive government, so groups of ultra- Orthodox extremists in Beit Shemesh, whose own communities decry them, can be trusted to treat nonreligious women poorly.

None of this is to say that we should stand by and allow poor single moms and their children to go hungry or that we should accept abuse of women by ultra-Orthodox bullies. The former is an issue for social services. The latter is an issue for law enforcement bodies. And to the extent that these institutions are failing in their missions, they should be required to improve their performance.

But just the majority of single mothers, who are not impoverished, don’t deserve to be placed in the victim column, so, too, the majority of ultra-Orthodox Israelis do not deserve to have their reputation besmirched because of the bad behavior of a small, vocal and easily provoked minority.

ALL OF this brings us to the issue at hand. Stories highlighting the deviant behaviors of marginal social forces tend to be simplistic and misleading, and to serve identifiable political forces. And so, with our national discourse suddenly dominated by stories describing the demise of Israeli democracy, women’s rights and the rule of law at the hands of modern and ultra- Orthodox Jews, we need to consider who benefits from the stories.

It is notable that the seam lines being opened by all of the stories, which are again, about deviations from the norm of Israel’s social cohesion, all fall within the governing coalition. Stories of “Jewish terrorists” set the security hawks against the ideological hawks. They set the likes of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his supporters against the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and their representatives in the Likud, Israel Beiteinu, Habayit Hayehudi and other coalition parties.

Stories about ultra-Orthodox misogynists make it politically costly for the Likud and Israel Beiteinu to sit in the same government as ultra- Orthodox parties such as Shas and United Torah Judaism. They also serve to weaken Shas among its nonultra- Orthodox voters. The fact that the ultra-Orthodox bus lines were inaugurated with the support of the Kadima government in 2007 is beside the point. It is the Likud that is now being blamed for their existence.

The current media-supported outcries against the national religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors follow the pattern of last summer’s social justice protests in Tel Aviv. The purpose of those protests was to discredit the government in the eyes of working class voters and young people.

The current protests also follow in the footsteps of the protests of 1998 and 1999 that brought down Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first government. Those protests pitted his Russian immigrant coalition members against Shas. They pitted secular Israelis against his ultra-Orthodox coalition members. They alienated young voters from his leadership.

They set his socialist partners against his capitalist partners.

The cleavages wrought in Netanyahu’s coalition made members of his own party as well as his coalition partners fear the electoral cost of maintaining their membership in his government. And so one by one, they bolted his government until it finally fell.

Notably, many of the same forces – from the New Israel Fund to various political consultants who work for the Israeli Left to European NGOs – who were active in the protests in 1999 and in the social justice protests last summer are also playing a role in the current protests. The New Israel Fund raised NIS 200,000 in “emergency funds” to pay for buses to transport protesters to Beit Shemesh last week.

It also paid for two rallies in Jerusalem attacking religious bans on female vocalists earlier last month.

Last summer, Israel’s New Left movement led by leftist political consultant Eldad Yaniv took credit for organizing the anti-free market protests. Yaniv and his colleagues were assisted in conceptualizing the protests by US Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who was also the architect of the social protests in 1998-99.

Indications of how the political Left has been impacted by the current wave of demonstrations are mixed. A Shvakim Panorama poll from last week, which posited the existence of a new anti-religious party led by popular television personality Yair Lapid and a new anti-capitalist Sephardic party led by former Shas leader Arye Deri, indicated that the Left as a whole has been strengthened against the Right. While Kadima would lose most of its Knesset seats to Lapid’s party, it is Deri who would be the undoing of the Right.

The poll claimed that Deri, who since his release from prison has strengthened his bonafides as a secular- friendly political dove, would win seven mandates. Shas would drop from its current 11 seats to five. Deri’s rise would decrease the political Right in all its various forms from its current 67-seat majority in the 120 seat Knesset to a minority of 57.

The media have trumpeted this poll as the first harbinger of spring for Israel’s political Left. And certainly it provides some reason for celebration among leftist political forces. Like the protests in the late 1990s, and like last summer’s anti-capitalist protests, the current batch of anti-religious campaigns serves to turn Israeli against Israeli by feeding on and inflaming sectoral envies and insecurities. And given their success, we can certainly expect them to continue.

For the benefit of society as a whole, we must hope that the basic health and cohesion of Israeli society that has grown so miraculously over the past decade will prevail in the current contest. We have far more that unites us than separates us. If we focus on this, there is no force either within or without our society that can defeat us.

But if we give in to the forces of contention and chaos, we risk endangering everything we hold dear.



caroline@carolineglick.com

Written by Tzvi Fishman:

Many people think that in lighting giant Hanukah menorahs in places like Manhattan, Paris, Melbourne, and Berlin, we are “a light to the nations.” However pretty and moving this may be, the light of these solitary and scattered menorahs gets swallowed up by the deep surrounding darkness. It’s a little like lighting a match in a dark alley. For a few seconds, there’s a flickering of light, and then it vanishes, engulfed by the darkness of the alley. Even if matches were lit in alleyways all over the world, the light would shine for an instant then disappear.


The only way of sustaining the light is by lighting all of the matches as one great bonfire, and this can only be accomplished by bringing the matches together and kindling them in one place – the Land of Israel.


When all of the scattered exiled Jews are gathered in the Land of Israel, a great Divine light goes out to the world like a beacon, illuminating the darkness of the nations. This is the meaning of “For from Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of the L-rd from Yerushalayim.” The light goes out from Yerushalayim, and not from Times Square or Beverly Hills. We become a “light to the nations” precisely when we are living together in Eretz Yisrael, and not when we are scattered all over the world, minorities in foreign lands, stripped of our Israelite nationhood and our pride.


During the long exile, the lighting of the Hanukah menorah had meaning in reminding the Jews in faraway places, where we were strangers in someone else’s land, that we were still connected to an eternal light and a Land of miracles – but now, with the re-establishment of Medinat Yisrael, and the ingathering of Jews from all over the world, we no longer need the menorahs in New York. The time has come for each and every Jew to take his little light and join in with the great light that is shining forth from Israel.


For example, even in this early stage of our Redemption, when millions of our outcasts have gathered in Eretz Yisrael, even though we are still a ways from our full Torah power, still, even in our temporary secular/Torah state, all of the world’s attention is focused on what the Jews are doing in Israel. Pick up any leading newspaper from the capitals of the world and chances are you will find a front-page story about Israel. When a settler lights a small menorah on a hilltop in Judea, the whole world goes crazy. The United Nations rushes to condemn it. The White House issues and immediate warning. And the Europeans protest at the top of their lungs, like a Sunday church choir.


No one cares about the giant menorah in Berlin or Brooklyn. But a tiny menorah lit by a Jewish settler in Beit-El, Elon Moreh, Yitzhar, or some deserted and unnamed hilltop, causes an international raucous. Why? Not because the settler is infringing on Palestinian rights. No one really cares about the Arabs. The uproar comes because, in their unconscious psyches, the gentiles sense that with each Jew who returns to the Land of Israel and sets up his home on a Biblical mountainside, the one and only G-d of Israel is returning with them, to establish His rule in the world, and the nations cry out, blinded by the light.


Even in our present interim stage of Redemption, when our incredible Torah power is still hidden, and when prophecy has not yet reappeared, the sons of Esav and Yishmael sense the great light and they tremble, knowing deep in their hearts that their religions and doctrines are false, that G-d has not abandoned the Jews as they claim, and that the prophecies of the Torah will surely come to pass if they don’t try everything in their power to stop it, so they can continue on with their falsehood, stealing, and whoring.


That’s why the light of even one small menorah on a hilltop in Samaria, where the Hanukah story all began, shines more brightly than all of the scattered menorahs, however towering that they might be, in the lands of the gentiles, “For from Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of the L-rd from Yerushalayim.”

My name is Aron Adler.

 

I am 25 years old, was born in Brooklyn NY, and raised in Efrat Israel.

Though very busy, I don’t view my life as unusual. Most of the time, I am

just another Israeli citizen. During the day I work as a paramedic in Magen

David Adom, Israel’s national EMS service. At night, I’m in my first year

of law school. I got married this October and am starting a new chapter of

life together with my wonderful wife Shulamit.

 

 

15-20 days out of every year, I’m called up to the Israeli army to do my

reserve duty. I serve as a paramedic in an IDF paratrooper unit. My squad

is made up of others like me; people living normal lives who step up to

serve whenever responsibility calls. The oldest in my squad is 58, a father

of four girls and grandfather of two; there are two bankers, one engineer,

a holistic healer, and my 24 year old commander who is still trying to

figure out what to do with his life. Most of the year we are just normal

people living our lives, but for 15-20 days each year we are soldiers on

the front lines preparing for a war that we hope we never have to fight.

 

This year, our reserve unit was stationed on the border between Israel,

Egypt and the Gaza Strip in an area called “Kerem Shalom.” Above and beyond

the “typical” things for which we train – war, terrorism, border

infiltration, etc., – this year we were confronted by a new challenge.

Several years ago, a trend started of African refugees crossing the

Egyptian border from Sinai into Israel to seek asylum from the atrocities

in Darfur.

 

What started out as a small number of men, women and children fleeing from

the machetes of the Janjaweed and violent fundamentalists to seek a better

life elsewhere, turned into an organized industry of human trafficking. In

return for huge sums of money, sometimes entire life savings paid to

Bedouin “guides,” these refugees are promised to be transported from Sudan,

Eritrea, and other African countries through Egypt and the Sinai desert,

into the safe haven of Israel.

 

We increasingly hear horror stories of the atrocities these refugees suffer

on their way to freedom. They are subject to, and victims of extortion,

rape, murder, and even organ theft, their bodies left to rot in the desert.

Then, if lucky, after surviving this gruesome experience whose prize is

freedom, when only a barbed wire fence separates them from Israel and their

goal, they must go through the final death run and try to evade the bullets

of the Egyptian soldiers stationed along the border. Egypt’s soldiers are

ordered to shoot to kill anyone trying to cross the border OUT of Egypt and

into Israel. It’s an almost nightly event.

For those who finally get across the border, the first people they

encounter are Israeli soldiers, people like me and those in my unit, who

are tasked with a primary mission of defending the lives of the Israeli

people. On one side of the border soldiers shoot to kill. On the other

side, they know they will be treated with more respect than in any of the

countries they crossed to get to this point.

 

The region where it all happens is highly sensitive and risky from a

security point of view, an area stricken with terror at every turn. It’s

just a few miles south of the place where Gilad Shalit was kidnapped. And

yet the Israeli soldiers who are confronted with these refugees do it not

with rifles aimed at them, but with a helping hand and an open heart. The

refugees are taken to a nearby IDF base, given clean clothes, a hot drink,

food and medical attention. They are finally safe.

 

Even though I live Israel and am aware through media reports of the events

that take place on the Egyptian border, I never understood the intensity

and complexity of the scenario until I experienced it myself.

 

In the course of the past few nights, I have witnessed much. At 9:00 PM

last night, the first reports came in of gunfire heard from the Egyptian

border. Minutes later, IDF scouts spotted small groups of people trying to

get across the fence. In the period of about one hour, we picked up 13 men

- cold, barefoot, dehydrated – some wearing nothing except underpants.

Their bodies were covered with lacerations and other wounds. We gathered

them in a room, gave them blankets, tea and treated their wounds. I don’t

speak a word of their language, but the look on their faces said it all and

reminded me once again why I am so proud to be a Jew and an Israeli. Sadly,

it was later determined that the gunshots we heard were deadly, killing

three others fleeing for their lives.

 

During the 350 days a year when I am not on active duty, when I am just

another man trying to get by, the people tasked with doing this amazing

job, this amazing deed, the people witnessing these events, are mostly

young Israeli soldiers just out of high school, serving their compulsory

time in the IDF, some only 18 years old.

 

The refugees flooding into Israel are a heavy burden on our small country.

More than 100,000 refugees have fled this way, and hundreds more cross the

border every month. The social, economic, and humanitarian issues created

by this influx of refugees are immense. There are serious security

consequences for Israel as well. This influx of African refugees poses a

crisis for Israel. Israel has yet to come up with the solutions required to

deal with this crisis effectively, balancing its’ sensitive social,

economic, and security issues, at the same time striving to care for the

refugees.

 

I don’t have the answers to these complex problems which desperately need

to be resolved. I’m not writing these words with the intention of taking a

political position or a tactical stand on the issue.

 

I am writing to tell you and the entire world what’s really happening down

here on the Egyptian/Israeli border. And to tell you that despite all the

serious problems created by this national crisis, these refugees have no

reason to fear us. Because they know, as the entire world needs to know,

that Israel has not shut its eyes to their suffering and pain. Israel has

not looked the other way. The State of Israel has put politics aside to

take the ethical and humane path as it has so often done before, in every

instance of human suffering and natural disasters around the globe. We Jews

know only too well about suffering and pain. The Jewish people have been

there. We have been the refugees and the persecuted so many times, over

thousands of years, all over the world.

 

Today, when African refugees flood our borders in search of freedom and

better lives, and some for fear of their lives, it is particularly

noteworthy how Israel deals with them, despite the enormous strain it puts

on our country on so many levels. Our young and thriving Jewish people and

country, built from the ashes of the Holocaust, do not turn their backs on

humanity. Though I already knew that, this week I once again experienced it

firsthand. I am overwhelmed with emotion and immensely proud to be a member

of this nation.

With love of Israel,

Aron Adler writing from the Israel/Gaza/Egyptian border.

In May 1998, the eminent British historian Paul Johnson published an essay in Commentary to mark Israel’s 50th birthday; marking its 63rd, we re-publish the essay here.—The Editors

The state of Israel is the product of more than 4,000 years of Jewish history. “If you want to understand our country, read this!” said David Ben-Gurion on the first occasion I met him, in 1957. And he slapped the Bible.

But the creation and survival of Israel are also very much a 20th-century phenomenon, one that could not have happened without the violence and cruelty, the agonies, confusions, and cross-currents of our tragic age. It could even be argued that Israel is the most characteristic single product, and its creation the quintessential event, of this century.

Certainly, you cannot study Israel without traveling the historical highroads and many of the byroads of the times, beginning with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. That great watershed between an age of peace and moderation and one of violence and extremism set the pattern for all that followed, and marked a turning point as well in the fortunes of Zionism.

Theodor Herzl’s Zion, a product of the 1890’s, was not exactly a modest proposal, but it could fairly be described as a moderate one. His book was entitled Der Judenstaat, and that phrase—a “state of the Jews”—fairly describes what he had in mind. But he was not necessarily wedded to the historical dream of a state in Palestine. He toyed, for example, with the notion of a giant settlement in Argentina, and not until the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905 was Uganda, too, finally rejected as a possible site. By that time Herzl was dead, at the age of forty-four. One of his last pronouncements had been: “Palestine is the only land where our people can come to rest.”

Uncertainties and ambivalences of other kinds abounded. Although Herzl had always used the word “sovereignty” in connection with his imagined Jewish state, his friend Max Nordau, the philosopher, believed that in order to avoid offending the Turks, of whose empire Palestine then formed a part, the term Judenstaat should be replaced by Heimstätte, or homestead, rendered into English as “national home.” This fortuitously became an important factor in winning acceptance for the Zionist idea among European statesmen. Similarly, Herzl had written of a huge “expedition” that would “take possession of the land,” but the idea that the land would actually have to be conquered, and then fiercely defended, does not seem to have occurred to him.

As for the arrangements of life in his future commonwealth, Herzl was enamored of the model of Venice at the height of its power. He imagined a Venetian-style constitution, a Jewish doge, a coronation ceremony, and city plans featuring huge squares like the Piazza San Marco. He also foresaw theaters, circuses, café-concerts, and an enormous opera house specializing in Wagner, his favorite. The only military touch was to be a guards regiment, the Herzl-Cuirassiers, for ceremonial occasions; the New Zion would not, he thought, need much of an army. In many ways, Herzl’s conception had more in common with the Ruritania of Anthony Hope’s novels than with the state that actually came into being a little over four decades after his death.

World War I had a double effect on Zionism, transforming its program from a theoretical into a real possibility but also ensuring that the creation of the Jewish state would be bloody. Until 1914, the men who ran the British empire, though sympathetic to Zionism, were inclined to fob off Jewish leaders with schemes for developing a slice of Africa. Turkey was a traditional British ally, and keeping its ramshackle possessions together was a prime object of British policy. What put an end to all that was the fateful decision of the Turks to join the side of Germany in the war. In a dramatic speech in November 1914, the British Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, announced: “The Turkish empire has committed suicide.”

Immediately, a Palestinian Zion became conceivable, and what would be known as the Balfour Declaration was in train. But the British decision to end the Turkish empire in the Middle East also presupposed the existence of new Arab states as well, and inevitably brought into being Arab nationalism. It is here that Herzl’s initiative and dynamism proved to be so crucial. Timing is all-important in history. No doubt a Zionist political movement would in due course have come into existence without Herzl. By launching it in the 1890’s, Herzl gave the Jews, in effect, a twenty-year headstart over the Arabs. Even before the war began, Zionist leaders had been in touch with leading British policy-makers, and they exploited the possibilities produced by the war with great energy and sophistication.

It is amazing, in retrospect, that the Zionists were able to secure the Balfour Declaration—ensuring the “best endeavors” of the British government to achieve “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”—in 1917, while the war was still undecided, thus preempting the postwar negotiations and settlements of national claims. By the time the Arabs got themselves organized as an international pressure group, at the Versailles Peace Conference, it was too late. They did win their Arab states, but the Jews had already gained their national home and were settling it with all deliberate speed.

But World War I also introduced unprecedented degrees of violence and extremism into the world, and these too held consequences for the future of Israel. Gone was any possibility that the Jewish national home might integrate itself peacefully with its Arab neighbors, paying for its presence in their midst by teaching them the modern arts of agriculture and commerce. The so-called Arab Revolt that began in 1936 and that was encouraged and rewarded by the British mandatory power confirmed local Arab leaders in the view that their most promising option against the Zionists was force. What had driven out the Turks and created the new Arab states could also be employed, in due course, to extirpate the Jews. This became a fixed Arab notion, so that in time, both within Palestine and across the Middle East as a whole, Arab leaders, faced with the choice of negotiation or war would invariably choose war—and invariably lose.

The violence bred by the searing years 1914-18 also decisively changed the moral climate of Europe, again with fateful results for the future Jewish state. In the wake of the war, extremist regimes seized power and ruled by force and terror—first in Russia, then in Italy, and finally in Germany. The transformation of Germany from the best-educated society in Europe into a totalitarian race-state was, of course, determinative. Although the anti-Semites of Central Europe had always treated Jews with varying degrees of cruelty and injustice, up to and including murderous pogroms and expulsion, it was only with Hitler that actual extermination became a possible program. The outbreak of World War II provided the covering darkness to make it not just possible but practical.

The Holocaust destroyed by far the greater proportion of European Jews, the pool from which Zionism had drawn both recruits and moral fervor. But it also united much of the rest of world Jewry behind the Zionist project, and brought into existence the American Jewish lobby, the prototype of all the great lobbies of the later 20th century. In the perspective of the Holocaust, moreover, it became clear that Zion had to be not merely a “national home” but a refuge, and a fortress. Finally, the Holocaust spurred the Palestinian Jews (and the refugees who joined them) to create the military means to defend the citadel. If World War I created the new Zion, it was World War II that made possible the Israeli army.

In the last half-century, over 100 completely new independent states have come into existence. Israel is the only one whose creation can fairly be called a miracle.

I observed the drama of 1948-49 from the security of an ancient Oxford college, where I was an undergraduate. Academic opinion was then, on balance, favorable to the new Zion: many dons had been brought up in the philo-Semitic tradition of Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot’s novel about a young man who discovers his identity as a Jew and dedicates himself to the Zionist cause, and they welcomed Israel as an intellectual and moral artifact. But opinion was also virtually unanimous that the state would be crushed. That was assuredly the view of most governments and military staffs: the notion of the Jew as a soldier had not yet captured the Western imagination.

In 1948, the Haganah, Israel’s defense force, had 21,000 men, as against a professional Arab invading army of 10,000 Egyptians, 4,500 in Jordan’s Arab Legion, 7,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, and 3,000 Lebanese—plus the “Arab Liberation Army” of Palestinians. In equipment, including armor and air power, the odds were similarly heavy against Israel. Revisionist historians (including Israeli ones) now portray the War of Independence as a deliberate Zionist land grab, involving the use of terrorism to panic Arabs into quitting their farms and homes. They ignore the central fact that the Zionist leaders did not want war but rather feared it as a risk to be taken only if there was absolutely no alternative. That is why in 1947 the Zionist leadership had accepted the United Nations partition scheme, which would have given the nascent state only 5,500 square miles, chiefly in the Negev desert, and would have created an impossible entity of 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs. Arab rejection of this scheme was an act of supreme folly.

Of course the Jews fought heroically, and performed prodigies of improvisation: they had to—it was either that or extermination. No doubt they fought savagely, too, on occasion, and committed acts that might appear to lend some coloring to the revisionist case. But as a whole that case is historically false. It was the Arab leadership, by its obduracy and its ready resort to force, that was responsible for the somewhat enlarged Israel that emerged after the 1949 armistice, and the same mind-set would create the more greatly enlarged Israel that emerged after the Six-Day War of 1967. In another of the paradoxes of history, the frontiers of the state, as they exist today, were as much the doing of the Arabs as of the Jews. If it had been left to the UN, tiny Zion probably could not have survived.

Another paradoxical aspect of the Zionist miracle, which we certainly did not grasp at the time and which is insufficiently understood even now, is that among the founding fathers of Israel was Joseph Stalin. Stalin had no love for Jews; quite the contrary, he murdered them whenever it suited his purposes. In his last phase, indeed, he was becoming increasingly paranoid; had he lived, he might well have carried out an extermination program rivaling Hitler’s. Moreover, like Lenin before him, Stalin had always opposed Zionism. He did so not only as a Great Russian imperialist but as a Marxist, and he was consistent on the matter up to the end of World War II and again from 1950 to his death in 1953. But during the crucial years 1947-48, he was guided by temporary considerations of Realpolitik, and specifically by what he saw as the threat of British imperialism.

Stalin ignorantly supposed that the way to undermine Britain’s position in the Middle East was to support the Jews, not the Arabs, and he backed Zionism in order to break the “British stranglehold.” Not only did he extend diplomatic recognition to Israel but, in order to intensify the fighting and the consequent chaos, he instructed the Czech government to sell it arms. The Czechs turned over an entire military airfield to shuttle weaponry to Tel Aviv; the Messerschmitt aircraft they supplied were of particular importance. Then, in mid-August 1948, Stalin decided he had made a huge error in judgment, and the obedient Czech government ordered a halt to the airlift within 48 hours. But by then the war had effectively been won.

The fledgling Israeli state was equally fortunate when it came to America, benefiting from a phase of benevolence that once again might not have lasted. President Truman was pro-Zionist, and he needed the Jewish vote in the 1948 election. It was his decision to push the partition scheme through the UN in November 1947 and to recognize the new Israeli state (de facto, not de jure) when it was declared in May 1948. But the contrary pressure he had to face, both from the State Department under George C. Marshall and from his Defense Secretary, James V. Forrestal, was immense. If the crisis had come a year later, after the cold war started to dominate the thinking of the West to the exclusion of almost everything else, it is likely that the anti-Zionist forces would have proved too strong for Truman. As it was, American backing for Israel in 1947-48 was the last idealistic luxury the Americans permitted themselves before the realities of global confrontation descended.

Thus, in terms both of Soviet and of American policy, Israel slipped into existence through a window that briefly opened, and just as suddenly closed. Once again, timing—or, if one likes, providence—was of the essence.

If it took a half-century to transform Zionism from an idea into a reality, the reality is itself now a half-century old. Both 50-year periods illustrate the extraordinary interplay, so fascinating to a historian, between the force of ideas and the accidents of time and chance.

Herzl’s Zion was seen, by him at any rate, in terms of a visual drama. His great love was show business; he boasted that “the next Exodus to the Promised Land” would outshine “that of Moses,” just as a “Wagnerian opera” outshone a “Shrove Tuesday play.” He opened the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 with the overture from Tannhäuser; insisted that delegates wear full evening dress with white tie at formal sessions; and imposed luxurious sumptuary regulations, based on the highest Western standards. The Judenstaat was to be a grand affair, as far from ghetto and gabardine as possible.

That was the one image: Zion as a glittering renaissance, a new City of David, painted in the strongest of colors. But there were two competing images. First there was the vision of the pious Jew, for whom Zion was a religious event, and the creation of a materialistic national home, let alone of a sovereign secular state, was an irrelevancy at best. Such Jews returned to Palestine, and then Israel, to pray and observe religious law and to encourage (and, where possible, compel) others to do likewise. They were there before modern Zionism got under way and they are still there, in much greater numbers, offering an alternative vision and wielding with persistence such political power as they can secure.

Then there was the vision of the actual pioneers who came to redeem and work the land and make the waste places bloom, whether as independent farmers or, more usually, as members of a kibbutz or a cooperative. They were colonists but also, for the most part, democrats, egalitarians, and socialists. It would be hard to say whether their image of Zion was farther removed from Herzl’s Venetian-style oligarchy or from the religious Zion of the pious. Literally and figuratively they rejected both gabardine and white-tie-and-tails, settling for open-necked shirts unadorned by starch or tie.

Though little else in the three visions was realized, the open-necked shirt did become the uniform of Israeli politicians during the state’s formative period. And in another respect, too, the colonizing founder-farmers left an imprint on the new state and society that so far has proved almost ineffaceable.

These Ashkenazi Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe, were colonists despite themselves. They were taking up land that had not been farmed before, or had been poorly farmed, in exactly the same way as were many of their non-Jewish contemporaries who were settling in Rhodesia, or Kenya, or Argentina, or the Maghreb. But they also wanted to differentiate themselves from those foot soldiers of the colonial empires, as well as from the whole structure of capitalist accumulation. So, partly out of intention, partly out of necessity, and partly under the influence of the Tolstoyan communitarian spirit of Russia, whence many of the most active leaders came, first the national home and then Israel itself grew up under what would later be called a “mixed economy,” in which the public sector was the determining ingredient.

The small but complex state whose foundation David Ben-Gurion superintended contained many entrepreneurial elements. But these elements were usually held in the hands of the state or other collectivist institutions like the trade unions, which owned property on a huge scale. For purposes of defense, indeed of sheer survival, Israel had to have a “military-industrial complex” (to use the later formulation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower). This too was a publicly owned network, and the imperative needs of defense took priority over the market at every point. In a sense, embattled Israel had, and had to have, a command economy, one in which government gave most of the orders and the private sector and the enterprising spirit struggled against wartime levels of taxation and a forbidding density of regulations. No one got rich, legally at least. Businessmen crouched low in the social pecking order.

Was David Ben-Gurion himself a socialist? He was undoubtedly an idealist of sorts. He was also a master of Realpolitik, and an improviser of genius. He radiated strength, energy, passion, and an intelligence that oscillated disconcertingly from subtlety to brute power. His Zionism, though unblushingly secular in theory, had quasi-religious or at any rate metaphysical overtones. He spanned biblical categories—now the prophet inspired, now King David—and he was protean, switching from one role to the next as occasion required. In short, he was an original. But he certainly thought of himself as a socialist.

Was his Israel socialist? Revisionist historians ruefully deny the claim, portraying the country instead as a pseudo-socialist enterprise in which the overriding demands of nationalism took precedence over humanitarian values. That, however, was certainly not the way people on the Left, including me at the time, thought of the matter.

Let us get our categories clear here. In the 1950’s, it was already horrifyingly apparent that the “Socialist Sixth of the World” under Soviet domination was a murderous caricature, incapable of producing prosperity, justice, or security. As for the social-democratic welfare states of Europe, these were tame and feeble affairs and, to the sharp-eyed, already moribund. But Israel seemed somehow different. To visit the country was to get not just a whiff but huge lungsful of realized socialism at its best—and at its most exhausting. (Kingsley Martin, my old editor at the left-wing New Statesman, used to say: “Israel is the only country in the world where every official, from highest to lowest, seems to be an intellectual, and you can debate with them half the night.”)

Nevertheless, the revisionists do have a kind of point, if not the one they intend. The fact that many of the Zionist settlers in the early 20th century called themselves socialists obscures the fundamental antagonism between Zionism and socialism, whether it be socialism of the internationalist variety, which always saw the Zionists as traitors to the ideals of working-class solidarity, or socialism of the national kind, which was usually anti-Semitic anyway. Most of the anti-Semitic parties that began to form in Central Europe starting in the late 1870’s had the word “socialist” in their title. Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term “anti-Semitism,” was a socialist-anarchist, and the Christian Socialist Workers party was the first to adopt an openly anti-Semitic platform. Karl Lueger, the notorious anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, called himself a socialist. In turning the German Workers party into an anti-Semitic organization, Hitler was thus in a tradition already nearly half a century old.

If, then, the founding fathers of Israel did diverge from the path of socialist priorities into the path of Jewish national ones, as the revisionists accuse them of having done, it is to their everlasting credit.

Whatever hybrid political form the young state took, one thing it was not and could not be was a light unto its closest neighbors. The 1948-49 war ended not in peace but in an armistice, followed over the ensuing decades by a desperate arms race, Arab economic boycott, horrific acts of violence, and outright war. Although the returning Jews came eager to teach the arts of peace, they repeatedly had to confront their neighbors instead on the fields of battle, and constantly had to hone their military skills to stay ahead.

This is not to say that the old dream of reconciliation fell by the wayside. Some Israeli public figures, indeed, became fond of arguing that Arab hatred of Israel was a case of mistaken identity: the Arabs wrongly saw the Jewish state as a colonizing power, a foothold of Western imperialism, or a 20th-century version of the medieval Crusader kingdom. To correct this unfortunate image, Israel would have to “go native,” becoming a genuine Middle Eastern state with the geopolitical priorities and instincts of its neighbors. It would have to adopt a low profile, and a local one.

Despite the manifest utopianism of this idea, the ruling Labor coalition flirted with a policy based on it for many years. The idea was impractical for a number of reasons. In the first place, Israel could not dispense with its military and financial umbilical cord to the United States, the fons et origo of “Western imperialism.”

Second, Israel was not, and could not become, a Middle Eastern state like other Middle Eastern states, nor could its people successfully pretend to be (as it were) Jewish Arabs.

An irony here is that there were indeed plenty of Jewish Middle Easterners in Israel: the (misnamed) Sephardim who flocked there in fear and poverty after being driven out of the Arab world. But these arrivals, far from leavening the Western-formed majority with a local yeast, pushed in the opposite direction. Having suffered at Arab hands, they had none of the dreamy good will of some Ashkenazi founders and their successors. To the contrary, the Sephardim saw Arab and Israeli interests as clearly distinct, and clearly incompatible. Having come to Israel precisely because it was not a Middle Eastern state like the rest, they sought to keep it that way.

In due course, these Jewish Middle Easterners played a crucial role in Israeli politics, decisively helping to bring about the fall of Labor and the end of the first phase of Israel’s existence: the phase of socialist ideals and illusions, of high hopes deferred and grand visions unrealized. Now, starting in 1977, came the second phase—the phase of resigned realism—which, two decades later, is still with us.

After many dogged years as the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Menachem Begin came to power in 1977 at the head of the victorious Likud coalition. Begin was not as important in Israel’s history as Ben-Gurion, but he ran a close second, and the two granitic men had much in common. Both of them were stiff-necked, opinionated, obstinate, and, so far as I could see, totally lacking in fear. But Begin, who spent the early years of World War II in Eastern Europe, was also bitter in a way that Ben-Gurion was not. He had good reason: in 1939, his home town, Brest-Litovsk, had contained over 30,000 Jews, making up 70 percent of the population. By 1944, only ten were left alive, and the dead included most of Begin’s family. He seemed ever after to be in perpetual mourning.

Begin spurned the semi-bohemian style of the Israeli political class; in office, he and his men wore neat business suits with dark ties. But if this sartorial choice could be thought of as signaling the end of naive idealism, Begin was too energized by memories and by his sense of righteousness to be a genuine realist. If anything, contrariness was his outstanding characteristic—and, to me at least, a delight. In 1979 I sat next to him in Jerusalem at the opening session of a conference on international terrorism that had been put together by the young Benjamin Netanyahu. Just before Begin spoke, I said to him, “Prime Minister, if I were you, I would not mention the King David Hotel affair.” (As the leader of the underground Irgun in pre-state Palestine, Begin had given the order in July 1946 to blow up a section of the hotel that housed offices of the British mandatory government, causing extensive loss of life.) He replied: “Mr. Johnson, you have persuaded me that I should not merely mention it, I should emphasize it.” And he did.

Before he finally became prime minister, Begin had lost, I calculate, more general elections than any other party leader in the history of democracy. So he had certainly learned patience. But once in power, he knew how to act decisively. Two of the most salutary events in Israel’s history can be laid at his feet: peace with Egypt, and the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. In the 1960’s, I had written a long article about Israel entitled “The Militant Peacemaker.” The fierce, sorrowing, tragic figure of Begin came, for me, to personify that paradox.

Peace with Egypt made all the difference to Israel’s security. I often feared for the country in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and even after its victory in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. But once Anwar Sadat, a serious and far-sighted man, signed the Camp David accords, I breathed easier. Israel, I thought, was now safe for the foreseeable future. Thanks to Israel’s policy of realism, sometimes a necessary ultra-realism, a process of accommodation with Israel’s neighbors had been made possible. Since the time of Begin, that process has been inching forward.

Almost as fortunate as the peace with Egypt was the collapse of Soviet Communism. The return of Russia to the ranks of the conventional great powers removed the last serious hope of the Arab extremists that, if only they waited and fought long enough, they would get the kind of apocalyptic solution they desired to the “problem” of Israel. Russia will undoubtedly remain an important factor in the Middle East, and will occasionally cause trouble there—especially as the country comes to develop less confused policies than at present. But today, as in the 19th century, Russia once again operates within the parameters of a moral code, and for Israel that can mean a great deal.

To be sure, some of Israel’s enemies have remained intractable, while others wait to see what time and opportunity will afford: there will be many an agonizing passage to negotiate before the country can ever breathe easy. That is precisely why in my judgment it is a singularly lucky thing that Benjamin Netanyahu is now the prime minister. Like both Ben-Gurion and Begin, his two great predecessors, he is a figure who inspires fierce criticism and even hatred. Although ideologically akin to Begin, in his combination of ruthlessness tempered by idealism he actually reminds me more of Ben-Gurion. His geopolitical approach, too, is similar to Ben-Gurion’s, although, having been a diplomat, he also knows how to be smooth where Ben-Gurion—let us not forget!—was much rougher.

Netanyahu differs from Ben-Gurion in his determination to unscramble the collectivist framework inherited from the state’s youthful days. This is a very good thing: Israel is due—overdue—for Thatcherization and privatization. But given its obdurate and in certain respects arthritic economy, the task is huge. There are some people, ranging from pious Jews to left-wing fundamentalists, who do not want Israel to become rich. One may sympathize with them; but they are in a minority, and Israel is a democracy whose citizens, including its Arab citizens, want the material blessings of life.

Such, at any rate, is the way ahead. Today’s global economy puts the emphasis on educated and motivated people, and in this sphere Israel has a decided advantage. When the great migration of Russian Jews began in the late 1980’s, it was the fashion to protest that the country really needed more farmers and craftsmen, not more university professors. I recall Shimon Peres’s joke about going to Ben-Gurion airport to greet some new arrivals. “You see,” complained the official standing next to him, “they’re all concert violinists—look at the cases they’re carrying.” “That man doesn’t have a case,” Peres pointed out hopefully. Came the reply: “He’s a pianist.” On the whole, these brilliant soloists are faring well in Israel, at whatever they have learned to do, and their children will fare better.

The real task, and one that Netanyahu is well equipped to handle, is to create a society where—under conditions of peace—the clever children of Israel will want to stay, and where they can be confident they will flourish. Israel is an elite nation; in my opinion, that is what it should be, and unashamedly so, encouraging and training its people to be in the vanguard of the world’s activity in agriculture and industry, in technology, in the arts, in education and administration, in the conquest and the preservation of nature. Israel must have its place among the nations (to borrow the title of a book by its prime minister). But it is not a nation like other nations. Willy-nilly, it is and will continue to be sui generis, its people shaped by the terrible events of our century, and marked by destiny.

Paul Johnson has written A History of the Jews, A History of Christianity, Modern Times, and A History of the American People, among many other works.

Reprinted from Commentary, May 1998, by permission; all rights reserved.

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What is the point of this story

What information pertains

The thought that life could be better

Is woven indelibly

Into our hearts

And our brains

Paul Simon: Train in the Distance

The point of the story of the State of Israel, as is that of the story of the Jewish people, is that we live with the conviction that life can always be better. This is the idea of Israel and is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains. Why else would we be so committed to attempting to make peace with people who have vowed to destroy us? How else could we possibly have become the “Start up Nation” even while in a constant state of war since the inception of the State? Life can always be better.

People have asked me how I can believe that Israel is the beginning of Redemption when it cannot possibly be considered a blessing to live under such constant threat? For me, the idea of Redemption, by which we have lived for more than two thosand years in the diaspora, is that life can always be better.

For me, the idea of Counting the Omer from Pesach to Shavuot is that life can always be better. We count forty-nine steps that we can climb to ascend to the heights of Sinai with the conviction that there is always something better at the top.

For me, when God asks only for fresh Showbread once each week even while sending fresh Manna every morning, He wants us to wait for tomorrow’s bread hoping that it will be even better than today’s.

For me, each of the appointed festivals that occur each year comes with the promise that this year’s festival will be better than any of the past.

For me, the Shabbat, which introduces this section of the festivals, is a promise that next week will be better than this.

For me, the sin of striking another human being includes a refusal to look at the person and believe that he can become a better human being. We cannot afford to look at any part of life or any human being without that thought that life can be better being woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.

For us, the “Train” is never in the distance, but always just up ahead.

Author Info:
Learn & discover the Divine prophecies with Rabbi Simcha Weinberg from the holy Torah, Jewish Law, Mysticism, Kabbalah and Jewish Prophecies. The Foundation Stone™ is the ultimate resource for Jews, Judaism, Jewish Education, Jewish Spirituality & the holy Torah.

Dedicated To Meir & Jenny Solomon: “Heading east” was the deed he chose to clothe himself in. Friends sought to dissuade Rabbi Yehuda Halevi. He argued with them. To one, he wrote an angry poem. “Your words were salved with smoothest myrhh,” it began with a touch of sarcasm, which quickly changed to the accusation that the friend’s remarks, while “sweetly stated,” concealed “stinging bees, their honeycomb a bed of thorns.” Although we are not explicitly told what these were, it is possible to reconstruct their two main points from Rabbi Yehuda’s reply.

The first was that it was foolhardy to put himself at peril by jounreying to a country that was in the hands of barbarians. Although the love of Zion was praiseowrthy, one had to be sensible. It was reckless to “seek the peace of Jerusalem” when the city belonged to “the blind and the lame” – an allusion to the Crusaders taken from the Book of Samuel, where the words contemptuously refer to Jeruslaem’s Jebusite rulers before King David’s conquest of the city.

Rabbi Yehuda made short shrift of this argument. Was Abraham being sensible, he asked, when he left everything at God’s bidding for a promised land? If personal safety came first, “our forefathers erred in being strangers” in a land in which “unjustifiably they built their altars/ and sacrificed upon them to no end.” To challenge his, Halevi’s, decision on such a basis was to accuse the biblical patriarchs of recklessness.

The friend’s second point concerned Spain. In no other country was Jewish life more thriving or secure. How could one abandon it for a wilderness where there was hardly a synagogue to pray in, much less the amenities of civilized life? How could Halevi reject the home in which his ancestors were buried and his family had lived for generations? Surely loyalty to Judaism and its traditions called for remaining in Spain, not leaving it.

The poem’s response to this was scathing. The dead, it declared, command our loyalty not by virture of being dead, but only by virtue of being models for the living, “Are we to haunt old wormy graves,” it demanded,

And turn away from life’s eternal source?

Are synagogues our sole inheritance,

And is God’s holy mount to have no heirs?

And where, in East or West, are we more safe

Than in the land whose many gates all face

The Heavens?

Hillel Halkin – Yehudah Halevi (Pages 131-132)

The friend’s arguments are still repeated in the minds of many of us who choose to remain distant from Zion. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s poems challenge us to ask ourselves:

“And where, in East or West, are we more safe

Than in the land whose many gates all face

The Heavens?”

Author Info:
Learn & discover the Divine prophecies with Rabbi Simcha Weinberg from the holy Torah, Jewish Law, Mysticism, Kabbalah and Jewish Prophecies. The Foundation Stone is the ultimate resource for Jews, Judaism, Jewish Education, Jewish Spirituality & the holy Torah.

Finally! Since the beginning of this fiasco, where the international community has lined up against Israel for legally enforcing its blockade on the genocidal Islamists in Gaza, CJHS has been waiting for someone to put together a fully documented expose on the lies and fabrications being thrown around in the media. That video has finally arrived.

Please watch this explanation, which begins with the blockade itself and moves backward and forward, exposing the “humanitarian disaster” and the “Israeli aggression” myths for what they are – calculated and dishonest attacks meant to delegitimize the very possibility of Jewish self-defense.

http://vimeo.com/12555636

You probably don’t remember the  name Eric Hoffer. 


He was a longshoreman who turned  into a philosopher, wrote columns for newspapers and some books. 
He was a non-Jewish American social  philosopher. 
He was born in 1902 and died in 1983, after writing nine books and winning the Presidential Medal  of Freedom. 
His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a  classic.

 

Eric Hoffer was  one of the most influential American philosophers and free  thinkers of the 20th Century.  His books are still  widely read and quoted today.  Acclaimed for his  thoughts on mass movements and fanaticism, Hoffer was  awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.   Hopewell Publications awards the best in independent  publishing across a wide range of categories, singling out  the most thought provoking titles in books and short prose,  on a yearly basis in honor of Eric Hoffer. 


Here is  one of his columns from 1968 — 42 years ago! Some  things never change!

 

ISRAEL ‘S PECULIAR POSITION

…by  Eric Hoffer



Los Angeles  Times May 26,  1968.



The Jews are a peculiar people:  things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. 


Other  nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee  problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. 
Turkey  threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchman. 
Indonesia  threw out heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about  refugees. 
But in the case of Israel , the displaced Arabs have become  eternal refugees. 
Everyone insists that Israel must take back every  single one. 


Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an  atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. 


Other nations when  victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. 


But when Israel is  victorious, it must sue for peace. 
Everyone expects the Jews to be  the only real Christians in this world. 


Other nations, when they are  defeated, survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be  destroyed. 
Had Nasser triumphed last June [1967], he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the  Jews. 
No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own,  is worth the paper it is written on. 


There is a cry of outrage all  over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Blacks are executed in   Rhodesia . 
But, when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one demonstrated  against him. 


The Swedes, who were ready to break off diplomatic  relations with America because of what we did in Vietnam , did not let out a  peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. 
They sent Hitler choice iron  ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troops in Norway . 


The Jews  are alone in the world. 


If Israel survives, it will be solely because  of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. 


Yet at this moment, Israel  is our only reliable and unconditional ally. 
We can rely more on   Israel than Israel can rely on us. 
And one has only to imagine what  would have happened last summer [1967] had the Arabs and their Russian backers  won the war, to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the  West in general. 


I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it  goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. 
Should Israel perish,  the Holocaust will be upon us all.

‘War-torn’ land is in fact economic, scientific, cultural powerhouse

Yoram Ettinger

1. Bankruptcy rate in Israel is one of the lowest in the world (19% increase during the first half of 2009), compared with the US – 45% increase, Spain – 58%, Spain – 75% and Switzerland – 15% (Yedioth Ahronoth, July 27, 2009).

2. The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has rebounded to its September 10, 2008 (meltdown) level, scoring a 50% surge (Yedioth Ahronoth, July 27).

3. Sequoia Capital and Tanya Capital led a $15.5MN round of private placement by Israel’s Kontera (Globes, July 24). Intel Capital, Cisco, Greylock Ventures and Menlo Ventures participated in a $13MN round by Israel’s AeroScout (Globes, June 29). The Boston-based media giant, Medtronics, invested over $10MN in the Israeli VC fund, TriVentures (Globes, June 23). Motorola Ventures, Stata Venture Partners, Argonaut and Walden participated in a $10MN 4th round by Israel’s Amimon (Globes, July 15). Arts Alliance Digital Ventures invested $9MN in Israel’ YCD Multimedia (Globes, June 23). Innogest, Italy’s largest venture capital fund, invested $8MN in the Israeli-Italian company, beeTV (Globes, June 4). The Boston-based Globespan Capital and Spark Capital invested $7.5MN in Israel’s 5min, their 3rd investment in Israel (Globes, July 24).

4. Intel Vice President for Technology and Manufacturing Group and General Manager of Intel Israel (6 plants, 6,500 employees!), Maxine Fassberg: “We have developed breakthroughs in Israel that have changed the face of computerization…In Israel, we are developing and manufacturing network and communication products as well as microprocessors – in parallel to spearheading the mobile domain in Intel Corp. Among the technologies developed here are MMX, which constitutes the basis of the Pentium processor, platforms for Intel Centrino mobile computers and the Intel Core 2Duo processor. In addition, the first fast Ethernet and first wireless LAN (Local Area Network) were developed here…(Jerusalem Post, May 23, 2009).

5. The Med’s best-kept secret (excerpts of Willy Stern, The Weekly Standard, July 27, 2009):

“Perhaps nowhere else on the globe does there exist a greater discrepancy between perception and reality than Israel. The press portrays the country as a savage land racked by war and terrorism… The reality, though, is a country of 7.4 million people whose stock market and economy are humming along quite nicely (at least in contrast to the rest of the globe) and whose citizens revel in their chic Mediterranean lifestyle…

“In Israel, life goes on. The Western newspapers just don’t notice… Israel today has become a vibrant, functioning jewel of a nation tucked into the eastern flank of the Mediterranean. Tel Aviv looks more like San Diego or Barcelona than Baghdad or Kabul. On a recent five-mile run along Tel Aviv’s Gordon Beach, I saw Israeli yuppies cycling the boardwalk on $1,500 Italian mountain bikes, teenagers in full-body wetsuits surfing the breakers, a deep-cleavaged Russian model (nobody seemed to know her name) doing a photo shoot in a skimpy bikini whilst middle-aged Israeli men with potbellies and hairy chests shamelessly gawked, rows of high-priced yachts docked at the Tel Aviv marina, an endless stream of private planes on final approach to small Sde Dov Airport, and two Israeli soldiers in drab green uniforms making out in the sand and drinking Heineken. A nation at war? It seemed more like high season at Coney Island…

“Israel has a world class cultural scene. Want to see Franco Zeffirelli and Daniel Barenboim? No problem. The Alvin Ailey Dance Company visits. The opera plays to audiences at 97 percent capacity. Even at lower pay, (Israel) attracts the best talents from around the globe…

“Israel enjoys top universities, upscale restaurants, million-dollar homes, hoity-toity architecture, and the like. In the fourth quarter last year, when the global economy went all to hell, Israel’s annual, quarter-over-quarter rate of GDP was only off 0.5 percent, the best figure in the industrialized world. (The United States was off 6.3 percent and Japan 12.1 percent.) ‘Think about the resistance of our economy in recent times,’ suggests Zvi Eckstein, deputy governor of the Bank of Israel. ‘Our prime minister (has a stroke). The war in Gaza. The war in Lebanon. The government gets replaced. But we’ve maintained a stable macroeconomic structure and a strong high-tech sector…’

What’s the secret? A very conservative banking system…No mortgage crisis…A current account surplus since 2003…Negligible inflation…Prudent governmental fiscal policy… Healthy integration into the world economy. Last year, 483 Israeli high-tech companies raised a whopping $2.08BN (only US companies raised more). All the major tech players – Google, Microsoft, IBM – have large research centers in Israel. They go where the talent is…’Israel is today the third-hottest spot (after Silicon Valley and Boston) for high-tech venture capital in the world…’ Israel produces more science papers per capita than any other country. Israel lags behind only the United States in number of companies listed on NASDAQ. Twenty-four percent of Israel’s workforce has a university degree; only the United States and Holland have a higher number. Israel leads the world in scientists and technicians per capita…

“The cell phone? Developed in Israel. Ditto for most of the Windows NT operating system and for voice mail technology. Pentium MMX Chip technology? Designed in Israel. AOL Instant Messenger? Developed in Israel. The list goes on. Firewall security software originated in Israel. The latest breakthrough is the “PillCam,” a video camera that can be swallowed and aids physicians in diagnosing intestinal cancer…it seems the other Israel – the land not of terrorists but of milk and honey and goats – may finally be being discovered.”

Subject: Re: *The other Israel*

Manley Cohen added:

I can attest to the million dollar homes, and the achievements of the past.

Also to the corruption, bureaucracy, inefficiency, and theft of my purse with all my cash, passport, and credit cards, which I’d like to believe was by Arab teenagers who slashed a tyre of my rented car: but my fear is that these hooligans were Jews as it was in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Also to the prostitution and solicitation around Dizengoff square, and even in Jerusalem. But worst of all, for me, are the Neturei Karta, who throw stones at cars on the streets of Jerusalem, and worse. Believing as I do that sinat chinom must be eliminated first, that ALL Jews must cooperate with each other and give one face to the world we wish to improve, I find these fringe fanatics difficult to accept. Perhaps because when I try to see the whole picture, I sometimes wonder “Could these crazies be correct, and I be wrong?” Yet the more I learn about them and other very black hats, do I not understand how “ve’ahavta lereacha kamocha” can be applied to them. Certainly, I do not hate them. But how can I agree with them, who will not even accept me as Jewish?

mc

The Ta Phrom Buddhist temple in Angkor Wat stands out from all other structures because the government has chosen to leave the entire site in its overgrown, dilapidated, original state of discovery. The temple is crumbling and being absorbed back into tthe jungle in a manner that is both beautiful and frightening. The giant banyan trees are spilling, at glacial speed, over the tops of the temple walls, wrapping around pillars, and pouring into the nooks and crannies between the bricks. Teratological rhizomorphic tentacles grow over the ruins and each other in thick ancient layers. Green creeping vines bubble up out of every crevice and embrace the collapsing sandstone architecture. In the 1930s, H.W. Ponder, in Cambodian Glory, described Ta Phrom beautifully: “Everywhere around you, you see Nature in its dual role of destroyer and consoler; strangling on the one hand, and healing on the other; no sooner splitting the carved stones asunder than she dresses their wounds with cool, velvety mosses, and binds them with her most delicate tendrils; a conflict of moods so contradictory and feminine as to prove once more – if proof were needed – how well “Dame” Nature merits her feminine title!”

The agony of seeing the ruins of Jerusalem is softened by the powerful signs of life renewed. The city grows, expands, vibrates with energy and passions, and most of all, continues to express the victory of Life over Destruction.

Yet, where Ponder saw “Dame” Nature, we see Menachem Av – The Comforting Father: We are not passive observers to roots, branches and mosses. We are active, empowered participants in this victory of life and hope that pumps through the air and earth of Jerusalem and Israel. Ponder observes Nature. We, see God.

God’s Chesed, or Life Force, permeates this world, and resonates more powerfully in Jerusalem than any other place in the Universe.

Destruction comes only when we fail to witness the miracle of this victory of Life Force. Perhaps this is the essence of Rabbi Akiva’s laughter when he observed foxes prancing through the ruins of the Temple Mount: He appreciated the miraculous victory of Life Force over destruction.

We have survived with this vision of victory flowing through our hearts and souls.

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Learn & discover the Divine prophecies with Rabbi Simcha Weinberg from the holy Torah, Jewish Law, Mysticism, Kabbalah and Jewish Prophecies. The Foundation Stone is the ultimate resource for Jews, Judaism, Jewish Education, Jewish Spirituality & the holy Torah.