Category Archives: Israel

“when Israel’s security barrier is described with preposterous obscenities like “apartheid wall,” we must make sure people know the facts”

…when Israel’s security barrier is described with preposterous obscenities like “apartheid wall,” we must make sure people know the facts: that 96% of it is a fence, that there are Palestinians and Israelis, Jews, Christians and Muslims on both sides of it; that it was erected as a last resort by a prime minister long opposed to doing so, after more than a thousand Israeli women, men, and children were murdered by suicide bombers in cafes, malls, buses, and Passover seders; and that Israel’s Supreme Court has ordered it moved when it caused unjustified privation. Whatever our views on the security barrier, settlements, and “the occupation,” we are morally obliged to make it clear: that Palestinian terrorism preceded them—they were not its cause; that they are not the conflict’s origins, but its manifestations; and that they will not be resolved by boycotts, denunciations, or unilateral measures, but only by a permanent peace agreement that the parties alone can achieve.

Rabbi Richard A. Block, “How Should Rabbis Speak About Israel?”, The Tower Magazine, Issue 14 (May 2014) {http://www.thetower.org/article/rabbis-speak-israel-2/}

Rabbi Chaim Richman: “Do I have to apologize for the fact that Islam squatted on that spot?”

Asked about when and exactly how he envisions a Third Temple, Rabbi Richman demurs. That’s a political question he says that depends on when the “when the people are ready” to rebuild. As for the geopolitical fallout, he believes Israel shouldn’t be viewed as the problem in such a scenario, saying, “Do I have to apologize for the fact that Islam squatted on that spot?”

Joshua Mitnick, “Mounting A Challenge To The Status Quo”, The Jewish Week (11 April 2014), 35.

Use it or Lose it?: “We’ve given the impression that we don’t hold the Temple Mount dear, and we don’t care under whose sovereignty it happens to be.”

In recent weeks, a group of Religious Zionist rabbis signed a letter urging the government to erect a synagogue on the Temple Mount. One of the signatories was Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of Efrat and former leading New York spiritual leader, who said that even though he believes in a two-state solution and that a unilateral move would spark a war, a peace agreement should include a deal to add a place for Jewish prayer on the complex.

“I don’t think the government has made as much of a statement as it should have made that this is a holy shrine and we should be able to pray there,” he said. “My American experience teaches me that if you don’t use it you lose it. We’ve given the impression that we don’t hold the Temple Mount dear, and we don’t care under whose sovereignty it happens to be.”

Joshua Mitnick, “Mounting A Challenge To The Status Quo”, The Jewish Week (11 April 2014), 35.

“many Israelis see the demise of the country as not just possible, but probable. The State of Israel has been established, not its permanence”

…many Israelis see the demise of the country as not just possible, but probable. The State of Israel has been established, not its permanence. The most common phrase in Israeli political discourse is some variation of “If X happens (or doesn’t), the state will not survive!” Those who assume that Israel will always exist as a Zionist project should consider how quickly the Soviet, Pahlavi Iranian, apartheid South African, Baathist Iraqi and Yugoslavian states unraveled, and how little warning even sharp-eyed observers had that such transformations were imminent.

In all these cases, presumptions about what was “impossible” helped protect brittle institutions by limiting political imagination. And when objective realities began to diverge dramatically from official common sense, immense pressures accumulated.

Ian S. Lustick, “The Two-State Illusion”, The New York Times (15 September 2013), SR6.