8 January, 1918: President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points
President Woodrow
Wilson's Fourteen Points
8
January, 1918 :
President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points
It will be our wish and
purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely
open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings
of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day
of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and
likely at some un-looked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is this
happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not
still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every
nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to
avow nor or at any other time the objects it has in view.
We entered this war
because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made
the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world
secure once for all against their recurrence. What we demand in this war,
therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit
and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every
peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine
its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other
peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples
of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we
see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to
us. The program of the world's peace, therefore, is our program; and that
program, the only possible program, as we see it, is this:
I. Open covenants of
peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international
understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in
the public view.
II. Absolute freedom
of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in
war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international
action for the enforcement of international covenants.
III. The removal, so
far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality
of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and
associating themselves for its maintenance.
IV. Adequate
guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the
lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
V. A free,
open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based
upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such
questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have
equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be
determined.
VI. The evacuation of
all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia
as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the
world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the
independent determination of her own political development and national policy
and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under
institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of
every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia
VII. Belgium, the whole
world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit
the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No
other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the
nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the
government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the
whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.
VIII. All French
territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done
to France Prussia
IX. A readjustment of
the frontiers of Italy
X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary
XI. Romania, Serbia,
and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia
accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several
Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically
established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees
of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the
several Balkan states should be entered into.
XII. The Turkish
portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty,
but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured
an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of
autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a
free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international
guarantees.
XIII. An independent
Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited
by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure
access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and
territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.
XIV. A general
association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose
of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial
integrity to great and small states alike.
In regard to these
essential rectifications of wrong and assertions of right we feel ourselves to
be intimate partners of all the governments and peoples associated together
against the Imperialists. We cannot be separated in interest or divided in
purpose. We stand together until the end.
For such arrangements
and covenants we are willing to fight and to continue to fight until they are
achieved; but only because we wish the right to prevail and desire a just and
stable peace such as can be secured only by removing the chief provocations to
war, which this program does remove. We have no jealousy of German greatness,
and there is nothing in this program that impairs it. We grudge her no
achievement or distinction of learning or of pacific enterprise such as have
made her record very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to injure her or
to block in any way her legitimate influence or power. We do not wish to fight
her either with arms or with hostile arrangements of trade if she is willing to
associate herself with us and the other peace- loving nations of the world in
covenants of justice and law and fair dealing. We wish her only to accept a
place of equality among the peoples of the world, -- the new world in which we
now live, -- instead of a place of mastery.
President Woodrow Wilsons 14 Points (1918)
In this January 8, 1918, speech on War Aims and Peace Terms, President Wilson set down 14 points as a blueprint for world peace that was to be used for peace negotiations after World War I. The details of the speech were based on reports generated by “The Inquiry,” a group of about 150 political and social scientists organized by Wilson’s adviser and long-time friend, Col. Edward M House. Their job was to study Allied and American policy in virtually every region of the globe and analyze economic, social, and political facts likely to come up in discussions during the peace conference. The team began its work in secret and in the end produced and collected nearly 2,000 separate reports and documents plus at least 1,200 maps.
In the speech, Wilson directly addressed what he perceived as the causes for the world war by calling for the abolition of secret treaties, a reduction in armaments, an adjustment in colonial claims in the interests of both native peoples and colonists, and freedom of the seas. Wilson also made proposals that would ensure world peace in the future. For example, he proposed the removal of economic barriers between nations, the promise of “self-determination” for those oppressed minorities, and a world organization that would provide a system of collective security for all nations. Wilson’s 14 Points were designed to undermine the Central Powers’ will to continue and to inspire the Allies to victory. The 14 Points were broadcast throughout the world and were showered from rockets and shells behind the enemy’s lines.
When the Allies met in Versailles to formulate the treaty to end World War I with Germany and Austria-Hungary, most of Wilson’s 14 Points were scuttled by the leaders of England and France. To his dismay, Wilson discovered that England, France, and Italy were mostly interested in regaining what they had lost and gaining more by punishing Germany. Germany quickly found out that Wilson’s blueprint for world peace would not apply to them. However, Wilson’s capstone point calling for a world organization that would provide some system of collective security was incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles. This organization would later be known as the League of Nations. Though Wilson launched a tireless missionary campaign to overcome opposition in the U.S. Senate to the adoption of the treaty and membership in the League, the treaty was never adopted by the Senate, and the United States never joined the League of Nations. Wilson would later suggest that without American participation in the League, there would be another world war within a generation.
ReplyDeleteWe need to publicize the idea that Jewish control of Israel's holiest site, the Temple Mount (the Har HaBayit) on which stood the Beit HaMikdash, is a precondition of uncontested Jewish control of an undivided Jerusalem and the vivid restoration of Jewish national honor as well as the sanctification of God's Name. Once Jews maintain unequivocal control of the Temple Mount, a serious movement can be initiated among Christian in the United States to move the American embassy to Jerusalem — which would produce a salutary shock wave across the world.
2. Conversely, so long as the Muslim Authority (the Wakf) controls and desecrates the Temple Mount, the nations will despise Israel and kowtow to the Arab-Islamic world. Muslim desecration of the Temple Mount not only exposes Jewish weakness, but increases Muslim arrogance and incites Islamic violence everywhere.
3. Jewish spiritual revival of the Temple Mount would not only be the pinnacle of a Jewish restoration of Jerusalem; it would also inflict a lethal blow on the ambitions of Muslims, who regard Jerusalem is the key to their global ambitions.
4. The Wakf has long been violating the Law of Antiquities and the Law of Planning. The Muslims are erasing all historical evidence of Jewish presence on the Temple Mount. The Netanyahu Government knows this and has cravenly said they have no intention of interfering.
5. Of course, exclusive Jewish control of the Temple Mount is inseparable to Israel's control of Judea and Samaria. (See below, point 14.)
6. To show that the Temple Mount is the key to the world-historical function of the Jewish people prescribed in the Tenach, I shall now quote various passages from Joshua Berman's book, The Temple.
7. The Temple, he writes, represents "the spiritual center of the country. Here, at the site where God's presence is most manifest, the representatives of the Jewish people execute commandments and rites that symbolize the service of the nation as a whole."
8. It should also be noted that any non-Jew, so long as he adheres to the Seven Noahide Laws of Universal Morality, can bring certain "sacrifices" to the Temple, which acknowledges God's sovereignty over mankind.
9. The Temple — "a house for God's Name" — symbolizes "a public declaration of God's sovereignty. The ambition of declaring God's sovereignty in the world, which was initiated by Abraham, is the calling of the Jewish people."
10. Berman goes on to say: "God's acclaim in the world is a direct function of how Israel is perceived [by the nations]." Israel must become a great country. "A great country should possess political stability at home and should be at peace with its neighbors. It should possess a strong economy and should be home to a culture that boasts strong [moral and intellectual] virtues." Israel did not become such a nation until the reign of King David, and it was left to his son Solomon to build the (first) Temple. All nations then flocked to Jerusalem, which was recognized not only as the City of Peace but the City of Truth.
11. "The function of the Temple as a symbol for God's acclaim in the world reaches its apex with the visit of the queen of Sheba to Solomon's court" — Solomon, the wisest of kings. Ponder, therefore, these verses of Isaiah 2:1-3: "And many nations will go and cry, 'Let us go up the to mountain of God's house, to the house of the Lord of Jacob, and we will learn from His ways and walk in His paths, for out of Zion goes forth the Torah and the word of God from Jerusalem.'"
12. Now let us consider Rabbi Chaim Richman's essay, "A Third Jewish Temple" (May 18, 2000), where he says: "People assume those who are interested in the Temple are radical elements opposed to peace." Alluding to the era of King Solomon, Rabbi Richman points out that the Temple Mount represents "the hallmark of the greatest era known to man.... This place has been sanctified by God from the beginning of time.... Here Jacob laid his head. Here Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac.... Of the 613 commandments in the Torah, 113 of them depend on the existence of a Jewish Temple. We have not received a cancellation order for any of the commandments issued at Mount Sinai."
ReplyDelete13. Public opinion must therefore be educated about the Temple, about its significance in Judaism. Obviously, the Netanyahu Government, steeped in timidity and intellectual stagnation, will not do this. This Government doesn't really represent the Jewish people. At least 25% of Israel's Jewish population is religious, and at least 50% is traditional. The Jewish people were not consulted when, Netanyahu, without Knesset or public discussion, endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, Israel's heartland. There is no reason to believe, therefore, that this orator with a golden tongue and clay feet will stand firm on the issue of Jerusalem and the Har HaBayit.
14. Hence, a Jerusalem Movement involving a network of cells across the nation should be initiated by Jewish youth and venerable rabbis. Their proclaimed purpose is to preserve the integrity of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount now being sullied by Muslims. Weekly demonstrations will be necessary. Eminent speakers should be called upon to denounce Netanyahu's policy of moral equivalence regarding Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land — an insult to Jewish intelligence, as well as to countless Christians who are grateful for Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem, knowing that by this alone will they be welcomed in the Holy City.
STATUS QUO? 'JEWS PRAYED ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT FOR CENTURIES'
ReplyDeleteBy Hillel Fendel
Exploring the history and meaning of the 'status quo' on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
PART 1: ORIGINS OF THE HOTLY-CONTESTED 'STATUS QUO' AT JUDAISM'S HOLIEST SITE
'Status Quo'? Arab rioters on the Temple Mount
Though "maintaining the status quo" on the Temple Mount seems to be a universal goal, no one is quite sure what it is. Those who believe it means that Jews must not pray there should take note that the late Rabbi Shlomo Goren, Chief Rabbi of the IDF and later of Israel, wrote that Jews prayed there for "hundreds of years" up until three centuries ago.
When Israeli, American and other diplomats and statesmen speak of maintaining the status quo, they generally mean that Muslims must be allowed free entry for worship or leisure, while Jews must continue to be restricted in their access. Jews, according to this definition of the "status quo," must be prevented from entering in large groups, or at other than several specified daily hours — and from praying at the site altogether.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other Cabinet ministers have repeatedly stated of late that there will be no change in the status quo. They have made this clear to Jordan's King Abdullah, the European Union's new foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini,[1] and others.
However, this 'status quo' under which Jews do not pray on the Temple Mount actually came into effect only relatively recently. As recently noted by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed[2] in BeSheva, Rabbi Goren, who blew a shofar at the site upon its liberation during the Six Day War in 1967, wrote in his work "The Temple Mount" that "Jewish prayer at the Western Wall began only in the 16th century; prior to that, Jews prayed for centuries on the Temple Mount."
Rabbi Goren, a Temple Mount expert, notes that, based on the renowned Radbaz — the 16th century Rabbi David Ben Shlomo Ibn Zimra, whose rulings form the basis of much of accepted Halakhah — and others, "it is clear that after the Amoraim and Geonim [i.e., after the year 1038], the general custom followed the opinion that there was no reason to forbid entry to the Holy Site in its destruction, as the Meiri writes... This is true even when there was no Red Heifer for purification... This practice cannot be attributed to lack of knowledge; it is not reasonable to assume that Jews prayed for centuries at the site of the Holy Temple without anyone mentioning that this involves a grave prohibition, punishable by karet."
Of course, the custom gradually changed. The Muslims banned the Jews from entering the holy site, and their "holiest site" gradually came to be the Western Wall — which was actually just a supporting wall of the Temple Mount. "When the Medrash states that the Divine Presence never left the Western Wall," Rabbi Goren writes, "it does not refer to this wall, but rather to the western wall of the Temple courtyard or of the sanctuary."
ReplyDeleteRabbi Goren writes that he himself was "bound up in chords of love for the [present-day] Western Wall, where I used to pray every Sabbath and holiday," and that this prevented him from acting immediately after the Six Day War to institute Jewish entry to the Temple Mount. However, "the voice of our cry [in Psalms], 'Who will ascend to the mountain of G-d?', aroused me to take strength and clarify the matter of visiting the Temple Mount." This he did by assigning the IDF's Engineering Corps to map out the exact measurements of the Mount, and consulting Rabbinic and other texts to clarify the precise location of the Holy of Holies and other forbidden areas.
Rabbi Goren attempted to arrange prayer services on the Temple Mount, but was stopped from doing so by then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.
In any event, the 'status quo' in previous centuries included Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. After 1967, a new 'status quo' was instituted — one that barely resembles the situation of today.
PART 2: RECENT HISTORY OF THE 'STATUS QUO' AT JUDAISM'S HOLIEST SITE
The Kotel, The Western Wall
It is very popular to demand nowadays that Israel "maintain the status quo" on the Temple Mount — but barely anyone can say exactly what that 'status quo' is. In fact, the rules instituted for prayer rights on the Mount immediately after the Six Day War barely resemble those in place today.
It must be stated at the outset that after the Six Day War, control of the Temple Mount was granted to the Muslim Waqf by none other than then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. A very controversial personality in modern Israeli history, Dayan was credited with much of the responsibility for Israel's miraculous victory at the time — and was blamed for much of what happened during the Yom Kippur War six years later.
Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, Rabbi of the town of Har Brachah and Dean of its Yeshiva, wrote this week[3] in B'Sheva, "For years, it has been known that there were two sides to Moshe Dayan; darkness and light served together. On the one hand, he was a true Israeli war hero, and on the other hand, he was an adulterer and a thief [of archaeological artifacts — HF]. Apparently, the latter traits tipped the scales against him. [After 1967] he began to lose his public stature; his name will be remembered in infamy."
After Dayan had the Israeli flag removed from the Temple Mount after the Six Day War, he put in place the following arrangements (based on a list compiled by Jerusalem expert and historian Nadav Shragai):
The Waqf, a Jordanian-Muslim religious body, would continue to manage the site.
Jews would be permitted to visit the Temple Mount, but forbidden to pray there.
Israel's police would maintain law and order in the sacred compound.
Israeli sovereignty and law would be applied to the Temple Mount, as to the other parts of Jerusalem.
Shortly afterwards, it was also decided that Jews and other non-Muslims would enter the Mount only via the Mughrabi Gate, located at the center of the Western Wall. It also later became prohibited to unfurl any flag on the Mount.
"In retrospect," Shragai sums up, echoing the sentiments of many Jews around the country and the world, "the concession Dayan made in the name of the Jewish People was indeed immense, colossal, almost inconceivable. The Jewish State entrusted its holiest place to a competing religion — the Muslim religion, for which the place is only the third in holiness, and gave up the right to pray there."
ReplyDeleteAt that time, Jewish protest against the regulations was minimal, for the Jewish public was excited at the prospect of being able to pray at the Western Wall — a supporting wall of the Temple Mount. In addition, virtually all rabbis ruled in accordance with long-standing tradition - and long-standing ignorance of the exact locations of the Halakhically-forbidden areas on the Mount - that entry to the Temple Mount was forbidden.
Today, over 40 years later, the above 'status quo' is no longer in effect. For one thing, religious Jews now clamor to be allowed in — as the boundaries of the permitted locations have become well-known. In addition, they fear the loss of Israeli sovereignty there, and are convinced that their frequent visits to the site will prevent this.
Under the original arrangements, Jews were freely allowed to visit the Mount — but today, such visits are often restricted. They may ascend to the holy site only five days a week, for three hours in the morning and one in the afternoon. Even these few hours are often removed from the Jewish itinerary when Arab incitement and unrest portends violence in the area.
Religious Jews may visit only in small groups; visitors are often forced to wait for hours until those in front of them in line have completed their visits. Even then, they frequently are not allowed in.
In addition, the prohibition on raising flags on the Temple Mount is enforced only in the case of Israeli flags, but not when Hamas or Palestinian Authority flags are unfurled.
When Knesset Members and other public figures such as Temple Mount activist Yehuda Glick (still recovering from the critical wounds he suffered in a near-fatal Palestinian assassination attempt) call for Jewish prayer rights at Judaism's holiest site, they are often accused of trying to change the 'status quo.' Their critics should be reminded that the 'status quo' has already been changed very heavily — to the exclusive detriment of Jewish would-be worshipers.
PART 3: STATUS QUO? THE DOME OF THE ROCK WAS BUILT FOR JEWS
ReplyDeleteThe Dome of the Rock (Israel news photo: Flash 90)
Parts I and II have shown that the "status quo" on the Temple Mount is not quite all it's been hyped up to be. It certainly is not an all-out ban on Jewish prayer on the holiest site to the Jewish People — because for hundreds of years, up until possibly 300 years ago, it was frequently used for just that purpose. Jews visited the Mount often and prayed there regularly.
On the other hand, if the "status quo" refers to the arrangements put in place after the Six Day War in 1967, they have long been changed — and to the detriment of Jewish rights there. It is ostensibly illogical to demand retaining the "status quo" to forbid Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, while changing the "status quo" in order to much more severely restrict Jewish visitation rights.
In any event, latest research regarding the construction of the Dome of the Rock — the magnificent structure that stands atop the site of the Holy of Holies — shows that it was originally built not for Muslims at all. Rather, it was built for the Jewish People!
We herewith present the sources for this novel concept. The late Rabbi Shlomo Goren, a Temple Mount expert and Chief Rabbi of the IDF and later of Israel, wrote in his classic work "The Temple Mount" (Ha'Idra Rabba Publications, Jerusalem, 2005, 2nd ed., p. 327) as follows:
"The Al-Aksa Mosque [at the southern end of the Mount, opposite the Dome of the Rock — HF] was built as a Muslim house of prayer outside the boundaries of the original Temple Mount, and therefore it points southward towards Mecca. And at the request of the Jews, Omar built the Dome of the Rock sanctuary to serve as a house of prayer for the Jews. This was after the Jews showed him the site where the Holy Temple had stood — and it does not point to Mecca."
Rabbi Goren clearly delineates between the two buildings: One is in the direction of the holy Muslim city of Mecca, and is to serve as a mosque — while the other was built without regard to Mecca, and only at the guidance and request of the Jews.
Rabbi Goren did not list all of his sources, but most certainly one of them was the Byzantine historian Theophanes. In the year 635, he wrote a Greek work entitled Chronographia, an English translation of which was published in Bonn in 1839. The famed English historian Guy Le Strange cited the following relevant passage from the translation in his 1890 work History of Jerusalem Under the Moslems, p.11:
"In this year [635 C.E.], Omar began to restore the Temple at Jerusalem, for the building, in truth, no longer then stood firmly founded, but had fallen to ruin. Now when Omar inquired the cause, the Jews answered saying, 'Unless thou throw down the Cross, which stands on the Mt. of Olives, the building of the Temple will never be firmly founded.' Thereupon Omar threw down the Cross at that place, in order that the building (of the Temple) might be made firm..."
Le Strange underlines the trustworthiness of this amazing report by emphasizing that the author, Theophanes, preceded the earliest Arab authorities on this topic by more than 50 years. He further highlights that Theophanes lived "considerably under a century and a half [after] the date of Omar's conquest of Jerusalem."
It is thus to be seen, based on apparently the earliest account of the building of the Dome of the Rock, that it was built not for Moslems, but for Jews, and was even supposed to be a "more firmly founded" version of the Holy Temple.
How ironic it is that this is the true background of the building that now symbolizes, throughout the world, Moslem control of Judaism's holiest site — and the ban on Jewish prayer there.
ReplyDeleteWhen next is heard a call to return to the "status quo" on the Temple Mount, let it be clear that this means nothing less than full Jewish prayer rights at the holy site — and possibly even much more.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Footnotes
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federica_Mogherini
[2] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15980
[3] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15980#.VGnejfmUc6U
THE MEDIA AND POLITICAL PROPAGANDA
ReplyDeleteThe media are everywhere in Israel and the Territories, but the reporters and camera men see only what they want to see and hear only what they want to hear. They are susceptible to Arab hoaxes and indifferent to truth spoken by Jews. They are advocates for the Arabs, whose cause justifies all. And oddly enough, instead of feeling guilty about corrupting the advertised standards of their guilds, they are satisfied that they are doing the politically correct thing to do — vilifying the Jews.
THE IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF MEDIA BIAS AGAINST ISRAEL
ReplyDeleteby Matti Friedman
On 26 January 2015 the former AP reporter Matti Friedman delivered the keynote speech at BICOM's annual dinner in London. Expanding on a widely-noted argument first set out in Tablet and The Atlantic, Friedman spoke about how the media dissect and magnify Israel's flaws while purposely erasing those of its enemies. He spoke about a fashionable and extravagant disgust for Israel among many in the West, and the rise of a 'cult of the Occupation' which positions Jewish arrogance and perfidy at the heart of all the problems of the Middle East.
One night several years ago, I came out of Bethlehem after a reporting assignment and crossed through the Israeli military checkpoint between that city and its neighbour, Jerusalem, where I live. With me were perhaps a dozen Palestinian men, mostly in their 30s — my age. No soldiers were visible at the entrance to the checkpoint, a precaution against suicide bombers. We saw only steel and concrete. I followed the other men through a metal detector into a stark corridor and followed instructions barked from a loudspeaker — 'Remove your belt!' 'Lift up your shirt!' The voice belonged to a soldier watching us on a closed-circuit camera. Exiting the checkpoint, adjusting my belt and clothing with the others, I felt like a being less than entirely human and understood, not for the first time, how a feeling like that would provoke someone to violence.
Consumers of news will recognise this scene as belonging to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which keeps the 2.5 million Palestinians in that territory under military rule, and has since 1967. The facts of this situation aren't much in question. This should be an issue of concern to Israelis, whose democracy, military, and society are corroded by the inequality in the West Bank. This, too, isn't much in question.
The question we must ask, as observers of the world, is why this conflict has come over time to draw more attention than any other, and why it is presented as it is. How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 per cent of the world's surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other? We must ask how Israelis and Palestinians have become the stylised symbol of conflict, of strong and weak, the parallel bars upon which the intellectual Olympians of the West perform their tricks — not Turks and Kurds, not Han Chinese and Tibetans, not British soldiers and Iraqi Muslims, not Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Christians, not Saudi sheikhs and Saudi women, not Indians and Kashmiris, not drug cartel thugs and Mexican villagers. Questioning why this is the case is in no way an attempt to evade or obscure reality, which is why I opened with the checkpoint leading from Bethlehem. On the contrary — anyone seeking a full understanding of reality can't avoid this question. My experiences as a journalist provide part of the answer, and also raise pressing questions that go beyond the practice of journalism.
I have been writing from and about Israel for most of the past 20 years, since I moved there from Toronto at age 17. During the five and a half years I spent as part of the international press corps as a reporter for the American news agency The Associated Press (AP), between 2006 and 2011, I gradually began to be aware of certain malfunctions in the coverage of the Israel story — recurring omissions, recurring inflations, decisions made according to considerations that were not journalistic but political, all in the context of a story staffed and reported more than any other international story on earth. When I worked in the AP's Jerusalem bureau, the Israel story was covered by more AP news staff than China, or India, or all of the 50-odd countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. This is representative of the industry as a whole.
ReplyDeleteIn early 2009, to give one fairly routine example of an editorial decision of the kind I mean, I was instructed by my superiors to report a second-hand story taken from an Israeli newspaper about offensive t-shirts supposedly worn by Israeli soldiers. We had no confirmation of our own of the story's veracity, and one doesn't see much coverage of things US Marines or British infantrymen have tattooed on their chests or arms. And yet t-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers were newsworthy in the eyes of one of the world's most powerful news organisations. This was because we sought to hint or say outright that Israeli soldiers were war criminals, and every detail supporting that portrayal was to be seized upon. Much of the international press corps covered the t-shirt story. At around the same time, several Israeli soldiers were quoted anonymously in a school newsletter speaking of abuses they had supposedly witnessed while fighting in Gaza; we wrote no fewer than three separate stories about this, although the use of sources whose identity isn't known to reporters is banned for good reason by the AP's own in-house rules. This story, too, was very much one that we wanted to tell. By the time the soldiers came forward to say they hadn't actually witnessed the events they supposedly described, and were trying to make a point to young students about the horrors and moral challenges of warfare, it was, of course, too late.
Also in those same months, in early 2009, two reporters in our bureau obtained details of a peace offer made by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, to the Palestinians several months before, and deemed by the Palestinians to be insufficient. The offer proposed a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in a shared Jerusalem. This should have been one of the year's biggest stories. But an Israeli peace offer and its rejection by the Palestinians didn't suit our story. The bureau chief ordered both reporters to ignore the Olmert offer, and they did, despite a furious protest from one of them, who later termed this decision 'the biggest fiasco I've seen in 50 years of journalism.' But it was very much in keeping not only with the practice at the AP, but in the press corps in general. Soldiers's vile t-shirts were worth a story. Anonymous and unverifiable testimonies of abuses were worth three. A peace proposal from the Israeli prime minister to the Palestinian president was not to be reported at all.
Vandalism of Palestinian property is a story. Neo-Nazi rallies at Palestinian universities or in Palestinian cities are not — I saw images of such rallies suppressed on more than one occasion. Jewish hatred of Arabs is a story. Arab hatred of Jews is not. Our policy, for example, was not to mention the assertion in the Hamas founding charter that Jews were responsible for engineering both world wars and the Russian and French revolutions, despite the obvious insight this provides into the thinking of one of the most influential actors in the conflict.
ReplyDelete100 houses in a West Bank settlement are a story. 100 rockets smuggled into Gaza are not. The Hamas military build-up amid and under the civilian population of Gaza is not a story. But Israeli military action responding to that threat — that is a story, as we all saw this summer. Israel's responsibility for the deaths of civilians as a result — that's a story. Hamas's responsibility for those deaths is not. Any reporter from the international press corps in Israel, whether he or she works for the AP, Reuters, CNN, the BBC, or elsewhere, will recognise the examples I've cited here of what is newsworthy and what is not as standard operating procedure.
In my time in the press corps I saw, from the inside, how Israel's flaws were dissected and magnified, while the flaws of its enemies were purposely erased. I saw how the threats facing Israel were disregarded or even mocked as figments of the Israeli imagination, even as these threats repeatedly materialised. I saw how a fictional image of Israel and of its enemies was manufactured, polished, and propagated to devastating effect by inflating certain details, ignoring others, and presenting the result as an accurate picture of reality. Lest we think this is something that has never happened before, we might remember Orwell's observation about journalism from the Spanish Civil War: 'Early in life,' he wrote, 'I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. (...) I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various "party lines."' That was in 1942.
Over time, I came to understand that the malfunctions I was witnessing, and in which I was playing a part, were not limited to the AP. I saw that they were rather part of a broader problem in the way the press functioned, and in how it saw its job. The international press in Israel had become less an observer of the conflict than a player in it. It had moved away from careful explanation and toward a kind of political character assassination on behalf of the side it identified as being right. It valued a kind of ideological uniformity from which you were not allowed to stray. So having begun with limited criticism of certain editorial decisions, I now found myself with a broad critique of the press.
Eventually, however, I realised that even the press wasn't the whole story. The press was playing a key role in an intellectual phenomenon taking root in the West, but it wasn't the cause, or not the only cause — it was both blown on a certain course by the prevailing ideological winds, and causing those winds to blow with greater force. Many journalists would like you to believe that the news is created by a kind of algorithm — that it's a mechanical, even scientific process in which events are inserted, processed, and presented. But of course the news is an imperfect and entirely human affair, the result of interactions between sources, reporters, and editors, all of whom bear the baggage of their background and who reflect, as we all do to some extent, the prejudices of their peers.
In the aftermath of last summer's Gaza war, and in light of events in Europe in recent months, it should be clear that something deep and toxic is going on. Understanding what that is, it seems to me, will help us understand something important not only about journalism but about the Western mind and the way it sees the world.
ReplyDeleteWhat presents itself as political criticism, as analysis, or as journalism, is coming to sound more and more like a new version of a much older complaint — that Jews are troublemakers, a negative force in world events, and that if these people, as a collective, could somehow be made to vanish, we would all be better off. This is, or should be, a cause for alarm, and not only among people sympathetic to Israel or concerned with Jewish affairs. What is in play right now has less to do with the world of politics than with the worlds of psychology and religion, and less to do with Israel than with those condemning Israel.
The occupation of the West Bank, with which I opened, would seem to be at the heart of the story, the root cause, as it were, of the conflict portrayed as the most important on earth. A few words, then, about this occupation.
The occupation was created in the 1967 Mideast War. The occupation is not the conflict, which of course predates the occupation. It is a symptom of the conflict, a conflict that would remain even if the symptom were somehow solved. If we look at the West Bank, the only Palestinian area currently occupied by Israel, and if we include Jerusalem, we see that the conflict in these areas claimed 60 lives last year — Palestinian and Israeli.
An end to this occupation would free Palestinians from Israeli rule, and free Israelis from ruling people who do not wish to be ruled. Observers of the Middle East in 2015 understand, too, that an end to the occupation will create a power vacuum that will be filled, as all power vacuums in the region have been, not by the forces of democracy and modernity, which in our region range from weak to negligible, but by the powerful and ruthless, by the extremists. This is what we've learned from the unravelling of the Middle East in recent years. This is what happened in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, and before that in Gaza and southern Lebanon. My home in Jerusalem is within an easy day's drive of both Aleppo and Baghdad. Creating a new playground for these forces will bring the black-masked soldiers of radical Islam within yards of Israeli homes with mortars, rockets, and tunnelling implements. Many thousands will die.
Beyond the obvious threat to Palestinian Christians, women, gays, and liberals, who will be the first to suffer, this threatens to render much or all of Israel unliveable, ending the only safe progressive space in the Middle East, the only secure minority refuge in the Middle East, and the only Jewish country on earth. No international investment or guarantees, no Western-backed government or Western-trained military will be able to keep that from happening, as we have just seen in Iraq. The world will greet this outcome with sincere expressions of sympathy. Only several years ago I, like many on the left, might have dismissed this as an apocalyptic scenario. It isn't. It is the most likely scenario.
ReplyDeletePeople observing this conflict from afar have been led to believe that Israel faces a simple choice between occupation and peace. That choice is fiction. The Palestinian choice, it is said, is between Israeli occupation and an independent democracy. That choice, too, is fiction. Neither side faces a clear choice, or clear outcomes. Here we have a conflict in a region of conflict, with no clear villain, no clear victim, and no clear solution, one of many hundreds or thousands of ethnic, national, and religious disputes on earth.
The only group of people subject to a systematic boycott at present in the Western world are Jews, appearing now under the convenient euphemism 'Israelis.' The only country that has its own 'apartheid week' on campuses is the Jewish country. Protesters have interfered with the unloading of Israeli shipping on the West Coast of the United States, and there are regular calls for a boycott of anything produced in the Jewish state. No similar tactics are currently employed against any other ethnic group or nationality, no matter how egregious the human rights violations attributed to that group's country of origin.
Anyone who questions why this is so will be greeted with shouts of 'the occupation!', as if this were explanation enough. It is not. Many who would like to question these phenomena don't dare, for fear that they will somehow be expressing support for this occupation, which has been inflated from a geopolitical dilemma of modest scope by global standards into the world's premier violation of human rights.
The human costs of the Middle Eastern adventures of America and Britain in this century have been far higher, and far harder to explain, than anything Israel has ever done. They have involved occupations, and the violence they unleashed continues as I speak here this evening. No one boycotts American or British professors. Turkey is a democracy, and a NATO member, and yet its occupation of northern Cyprus and long conflict with the stateless Kurds — many of whom see themselves as occupied — are viewed with a yawn; there is no 'Turkish Apartheid Week.' The world is full of injustice. Billions of people are oppressed. In Congo, five million people are dead. The time has come for everyone to admit that the fashionable disgust for Israel among many in the West is not liberal but is selective, disproportionate, and discriminatory.
There are simply too many voices coming from too many places, expressing themselves in too poisonous a way, for us to conclude that this is a narrow criticism of the occupation. It's time for the people making these charges to look closely at themselves, and for us to look closely at them.
Naming and understanding this sentiment is important, as it is becoming one of the key intellectual trends of our time. We might think of it as the 'Cult of the Occupation.' This belief system, for that it what it is, uses the occupation as a way of talking about other things.
As usual with Western religions, the centre of this one is in the Holy Land. The dogma posits that the occupation is not a conflict like any other, but that it is the very symbol of conflict: that the minute state inhabited by a persecuted minority in the Middle East is in fact a symbol of the ills of the West — colonialism, nationalism, militarism, and racism. In the recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, a sign hoisted by marchers linked the unrest between African Americans and the police to Israeli rule over Palestinians.
ReplyDeleteThe cult's priesthood can be found among the activists, NGO experts, and ideological journalists who have turned coverage of this conflict into a catalogue of Jewish moral failings, as if Israeli society were different from any other group of people on earth, as if Jews deserve to be mocked for having suffered and failed to be perfect as a result.
Most of my former colleagues in the press corps aren't full-fledged members of this group. They aren't true believers. But boycotts of Israel, and only of Israel, which are one of the cult's most important practices, have significant support in the press, including among editors who were my superiors. Sympathy for Israel's predicament is highly unpopular in the relevant social circles, and is something to be avoided by anyone wishing to be invited to the right dinner parties, or to be promoted. The cult and its belief system are in control of the narrative, just as the popular kids in a school are those who decide what clothes or music are acceptable. In the social milieu of the reporters, NGO workers, and activists, which is the same social world, these are the correct opinions. This guides the coverage. This explains why the events in Gaza this summer were portrayed not as a complicated war like many others fought in this century, but as a massacre of innocents. And it explains much else.
So prevalent has this kind of thinking become that participating in liberal intellectual life in the West increasingly requires you to subscribe at least outwardly to this dogma, particularly if you're a Jew and thus suspected of the wrong sympathies. If you're a Jew from Israel, your participation is increasingly conditional on an abject and public display of self-flagellation. Your participation, indeed, is increasingly unwelcome.
What, exactly, is going on?
Observers of Western history understand that at times of confusion and unhappiness, and of great ideological ferment, negative sentiment tends to coagulate around Jews. Discussions of the great topics of the time often end up as discussions about Jews.
In the late 1800s, for example, French society was riven by the clash between the old France of the church and army, and the new France of liberalism and the rule of law. The French were preoccupied with the question of who is French, and who is not. They were smarting from their military humiliation by the Prussians. All of this sentiment erupted around the figure of a Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, accused of betraying France as a spy for Germany. His accusers knew he was innocent, but that didn't matter; he was a symbol of everything they wanted to condemn.
To give another example: Germans in the 1920s and 1930s were preoccupied with their humiliation in the Great War. This became a discussion of Jewish traitors who had stabbed Germany in the back. Germans were preoccupied as well with the woes of their economy — this became a discussion of Jewish wealth, and Jewish bankers.
In the years of the rise of communism and the Cold War, communists concerned with their ideological opponents talked about Jewish capitalists and cosmopolitans, or Jewish doctors plotting against the state. At the very same time, in capitalist societies threatened by communism, people condemned Jewish Bolsheviks.
ReplyDeleteThis is the face of this recurring obsession. As the journalist Charles Maurras wrote, approvingly, in 1911: 'Everything seems impossible, or frighteningly difficult, without the providential arrival of anti-Semitism, through which all things fall into place and are simplified.'
The West today is preoccupied with a feeling of guilt about the use of power. That's why the Jews, in their state, are now held up in the press and elsewhere as the prime example of the abuse of power. That's why for so many the global villain, as portrayed in newspapers and on TV, is none other than the Jewish soldier, or the Jewish settler. This is not because the Jewish settler or soldier is responsible for more harm than anyone else on earth — no sane person would make that claim. It is rather because these are the heirs to the Jewish banker or Jewish commissar of the past. It is because when moral failure raises its head in the Western imagination, the head tends to wear a skullcap.
One would expect the growing scale and complexity of the conflict in the Middle East over the past decade to have eclipsed the fixation on Israel in the eyes of the press and other observers. Israel is, after all, a sideshow: The death toll in Syria in less than four years far exceeds the toll in the Israel-Arab conflict in a century. The annual death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is a morning in Iraq.
And yet it is precisely in these years that the obsession has grown worse.
This makes little sense, unless we understand that people aren't fixated on Israel despite everything else going on — but rather because of everything else going on. As Maurras wrote, when you use the Jew as the symbol of what is wrong, 'all things fall into place and are simplified.'
The last few decades have brought the West into conflict with the Islamic world. Terrorists have attacked New York, Washington, London, Madrid, and now Paris. America and Britain caused the unravelling of Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead there. Afghanistan was occupied and thousands of Western soldiers killed, along with countless civilians — but the Taliban are alive and well, undeterred. Gaddafi was removed, and Libya is no better off. All of this is confusing and discouraging. It causes people to search for answers and explanations, and these are hard to come by. It is in this context that the 'Cult of the Occupation' has caught on. The idea is that the problems in the Middle East have something to do with Jewish arrogance and perfidy, that the sins of one's own country can be projected upon the Western world's old blank screen. This is the idea increasingly reflected on campuses, in labour unions, and in the media fixation on Israel. It's a projection, one whose chief instrument is the press.
As one BBC reporter informed a Jewish interviewee on camera several weeks ago, after a Muslim terrorist murdered four Jewish shoppers at a Paris supermarket, 'Many critics of Israel's policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffered hugely at Jewish hands as well.' Everything, that is, can be linked to the occupation, and Jews can be blamed even for the attacks against them. This isn't the voice of the perpetrators, but of the enablers. The voice of the enablers is less honest than that of the perpetrators, and more dangerous for being disguised in respectable English. This voice is confident and growing in volume. This is why the year 2015 finds many Jews in Western Europe eyeing their suitcases again.
ReplyDeleteThe Jews of the Middle East are outnumbered by the Arabs of the Middle East 60 to one, and by the world's Muslims 200 to one. Half of the Jews in Israel are there because their families were forced from their homes in the 20th century not by Christians in Europe, but by Muslims in the Middle East. Israel currently has Hezbollah on its northern border, Al-Qaeda on its north-eastern and southern borders, and Hamas in Gaza. None of these groups seek an end to the occupation, but rather openly wish to destroy Israel. But it is naïve to point out these facts. The facts don't matter: We are in the world of symbols. In this world, Israel has become a symbol of what is wrong — not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Great Britain, not America, not Russia.
I believe it's important to recognise the pathologies at play in order to make sense of things. In this context it's worth pointing out that I'm hardly the first to identify a problem — Jewish communities like this one, and particularly organisations like BICOM, identified a problem long ago, and have been expending immense efforts to correct it. I wish this wasn't necessary, and it shouldn't be necessary, but it undoubtedly is necessary, and becoming more so, and I have great respect for these efforts. Many people, particularly young people, are having trouble maintaining their balance amid this ideological onslaught, which is successfully disguised as journalism or analysis, and is phrased in the language of progressive politics. I would like to help them keep their bearings.
I don't believe, however, that anyone should make a feeling of persecution the centre of their identity, of their Judaism, or of their relationship with Israel. The obsession is a fact, but it isn't a new fact, and it shouldn't immobilise us in anger, or force us into a defensive crouch. It shouldn't make us less willing to seek to improve our situation, to behave with compassion to our neighbours, or to continue building the model society that Israel's founders had in mind.
I was in Tel Aviv not long ago, on Rothschild Boulevard. The city was humming with life. Signs of prosperity were everywhere, in the renovated Bauhaus buildings, in the clothes, the stores. I watched the people go by: kids with old bikes and tattoos, businesspeople, men with women, women with women, men with men, all speaking the language of the Bible and Jewish prayer. The summer's Hamas rockets were already a memory, just a few months old but subsumed in the frantic, irrepressible life of the country. There were cranes everywhere, raising new buildings. There were schoolchildren with oversized knapsacks, and parents with strollers. I heard Arabic, Russian, and French, and the country went about its business with a potent cheer and determination that you miss if all you see are threats and hatred. There have always been threats and hatred, and it has never stopped us. We have enemies, and we have friends. The dogs bark, as the saying goes, and the convoy rolls by.
ReplyDeleteOne of the questions presented to us by the wars of the modern age is what now constitutes victory. In the 21st century, when a battlefield is no longer conquered or lost, when land isn't changing hands and no one ever surrenders, what does it mean to win?
The answer is that victory is no longer determined on the battlefield. It's determined in the centre, in the society itself. Who has built a better society? Who has provided better lives for people? Where is there the most optimism? Where can the most happy people be found? One report on world happiness ranked Israel as the 11th happiest country on earth. The UK was 22nd.
Israel's intellectual opponents can rant about the moral failings of the Jews, obscuring their obsession in whatever sophisticated way they choose. The gunmen of Hamas and their allies can stand on heaps of rubble and declare victory. They can fire rockets, and shoot up supermarkets. But if you look at Tel Aviv, or at any thriving neighbourhood in Jerusalem, Netanya, Rishon LeZion, or Haifa, you understand that this is victory. This is where we've won, and where we win every day.
I think the Arab-Palestinians need to face reality and stop deluding themselves. No distortion of history or pressure by the Arab-Palestinians will change that. No UNESCO – U.N. declaration-resolution that are non-binding and have no legal standing or anyone else. There is not going to be another Arab-Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. The Arabs have already an Arab Palestinian state which is on Jewish land over three times the size of Israel, east of the Jordan River; it is called Jordan, where 80% of the population are Arab Palestinians and the Arabs in Judea and Samaria aka the West Bank have a Jordanian passport. They were all Jordanian citizens when Jordan Annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Arabs received over 12 million sq. km. with a wealth of oil reserves, after WWI and the Jewish people were given back their historical land in all of Palestine aka The Land of Israel. The Arab countries also terrorized and expelled over a million Jewish families and confiscated all their assets, including businesses, homes and over 120,000 sq. km. of Real Estate and land owned by the Jewish people for over 2,600 years; these assets are valued in the trillions of dollars. Most of the million expelled Jewish families from Arab countries now reside in Israel.
ReplyDeleteYJ Draiman
I am somewhat surprised at all the commotion regarding the U.N non-binding resolution 2334 (U.N. Resolutions which is non-binding and have no legal standing) which condemns (without legal power and in violation of the 1919 treaty signed by Faisal and Weizmann) Jewish Communities and Settlements in the West Bank aka Judea and Samaria. It should be noted Israel regained land and rebuilt communities previously taken from it illegally via the Defensive War of 1967 when it had to defend itself from an unprovoked attack from Jordan. If the U.N voted a resolution declaring the Vatican as Muslim territory, is anyone going to abide by it?
ReplyDeleteAccording to my research, the U.N. Charter only provides for the recommendation(s) of a non-binding Resolution, with no legal standing. In fact, the U.N. has absolutely no legal standing or power to enforce any non-binding Resolution(s). Furthermore, it cannot be ignored that the U.N. has recommended hundreds of non-binding Resolutions against Israel with no legal, or factual standing to support said Resolutions. There is also the U.N. Article 51 which provides countries for defense against attack. The U.N, and the ICJ have no appeal process and that is against every Democratic law. Their opinions and non-binding resolutions are based on false information; there is no procedure to remedy the erroneous biased non-binding decisions which have no legal standing.
Israel is on solid legal and historical ground as far as its' territorial boundaries west of the Jordan River. In fact, history proves Israel has both a legal and historical claim for a lot of land held by Jordan. See the January 1919 Faisal Weizmann Agreement. (Check British archives which provides evidence how the British defrauded the Jewish people of their complete Historical territory – See The Rape of Palestine by William Ziff)
I think the U.S. should return the country back to the American Indians and Mexico. The European countries and others should return all the territories they took from other countries and so should other countries.
The World at large has for thousands of years wrongfully and maliciously persecuted the Jews, confiscated and stole their assets including personal valuables, homes and Real Estate property. The world at large will try and push us around if we let them. It is time to put an end to such biased unjustified and deliberate persecution.
All the distortions of history up to and including modern day, by biased nations relying upon deceptive, fictitious make-believe facts and wishful beliefs, must not be tolerated any more. While most of the biased world continues to unjustly assail Israel; the nation of Israel contributes to the world a substantial amount of advancement and technology in all fields, including medicine, energy, water desalination, IT, and much more.
Today the Jewish State of Israel has the man-power and the resources to defend itself against most world powers, with the help of the almighty. Thus, it is time for us Jews to become unified and stand up for ourselves as was done during the days of Moses, King David and King Solomon.
We are supposed to be "a stubborn nation" (Am Kshey Oref). Let us utilize our "stubborn" resolve with a strong backbone steeled with our unwavering faith. If we stand our ground without capitulations, we might encounter some obstacles and suffer some set-backs. But in the long run we will be stronger and the world at large will respect us more.
We must overcome the "Diaspora victim mentality" we have too easily accepted over thousands of years.
It is time for all Jews worldwide to raise our heads, and steel our resolve as a proud nation with proud people with our ancestral Jewish code and tradition.
“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean!”
YJ Draiman
https://www.dreuz.info/2017/01/13/israel-is-the-legal-occupant-of-the-west-bank-says-the-court-of-appeal-of-versailles-france/