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Stand for Israel Blog

Israeli ambassador undaunted, offers to return to campus where he was shouted down

March 9, 2010

You may remember how, last month, a speech by Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren at UC Irvine was continually interrupted by a series of Arab and Muslim “protestors” calling him a “murderer” and “war criminal” – to the point where the University chancellor had to get on the stage and lecture the portion of the audience that had, according to press reports and materials they’d distributed prior to the speech, come with the intention of disrupting the event to the point that it couldn’t continue.

Oren, whose best-selling histories of the Six-Day War and the U.S. involvement in the Middle East made him known in the U.S. prior to his becoming ambassador, isn’t intimidated.  In fact, in an open letter to the campus, he’s offering to come back:

The diplomat said he understood the emotional nature of Middle East politics, but said it was also important to observe the decorum of free speech and hear others’ viewpoints.

“I was saddened by the loss of this opportunity to exchange ideas with those who disagreed with me and, at the very least, to introduce them to different perspectives,” he wrote.

Oren noted that the incident underscored the importance of dialogue, and said dialogue was the only way peace in the Middle East would be achieved. He offered to return to the campus as long as the proper decorum of free speech is respected.

Apparently, according to the AP report, the arrests of 11 students at the lecture has become an issue on campus, with some charging that they were “unfairly targeted for making a political statement and exercising their own right to free speech.” They might try a few courses in the law or political science department, or maybe just open a dictionary of common sense, to figure out the different between “free speech” and chaotic, disorderly conduct.

Turkish PM: Rachel’s tomb is Muslim, was never Jewish

March 8, 2010

In a statement that reveals what’s really at stake in the ongoing controversy–and PA-stoked violence–over Israel adding some religious sites to a list of Jewish heritage sites, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the Saudi newspaper Al Wattan that al Aksa Mosque, the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb “were not and never will be Jewish sites, but Islamic sites.”

The al-Aksa Mosque is the black-domed mosque that sits at the southern end of the Temple Mount, which was not included (some Israelis have said, scandalously) on the list of national heritage sites.

As a reminder, Rachel was one of the Jewish people’s four matriarchs and lived several thousand years before the Islam was founded. Her grave, which is described in Genesis 35:19, has been a pilgrimage site for Jews (and, later, Christians) for thousands of years.

Waqf, PA leadership attempt to rewrite biblical history

We told you before about the ongoing (low-burn) violence and media circus surrounding the Jewish state’s adding two major tourist and spiritual pilgrimage spots to a list of sites of “Jewish cultural heritage.”

Well, on Friday, worshipers at the Western Wall were stoned by rioters on top of the Temple Mount and 15 Israeli policemen and dozens of the rioters were injured in the resulting scuffles. (Don’t Islamic leaders mind their followers using the high ground of what is ostensibly a holy site to attempt to maim worshipers below?)

So let’s go over this again: Israel added two spots to a list that designates sites of historical and cultural relevance. And this caused Palestinians to riot? (Continuing the long tradition of the Palestinian Authority using violence or threats of it where other governments use diplomacy.) And countries ranging from Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab league states, to–predictably– the UN felt the need to condemn the list-making (while not condemning the violence fomented by the PA). And, of course, the U.S. hasn’t retracted the State Department’s comments on the matter, which were that the Israeli list was “provocative and unhelpful.”

So what are these sites anyway?

What exactly are these sites? One is Rachel’s Tomb, which sits on the edge of Bethelehem close to Jerusalem. The second is the Cave of the Patriarchs, which sits in the middle of Hebron. Just how “provocative” is it to add these to the list of sites of Jewish cultural import?

Rachel’s Tomb is identified in Genesis 35:19-20: “So Rachel died and was buried on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem). Over her tomb Jacob set up a pillar, and to this day that pillar marks Rachel’s tomb.” As the Bible relates, the site has been holy to Jews for thousands of years — more than a thousand years before Islam even came into existence! (And holy to Christians hundreds of years before…)

The case of the Cave of the Patriarchs is even more ironic: Genesis 23 records how Abraham insists on purchasing a burial cave near his home in Kiryat Arba (next to modern-day Hebron) from Ephron the Hittite, even when Ephron offers it to him as a gift:

Then Abraham rose from beside his dead wife and spoke to the Hittites. He said, “I am an alien and a stranger among you. Sell me some property for a burial site here so I can bury my dead.” (Genesis 23:3-4)

The Hittites offer him “the choicest of our tombs,” but Abraham asks them to “intercede with Ephron son of Zohar on my behalf so he will sell me the cave of Machpelah, which belongs to him and is at the end of his field. Ask him to sell it to me for the full price as a burial site among you.”

Ephron offers to give Abraham the cave for free: “No, my lord,” he said. “Listen to me; I give you the field, and I give you the cave that is in it. I give it to you in the presence of my people. Bury your dead.” (Genesis 23:11-12)

A recorded real estate transaction

But Abraham insists on paying for it:

Again Abraham bowed down before the people of the land and he said to Ephron in their hearing, “Listen to me, if you will. I will pay the price of the field. Accept it from me so I can bury my dead there.”

Ephron answered Abraham, “Listen to me, my lord; the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver, but what is that between me and you? Bury your dead.”

Abraham agreed to Ephron’s terms and weighed out for him the price he had named in the hearing of the Hittites: four hundred shekels of silver, according to the weight current among the merchants.

So Ephron’s field in Machpelah near Mamre—both the field and the cave in it, and all the trees within the borders of the field—was deeded to Abraham as his property in the presence of all the Hittites who had come to the gate of the city. Afterward Abraham buried his wife Sarah in the cave in the field of Machpelah near Mamre (which is at Hebron) in the land of Canaan. So the field and the cave in it were deeded to Abraham by the Hittites as a burial site. (Genesis 23:12-20)

The Jewish Sages comment that part of the reason that Abraham was so eager to pay for the burial cave was so that no one could ever dispute that fact that the Jewish people owned it. (The only other sites so recorded are the Tomb of Joseph, which is near the Biblical Shechem, now present-day Nablus, and the site of the Holy Temple, the Temple Mount – both of which Palestinians claim as being of dubious import to the Jewish people.)

Commentator Michael Freund says it best:

Sites such as Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are part of the national and religious patrimony of the Jewish people, and we do not need anyone’s permission to renovate and maintain them. Our reverence for these sites and attachment to them predates Muhammad and precedes Jesus, and no one has the right to lecture us about where and how we choose to serve God.

In fact, this entire episode provides a revealing glimpse of just how transparently hypocritical our critics have become. After all, it was nearly 15 years ago, in the September 1995 Oslo II Accords, that the Palestinians themselves recognized Israel’s attachment to Rachel’s Tomb. In Article V, Annex I to the agreement, the Palestinians agreed that “the present situation and existing practices in the tomb shall be preserved,” meaning that they clearly consented to Israeli control and use of the site, which has never been anything other than a place of Jewish worship.

So for chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat to say last week that Israel’s move amounts to a “unilateral decision to make Palestinian sites in Hebron and Bethlehem part of Israel” is not only absurd, it is patently false.

And since the accords were signed on the White House lawn in front of the world, and were formally witnessed by representatives of both the US administration and the European Union, one would expect them to see right through the Palestinians’ shenanigans.

Worse yet, by playing along with the feigned outrage of the Palestinian leadership, the international community is merely giving credence to their boorish denial of the Jewish essence of these sites.

You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar or a learned archeologist to recognize the long-standing and incontestably Jewish nature of Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs. Arguing otherwise is akin to asserting that the earth is flat, Elvis is still alive and the moon is made of cheese, and that is how the Palestinian claims should be viewed.

Is it offensive to call Jesus’ birthplace a Christian site?

Can the world imagine a case in which Israel would list the Church of the Manger (Jesus’ birthplace) in Bethlehem and Jesus’ family home in Nazareth as sites of historical importance to Christians — and the Palestinians would protest?

Unfortunately, I think we can. But that doesn’t make it any more crazy.

British colonel sees “dark forces” arrayed against Israel, thanks Jewish state for life-saving work

February 24, 2010

Col. Richard Kemp

As the UN and other zealous critics of  the Jewish state continue to condemn her for defending herself against the terrorists who seek her annihilation, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan is  praising Israel for her contributions to the war on global terror and harshly criticizing the “dark forces” motivating those who unfairly target Israel.

Col. Richard Kemp told a London audience that the media often is exploited by “dark forces” who want to harm Israel. He also praised Israel for pioneering military technology and tactics that he said had been “invaluable” in combatting Afghan suicide bombers. In fact, he said, the Israeli tactics form the basis of official British army guidelines used by soldiers on the ground there.

Remarking on the unusual amount of criticism lobbed at Israel, Kemp said that–even though there are tremendous similarities between the IDF and British forces, UK soldiers did not have to deal with the same amount of criticism from the international community:

“When we go into battle we do not get the same knee-jerk, almost Pavlovian response from many, many elements of the international media and international groups, humanitarian groups and other international groups such as the United Nations which should know better… of utter automatic condemnation. We don’t have to put up with that.”

As usual, a small group of British Jews who oppose Israeli actions in Gaza protested outside the hotel where Kemp spoke.

Israeli groups call on lovers of Israel around the world to mark first-ever “Temple Mount Awareness Day”

February 23, 2010

"A view of the Dome of the Rock sitting on top of the Temple Mount, with the new city of Jerusalem spreading behind it."

A coalition of Israeli organizations is calling on Jewish and gentile lovers of Israel to participate in next month’s first annual Temple Mount Awareness Day, set for Wednesday, March 16.

Jewish tradition identifies the Temple Mount as “Mt. Moriah,” the holiest spot in the world: It was there that both the first and second Temples stood; there where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son, Isaac; and is considered the spot where God’s Presence Dwells in this world.

The Mount is holy to Christians not only because of the Jewish roots of Christianity, but also because of the significant role the Temple played in the life of Jesus.

It is holy to Muslims not only because Muslim tradition incorporates the holy sites of other religions (and turns them into Islamic sites), but also because the Koran records that Mohamed ascended to heaven from there. The surface of the Mount–which was plowed down following the destruction of the second Temple in 70 A.D.–is now occupied by two Islamic shrines: The familiar gold-topped “Dome of the Rock” and the Al-Aksa Mosque, the black compound on the Mount’s southern end.

Although Israel regained control of the Temple Mount when Jerusalem was reunified following the Six-Day War, Israel immediately ceded effective power over it to the Islamic Waqf, the Muslim religious land trust. Since then, many Israelis charge, the Waqf has done all it can to undermine Jewish claims to the site and has imposed ludicrous restrictions on them (see this post about a bride arrested the day before her wedding for the “crime” of praying on the Mount).

The group organizing the Awareness Day–which is comprised mostly of organizations on the right–wants to raise awareness about the facts that “non-Moslems are denied the right to pray in groups, and even as individuals” and that Jews are especially subject to “constant degradation,” including being followed and harassed by police and Waqf guards when they attempt visits.

Organizers also want to call on the Prime Minister’s Office to include the Temple Mount among those sites of historical, cultural and religious significance to the Jewish people that will receive government protection and funds for the improvement of access, upkeep, and beautification of the sites.

Further, they want to condemn the Waqf for:

  • Illegal digs causing unparalleled destruction of archeological evidence of the Holy Temple and the historical Jewish presence on the Mount.
  • Endless incitement against the Jewish State and Nation from within the Mosques.
  • Physical attacks against Jews on the Mount and down below at the Western Wall

For more information, go here or visit the group’s facebook page here (be sure you’re logged into your facebook account when you click the link).

New book explores long roots of Christian Zionism

February 17, 2010

While committed Christians know this to be bunk, much of the world thinks of “Zionism” as a pretty much purely Jewish phenomenon. A new book, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews and the Idea of a Promised Land, is making the case in academia that Zionism has long belonged to believing Christians, as well as Jews, and that Christian dedication to a Jewish state in the Holy Land has a long history that goes back far from the modern era (contrary to the conventional wisdom, which says that it’s only modern Evangelicals who “discovered” Christian support for Israel).

Written by Shalom Goldman, a professor of Hebrew and Middle Eastern studies at Emory University in Atlanta, the book traces the history of Christian Zionism, which has been embraced at various times by Catholics and Protestants, liberals and conservatives, reformers and traditionalists. Included among the history are stories of the Vatican and Israel and–unexpectedly–Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita, among other controversial modern classics).

Goldman’s work challenges the conventional wisdom (already rebutted in Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy) that the modern Zionist movement is nearly exclusively Jewish, and that its history is “one in which Christians do not appear except as antagonists. … Goldman makes the case for a wider and more inclusive history, one that brings the substantial Christian involvement with Zionism–most recently by American evangelical Protestants–into the light.”

Read an excerpt here.

Intellectuals’ finger-pointing session yields useful Israel advocacy points

February 15, 2010

There’s an ongoing kerfluffle among the media’s intellectual elite over allegations by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the high-brow news magazine The New Republic, that Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan–a frequent critic of Israel–is, in fact, an anti-Semite. (Sullivan’s response is here.)

Much of the discussion is inside-baseball, but another of the bloggers at The Atlantic, the excellent Jeffrey Goldberg makes some important points about the rather strange turns that criticism of the Jewish State takes, even among ostensibly “broad-minded” thinkers. Like so many writers who think themself “fair,” Goldberg writes, Sullivan’s actually “consistently and rather wildly one-sided“:

I agree with Andrew that he’s not anti-Semitic, as I’ve written. I also think that, for whatever reason, he doesn’t recognize the severity of his language on Israel and Jewish matters over the past year. For instance, he doesn’t seem to recognize the implications of his call for the U.S. to impose a military solution on Israel and have the American army forcibly dismantle settlements. In other words, he’s opposed to military action against Iran, but he’s for military action against Israel. Let me put it this way: This is not how a friend constructively criticizes Israel. …

He also sums important facts that every advocate for Israel should know (emphasis is ours):

I’m opposed to all settlements, just as Andrew is, but it is silly to argue that for two decades Israel has simply refused to cooperate. By the end of the Camp David talks, Israel was ready to cede roughly 90 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians. By the Taba round, more than 95 percent. Recently, the former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, made — as an opening gambit — an offer of 97 percent of the West Bank, plus land swaps. These offers were rejected by Israel’s Palestinian interlocutors. And of course, Israel unilaterally reversed its land-grab in Gaza by forcibly evacuating eight thousand settlers there in 2005 (and it evacuated four West Bank settlements at the same time).

And Goldberg doesn’t note that the Palestinians’ response to evacuating those Gaza communities was to begin bombarding Israeli cities with rockets — about 12,000 of them before Israel had no choice but to launch the Gaza War last year.

Stabbing attempt thwarted in Hebron’s Jewish neighborhood

February 14, 2010

A few days after an IDF soldier was stabbed to death by a Palestinian police officer near the Biblical city of Shechem, Israeli security forces shot and killed a Palestinian terrorist on Friday as he attempted to stab an Israeli soldier during a riot in Hebron, Haaretz reports.

No soldiers were injured in the attack, which occurred after their unit had been called in response to rocks being hurled at the home of a Jewish family in Hebron’s old city. The Palestinian attacker was shot in the stomach by IDF forces and later succumbed to his wounds at a hospital.

The Jewish family lives in the  Avraham Avinu (“Father Abraham”) neighborhood, which is a short walk from the Cave of the Patriarchs, which Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition identify as the resting place of the Jewish forefathers and foremothers, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. (Rachel’s tomb is near Bethlehem.)

Hebron had a continuous Jewish presence from the Biblical era until 1929, when 29 members of the Jewish community were murdered during Arab riots, and many others were injured. The survivors were forced out. When Israel re-gained control of Hebron in 1967, Jews went back to the ancient city and re-established the ancient community. Their presence is controversial and the city is a frequent flashpoint for tension and violence from those who object to a Jews living in the city.

Not really a shock: 90 percent of Middle East views Jews unfavorably

February 12, 2010

A new study ”paints a worrying picture” of Middle Easterners’ attitude toward Jews, the Jerusalem Post reports.

In the predominantly Muslim nations surveyed, views of Jews were overwhelmingly unfavorable. Nearly all in Jordan (97 percent), the Palestinian territories (97%) and Egypt (95%) held an unfavorable view. Similarly, 98% of Lebanese expressed an unfavorable opinion of Jews, including 98% among both Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, as well as 97% of Lebanese Christians.

It’s not really that surprising. After years of being told by their own governments that Jews eat Palestinian children for breakfast and other nonsense, of course the majority of Israel’s Arab and Muslim neighbors despise Jews. Their governments can’t take responsibility for the squalor of their countries, so they blame the thuggery and corruption of their countries on Jews. It’s not a new tactic (See blood libels, Chemielnicki pogroms, Nazi propaganda, or of the other countless violent scape-goating episodes in Jewish history.)

What is really interesting about this study, though, is that among Israeli Arabs –those who have the closest contact with Jews and who are subject to much of the same propaganda, only 35 percent expressed negative opinions and 56 percent expressed positive opinions.

The lesson? Reality seems to trump propaganda.

(Incidentally, the propaganda extends outside the Middle East, according to the survey:)

Negative views of Jews were also widespread in the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed in Asia: More than seven-in-ten in Pakistan (78%) and Indonesia (74%) expressed unfavorable opinions.

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