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April 11, 2004
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U.S. to Declare Israel Won't Have to Withdraw to 1949 Border by Aluf Benn
Ariel Sharon leaves on Monday night for a crucial meeting with President Bush at the White House on Wednesday. The main item on the agenda is Sharon's disengagement plan. The two leaders will exchange letters that detail both Sharon's plan, and what America will provide in exchange for the Israeli pullout. Israel will not be asked in the future to withdraw to the 1949 cease-fire lines (the "green line") on the West Bank, according to a letter Bush is to present to Sharon. (Ha'aretz)
The Battle on America's Campuses by Nathan Guttman
Most activists agree that despite the impression that Israel is being defeated and that Jewish students are under assault, the opposite is true. Dozens of campuses throughout the U.S. have signed up thousands of students on petitions of support for Israel, and pro-Israel activists have been elected in recent months to key positions at many universities. Research conducted by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco indicates that the attitude of faculty members to the Middle East conflict constitutes the main problem facing Jews and supporters of Israel in the United States. (Ha'aretz)
Palestinians Salute Iraqi "Intifada" by Khaled Abu Toameh
Hundreds of Palestinians marched in the streets of Ramallah and in Gaza on Wednesday to condemn the U.S. and express their support for the attacks against coalition forces in Iraq. The protesters noted that the Iraqis and the Palestinians were fighting the same war against the powers of evil. (Jerusalem Post)
Jewish School Firebombed in Montreal, Anti-Semitic Notes Found by Barry Brown
A firebomb damaged the library at a Montreal Jewish elementary school on the eve of the Passover holiday last week, and police found anti-Semitic notes taped to the school's walls. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin called the firebombing an "attack on freedom." Last month, B'nai B'rith Canada reported an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2003, with almost 600 cases of violence, harassment, and vandalism against Jews. (AP/Washington Post)
See also Attack Dishonors Our Parents by Fadi Amine, law student, Universite de Montreal, letter to the editor
The attack on the United Talmud Torah elementary school is a shameful act that should be loudly condemned by all Montreal communities, and the thugs who did this should know they do not have my support, nor the support of any of the Arabs or Muslims that I know living in this city. (The Gazette)
 Keep the Gloves Off by Ehud Ya'ari
Hamas's fiery rhetoric of revenge is reaching new peaks, and they will strike to the full extent of their capability; Israel therefore must not ease the pressure. There are now those in the army questioning the credo of "limited conflict" which is the cause of the slow, limping pace of the war on terror, arguing that it is precisely the credo of limited conflict that is dragging out the bloodshed over time, while this current intifada has in fact been an "all-out confrontation" from the start. (Jerusalem Report)
Like It Or Not, Israel's War With Hamas Is America's, Too by Jonathan Rauch
America has lost a few thousand people to al-Qaeda. Israel, with a population one-fiftieth the size, has lost hundreds to Hamas. Hamas's civilian operations hardly made Yassin a civilian in any sense that mattered. To the contrary, he was head of a terrorist organization that is well on its way to operating its own mini-state in Gaza. State sponsors of terrorism and terrorist sponsors of states (Hamas in Gaza, Hizballah in Lebanon, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan) are two sides of one coin. Hamas and al-Qaeda are organizationally distinct but ideologically joined at the hip. Both are anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and dedicated to extinguishing secular politics in what they regard as Islamic lands. (National Journal)
Abominations by Martin Peretz
The Palestinians won't get what they came to expect at Camp David and at Taba. There are costs to rejectionism, and there certainly shouldn't be rewards for the three and a half years of endless intifada blood-letting. If Hamas grows stronger, which I doubt it will, then the fence being built by Israel will become the real frontier and, with time, the international border. The Palestinians have had proposed to them over eight decades at least five partition plans, and, as it happens when you lose wars, each of them is worse for you than the last. They refused even to discuss three of them, absenting themselves from the conference table, and turned down the other two, flat. (The New Republic)
Freedom Is at Root of Mideast Peace by Rep. Howard Berman
We've operated under the assumption that once the thorny Israeli-Palestinian conflict gets worked out, peace will come to the Middle East as part of a domino effect. But that's not just wrong, it's backward. Israel and America won't have stable, long-term, peaceful relations with the PA or Egypt, for example, until they're across the negotiating table from a truly democratic Palestine or Egypt. Passover is the time when the Jewish people were freed from Egyptian slavery. Perhaps this year, it's time to begin to free the Egyptians, so-to-speak, from slavery and grant them the freedom we as American Jews can celebrate openly.
(Los Angeles Jewish Journal)
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Barnard: Israel is "Center of Barnard's Diaspora" by Sarah Bronson
According to a spokesman for the school, 317 Barnard alumnae are recorded as living in Israel, representing almost 2% of the college's living graduates; the concentration of "Barnard women" in Israel is greater than that in any other country outside the United States. "I have two great loves in my life, Barnard and Israel," said Flo Low, 23, who is voluntarily serving in the IDF in the Galil but goes to Barnard events in Jerusalem. (Ha'aretz)
Cornell: University Rejects "Divestment" by Melissa Korn
"Divestment" campaigns, in which students and faculty petition to have their university withdraw funds from Israel, were active at MIT, Harvard, Rutgers, University of California at Berkeley and dozens of other schools across the country. "As last year's 'Invest in Israel' petition showed, at Cornell there is wide support among all quarters for Israel and a strong U.S.-Israel relationship," said Jamie Weinstein, vice president for political affairs of Cornell-Israel Public Affairs Committee (CIPAC). One of the most significant investments in which Cornell has participated is the Bridging the Rift Center on the border of Israel and Jordan. (Daily Sun)
Emory: Robinson Defends Record to Cadre of Worried Critics by Jeremy Stahl
As the number of signatures on a petition demanding her removal as this year's Commencement keynote speaker neared 1,000, Mary Robinson defended her human rights record to about 25 students, faculty and administrators in a rushed visit to campus last week. While no one denied her achievements, much of the discussion following her opening remarks focused on her involvement as secretary general at the Durban conference against racism in September 2001, and as head of the Tehran conference that same year. Robinson acknowledged that both conferences had, at times, degenerated into a platform for anti-Semitic rhetoric. Kenneth Stein, Middle Eastern Studies professor and director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel and Middle East Research Program, called on Robinson to "acknowledge [the conference] was hijacked." (Emory Wheel)
Rhode Island: Racist Literature Dropped on URI Campus by Jennifer Jordan
The University of Rhode Island, it appears, is the latest in a string of drop-off spots in New England for dozens of racist and anti-Semitic fliers printed off a white-supremacist Web site. Several fliers bore the insignia and contact information of a white-supremacist organization called the National Alliance, based in West Virginia. Residents in several towns north of Boston awoke last month to find National Alliance fliers opposing gay marriage and Israel scattered throughout their neighborhoods. (Providence Journal)
Wesleyan: Former Terrorist Speaks by Alyssa A. Lappen and Jerry Gordon
On March 25, former PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat mesmerized a Wesleyan University audience as he described an attempted lynching when he and fellow Beit Sahour rioters attacked an Israeli officer. Shoebat worked as a PLO student organizer at Loop College in Chicago. Shoebat said that even if the educational systems that mass manufacture hatred should be unexpectedly dismantled, Jew hatred could not be expunged from PA, Arab, or Muslim societies in less than a generation. (Frontpagemag.com)
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The Saudi Fifth Column On Our Nation's Campuses by Lee Kaplan
The Saudis have steadily infiltrated American educational institutions, using vast infusions of money to turn the American educational system against U.S. support for Israel and in favor of the Saudi vision of a global Muslim state in which not only Jews, but Christians and all infidels will have subordinate status to the followers of the "true faith." At the same time they look to affect American policy in the Middle East and public opinion in the U.S. in a way to aid their Wahhabist goals. (Frontpagemag.com)
Central Florida: Letter Was Factually, Morally Wrong by Gloria Einstein, letter to the editor
In the few years after Israel's 1948 War of Independence, Arab countries expelled more than three-quarters of a million Jews who had been living in those countries, most who had lived there for centuries. This was equal to, or more than, the number of Arab refugees who left Israel in those years. Israel absorbed those Jews, yet the Arab countries did not absorb any of their Arab countrymen, leaving them as permanent refugees to make a political point against Israel. (Future)
See also Hamas Sends Children to Terrorize by Avy Ronay and Noah Saposnik, letters to the editor (Future)
Columbia: The Two-State Pipe Dream by David Plotz
There are so many fundamental problems with the two-state solution that a different model for peace will have to emerge. The Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat is corrupt and virtually defunct, while extremist groups like Hamas hardly offer a positive alternative. No Arab state offers a model for a flourishing democracy in Palestine. This conflict will end only when Palestinians cease demanding and fighting for a separate state and begin demanding equality within a single bi-national state. This could take decades to happen, but Israelis had better be ready for it. (Spectator)
Harvard: America Is No Better Than Israel On Assassination by Rachel L. Brown, letter to the editor
The Crimson's condemnation of Israel's targeted killing of Sheik Yassin seems ironic given the current state of affairs here in the United States. According to a Clinton administration official, "Senior legal advisers in the Clinton administration agreed that, under the law of armed conflict, killing a person who posed an imminent threat to the United States was an act of self-defense, not an assassination." The same could certainly be said of the former Hamas leader. (Crimson)
Michigan: Middle East Trips Continue Despite War by Lindsey Paterson
This May, 40 to 60 University students will travel to Israel on the Birthright Israel trip, joining close to 50,000 students nationwide who have taken the trip. "What they realized was one of the major experiences is to go to Israel, Israel being at the heart of the Jewish people," Hillel Program Director Ben Berger said. "The idea is that it is supposed to give these participants an Israel experience, seeing and understanding all that is Israel - culturally, politically, religiously - in all of its many facets." (Michigan Daily)
Texas A&M: Withdrawing Hostilities by Daniel Rossell
Unilateral withdrawal may not be the best solution to the problem, but Israel has no other choice. The message being sent is clear: Israel wants to put a stop to the bloodshed in the Middle East. It will do it with or without the cooperation of the Palestinians. However, cooperation and a crackdown on terrorist activities will be rewarded, while renewed violence will be punished. The one constant theme throughout the Middle East peace process is that for both sides to get what they want, the violence has to stop, and this plan makes that much easier to accomplish. (The Battalion)
Washington U. at St. Louis: Weir Speech Anything But Truthful and Accurate by Richard Woolf
Last week, free-lance journalist Allison Weir discussed what she claimed to be information left out by the media in their reporting of events in the Middle East. Instead what I heard was an hour of lies, deceptions, biases and half-truths. I heard her attempt to legitimize suicide bomber missions. I heard her proclaim Hamas a humanitarian social services organization. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, wishes to be free of terrorism and the threat and fear of terrorist attacks. (Student Life)
Northwestern: Performer Aims to Bridge Gap Between Israelis, Palestinians by Stephanie Bowen
Israeli native Noa Baum (pictured) acts an unlikely part - that of her Palestinian friend Jumana. Baum, an actress who has lived in the United States since 1990, performed last week on campus. The event was sponsored by Peace of Mind, a student group aimed at bettering relations between Muslim and Jewish students. Alternating between four characters - a Palestinian university student, a nine-year-old Israeli girl during the 1967 war, a Palestinian mother and an Israeli student - Baum attempted to convey to her audience both sides' perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Daily Northwestern)
Developing a Common Language
If the Abraham Fund has its way, all Israeli students will soon be speaking Arabic. The proposal is part of a wide-ranging initiative for advancing coexistence and equality in Israel. Last month, Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav announced a program in which fifth-graders in about a third of Haifa's Jewish schools will be required to study spoken Arabic and culture. (Israel21c)
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 - Targeted Killings: Two Israeli Perspectives | Destroying Enemies, Before They Destroy Us by Amira Schiff
- The aim of the recent Ashdod attacks and other planned bombings was to create an image of Israel as withdrawing under the pressure of terrorism. In an interview three days before his death, Yassin said, "Palestine belongs to the Arab and Muslim nation. The defeat of the Zionist enemy will begin with the withdrawal from Gaza."
- Contrary to the claims made by critics of targeted killings, who argue that Israel's assassination policy only fuels Palestinian rage and extremism, there is already evidence that the elimination of Yassin may strengthen moderate voices calling for dialogue and compromise. Following Yassin's assassination, prominent Palestinian personalities recommended not responding to the assassination and resorting instead to nonviolent means of resistance.
- Experience has shown that leaders under threat invest effort trying to save their own skins instead of mounting terrorist attacks. Israel's assassination of Yasser Arafat's deputy, Abu Jihad, in 1988, crippled PLO attacks.
- Some question the efficacy of Israel's action, claiming it will spur, not reduce, Palestinian terror. But terrorist attacks and attempts have never ceased. If the terrorist organizations don't succeed, it's for lack of capability, not motivation.
- Some argue that we must take the moral high ground with our enemies. But this is only applicable when dialogue and compromise are possible, which is not the case with Hamas. With implacable terrorists, we have only one choice: to undermine their destructive capabilities, even if it means eliminating their leadership.
- If an enemy of the Jews says that his goal to destroy them, take his ambition seriously. (Forward)
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A Half-Century of Assassinations, and Failure by Ehud Eiran
- A half-century of targeted assassinations did not solve a single Israeli strategic problem. The challenges we face are deep and structural, and are not embodied in any one person.
- The Palestinian problem did not disappear, despite the targeted killings of top PLO officials in 1973 in Beirut, of Yasser Arafat's deputy in Tunis in 1988 or of Islamic Jihad's leader in Malta in 1995.
- Targeted assassinations have proven to be an ineffective deterrent. Previous attempts on the lives of Hamas leaders - such as the director of Hamas's political bureau, Khaled Mashal, in 1997; the group's new leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, in 2003, and an earlier attempt on Yassin himself last year - did not change the nature of their involvement in terrorism.
- Targeted assassinations are not only an ineffective policy tool; they also result in blowback. The 1992 killing of Hizballah's secretary general, Abbas Musawi, demonstrates both problems. Musawi was replaced by a far more competent leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and Hizballah's revenge attacks against the Jewish community building and Israeli embassy in Argentina led to hundreds of casualties later that decade.
- Then there is the moral problem. Certainly Sheikh Yassin earned his violent exit from this world through his involvement in the deaths of many Israelis, Palestinians and others. Yet in a broader sense, we should be worried by the trigger-happy nature of our response to the second intifada.
- Israel was always innovative in creating security; it is time to go back to the drawing board and rethink Israel's strategies. (Forward)
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