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Hebrew-Arabic bilingual schools are building a future
>
> Column for May 30, 2012
> Hebrew-Arabic bilingual schools are building a future
>
> By J. Zel Lurie
> Bilingual education has always attracted me. I built the first
> bilingual Hebrew-Arabic primary school for citizens of Israel a
> quarter century ago. Now there are five bilingual schools in Israel and
> more on the drawing boards.
> I have a great-grandson in Palo Alto, Calif. He atends a public school
> where the teachers began talking Spanish to the kids in kindergarten.
> Now as he finishes second grade, his Spanish is as good as his Hebrew,
> which he picked up in two summer camps in Israel.
> English-Spanish bilingual schools are not uncommon in California. They
> do not have the problems that confront the five Israeli bilingual
> schools.
> The Israeli schools
The Double Mystery of the Cairo Codex
By J. Zel Lurie
Column for Jewish Journal 5/2/12
Jews come in many shapes and colors. One of the strangest is the Karaites, founded in the 7th century by a charismatic Jew named Anan Ben David. He totally rejected the holiness of the Talmud and strictly obeyed only the 613 mitzvot found in the Torah.
The Karaite claim to fame: Scribes who lived in and near Tiberius in the 9th and 10th centuries. They were the preservers of the Masoretic text of the Bible as we know it today. They wrote many Bibles on parchment in book form instead of a scroll. A Bible in book form is called a codex.
Three of these Bibles were discovered by scholars in the 19th century. They are known by the cities in which they were found, Cairo, Aleppo and Leningrad. All three were were written by Karaites and were in the possession of the Cairo Karaites at one time. Each codex has its history inscribed on the last page. It is called a colophon.
This column will deal with the Ben Asher family of scribes, father and son, who were attacked by the Sa’adia Gaon, a contemporary Rabbinate scholar, as dangerous heretics.
The father, Moshe Ben Asher, wrote the oldest codex, now called the Cairo codex. According to the colophon, it took him 25 years. It was finished in 894 and presented to the Jerusalem Karaite community by the wealthy Karaite Ya’abes Ben Shlomo al-Bably, who had commissioned it and paid all expenses for 25 years.
The Cairo codex consists of Neviim, the Prophets, the second book of the Bible. A scribe can write the entire Bible in a few years. Why did it take Moshe Ben Asher 25 years? I could not find any scholar who had addressed this question, but to me the reason is obvious.
I took him 25 years because he he had designed 14 carpet pages and meticulously drew them in micrography, complex geometric patterns in which all the lines are actually tiny Hebrew letters that spell out biblical phrases. These are wonderful examples of medieval Jewish art which have been ignored for a thousand years.
There were only 13 carpet pages in 1974 when the sexton of the Karaite synagogue in Cairo, who knew that I was going on to Israel, invited me to photograph the 13 carpet pages and give the slides to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The 14th carpet page was “stolen” said the sexton, and taken to Russia.
I did as I was told but the university wasn’t much interested. “We have a complete set of photos,” they said. They were not interested in carpet pages.
A recent inquiry at the Hebrew Univeristy failed to unearth my photos or any record of them.
I made copies of a few of them and piblished one on a full page in color in the March 1979 issue of Hadassah Magazine, which I edited for 34 years. I examined it last week. It is magnificent.
I found a second carpet page on the Internet under “micrography.” I learned that the Moses Ben Asher pages are the earliest known examples of micrography. A carpet page with a complex design accompanies the article on the Internet. Also on the Internet under “Cairo codex” you can click all 575 pages of the Prophets, from Joshua to Malachi. But no carpet pages.
Here is another example of Karaite indifference to the carpet pages. During Pesah I took advantage of the Seder which I hosted in Oakland, Calif., for 26 Lurie relatives to attend the Sabbath services at the Karaite synagogue in Daly City. The service, which superficially resembles Orthodox prayers, is actually totally different except for the reading from the Torah scroll. I counted four scrolls when the ark was opened. A full description of the service will have to wait for another column.
David Ovadia, 62, a former president of the congregation who arruved in the Bay area 50 years ago along with his parents and many other Cairo Karaites, handed me a 21-page brochure on the history of the two Ben Asher codices. It was written in 2004 by Murad al-Qudsi, a Karaite historian who has since passed away.
On the last page the historian reproduces one of the carpet pages with the simple caption: “A decorative page from the Mozshe Ben Asher codex.”
There is no mention of the carpet pages in the 21 pages of the brochure. To the Karaite and non-Karaite scholars, who studied the codex, they were decorations which could be ignored.
Only the sexton who asked me to photograph them in 1974 recognized their importance. He told me that that Nasser had proclaimed the codex a national treasure of Egypt but the Karaites intended to smuggle it out.
According to Mr. Al-Qudsi they succeeded 10 years later. He writes that the codex left Cairo in 1984. From another source, the New York Times, we learn that there were only a handful of Karaites in Cairo by 1980. No journalist and no scholar that I know of has seen the Cairo codex since 1980. That is the way the Karaites want it.
The second Ben Asher codex, the Aleppo, is another story.
According to its colophon, it was written by Shlomo Ben Buya’tta and was punctuated with little vowel signs by Moshe Ben Asher’s son, Aharon. It was completed and presented to the Karaite community in Jerusalem in 930. Both Ben Asher codicies were part of the loot of the Crusaders who captured Jerusaslem in 1099. They were redeemed a few years later by David Ben Yaphet, a wealthy Cairo Karaute.
The Aleppo codex was placed in the hands of the Karaites in Fustat, which is Old Cairo. Fustat is also the site of the oldest functioning Rabbinate synagoge of Ben Ezra, which contained the famous Geniza of medieval Jewish documents.
The Aleppo codex remained in Fustate until the 13th century, when a grandson of Maimonides, Hanagid Abraham, converted the Karaite congregation in Fustat. He acquired the Aleppo codex and it was transfered to the Sephardic congregation in Aleppo. The Aleppo codex consisted of all three books of the Bible. It was intact until 1947 when the Syrians in Aleppo rioted to protest the United Nations decision to partition Palestine.
Matti Friedman, a Jerusalem journalist, has written a book on who vandalized the Aleppo codex. It will be published on May 15 by the Algonquin Press. The Hebrew University has published a facsimile of the Aleppo codex with a multipage guide. Amazon Books offers several other books on the codex published in Europe. Amazon Books has nothing on the Cairo codex or its carpet pages. And that is a double mystery.
What really happened in 1947-48
Column for Jewish Journal 727/11
By J. Zel Lurie
Yes, there is a Jewish narrative and an Arab narrative about what happened in the War of Independence/Nakba in 1947-48 – and never the twain shall meet.
I prefer the Jewish narrative, not just because I’m a Jewish lover of Israel but because it adheres to the essential fact that the Arab army in Palestine launched a genocidal attack on their Jewish neighbors on November 30, 1947, the day after the United Nations General Assembly decided that Palestine should be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
The Jewish narrative goes on to describe the siege of Jerusalem, when my septuagenarian parents walked down six flights because there was no power for the elevator, to gather weeds at the side of the road to cook for their supper.
The Jewish narrative talks about the brave drivers who gave their lives in trying to bring food and arms to Jerusalem and whose burned out trucks lay at the side of the d for decades. Jewish school children, twenty years later, visited the “Burma Road” where Jewish rescuers carried food on their backs to a side road leading to Jerusalem.
The siege was not broken until late in April when the Haganah defeated the Arab army in the hills along the Jerusalem highway and killed its commander, Abdel Kader Husseini, a relative of the Mufti.
The Arabs in East Jerusalem took their revenge for the death of their commander. Under the eyes of the British forces they ambushed a Hadassah convoy to the Mt. Scopus hospital and killed several score Hadassah doctors and nurses including Dr. Ham Yassky, the Director-General of Hadassah in Israel.
The Haganah went on to implement Plan Daled and destroyed Arab villages along the highway to Tel Aviv and up the coast to Haifa.
The Jewish narrative does not mention Plan Daled but it stresses that, the British-officered Arab Legion of Jordan did not wait for the official British withdrawal from Palestine on May 15 and invaded the country killing Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem and destroying two kibbutzim on Gush Etzion, taking the survivors as prisoners to Jordan.
Except for the destruction of Arab villages, all of this history is ignored in the Arab narrative. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestine Authority, wrote in the New York Times, as quoted by Rabbi Bruce Warshal in last week’s Journal, that “shortly after the UN vote, the Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a Jewish majority in the future Jewish state.”
Rabbi Warshal finds President Abbas’s segment of why his family left Safed in 1947 plausible. I say it’s a lie. It’s a lie because it ignores history. What if the arras had not attacked? What if hey had not tried to starve the civilians in West Jerusalem? What if the Arab Legion had stay wed home and had not slaughtered the residents of Gush Etzion? Would the Haganah have been able to implement Plan Daled? Would the Jewish Agency Executive have adopted it in March 1947. not shortly after the UN vote the previous November?
Plan Daled referred to the Arab villages but the majority of the Arabs, then and now, lived in the cities.
As the British forces withdrew from the cities, with mixed populations of Jews and Arabs, the Haganah fought the Areas for control Jewish civilians, like my family, could not escape the fighting but middle classes Arabs, like the family of Mahmoud Abbas could lock up their homes and take a vacation in a nearby Arab counrtry. After all. seven Arab countries were preparing to invade Palestine on May 15. How long could the Haganah hold out?
Not all the Arabs left the cities. a A minority stayed in the country and became citizens of Israel. In one documented case, the capture of the purely Arab towns of Ramle and :od by the Haganah, General Moshe Dayan, on Ben Gurion’s instructions, demanded that the residents evacuate the towns and join the Arab Legion camped several miles to the north.
Ben Gurion noted in his diary that the transfer of Arabs to ensure a Jewish majority had been recommended by the British Royal Commission in 1937. Known as the Peel Commission it was the first to recommend partition.
Rabbi Marshal also errs in his description of the reaction of rte Arab states to UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which was appointed in the spring of 1947 to make a recommendation to the General Assembly in the fall. Rabbi Marshal claims that the Arab boycott of UNSCOP was a huge mistake.
Although I was at the UN daily covering for the Palestine Post, I have no memo pry of the Arab boycott of UNSCOP. But if it happened it had no effect whatsoever on the outcome.
UNSCOP submitted two reports. The majority report recommended partition. The minority report took the Arab position of one democratic state of Palestine with an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.
Both reports were referred to the Political Committee and were thoroughly debated for many weeks.
The majority report recommending two states won a majority of the committee but it fell short of a two-thirds majority necessary for passage by the General Assembly. The Jewish Agency saw their hopes for a Jewish state going up in smoke. The British hinted that they would be willing to resume the Mandate if asked.
Major efforts were exerted by the Jewish Agency to change the votes of several small sates, Stalin’s support was essential.
The efforts were successful and on November 29, 1947, the General Assembly voted by two-thirds majority to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
On November 30 the Arabs attacked. As the fighting raged the State Department backtracked and recommended a new Mandate. This was debated and debated at the United Nations until Friday May 14 when in quick order the following occurred: In Tel Aviv David Ban Gurion declared a Jewish state to be called Israel. In Washington, President Truman recognized Israel. At the United Nations where the debate on a new Mandate was ongoing, The Americans were left high and dry.
Look for similar sadden changes at the 2011 General Assembly’s debate on recognizing the Arab state of Palestine. Essentially it’s a repeat of the vote taken on November 29, 1947 when the UN voted for two states in Palestine, one Jewish and one Arab.
Obama’s Program: a Viable Palestine State & a Secure Jewish State
On his second day in office in January 2009 the new President Obama appointed a Special Envoy to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together in peace and tranquility. He chose for this “impossible” task George Mitchell who had won fame by ending the fratricidal war in Northern Ireland.
For two years Mitchell toiled. He kept telling his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that he needed a statement of U.S. policy to get the sides talking peace. The needed statement was blocked by Dennis Ross, Senior Advisor on Midddle East policy at the White House and a friend of Israeli officials including the Prime Minister.
In April Mitchell gave up and handed in his resignation. Obama accepted his resignation but dated it six weeks later on of May 19. On that day Obama intended to make a major speech which would state how peace could be accomplished.
So George Mitchell was in the audience of distinguished diplomats in the State Department’s auditorium last Thursday who heard Obama state that peace could be achieved based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps.
These swaps would allow Israel to annex 5 to 6 percent of the West Bank which contain the large blocs of Jewish settlements. About 80 percent of the Jewish settlers live in these blocs which are actually suburbs and exurbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The Geneva Initiative has been working on detailed maps for possible “mutually agreed swaps” of territory ever since it broached the topic of peace on the 1967 borders in October 2003, almost 8 years ago.
As it happened, Netanyahu had a date at the White House on the following day.
The Prime Minister felt betrayed. He was furious.
He had intended to seek United States support for his own plan of borders based on the fence that has been constructed around the Jewish settlements on the West Bank. This would confine the potential Palestine state to abut 60 percent of the West Bank.
That the Palestinians would not accept his solution didn’t bother Netanyahu. He hoped that the status quo and he occupation would continue for many more years while settlements would continue to expand under the protection of the Israel Defense Force. But it might deflect the “tsunami” of a resolution recognizing a Palestine state which is planned for the United Nations General assembly opening in New York in September.
The Prime Minister was deeply angry that Obama had adopted the 1967 borders the day before his arrival. He was fury unbounded as his plane touched down in Washington. The 1967 borders are indefensible he proclaimed.
His cry was repeated by Boca Raton Congressman Ted Deutch and all the other “bought” congressmen who attend ed the AIPAC conference to cheer stale on Sunday.
Indefensible borders has been the false cry of right wingers ever since they were fixed in green ink at the 1949 armistice talks. They were called “armistice lines” or “green lines” until “1967 lines” was adopted.
And through the years while they were hollering about indefensible borders they were crossing the border to build settlements on Palestinian land which now must be swapped.
I say calling the borders indefensible is stale baloney Mr. Deutch and your Jewish voters won’t eat it. In this age of missiles the security of Israel depends on making sure that “Israel can defend itself,” said Obama, “against all potential threats, and by itself,” he added.
That is Obama’s promise and the first rule of an Israeli politician is to make sure that that Israel/American friendship is not shaken.
He said other things that favor Israel’s narrative like referring to the Jewish state instead of Israel. But he also said that the occupation is not sustainable and that it threatens the dream of a democratic Jewish state.
He agreed with Netanyahu on Hamas whose charter calls for “the obliteration of Israel”. As Bruce Marshal pointed out on these pages last week the right wing Israel government has derided the Palestine Authority as representing half a nation. Now it will represent the entire nation and all the leaders of Hamas have announced that they will accept any agreement signed by the Palestine Authority with Israel.
Netanyahu and Obama ignored these statements by Hsmss leaders. In Obama’s speech to AIPAC on Sunday he drew applause by a vigorous attack on Hamas.
Obama’s vision of two stastes with mutually agreed swaps of land does not solve the problem, he admits. He did not discuss the core issues of Jerusalem and Arab refugees which have stymied previous negotiators. But he said if Israel and the Palestinian sign an agreement on the borders of Israel and the Palestine state bassed on the principles of “a viable Palestine state and a secure Israel” negotiations between the two states on Jerusalem and the Arab refugees would be easier.
From Benghazi in 2011 to Tel Aviv in 1947
column for Jewish Journal 03.30.2011
The joy, the happiness, the vast masses of humanity jumping up and down in the Central Square of Benghazi on the evening of the Security Council vote authorizing military action to save Libyan civilians reminded my generation of elderly Jewish journalists of the celebration in Tel Aviv on the night in 1947 when the UN General Assembly voted by two-thirds majority to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.
Because of a seven-hour time difference, it was the middle of the night in Tel Aviv when the vote was announced in Lake Success. Horns began to toot as Tel Avivians poured into the street. They gathered in Mugrabi square for dancing and drinking until sunrise to mark the renewal of a Jewish state after 2,000 years.
There is a great difference in the lineup of forces between 1947 and 2011. In 1947-48 Israel stood alone against six Arab armies. Non-intervention was the American law and we American Jews who shipped arms to Israel were breaking the law. Some of us were arrested by the FBI, and a few served prison terms.
Today American nonintervention has been replaced by a rold-wide coalition of military forces whose mission is to destroy the ability of the Libyan dictator ‘s arms which were aimed at the Libyan people. The residents of Benghazi would have been slaughtered. Hence the celebration when they were delivered from evil by air attacks that destroyed Qaddafi’s advancing armor.
A decade earlier, non-intervention was the diabolic excuse for refusing aid to the democratic Republic of Spain which faced a fascist rebellion led by General Franco. Adolf Hitler intervened for General Franco. Picasso’s “Guernica” marks the destruction of Spanish city by Nazi war planes.
Franco and anti-Antisemitism
Despite the fact that he had won power with German arms, General Franco did not follow the Nazi anti-Semitic laws and practices. Thousands of Jews were saved from the Holocaust by trking across the mountains into Spain.
An article in the current issue of Midstream by Prof. George Jochnowitz, the husband of an old friend, seeks to prove the common belief that totalitarianism and anti-Semitism run together.
It is true that the leading anti-Semitic murderers of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were totalitarian dictators. But their anti-Semitism was fanatic and irrational. They hated Jews, all Jews, including half-Jews and converts. Why has never been fully explained.
Hitler diverted trains and soldiers from the war effort to carry Jews to Birkenau to be gassed. Stalin acted more circumspectly persecuting to his Jewish citizens over the years. His first large-scale overt act was to abolish the Yevsectsiya, the Jewish section of the Communist Party. Then came the death of Yiddish schools and the founding of a Jewish province on the volatile Chinese border.
Stalin was actually plotting against his doctors, two of whom were Jewish, when a fatal stroke felled him and saved his doctors’ lives.
Soros gave $3 million to Solidarity
Anti-Semitism in Poland dates back to feudal rimes when Polish princes employed Jews to collect taxes from their impoverished peasants. The Polish Communist Party, which ruled Poland in Stalin’s time, used anti-Semitism in a vain attempt to become popular.
When the Nazis conquered Poland they mobilized reserve police battalions, ordinary middle-aged family men too old for combat, to go to remote villages in Poland to personally murder the Jews.
In Ordinary Men (HarperCollins), Holocaust historian Christopher Browning tells the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which arrived in the village of Jozefow in July 1942 and began rounding up the Jewish residents.
Some of the Jews fled to the nearby forest where they had dug bunkers to hide from the German murderers. Polish children roamed the forest searching out the bunkers and leading the killers to them.
Still, Poland had the only underground organization in Nazi-occupied European countries whose sole function was to save Jews, and there are more Poles remembered in Yad Veshem’s Avenue of the Righteous than any other country.
After the war, the Polish Communist Party ruled Poland for several decades. When I covered the United Nations for the Jerusalem Post, one of my chief sources of information was a Jewish Communist who was the deputy chief of the Polish delegation. He was purged in 1968 and settled in New York.
There were Jews in leading positions in the Solidarity movement which brought democracy to Poland. George Soros, an American Jewish billionaire who was born in Budapest, gave Solidarity $3 million. According to Forbes Soros ranked 35th in his wealth but according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy Soros was number one in giving away his money in 2010.
In 2009, Soros erred. His Open Society Foundation accepted a gift of a million dollars from Muammar Qaddafi’s son and gave him some sort of an honor.
According to Fox News Soros later said it was a mistake. He apologized for his error in accepting a gift from the family of the Libyan dictator.
But Qaddafi is not an anti-Semite. Neither is Fidel Castro and a number of other dictators.
Prof. Jochnowitz points out that the anti-Semitism of the Iranian dictator actually harms him. He would find it easier to achieve his objective of atomic weapons if he did not indulge in anti-Semitic rants and absurd denials of the Holocaust.
Jochnowitz writes that the idea that totalitarianism and anti-Semitism are on the same page was first promulgated by Hanna Arendt in her classic 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Hannah Arendt was wrong.
A stop in Sheikh Jarrah that aroused horror
Last April, when I was traveling around Israel with my tattooed grandson Joe as my driver, we stopped for a night at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. It is still the best hotel in Jerusalem, East or West, but the rates have quadrupled since the first time I slept there long ago. Then I was scared out of my wits when around 4 a.m. the loudspeaker at he tower of the mosque next door suddenly blasted out the Muslim call for morning prayer. When the sun rose I opened my door and discovered the beauty of the American Colony Hotel. Down below there was a large courtyard of trees and flowers where I had breakfast of perfectly cooked soft scrambled eggs. But there is still no elevator to these high-priced rooms. I shan’t have breakfast in this beautiful garden in the Holy City ever again. Joe and I left the American Colony Hotel and turned right up Nablus Road. We drove a few blocks past a shell of a building constructed many years ago by Al Quds University which is now occupied by squatters. Al Quds, Arabic for kadosh (holy), is what the Arabs call Jerusalem. But Al Quds University never got Israel’s permission to operate in Jerusalem and was exiled to the suburb of Abu Dis. Another quarter mile and we turned right into the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, once the home of wealthy members of the Husseini clan, including the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, who had joined forces with Adolf Hitler. The Mufti’s mansion had been sold by the Custodian of Enemy Property to a hotel operator, who named it the Shepherd Hotel. It was soon acquired by Dr. Irving Moskowitz of Miami Beach who had made millions buying and selling hospitals in California. Dr. Moskowitz is an Orthodox Jew who lives modestly in Miami Beach and walks to shul every morning. His minyan colleagues had no idea that he was wealthy until he achieved notoriety and a 60 Minute segment a decade ago. Before he retired to Florida, Dr. Moskowitz’s Foundation had acquired a bingo parlor in a slummy Latino section of Los Angeles. By California law bingo parlors can only be operated by churches or legitimate charities and all of its profits must be devoted to charity. Dr. Moskowiz’s charity was buying property in East Jerusalem, not in large Jewish neighborhoods such as Gilo or Pisgat Zeev, but in the middle of densely populated Arab neighborhoods such as the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. The bingo parlor was so prosperous that it expanded to a large casino with an electric sign that can be seen for miles. A local human rights group complained to California’s Attorney-General and the IRS that buying property abroad was not a legitimate charity. The Moskowitz Foundation’s IRS returns say that it is buying holy soil in the holy city of Yerushalyim close to the holiest site of all, the Holy Temple. No American authority would dispute him. The publicity did him no harm. He built a Jewish enclave, which resembles a 19th century U.S. cavalry fortress in Indian country, in Ras el-Amoud opposite the Mt. of Olives cemetery. He invested millions in Silwan, opposite the Dung Gate entrance to the Old City. Silwan, an Arab village of more than a thousand two-story homes, holds the well which fed water to Jerusalem in Biblical times and a Department of Antiquities excavation attributed to King David. The Friends of Ir [City of} David, a New York based charity with Moskowitz listed in its IRS returns as the largest contributor, has been raising millions for years. Its reports to the IRS show that from 2003 to 2007 it raised almost $18 million. Now we were heading into Sheikh Jarrah, Moskowitz’s latest charity. I had with me a Jerusalem Post clipping which stated that Moskowitz had joined with Irv Remart, a New York-based industrialist to pledge $25.4 million over five years to build Jewish homes in Sheikh Jarrah, beginning on the site of the Shepherd Hotel. The site plan for the Shepherd Hotel enclave had already been approved when, according to the Jerusalem Post, the State Department intervened. It asked Israel to halt the project as it was threat to the peace process. The French Government, the European Union and the Palestine Authority also voiced their objections. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Post continued, voiced his objections. Israel could not tolerste restrictions on Jews buying property in Jerusalem. That was the end of the Post clipping. Work on the Shepherd Hotel site halted. The settlers had something better. favorable orders by the Supreme Court. Now it was April 2010 and Joe and I found bedlam on a street in Sheikh Jarrah. About 150 years ago, two trusts, one Sephardic and one Ashkenazic bought close to five acres of empty land in Sheikh Jarrah going up the hill from the tomb of Shimon Hatzadik, an ancient pilgrimage site for Orthodox Jews. In 1947-48 there was a war, a cruel and barbaric war. In 1947 a Hadassah convoy en route to Mt. Scopus was ambushed in Sheikh Jarrah. Scores of Hadassah doctors and nurses were massacred while the British looked on. The British left in May 1948. The Jordanian Legion captured the Old City and East Jerusalem. All Jews were expelled to West Jerusalem. An exchange of population took place with Jews from the Jewish Quarter in the Old City being assigned homes of Arabs who had fled by the Israeli Custodian of Enemy Property. On the other side the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property assigned the Jewish-owned homes in Sheikh Jarrah to refugees from West Jerusalem. In 1967 East Jerusalem was captured by Israel and enlarged three times. The tripled East Jerusalem is another story. This column is about the original East Jerusalem as it existed under Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967. Somehow, one of Moskowitz’s settler organizations had acquired the property rights of the two Jewish religious trusts in Sheikh Jarrah. They petitioned the Supreme Court to expel the Arabs, who had “squatted” in their homes for four decades. After very prolonged litigation, the Supreme Court ordered the expulsion of the Arab residents. Many Israeli Jews were shocked. Every Friday they come out to protest the unfairness of evicting 1948 refugees from their homes. The police keep them behind a line. This was the Wednesday after Pesah and there were no police. We ere standing on a street above the Shimon Hatsadik tomb. Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights was there with a group of European students. We were told that almost every home on both sides of the street had received eviction orders. Three homes had already been turned over to the settlers. We were surrounded by the Arabs who had been expelled from their homes. As they were anxiously telling their story, a large SUV drove up to a house across the street which had been occupied by Jews. A half dozen Jews emerged carrying grocery bags. The Jews were settling in. No one spoke to them. I didn’t have a chance to be horrified by the scene. It was just another notch in the evil occupation. But last week I read in the Jerusalem Report of January 3 that Professor Yitzhak Reiter and researcher Lior Lehrs of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies have issued a report that states that reclaimng Jewish property in Sheikh Jarrah and other East Jerusalem neighborhoods “may eventually lead to Israel’s loss of sovereignity over Jerusalem.” ‘ Israel has always couched its claim to Jerusalem on the 1967 lines, Reiter explained to the Report. “Settling in neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah, which were lost in the War of Independence, opens up the unresolved questions of 1948 and leaves Israel vulnerable to the Palestinian demands on the right of return to their homes in West Jerusalem.” “Let the Arabs put in claims,” settler activist Aryeh King tells the Report. “According to the law in Israel there is no way they can obtain any property.” Former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair agrees. But he warns “the law is evil.” “My family had property in Sheikh Jarrah,“ Ben-Yair reveals to the Report. “We will not petition for the property even though we could. It would be wrong. It would be immoral.” Dr. Moskowitz and his Orthodox cohorts are not worried sbout morality. A spokesman, former journalist Nadav Shragai explains that Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem are putting “sticks in the wheels” of the two stare solution. Their success only increases the deligitamazation of Israel in world public opinion. That is what horrifies me. The end ..
Netanyahu and Abbas are squirming
The pundits have decided that the peace process is dead. That is myth number one.
The doyen of the pundits, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, wrote that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had buried peace talks when he foolishly rejected an American promise of $3 billion and 45 of the most advanced fighter aircraft in exchange for extending the freeze on settlement construction for another 90 days.
Netanyahu did no such thing. He is not foolish. The fools were in the White House who dreamed up the proposal. Netanyahu accepted in principle, he said later, but he kept it secret. He was not going to tell his hard-line allies that he had agreed to extend the freeze for 90 days until the details were fixed, like who was going to pay for the 25 extra planes above the 20 which the IDF had contracted for many months before.
Washington’s reply was a withdrawal of the promise. Cooler heads, probably in the State Department, asked what would happen after 90 days if there was as little progress as had been made during the ten month freeze which ended in September.
Netanyahu’s office was responsible for the commonly believed myth that the Palestinians had waited until the tenth month of the 10-month freeze before beginning to talk about peace.
The history of ten months of talks was told by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at a lamb and rice lunch on December 18 which he hosted for 60 Israeli politicians, journalists and lovers of peace at his headquarters in Ramallah. This unique affair was organized by the Geneva peace planners, who had issued their first report in 2003.
For many of the 60 Israelis it was the first time that they had visited the Palestinian capital which is as close to East Jerusalem as Yonkers is to New York City.
Abbas described nine months of intensive proximity talks with George Mitchell, President Obama’s special envoy, talking to both sides.
Israel had proposed and the Palestinians had agreed that they would concentrate on two of the five core issues, borders and security. Once the borders of the Palestinian state were fixed the negotiations on water, refugees and Jerusalem would be easier, they thought.
Unfortunately, Abbas reported, nine months of talks yielded little progress, really none to speak of. Then in early September Obama brought them to Washington for a show of direct talks which yielded nothing except pretty photo-ops.
In mid-September the freeze ended and it has not been extended. “That is our red line,” Abbas declared. There will be no talks, directly or indirectly, as long as settlement construction continues.
The Palestinian’s red line is being ignored by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. In her remarks at the annual Forum of the Saban Center for Midest Policy on December 10 she made it clear that she would not do a George Bush and abandon the peace process because of the intransigence of the parties.
“I know that improvement in security and growing prosperity have convinced some that this conflict can be waited out or largely ignored,” she said. “That view is wrong and dangerous,” she continued.
Addressing the Israelis, she said that the occupation, and she used that blunt term continually, is “endangering the Zionist vision of a Jewish and democratic state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.” The Israelis will have to make a choice if they want to “preserve both elements of their dream.”
The peace process is not dead but it is still at the beginning stage. The parties have not yet “grappled with the core issues of the conflict on borders and security; settlements, water and refugees; and on Jerusalem itself,” she asserted.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who also addressed the forum, claimed, as he has said many times, that Netanyahu is ready to make “historic compromises” on these issues.
Mrs. Clinton is demanding that Netanyahu state what he is ready to do. She said: “We will push the parties to lay out their positions on the core issues without delay and with specifity.”
Three days later, George Mitchell was in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Then he flew to Egypt andSaudi Arabia. Mrs. Clinton is counting on their help because of self-interest. In journalistic terms she has put Netanyahu and Abbas on the “hot seat” and they are squirming.
No, the peace process is not dead, but it has a long way to go. The United States will not give up. In Mitchell’s words we “will persevere until peace prevails.”
unpublished letter to the New York Times
Response to Tom Friedman 12/11/10
To the editor:
Tom Friedman has a short memory. When George Mitchell began talking separately to Jews send Palestinians he made it clear that he was following his Irish experience and that he would “persevere until peace prevails.” As in Ireland, it might take years.
Mitchell laid low for a few months while President Obsma played politics. Now Mitchell is back talking to both sides.
Netanyahu did not give up 3 billion dollars, as Friedman claims Israel will get all the advanced planes that its pilots can handle on schedule.
Abbas gave up nothing. The Palestinians sure rolling in European money. A new city is waiting to built. Israel’s permission is needed for an access road over Jewish-held territory. With Mitchell’s help that permission will be forthcoming shortly.
Abbas had made it clear that he was unhappy talking to Netanyahu. It was like Hirohito talking to MacArthur in 1945. But he is now talking to Mitchell.
Be patient, Tom.
unpublished letter to the New York Times
response to Tom Friedman 12/11/10
To the Editor:
Tom Friedman has a short memory. When George Mitchell began talking separately to Jews send Palestinians he made it clear that he was following his Irish experience and that he would “persevere until peace prevails.” As in Ireland, it might take years.
Mitchell laid low for a few months while President Obama played politics. Now Mitchell is back talking to both sides.
Netanyahu did not give up 3 billion dollars, as Friedman claims Israel will get all the advanced planes that its pilots can handle on schedule.
Abbas gave up nothing. The Palestinians sure rolling in European money. A new city is waiting to built. Israel’s permission is needed for an access road over Jewish-held territory. With Mitchell’s help that permission will be forthcoming shortly.
Abbas had made it clear that he was unhappy talking to Netanyahu. It was like Hirohito talking to MacArthur in 1945. But he is now talking to Mitchell.
Be patient, Tom.
A dubious arrangement for the Israeli budget
The U.S. Congress has earmarks. The Israeli Knesset has the Economic Arrangement Bill. Both are semi-secret bites on their respective budgets.
In Washington, every congressman has the right to insert an earmark into the federal budget appropriating a specific amount for a specific project in his district or state.
There is no committee discussion, no debate. The earmarks are passed with the budget. If there is no inquiring reporter who reads the fine print, no one will know about it.
Congressmen have been known to reward heavy campaign contributors with earmarks for projects in which the contributor can make money.
When the current Congress convened last year, lawmakers were faced with a demand by the new president, Barack Obama, that earmarks be abolished. They refused. Democrats and Republicans both loved their pork.
But they agreed to temper the secrecy. All earmarks have to be published. Not in the Washington Post where a taxpayer might notice it, but on the congressman’s website, which is filled with self-serving junk.
Also, the Congressmen agreed that no eamark would be greater than 2 percent of the budget. With a budget in trillions of dollars, that is still a lot of dough.
But what’s going on in Washington in semi-secrecy doesn’t hold a candle to the Economic Arrangements Bill, which the Israel Government is trying to push through the Knesset together with next year’s budget.
Mass rallies of protest have greeted the bill, which allocates 111 million shekels (about $3 million) to pay living expenses of young Jews who devote themselves to studying the Talmud.
They call it studying Torah. That is what they tell their supporters in the States. But the Bible is not part of their curriculum. Their rabbis fear modern interpretations known in Hebrew as bikoret hamikra.
Their yeshivot are fully supported by the state budget in addition to the living expenses, which are below the poverty level. A married student with children gets 1,884 shekels month.
I have a grand-nephew who lives in a Haredi section of Jerusalem with his wife and five children, the oldest of whom is 6 years old. That is not a misprint. So far his wife has borne five kids, almost one for every year year of their marriage.
My nephew is a rarity among the Haredim. He is a college graduate. He was a regular American kid with a degree from Humbolt College until he attended an ulpan in Israel and was snagged by the Haredim.
None of the current 70,000 Haredi pupils will get a pre-college education. According to a law passed in two years ago, Haredi chidren up to the age of 14 must be taught math and science in addition to Talmud. The Haredi teachers ignore the law, and the schools are not punished.
The draft pool of 18-year-old Haredim has grown expotentially from less than 1 percent in 1950 to 5 percent in 1995. Today it has reached 13 percent, most of whom claim exemption as yeshiva students. The few who are drafted are taught math and science before they are given a gun.
Yuval Elitzur, who has written a book about the Haredim, points out that in pre-war Europe there were 10 million Jews and only 5,000 adult yeshiva students, who were known as iluim, which can be translated as geniuses.
Elitzur suggests that the compulsory education law be extended to age 17 and enforced and that those who wish to continue studying talmud pass a state exam.
Israel is the only country in the world where the Haredim are state supported and do not receive an education that fits them for work. An Israeli journalist visiting New York was astonished to find a large camera store manned entirely by Haredim. They were excellent camera salesmen, he reported. It was the first time he had seen Haredim working in semiprofessional jobs.
In June of this year, the Israeli Suspreme Court ruled that supporting yeshiva students violated Isrrael’s basic laws because no support is offered to university students. The Government is trying to bypass the Supreme Court in the Economic Arrangement Bill by appropriating 111 million shekels to support yeshiva students.
Now here is the crunch. Another article in the Economic Arrangements Bill extends the income tax law to university scholarships. This new tax would raise 111 million shekels – the same smount to be appropriated for the yeshiva students.
So the public gets the impression that the university students will be supporting the yeshiva families.
Menachem Ben Sasson, President of Hebrew University, was so incensed that for the first time in the university’s history, on November 1 he cancelled all classes after 6 p.m. so the students could attend a mass protest rally in Zion Square.
The State budget and the Economic Arrangement Bill will be debated soon in the Knesset. Watch the New York Times for news of this dubious arrangement.
The Jerusalem bureau of the Times receives this column.
A minority of voters defeats the Democrats
written for the Jewish Journal, 12.1.2010 issue
On the first Tuesday of November, two out of five citizens of the United States went to their polling stations and cast a ballot. Three out of five eligible voters stayed home. Many have never registered.
The 40 percent who voted gave Obama a “shellacking,” as he has aptly put it. The lack of jobs was a major factor in the Democratic defeat.
The 2010 midterm elections were over ten million voters shy of the presidential elections two years ago which swept the first black man into the White House.
Who actually voted last month? Elderly white men, who told pollsters that they were conservative, led the pogrom against the Democrats.
Who stayed home? Obama’s base. Voters under thirty; single women, members of ethnic minorities and unions. All of them refused to vote for the incumbent Democratic congressman and the Republicans won by default. The number of votes for Congress fell by a dramatic 45 million from 2008.
Obama, who gave the young and their elders such hope two years ago, was slammed on the nose. He has wasted two years trying to compromise with the Republicans.
The Republicans refused to compromise. Their strategy was to get rid of Obama by saying no. So far it has worked.
They have won the House of Representatives. For the first time in six decades, the Democrats have fewer than 200 seats.
Does this victory give them a mandate to enact their program? Absolutely not. They will bite at the health reform law. They will try to make abortions more difficult. They will cut taxes for the wealthy. They will once again try to privatize Social Security. They will fight laws to improve the environment. They will continue to fight Obama’s efforts to mitigate the economic crisis. But creating jobs and cutting the deficit will escape them.
President Clinton suffered a greater debacle in 1994. He lost both houses of Congress to the Republicans. He fought on, wisely and well, and won a second term in 1996. Obama will follow suit.
J Street came out on top
The results of the midterm elections are not entirely bleak. JStreetPAC, a separate organization from J Street, did rather well. They endorsed 55 incumbent Democrats, some of them committee chairmen, and contributed to their campaigns. Forty-five - or 82% - won.
One fourth of the Democratic caucus in the House will be endorsees of the young pro-Israel, pro-peace organization, which has supported President Obama in his dispute with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Last week, J Street came out in front of Obama. They urged the President to take bolder action for peace.
The number of J Street supporters in Congress will increase in the next election. Right-wing Israeli governments will no longer rely on Congress to mitigate the Administration’s relentless opposition to Israel’s support of Jewish settlements. This happened time and again in every Administration from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama.
J Street and JStreetPAC are hardly two years old. They will hold their second national convention in Washington in February.
JStreetPAC did a remarkable fund-raising job. They raised $1.5 million of taxable dollars, more than any other pro-Israel PAC.
But their success was not unmitigated. Two Senatorial candidates, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, were the two largest recipients of Street funds. Both lost by slim margins.
On the other hand there was the decisive victory of the third largest receiver of the PAC’s funds, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky in Chicago. Her opponent who was also Jewish, attacked J Street directly. He demanded that she return JStreetPAC’s money. She trounced him 2 to 1.
My Congressman, Ron Klein, who replaced a Republican in 2006, suffered defeat by a Tea Party supporter, Allen West. Klein was not endorsed by JStreetPAC. He supported Netanyahu in his fight with Obama.
West was far out hawkish on Israel. He opposed a two-state solution, which Netanyahu’s government officially supports. Does his victory mean that the majority of voters in my district oppose the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine?
Of course not.
Honoring World War II vets with free flight to DC
DELRAY BEACH, Florida – The alarm honked at the ungodly hour of 2:30 a.m. It was the first time I had used the alarm in 30 years and it proved to be unnecessary. Five minutes later the phone rang. It was Judy Stauffer, the dynamic Activities Director of Harbour’s Edge, who had organized our participation in the Honor Flight to Washington with the cooperation of Theresa Bertram, our executive director.
“There will be coffee in the lobby in 20 minutes,” Judy announced.
And so nine residents of Harbour’s Edge, all of us in our 80s or 90s, began the most hectic and most rewarding adventure of our elderly lives.
Through dark and deserted highways, Judy drove us to Stuart with Theresa Bertram, our Executive Director, at her side. There we joined a group of almost a hundred veterans of World War II. We were being honored with a free flight to Washington to visit the recently opened Memorial to the Second World War on the mall between the Washington monument and the Lincoln statue.
This was the fifth Honor Flight by the Southeast Florida Honor Flight Inc., founded in 2008. It is one of 93 hubs all over the United States which so far has given 20,000 WWII veterans absolutely free Honor Flights to Washington.
This fifth Honor Flight from Florida was organized by Martin County Fire and Rescue and the firemen did a fantastic job. They raised $61,000 for the trip. Since it is a completely volunteer organization this sum was enough to pay for everything: plane, deluxe buses, wheelchair rentals; half the vets had wheelchairs, and guardians. three meals, snacks and Honor Flight t-shirts and tote bags.
At Stuart I met my guardian, a well-informed handsome fireman named Derek Hartman. He was pushing my wheelchair. Derek was at my side throughout the day. He seemed to know everything about the places we visited. He was superb.
We said goodbye to Judy and Theresa and piled into intercity buses with room for wheelchairs in the baggage compartment. I usually take an aisle seat, but this time I left room for Derek on the aisle. Sure enough a lean, Jewish vet plopped into the seat before Derek got there. “It’s OK. I’ll sit in the back.” said the obliging Derek.
It was still pitch black outside as we rode to the airport. “Meshuga isn’t it,” observed my seat mate, “to get up in the middle of the night and fly to Washington to see a war memorial. As crazy as the war, itself.”
“Most wars are crazy,” I agreed smoothly. “But not this one. A psychopath set out to conquer the world and he almost succeeded. He killed 20 million people, including 6 million Jews and 400,000 American soldiers. We represent the soldiers who were killed in battle and we remember the defenseless Jews who were gassed. No sacrifice is too great.”
The fantastic reception we received at the airport showed that most people in Washington agreed with me. We ran a gantlet of cheering men, women and children, headed by a brass band. I shook more hands than a candidate for Congress. I’ll never forget the middle-aged lady, who may have lost her father in the Battle of the Bulge. She kissed me on the cheek and pressed a little packet in my hand. It contained a memorial poppy and a miniature American flag folded in a triangle as presented to a widow when her martyred husband is buried at the Arlington cemetery.
The cemetery itself is awesome. Row upon row upon row of small headstones over rolling countryside, up hills and down, as far as the eye could see. We were in time to witness the noon changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a military show with loud clicking of heels which ended with an army bugler plaintively playing taps.
The firemen produced lunch which we ate at long tables set up at the Women’s Memorial, one of the few buildings in Arlington cemetery.
Then on to the goal of the trip, the Second World War memorial opened in 2004, sixty years after the Battle of the Bulge. In which 20,000 German soldiers had surrounded 7,000 American men.
The memorial is a large pool with beautiful fountains surrounded by fifty concrete slabs with names of fifty states. We had two hours to wander around examining the pertinent quotes by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and other memorabilia.
Derek took a lot of photos with the one shot camera provided by Judy. It was very cold. I huddled in the warm jacket that Judy had given us. After an hour I used my privilege as the oldest vet on the trip. I climbed back into the bus and went to sleep.
Let me conclude with two quotations. The first is by Theresa Bertram, Executive Director of Harbour’ s Edge, who traveled with us at 3 am to Stuart and saw as off. She wrote:
The events of the morning reminded me of the depth and the sacrifices made by so many self-effacing heroes who in large measure served because they believed in the freedoms we enjoy today.
The second is the slogan on the statue of the flag raising at Iwo Jima at which we stopped on our way back to the airport. It read: “UNCOMMON VALOR COMMON VIRTUE.”
Attacks on J street are both false and helpful
When I worked in public relations sixty or seventy years ago, we consoled ourselves when a contrary opinion on our organization was published with an old adage: Any opnion, good or bad, is helpful, as long as they spell our name correctly.
This was never truer than the recent attacks on J Street that falsely stated that J Street was the creation of a liberal financial genius, George Soros. The attack with J Street’s factual reply made the front page of this Journal two weeks ago. Tens of thousands of Jewish readers were made aware of the successful appearance of this new organization two and a half years ago.
Actively working for peace, supporting President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, J Street has found a voice in the Jewish community. In the two and a half years of its existence it has raised $11 million.
The Soros family donated a bit less than 7%. Its first contribution came six months after the organization was founded by Jeremy Ben Ami and a few friends.
Ben Ami was caught telling a half truth. He said that Soros was not among the founders of the organization. He forgot to mention his later contribution until the attackers discovered it in J Street’s report to the IRS.
Even more remarkable than the $11 million raised by J Street and its tax-deductible Education Fund is the record of JStreetPAC. It has contributed $1.2 million to the election campaigns of 61 Senators and congressmen who will support the efforts of George Mitchell to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
JStreetPAC has raised more money in this election cycle than any other pro-Israel PAC.
Meanwhile the lovers of peace in Israel were demonstrating against a proposed racist law proposed by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who in his maiden speech to the United Nations last month said that peace was impossible.
The rally was held in front of the Tel Aviv building where on May 14, 1948 David Ben Gurion proclaimed “a Jewish state to be called Isael.”
Ben Gurion was following the terminology of the UN which had decided to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish.
Now Lieberman wants to add a definition to the Jewish state in the oath of allegiance that non-Jews swear in obtaining citizenship to “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The Israeli journalist Uri Avnery, who attended the rally asks: “Would a Turkish immigrant to Germany who applied for citizenship be asked to swear allegiance to Germany, the nation-state of the German people?”
Avnery heard Hanna Meron, the queen of the Israeli stage, read Israel’s Declaration of Independence which proclaims equal rights to all the residents of Israel regardless of religion or gender.
These noble words were common 62 years ago. Today they are forgotten by most of the members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet.
(Forty years ago Hanna Meron lost a leg in an Arab attack initiated by Issam Sartawi. Soon afterwards Sartawi changed his color. He became a pioneer Arab peace activist and held secret meetings with Lova Eliav, the former head of the Histadrut. They are memorialized in the Eliav-Sartawi journalism prize which I founded and which is being continued by Search for Common Ground.)
The Minister of Housing, who achieved fame by greeting the first visit of Vice President Joseph Biden with an announcement of the construction of a large number of housing units in Ramat Shlomo just outside of Jerusalem, deeply offendng Biden. The new neighborhood was not built.
To emphasize the ract that the freeze on settlement construction was history and to further annoy the Palestinians, the Minister announced the expansion of housing in two of East Jerusalem’s neighborhoods, in Ramot and Pisgat Zeev.
These anti-peace moves by Israel are matched by the Palestinian boycott of the direct talks with Israel. These talks have been plagued by the asymmetry of an economically and militarily powerful Isael meeting with a weak and divided Palestine Authority.
George Mitchell, who brought peace to the long war in Ireland, tried to solve the problem of asymmetry by proximity talks. Mitchell would talk to Netanyahu and he would talk to Abbas. The two would be almost equal. But Netanyahu demanded direct talks which he could dominate. Now that they have failed, the pundits will proclaim the complete failure of peace talks.
But the real talks on the borders of the two states, on the fair division of water and on the security of Israel, have hardly begun. George Mitchell is working on a two year cycle. Two months have gone by. He has 22 months left.
George Mitchell has lots of power. Bascked by Obama and Clinton he will use it. He will persist until both sides are willing to compromise for peace.
J Street raises $11 million in 30 months
J Street is a phenomenal success.
In the two and a half years since it was founded in Washington to promote the peace and security of Israel by backing the two state solution, it has raised over $11 million from 10,000 donors.
Its PAC has contributed $1,2 million to the election campaigns of pro-Israel pro-peace congressmen and senators. This is a substantial percentage of the money raised by pro-Israel PACs in this election cycle.
No less than 160,000 people, enough to fill four or five football stadiums, have indicated their support for J Street by signing its petitions or asking to be put on the mail list.
J Street has established groups in 35 communities and over 50 college campuses. They are supported by 45 staffers in 8 cities around the country.
This is truly a remarkable record for a new organization in the thirty months since its founding by Jeremy Ben Ami and his friends. Mr. Ben Ami says:
”We’ve tapped into a pent-up longing in the Jewish community for a home that marries a love of Israel with a deep desire for long term peace and security through a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
With this success comes vicious attacks by those who defend the indefensible status quo. One of them is my friend, Fred Kessler, who runs this website [note: reference to Company A, where this was originally published]. He picked up a diatribe in the Jerusalem Post, based on revelations in the Washington Times, and published them last week in All Things Jewish.
The Washington Times is a small circulation scandal sheet which was founded by the Reverend Moon. All NGOs must give the IRS the names of its largest contributors. It turns out that the largest contributors to J Street were the family of George Soros, just under 7 percent of the $11 million raised since 2008, and a woman in Hong Kong named Esdicul whom no one had ever heard of, just over 7 percent.
Boy what a tsimmus the right wing Post makes of these two facts. Ben Ami says that he is proud that the Soros family supports him but he points out that “George Soros has no operational or policy role with J Street.”
As for the Hong Kong woman, she is a business associate of Pittsburgh philanthropist Bill Benter, who is a political activist and a major supporter of J Street. He lives in Hong Kong part of the year and does business there.
The remaining 86 percent of the 11 million were contributed by 10,000 donors.
The other “revelations” by the Washington Times with regard to Goldstone and Colette Avital are simply lies.
J Street fills a gap in the American Jewish community. It supports peace and security for Israel but is not a knee-jerk supporter of every Israeli policy. At the moment it supports President Obama’s request for the extension of the freeze on settlement construction to the end of the year, and for Mahmoud Abbas to continue the peace talks.
