Israeli territory

 This letter appeared in the UK's Daily Telegraph on 31 May 2021

Sir

The report "Ireland attacks Israel's "de facto annexation" of Palestinian land" (May 27) is, of course, quite correct in stating that most countries view settlements Israel has built in territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war as illegal.

          What is almost never taken into account is that in 1948 Jordanian forces attacked the newly-born Jewish state and seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem.  In 1950 Jordan annexed them – a move not recognised by the UN or the Arab League, nor by any countries except the UK and Pakistan.  When in 1967 Israel succeeded in regaining control of them, it would have been logical for the UN - and most countries - to applaud Israel for liberating illegally acquired territories.  They did not seem to see it that way.

Neville Teller

Why Gaza must be de-Hamasified

 This article appears in the edition of the Jerusalem Report dated 7 June 2021

November 1944. World War Two is moving towards its close, and an Allied victory is assured. From Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), a document is issued setting forth one of the major war aims of the United Nations ­– the de-Nazification of Germany.

          “It is the declared war aim of the United Nations to extirpate both Nazism and militarism in Germany”, reads the introductory paragraph. The document proceeds to set out the objectives, which in brief were to destroy the Nazi Party, its political organizations and government agencies; to purge and re-organize the police; and to dismiss from government offices and other position of influence all active Nazis, their sympathizers and leading military figures. Very shortly after the end of the war, the programme was set in train.

Why was it done? Because Nazism, with its wild-eyed philosophy of Aryan racial superiority, its virulent antisemitism, its brutal disregard for human rights, its cynical manipulation of the law to serve its own ends, was seen as a virus that had infected the German state and its population, and had to be eliminated.

The programme was fraught with enormous difficulties. It was only made possible because the Allies had won total victory and extracted an unconditional surrender from Germany.

Hamas is an extremist military organization that shares much of the Nazi philosophy. It is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leaders in the 1930s and 1940s not only supported, but were actively involved in carrying through, the Nazi’s ”Final Solution to the Jewish problem” – the Holocaust.  The Allies’ carefully considered plans for ridding the world of Nazism are a template for dealing with its modern manifestation in Gaza.

As Professor David Patterson demonstrates in his seminal article “How Antisemitism prevents peace”, the jihadists’ virulent hatred of Jews can be traced back to three founding fathers of Sunni extremism: Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, jihadist ideologue Sayyd Quth, and the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s to the 1940s, the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini.

Al-Banna was an open admirer of Hitler and Nazi methods of antisemitic propaganda; modern jihadists take their lead from him. They not only repeatedly quote the long-discredited forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as proof of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, but deny the Holocaust.

Sayyd Quth followed the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg in arguing that all Jews were evil and must be annihilated. The Nazis contended that Jews were poisoning the Aryan race; Quth provided an Islamist slant by asserting that Jews were “by nature determined to fight God’s truth and sow corruption and confusion.” Just like the Nazis, he argued, the jihadists must eliminate this source of evil that threatens all humanity. In short, hatred of Jews and their extermination is obligatory for Muslims, as it was for Nazis.

The Sunni jihadist who more than any other espoused the Nazis’ loathing of Jews, and their aim of exterminating them, was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the one-time mufti of Jerusalem. “He who kills a Jew is assured of a place in the next world” was his rallying cry to the Arabs of Palestine in 1929, when they rose against the British mandate government and went on a frenzy of killing.

Just two months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Husseini met the Nazi Consul General in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, and arranged for the Nazis to provide support for the Muslim Brotherhood. He later indicated that the Arab revolt that he instigated in 1936, starting with rioting against the Jews of Jaffa, was engineered with the help of the Nazis.

In October 1937, shortly after the Peel Commission had recommended partition as the best way to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict, Husseini had his first meeting with Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo’s Department of Jewish Affairs. By November 1941 he was in Germany, conferring with Hitler. Before the end of the year, Husseini again met Eichmann, now responsible for carrying out the Final Solution. Eichmann’s deputy later stated that the mufti was directly involved in its initiation and execution, and in advising Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and its architect.

On 2 November 1943, at a rally in the Luftwaffe Hall in Berlin, Husseini declared, “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews. They have definitely solved the Jewish problem. [This makes] our friendship with Germany permanent and lasting…” In a series of broadcasts, he proclaimed that there are “considerable similarities between Islamic principles and those of National Socialism.” He enjoined Muslims to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.”

As the war turned against Germany, Husseini began to fear that it might end before the extermination of the Jews could be accomplished. He wrote to Himmler twice, urging greater speed in completing the enterprise.

Exemplified by Hamas, the modern jihadist movement has remained faithful to its origins. The Hamas charter expands on the theme of the God-approved duty of every Muslim to kill Jews. A good Muslim mother must prepare her children for the fighting that awaits them, for, as article 28 asserts: “The Zionist invasion of the world…[aims] at undermining societies, destroying values…and annihilating Islam.  Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people.”

The essential pre-requisite for a de-Hamasification programme in the Gaza strip would be either total victory by Israel following a ground invasion – a procedure fraught with overwhelming difficulties because of the inevitable extent of civilian deaths – or a fail-safe method of emasculating and out-manoeuvering Hamas through political means.

The disbanding of Hamas would need to be a well-conceived, comprehensive and fully worked-out plan, prepared and ready to put into action as soon as the moment was ripe. Back in May 2003, when the de-Ba’athification programme was initiated in Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), only half the necessary elements were in place. The goal was to remove the Ba’ath Party’s influence in the new Iraqi political system.  Accordingly all public sector employees affiliated with the Ba'ath Party were removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector. But the CPA had no plans to fill the vacuum in administration it had created, and the policy failed. It was officially rescinded a year later.

The de-Ba’athification exercise is an object lesson in how not to proceed in the case of Gaza.  In any event the current conflict will almost certainly not provide the opportunity for Israel to achieve a convincing victory against Hamas and initiate a de-Hamasification programme. International pressure to agree a cease-fire will pre-empt any sort of decisive outcome.  Once again a cease-fire will simply provide Hamas with a breathing space in which to regroup and re-arm in preparation for the next encounter.

Limited conflicts followed by ineffective cease-fires cannot go on forever. If not on this occasion, the time will eventually arrive when Israel will be forced to undertake a sustained, all-out effort to gain the upper hand against Hamas. With military means ruled out because of the unacceptable collateral damage in terms of civilian casualties, Israel, must devise a political strategy that will achieve the desired objective.

Out-of-the-box thinking is called for. One possible answer could lie in peace negotiations brokered, perhaps, by the Middle East Quartet (UN, EU, US and Russia), aimed at establishing not only a sovereign Palestine, but a political structure designed to support the new configuration in the region.  A sovereign Palestine could be established as part of a new legal entity – a Confederation embodying Jordan, Israel and Palestine.  A Confederation is a system in which sovereign states agree to collaborate in certain spheres such as security, defence, economic development or infrastructure.

Coming into legal existence simultaneously with the new Palestine, the Confederation  would be dedicated to providing hi-tech security and economic growth for all its citizens. The Israel Defense Forces would act in concert with the defence forces of the other parties to guarantee the security of Israel and that of the Confederation as a whole.

Gaza would, of course, be included within the new sovereign Palestine, and from the moment it came into legal existence, the Confederation could make it clear that any subsequent armed opposition, from whatever source, including Hamas, would be disciplined and crushed from within. 

          This is a configuration offering the possibility of spiking Hamas’s guns permanently.  It would allow the introduction of a de-Hamasification programme.  Hamas leaders and adherents would be dislodged from their positions of power within Gaza, the malevolent Hamas philosophy would be eliminated root and branch, and its Nazi-based anti-Jew, anti-Judaism and anti-Israel ideology extirpated from the Palestinian body politic. Gaza’s citizens would finally be freed from the social and economic deprivation they have endured for too long.

Published in the Jerusalem Post website, 24 May 2021
https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/why-gaza-must-be-de-hamasified-668967

Unconditional surrender -- re-thinking a forgotten concept

 

            Anyone who lived through the Second World War – and we are growing fewer by the day – knows the experience of fighting a life-or-death conflict against a ruthless and vicious enemy.  They can recall how the allies, combatting the Nazi and Japanese war machines, agreed that the only acceptable outcome of the conflict would be the unconditional surrender of the enemy – a concept proposed by US President Franklin Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference in January 1943.  Unconditional surrender, it was recognized, would only be achieved by fighting the enemy to a complete standstill.

            Unconditional surrender is a concept unfamiliar to this generation.  In the recent attempt by Israel to force the terrorist organization, Hamas, to stop firing missiles indiscriminately on defenceless Israeli civilians, the world called for a “proportionate” response.  What sort of response the pundits would consider proportionate was never specified.  Even when members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), having identified legitimate Hamas military targets, telephoned the inhabitants of buildings that housed them warning of an imminent attack, it was not enough.  Israel sought no civilian deaths at all, but given the fact that the Hamas military machine was embedded within and beneath the city of Gaza, it would have been simply impossible to respond at all without running the danger of unsought civilian casualties.

Hamas, like the Nazis, was waging what is known as “total war”.  Total war makes no distinction between enemy forces and unarmed and defenceless civilians.  Hitler’s opening shot in World War Two was his blitzkrieg against Poland, virtually obliterating Warsaw and scores of thousands of its inhabitants. Then he moved on to attack the civilian populations of much of western Europe.  When the Nazis decided to start bombing London, on September 7, 1940, causing thousands of civilian deaths, Britain responded in kind. 

By the end of the war, there was little attempt by any combatant to justify these bombing raids as strikes against military targets.  Indeed the Nazis’ so-called secret weapons – the V1 and V2 rockets – were simply launched at Britain and exploded wherever they fell.  The parallel with the Hamas missiles directed at Israel from Gaza is exact.

                                                     Hamas rockets target Jerusalem
           The ultimate purpose of Hamas’s existence is Israel’s total elimination.  Urged on by its paymaster, Iran, it seeks to conquer the Jewish state and replace it with its own regime, exactly as the Nazis sought in war-torn Europe.  When Britain stood alone against the Nazis in 1940, it was fighting for its very existence.  Under Iranian-inspired attacks from Gaza – or indeed from Lebanon, Syria or anywhere else – Israel is in the same position.  In the circumstances Israel would seem justified in declaring as its objective the unconditional surrender of its Hamas enemy.  But when the main battleground is the populated city of Gaza, and the consequent toll of civilian deaths would be totally unacceptable, unconditional surrender in a military sense is not a practical option.  The question, in a 21st century context, is whether it could be achieved by other means.

Unconditional surrender implies reducing Hamas to incapacity and ineffectiveness.  If achieved, it could enable Hamas and its hateful anti-Jew, anti-Judaism and anti-Israel philosophy to be eliminated from Gaza and the Palestinian body politic.  It could, as with the de-Nazification operation in Germany after World War Two, make membership of the Hamas organization illegal, remove Hamas officials from all positions of public responsibility in Gaza, and restore the administration to the Palestinian Authority.

Is there a political path to this desirable end? 

Lateral thinking is called for, but the vague outline of one possible strategy can be glimpsed – the frequently mentioned confederation concept.  Confederation and federation are different animals.  A federation is a system of government when sovereign states agree to merge their sovereignty in a joint form of administration. The USA is the supreme example.  A confederation, on the other hand, is a situation when sovereign states, while retaining their sovereignty, agree to collaborate in certain defined areas of government, and set up the machinery to do so.  The EU is a prime instance.

A new Israel-Palestinian peace initiative, building on the aspirations motivating the Abraham Accords, might be the way in.  Talks, brokered perhaps by the Middle East Quartet (the UN, the EU, the US and Russia), might aim at a deal incorporating copper-bottom guarantees of security for Israel, the absorption of the Gaza Strip into a sovereign Palestine, and a strengthening of the Jordan-Israel peace treaty.  

The mechanism for achieving a deal that would stick might be a Jordan-Israel-Palestine confederation, coming into legal existence simultaneously with a new sovereign Palestine.  The confederation would be dedicated to the defence of the region as a whole, and the IDF would act in concert with the defence forces of the other parties to guarantee it.  Jerusalem’s outstanding political and religious issues, as many others, would be much easier to handle within a confederation context.

From the moment it came into legal existence, the confederation could make it clear that armed opposition would not be tolerated, whatever source it might emanate from including Hamas.  It would be crushed by the integrated military forces of the confederation.  With Gaza incorporated within the new state of Palestine and its status guaranteed by the confederation, Hamas’s guns might be spiked permanently. 

In this 21st century Middle East of ours, the World War Two definition of unconditional surrender needs to be expanded to encompass a somewhat more sophisticated interpretation.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 24 May, and in the Jerusalem Post, 25 May 2021:

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/unconditional-surrender-re-thinking-a-forgotten-concept-opinion-669037

Published in the Eurasia Review, 21 May 2021:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/21052021-unconditional-surrender-re-thinking-a-forgotten-concept-oped/

Published in the Jewish Business News, 21 May 20221:

https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2021/05/21/unconditional-surrender-re-thinking-a-forgotten-concept/

Hamas: why now?

This article appeared in the Jerusalem Post on 18 May 2021 

   Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh meets Ayatollah Khamenei, Feb 2017

 Despite what much of the world's media report, Israeli police action on the Temple Mount and the Sheikh Jarrah affair are not prime causes of the current conflict between Hamas and Israel.  They are a convenient and long-awaited smoke screen behind which deeper incentives hide. 

Prime among them is the violent opposition to the Abraham Accords within the loose Islamist alliance of Iran, Turkey, Hamas and Hezbollah.  Sensible and pragmatic working relations between Muslim states and Israel, the aspiration behind the Accords, are the diametric opposite of what hard-line Islamists want.  As the agreements were announced Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, expressed outrage and threatened to cut diplomatic ties with the Emirates. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, denounced the Accords as a “humiliation” for Muslim nations.  Since then, the Islamist axis has calculated that the best way to shatter, or at least shake, Israel’s newly forged relationships with Gulf states and Morocco would be to renew the Hamas-Israel conflict, making sure that the precipitating cause was connected to sensitive Muslim interests.

An equally important precipitating factor in the current conflict is the determined effort by leaders of Hamas and its Islamist backers to seize control of the Palestinian cause, to become the undisputed champions of Palestinianism. This they regard as a vital step towards their ultimate aim – the destruction of Israel.  All the evidence suggests that the barrage of rockets fired at Israel’s heartlands is part of a long-standing campaign to wrest the leadership of the Palestinian people from Fatah.  All that the Palestinian militants, together with their Islamist backers, had been waiting for was an excuse, or a series of excuses, to provoke a fresh confrontation.  Fomenting provocation on the Temple Mount and indignation over the Sheikh Jarrah affair provided the convenient smokescreen.

As part of their campaign to wreck the Accords, Turkey and Iran, as well as other Islamist-supporting governments like Qatar, are keen that Hamas, committed to the destruction of Israel, becomes the dominant voice in Palestinian politics in place of Mahmoud Abbas, the current, and largely ineffectual, Palestinian leader.  Turkish and Iranian leaders had been hoping that Hamas would emerge victorious in the Palestinian elections that were due to be held on May 22.

Under intense pressure from US and world opinion to restore some degree of democratic credibility to the Palestinian Authority, which last held parliamentary and presidential elections back in 2005/6, PA President Mahmoud Abbas announced that polling would take place in May and July 2021.  However he was only too well aware that the outcome of free and fair elections under neutral observation would probably result in an even greater Hamas victory than occurred in 2006.  That probability would not have escaped Israeli attention either.  When the question arose of arrangements for eligible Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to vote, Israel, to quote the Jerome Kern song, “didn’t say yes, and she didn’t say no”.  Abbas seized on the issue, and cancelled the elections.

          Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, grasping the opportunity to parade himself as the Palestinian people’s defender, urged Abbas to defy Israel and go ahead with the polls. Hamas further strengthened its position in Palestinian eyes over the Temple Mount issue. Demanding that Israel remove the police from there by a given deadline, Hamas launched rockets against Jerusalem when its ultimatum went unheeded. The barrage of missiles it subsequently rained down on Israel, while testing the Iron Dome defensive system to the limit, was intended to consolidate the status of Hamas as the Palestinians’ champion. But the conflict is as much a battle for control of the Palestinian cause as it is an opportunity to attack Israel.

                      Hamas rockets target Jerusalem

For months Israeli security officials have warned that Hamas has been building stockpiles of missiles in Gaza in anticipation of renewed hostilities. The most sophisticated, manufactured locally, are based on medium-range Iranian systems, enabling Hamas to strike targets in major Israeli population centers and even as far as Eilat. 

This latest upsurge in Palestinian-Israeli violence is also due in no small measure to the obscure messages emanating from Washington about the US administration’s stance on the Middle East.  President Joe Biden certainly wants an end to the conflict, but he has been anything but clear about where he stands on the achievement of his predecessor, Donald Trump, in fostering Arab-Israeli peace.  Biden has so far shown little interest in maintaining the momentum of the Abraham Accords.  On the contrary, he has shown considerable enthusiasm for reopening dialogue with Iran and reviving the controversial nuclear deal.  The Abraham Accords are founded in part on a common Arab-Israeli desire to counter Iranian attempts to dominate the Middle East and overthrow both Sunni Muslim states and Israel.

Biden’s present position gives comfort to Israel’s enemies.  Middle East players interested in peace rather than eternal conflict need a display of strong US leadership, unequivocally opposed both to violence and to those states that foster it in pursuit of long-term goals of their own.  Is Biden prepared to provide this? 

These are the factors that have come together to provide the fuel for the current conflagration.  A desire to attack Israel in pursuit of a long-term aim of overthrowing the state is certainly among them, although by itself it is usually insufficient to spark conflict.  On this occasion it is strengthened by Islamist opposition to the recent Arab-Israeli reconciliation in the Abraham Accords, by the opportunity to seize control of the Palestinian cause from a clearly weakened PA leader, by the frustration of Hamas’s political ambitions because of the cancellation of the Palestinian elections, by ambiguous signals from the Biden administration tied to its desire to reopen the nuclear deal with Iran, and by convenient opportunities to whip up Palestinian anger provided by Israeli attempts to control protests on the Temple Mount and Sheikh Jarrah. 

In addition the Islamist axis has gained two unsought-for bonuses: the Arab-Jewish riots in Lod and elsewhere between extremist hotheads, and the collapse of the possibility of the United Arab List (Ra’am) joining a coalition Israeli government.

Can diplomacy and reason succeed in damping down the flames before they burst into all-out war?


Published in the Jerusalem Post, 18 May 2021, and in the Jerusalem Post on-line under the title: "Temple Mount, Sheikh Jarrah only smoke screens for Hamas's real incentive":
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hamas-why-now-668355

Published in the Eurasia Review, 15 May 2014:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/14052021-hamas-why-now-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 14 May 2021:
https://mpc-journal.org/hamas-why-now/

Published in the Jewish Business News, 14 May 2021:
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2021/05/14/hamas-why-now/

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

 

J-TV – the global Jewish TV channel based in Britain

            Back in 2015 Oliver Anisfeld was an undergraduate reading history at University College, London (UCL).  Had he chosen, he could have had an assured future in the old-established family firm, H Forman and Son, headed by his father, the great grandson of its founder.  At one time, when London’s East End was home to hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, you had only to mention the name Forman, and everyone knew you were talking smoked salmon.  By 2015 the firm had expanded into an impressive nationwide enterprise with headquarters in the aptly named Fish Island, an area of east London adjacent to the River Lea.

            However, the heir presumptive to the Forman enterprise had other ideas.  Concerned at what he saw as apathy among young Jews about their Jewish identity, he dreamed a dream.  He conceived the idea of a new, high quality, online global Jewish media channel – a rich and vibrant source of information, thought, discussion and interchange about issues of concern to Jews the world over.  A source like this would have young Jews particularly in mind.  It would aim to inculcate, sustain and enrich their awareness of their cultural heritage.

Ideas are ten a penny; it takes special qualities of imagination, persistence and chutzpah to bring one to fruition.  These qualities Ollie Anisfeld possesses in abundance.  He set his sights on enlisting the help of the eminent Jewish peer, Lord Kestenbaum, to help with the birth of his enterprise.  Jonathan Kestenbaum, once head of Chief Rabbi Sacks’s office, and later chief executive of the United Jewish Israel Appeal (UJIA), was known for his extensive involvement in education.

“Tell him to leave a message,” was Kestenbaum’s first reaction, when told that a young student was asking for an interview. 

“No,” Anisfeld told his secretary. “I want to talk to him.”

“Tell him to send an email,” said Kestenbaum.

But Anisfeld refused to be palmed off.  Finally Kestenbaum, impressed with his persistence, agreed to see him.

“When he told me his idea,” Kestenbaum later admitted, “I was hooked.”

Less than a year later J-TV was launched at a prestigious reception held at Portcullis House, adjacent to the Houses of Parliament.  At the ripe old age of 22, Ollie Anisfeld had become a new Jewish media mogul.

 With the aim of disseminating Jewish ideas of global relevance, J-TV posts all sorts of video podcasts across a range of subjects of Jewish interest each week.  Subject headings include, amongst others, current affairs, Jewish wisdom. Jewish philosophy, entertainment, mental health, modern and ancient Jewish history.  Over the years Anisfeld has brought scores of politicians, academics, religious leaders, and thinkers to his studio to air their views or to be cross-questioned about them.  J-TV has never flinched from controversy, challenging personalities such as Norman Finkelstein, Baroness Tonge, Ben Shapiro and Shami Chakrabati to justify positions they had taken on issues of Jewish concern.

Anisfeld says that over the years he has learned some of the techniques necessary to grab and hold a social media audience.  A video must be fast-moving, but it should appeal as much to the emotions as to the eye.  To hold the attention it needs to be slick and graphic.  Above all, it must be entertaining.  I asked Anisfeld for an example, and he quoted J-TV’s Purim fest of a few years back, when he engaged a professional Donald Trump impersonator.  It proved to be an outstandingly popular video.

Over the five years of its existence J-TV has built up a regular global audience of some 250,000, though some videos have registered a million or more viewings.  The channel finds its largest audience in the US. with the UK a good second, followed by Israel, South Africa, Canada and Australia.

J-TV is an on-line video streaming channel, using YouTube as its main platform.  I asked Anisfeld whether he had been tempted to provide a fully-fledged TV service, but he said that he had favored the internet and popular social media from the start – he’d had no desire to launch his own website to carry his content.  His idea was to make access for his audience as easy as possible, and he believes that on-line provision from the well-established social media platforms is the key to reaching the younger audience who are his main target.  Being streamed online, J-TV can be watched anywhere and at any time.

                       Anisfeld interviews Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis

Anisfeld has succeeded in extending his audience to include a fair proportion of non-Jews – some 30 percent is his estimate. One ambition is, while expanding his existing devotees, to reach out to a non-Jewish audience and engage their interest.  He believes that the current upsurge of antisemitism in the West is based in fair measure on lack of knowledge and frank misapprehensions about Jews and Judaism.  In particular, he believes that some of the social  pressure placed on University Jewish societies, on both American and British campuses, could be countered by the dissemination of well-based media content aimed at people who are open to reason.

In this aim, Anisfeld told me, he would welcome input from people willing to contribute to his growing operation.  He wants to encourage creative video material and genuine emotional involvement with J-TV.  The enterprise has a long way to travel. Ollie Anisfeld is seeking help to achieve its worthy ideals.

When we were last in touch, he had this to say: "You said I didn't go into the salmon business, but I would beg to differ. The salmon is unique in that it swims upstream, against the tide, and that's what I've been trying to do every single day."

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 12 May 2021:

https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/j-tv-the-growing-global-jewish-tv-channel-based-in-britain-667942

Afghanistan: Has Biden Taken a Wrong Turn?

This article appears in the Jerusalem Post today, 11 May 2021

On April 14, 2021 President Joe Biden announced that he was abandoning the timetable for withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan that his predecessor, Donald Trump, had agreed with the Taliban.  He had decided that the process of withdrawal would continue, but at a slower pace.  The new deadline for its completion would be September 11, 2021 – the 20th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the United States.

The Taliban were unimpressed with Biden’s symbolic gesture.  They marked their objection to his unilateral abandonment of the earlier agreement with a surge in violence and a car bomb in Logar province which killed nearly 30 people.  Then on May 3 at least seven Afghan military personnel were killed when the Taliban set off explosives smuggled through a tunnel that the group had dug into an army outpost in southwestern Farah province. On May 6 they captured the vast Dahla Dam in Arghandab. The Afghan defense ministry says security forces have been responding to attacks by the Taliban in at least six other provinces.

   Experts say that the Taliban, despite losses estimated in the tens of thousands, is stronger now than at any point since 2001. With up to 85,000 full-time fighters, it controls twenty percent of the country.  It is this continuing power of the Taliban that is behind objections in Washington to Biden’s policy.  Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned of "huge consequences" of Biden's decision to withdraw American troops.  Her fear is that the Taliban could take over control of Afghanistan, resulting in a new civil war.

She is not alone. Many foreign policy experts in Washington, both Democrat and Republican, feel that the US should continue to deploy its military – among them Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state under President George W Bush.  She too has warned about the risks of withdrawing troops and the consequent threat of terrorism.

A possible expansion of terrorist activity also concerns retired General David Petraeus, who commanded US forces in Afghanistan and later ran the CIA.  Petraeus worries the Taliban will continue to gain ground militarily and allow terrorist groups to operate, while the US and NATO will have lost the platform that Afghanistan provides for counter-terrorism campaigns.

"I'm really afraid,” he said, “that we're going to look back two years from now and regret the decision.”

According to BBC reporters the Taliban see themselves as a government-in-waiting. They have a sophisticated "shadow" structure, with officials in charge of overseeing everyday services in the areas they control. They refer to themselves as the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan." 

   There is no escaping the truth, painful though it may be. The Taliban – the hardline Islamist organization swiftly identified by US intelligence in the wake of the 9/11 attack as linked to al-Qaeda and shielding its leader, Osama bin Lada – has emerged unvanquished, if not unscathed, from its twenty-year struggle with America and its allies.  The group has withstood counter-insurgency operations from three US administrations backed by NATO in a war that has killed more than 6,000 US troops and contractors, over 1,100 NATO soldiers, and an estimated 73,000 Afghan fighters and police officers.

Back in 2001 it took Washington less than a week to determine the source of the deadly terrorist attack it had sustained, and on September 18, 2001 then President George W Bush signed legislation authorizing the use of US forces against the perpetrators.  The US launched military operations in Afghanistan on October 7 by way of a series of air strikes against Taliban military sites and terrorist training grounds.

          Intensive and sustained efforts by the US, boosted in December 2009 by then President Barack Obama increasing US troop numbers to 100,000, may have weakened, but it failed to deter, the Taliban’s sustained resistance.  Their demand was for the withdrawal of all foreign troops. On June 22, 2011 Obama, maintaining "We are starting this drawdown from a position of strength," announced that 10,000 US troops would be withdrawn by the end of 2011 and an additional 23,000 by the summer of 2012.

From the moment US President Donald Trump took office in 2017, he pledged to put an end to the conflict and achieve Obama’s aim of bringing the American forces back home.  It took two years of secret back-channel negotiations before peace talks began on February 25, 2019. Abdul Ghani Barada, the co-founder of the Taliban, was at the table.

This extraordinary arrangement between the world’s leading power and a hardline extremist Islamist movement was greeted with optimism by President Trump. "I really believe the Taliban wants to do something to show we're not all wasting time," he said.

           The talks appeared successful. Agreement was quickly reached on a draft peace deal involving the withdrawal of US and international troops from Afghanistan, matched by an undertaking by the Taliban to prohibit other jihadist groups operating within the country.

          However the agreement was far from watertight, and months of wrangling followed. President Joe Biden took office with many details still unresolved – among them evidence that the Taliban was prepared to break its ongoing ties with al-Qaeda, and that it was actually prepared to enter a political arrangement with the Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani. 

Who are the Taliban? 

The group emerged following a 10-year occupation of the country by the Soviet Union.  The USSR had invaded in 1979 in an attempt to keep Afghanistan within its sphere of influence, but a decade of guerilla warfare conducted by Sunni extremists eventually led to Soviet troops withdrawing in February 1989.

A year or so later a new hardline Sunni Islamist group calling itself Taliban (“students” in the Pashto language), began to emerge.  They swiftly became a formidable military machine, and towards the end of 1996 they captured the Afghan capital, Kabul.  By 1998, the Taliban were in control of almost 90 percent of Afghanistan.

Initial support from some of the population quickly faded as the Taliban imposed hardline Islamist practices, such as amputations for those found guilty of theft, and public executions of adulterers. Television, music and cinema were banned, and girls aged 10 and over were forbidden to attend school.  Meanwhile, they continued to wage their two-handed war – against the US presence in the country on the one hand, and the Afghan government on the other. That war persists.

          The Taliban are a ruthless extremist terrorist organization hell-bent on securing control of Afghanistan.  To achieve their objective they have consistently demanded the evacuation of all foreign troops.  Biden is kindly obliging.  No wonder experienced voices in Washington and beyond are raising objections. 

Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post on-line, 11 May 2021:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/afghanistan-has-biden-taken-a-wrong-turn-opinion-667792

Published in the Jewish Business News, 7 May 2021:

https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2021/05/07/afghanistan-has-biden-taken-a-wrong-turn/

Published in the Eurasia Review, 7 May 2021:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/07052021-afghanistan-has-biden-taken-a-wrong-turn-oped/

Time for Israel to call a spade a spade

        This article appeared in the Jerusalem Post on 4 May 2021

          More than two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman empire in 1914, on the eve of World War I. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others – some 1.5 million – had been killed. Most historians describe this mass annihilation as genocide. More than 30 nations agree. Some prominent countries do not, among them Britain, Australia and Israel.

          A few years ago the UK government was asked in parliament whether it recognized the existence of genocide in Armenia in 1915. A foreign office minister responded: “The Government acknowledges the strength of feeling about this terrible episode of history and recognizes the massacres of 1915-16 as a tragedy. However neither this Government nor previous Governments have judged that the evidence is sufficiently unequivocal to persuade us that these events should be categorized as genocide as defined by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.”

          That remains the British government’s position. It used to be the position of the United States, until just a few days ago. On April 24 President Joe Biden, in a statement marking Armenian Remembrance Day, said: “We remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide, and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring.” All previous US presidents (with the exception of Ronald Reagan) had avoided using the word “genocide” to describe the Ottoman empire’s deportation and massacre of some 1.5 million Armenians.

          In 1981, President Ronald Reagan stated that "Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it - and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples - the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten."

          Biden’s words evoked an immediate reaction from Turkey, which has consistently rejected all attempts to characterize the killings as genocide. Turkey’s foreign ministry denounced Biden’s statement. A few days later Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called on Biden to “turn back from this wrong step as soon as possible.”

          The Turkish government accepts that atrocities were committed, but argues that there was no systematic attempt to destroy the Armenian people. Therefore, it argues, their mass destruction cannot be described as genocide. Turkey bases its position on the issue of premeditation – namely, the extent to which the killings were orchestrated. However the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) is clear on the matter. In a 2005 letter to Erdogan, then Turkey's prime minister, it said "the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide" was that the Armenian killings were indeed genocide.

          So far Israel has failed to align itself with this consensus. Israel’s reaction to Biden’s statement was a foreign ministry statement recognizing the “terrible suffering and tragedy of the Armenian people,” but notably failing to term it a genocide. However Yair Lapid, leader of Israel’s left-of-center party Yesh Atid, and possibly the next to be charged by the president with attempting to form a government, disagrees with this position. He declared: “I will continue to fight for Israeli recognition of the Armenian genocide. It is our moral responsibility as the Jewish state.”

          Israel’s long-standing failure to do so possibly stems from 2001, when a Turkish newspaper quoted then foreign minister Shimon Peres as saying: "We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not a genocide."

          Peres was apparently attempting to defend the uniqueness of the Holocaust experience, but there is no evidence of any attempt to describe the Armenian experience as a holocaust. Genocide, however, is defined in Article Two of the UN Convention on Genocide of December 1948 as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

          In 1908 the Young Turks, an army officers' movement, seized power in Turkey, and in 1914 entered the war on Germany's side. As the disintegrating Ottoman empire began suffering military defeats, Turkish propaganda increasingly laid the blame on the Armenians, whom it portrayed as saboteurs and a pro-Russian "fifth column" (the Russians were allied with Britain and France in the Triple Alliance). Underlying the tension was the fact that Turkey was, of course, a Muslim country, while both the Armenians and the Russians were Christian.

          In January 1915 Turkish leader Enver Pasa attempted to push the Russians back at the battle of Sarikamis, only to suffer the worst Ottoman defeat of the war. The government declared that Armenian treachery was the cause of the debacle. Armenian soldiers and other non-Muslims in the army were demobilized, and the disarmed Armenians were then murdered by Ottoman troops. At about the same time, irregular forces began carrying out mass killings in Armenian villages near the Russian border.

          Soon after the defeat at Sarikamis, the Ottoman government began to deport Armenian civilians from Eastern Anatolia on the grounds that their presence near the front lines posed a threat to national security. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1915, Armenians were rounded up and marched through the valleys and mountains of Eastern Anatolia to desert concentration camps.  Mass murder marked the deportation. Of the survivors, many starved to death, or were slaughtered in the camps.

          By the end of the war, more than 90 percent of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire were gone, and many traces of their presence had been erased. Their deserted homes and property were given to Muslim refugees, and any remaining women and children were often forced to convert to Islam.

          In both the UK and Australia there have been large-scale public protests at the failure of the government to take a firm stand on the Armenian genocide. A petition to the UK parliament in 2020 called on the government “to recognize the Armenian Genocide” – and in fact recognition is already in effect in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by way of their devolved governments.

          As for Australia, on Armenian Remembrance Day and hours before Biden’s declaration, hundreds of people rallied in Sydney and Melbourne calling for Prime Minister Scott Morrison to recognize the massacre of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman empire as a genocide.

          In Israel, except for some straight speaking in the media and the statement by Yair Lapid, there is little evidence of popular pressure on the government to acknowledge the true nature of the crimes committed by the Ottomans against the Armenian people. But genocide is genocide. Israel should call it out for what it is.

Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post on-line, 4 May 2021:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/armenian-genocide-time-for-israel-to-call-a-spade-a-spade-opinion-667112

Published in the Eurasia Review, 3 May 2021:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/03052021-time-to-call-a-spade-a-spade-oped/

Published in the Jewish Business News. 30 April 2021:

https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2021/04/30/time-to-call-a-spade-a-spade/

Reason to Believe: The controversial life of Rabbi Louis Jacobs

           Britain’s Anglo-Jewish community dates its formal birth from a declaration in 1656 by the then autocratic ruler of England, Oliver Cromwell ‒ the man who instigated and won a civil war, executed the king and established a republic with himself at its head. Anglo-Jewry’s subsequent 365-year history boasts a multitude of eminent individuals, but in all that time no more controversial a figure has arisen than Rabbi Louis Jacobs.

            The title chosen by Harry Freedman for his absorbing and insightful account of Jacobs’s life echoes that of the volume by Jacobs himself which lies at the heart of his strife-ridden public career: We Have Reason to Believe.  Jacobs’s unceasing battles with the orthodox Jewish establishment that followed its publication in 1957 are encapsulated in that title ‒ his attempt, futile in the event, to reconcile reason with belief, modern enquiring scholarship with traditional unquestioning faith. 

            Born in 1920 to a working class Jewish family in Manchester, Louis Jacobs attended orthodox yeshivot in his home city and then Gateshead, impressing his tutors with his intellectual and scholastic brilliance.  Quickly earning a double semicha (the rabbinic qualification), he moved from a period in the celebrated Munk’s synagogue in London’s Golders Green, to the enormously prestigious New West End Synagogue in the heart of London which numbered the great and the good of Anglo-Jewry among its congregation.

            The dynamite that came to be known as “The Jacobs Affair” had a long fuse.  When We Have Reason to Believe first appeared in print it attracted little comment.  Four eventful years followed until what Jacobs had written suddenly assumed toxic significance. 

The fundamental belief of traditional Judaism is Revelation ‒ that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, is the word of God, dictated direct to Moses on Mount Sinai.  In orthodox eyes, the truly pernicious assertion lodged in Jacobs’s slim volume was that Revelation need not be taken literally.  As Freedman explains, Jacobs maintained that there had never been a universally accepted view of how God’s word had been revealed nor, since the twelfth century, agreement that the entire Torah was revealed word for word to Moses.  That the Torah was the word of God Jacobs believed implicitly, but he maintained with equal vigour that it was legitimate to believe that the Almighty could have revealed the sacred text over time through a number of divinely inspired individuals.  Modern Bible scholarship indicated that this may well have occurred. In short, Torah min ha-Shamayim (Torah from Heaven) the Bible certainly was, but the route by which it reached us was open to discussion.

            In 1961 Louis Jacobs was a tutor at Jews' College, the renowned training ground for the UK’s community rabbis, a post he had accepted on the understanding that he would take over as Principal when the then head retired.  As the time approached, however, his way was blocked by Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie.  A member of the Beth Din had taken the trouble to read and ponder on what Louis Jacobs had written four years before.  Now he advised the Chief Rabbi that Jacobs’s views rendered him ineligible for the post.

            Freedman provides a spirited account of the subsequent furore. “The affair hit the national press,” he writes, and describes the storm of comment, within and outside the Jewish community, that ensued.  It ran on for months and, in a sense, persisted for the rest of Jacobs’s life. The “Jacobs Affair” shook Anglo-Jewry to its very core, and robbed Jacobs of any professional career within the auspices of the United Synagogue (US), the religious organization to which the vast majority of British Jews belonged. 

The enigma at the heart of Jacobs’s career is perhaps illustrated by the fact that nearly forty years later nothing had greatly changed.  Even though Jacobs had established his own synagogue, the New London, and a few congregations had broken away and followed him, the US still dominated the Jewish religious scene.  In 2005 the Jewish Chronicle, the UK’s old-established and leading Jewish journal, ran an extended campaign to discover whom the Anglo-Jewish community regarded as “the greatest British Jew”.  A long list of names was whittled down to just a few, and in the final vote the winner, beating Moses Montefiore, was Rabbi Louis Jacobs ‒ the man denounced as a heretic and spurned by the Jewish orthodox establishment. Yet at the age of 85 he was lauded by Anglo-Jewry and regarded by most as “the best Chief Rabbi we never had.”

Freedman quotes the Jewish Chronicle’s renowned commentator, Chaim Bermant:  “Anglo-Jewry is very English, and the controversy died down long before everyone was quite sure what it was about.”  In the final analysis it was about the impossibility that Jacobs found in reconciling the results of unimpeachable scholarship with the unquestioning adherence to faith-based beliefs demanded by orthodoxy ‒ an exercise that the majority of Anglo-Jewry clearly did not find over-burdensome to their consciences.  So while he was universally hailed as an outstanding theologian, preacher, teacher and spiritual guide, only comparatively few followed Jacobs out of the old-established US into his independent synagogue and eventually his breakaway Masorti movement.

Reason to Believe is eminently readable as an account of Louis Jacobs’s life with all its triumphs and disasters, yet Freedman’s greater achievement is the clarity he brings to Jacobs’s profoundly-held beliefs.  Embedded within the details of his life, Freedman traces the development of his convictions, illustrating their origins and illuminating the often unfamiliar and profound religious and scholastic issues that engaged Jacobs’s attention for so much of his life.  Reason to Believe is highly recommended.