Year-end expanded edition

December 30, 2005

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JPN thanks all our readers for their marvelous support in 2005. We close the year with a larger than usual collection of articles exploring many facets of Israel and the Israel-Palestine conflict. We all share our hopes for a better year in 2006.

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Today's Contents:

Should Israel give up its nukes? (Los Angeles Times) George Bisharat raises a call for Israeli nuclear disarmement

More Important Articles Links to other important news articles for today

[JPN Commentary: George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East. The major radical idea which is at the crux of the study is when looking at nuclear weapons in the Middle East, it's essential to look at everyone, starting with the one player who already has them - Israel. Take note that the study discussed and its recommendation that Israel start dismantling its nuclear program comes from a group which includes "pro Israeli" people. - RG]

The Los Angeles Times 9 December 2005 http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-bisharat9dec09,1,2081436.story IN A SUDDEN ATTACK of common sense, a Pentagon-commissioned study released in mid-November suggests an approach to nuclear nonproliferation in the Middle East that might actually be accepted by the people of the region. What is this breakthrough idea? That U.S. policies begin not with a country that currently lacks nuclear weapons -- Iran -- but rather with the one that by virtually all accounts already has them -- Israel. To avert Iran's apparent drive for nuclear weapons, concludes Henry Sokolski, a co-editor of "Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran," Israel should freeze and begin to dismantle its nuclear capability. This and other recommendations emerged from two years of deliberations by experts on the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. Limiting the spread of nuclear weapons is a pivotal U.S. foreign policy objective. As the sole nation ever to have employed them, we bear a special responsibility to prevent their use in the future. With regard to the Middle East, we rightly worry not only about the potential use of the weapons themselves but about the political leverage bestowed on those who would possess them. However, there is an Achilles heel in our nonproliferation policy: the double standard that U.S. administrations since the 1960s have applied with respect to Israel's weapons of mass destruction. Israel's suspected arsenal includes chemical, biological and about 100 to 200 nuclear warheads, and the capacity to deliver them. Initially, the United States opposed Israel's nuclear weapons program. President Kennedy dispatched inspectors to the Dimona generating plant in Israel's south, and he cautioned Israel against developing atomic weapons. Anticipating the 1962 visit of American inspectors, Israel reportedly constructed a fake wall at Dimona to conceal its weapons production. Since then, no U.S. administration has effectively pressured Israel to either halt its program or to submit to inspections under the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nor has Israel been required to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The apparent rationale: Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of an ally are simply not an urgent concern. Yet this rationale neglects a fundamental law of arms proliferation. Nations seek WMD when their rivals already possess them. Israel's nuclear capability has clearly fueled WMD ambitions within the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, for example, in an April 1990 speech to his military, threatened to retaliate against any Israeli nuclear attack with chemical weapons -- the "poor man's atomic bomb." WASHINGTON'S inconsistency on the nuclear issue in the Middle East has been terribly corrosive of American legitimacy throughout the world, and a reversal of our policy would be widely noted regionally. Nor is our international legitimacy all that is at stake. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, a panicky Israel, facing early battlefield losses, threatened a nuclear strike. This evoked a massive arms shipment from the United States, eventually permitting Israel to turn the tide of the war -- demonstrating the kinds of pressures that nuclear powers can apply, even on allies. Although many view Israel's victory with favor, it surely enabled subsequent decades of Israeli intransigence over the fate of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and has contributed to the impasse afflicting the region. The study's authors include retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Shlomo Brom and Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- in short, no enemies of Israel. Their suggestion is comparatively mild: Israel should take small, reversible steps toward nuclear disarmament to encourage Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Nonetheless, Israeli leaders reportedly have already demurred. One can anticipate the bipartisan stampede of U.S. lawmakers to denounce the recommendation should it win official U.S. backing. That would be a shame. Sooner or later, common sense must prevail in our Middle East policy. Otherwise, we will continue to run our global stature into the ground.

12/18/2005 Two days after the U.S. Congress voted by a large majority (397 to 17) to threaten the Palestinian Authority with withholding aid if it includes Hamas in the next government, U.S. officials pressured the European donor nations to transfer $60 million immediately to the PA to pay the salaries of its officials and security apparatus. The money had been withheld in protest over PA salary hikes and unimplemented administrative reforms. Last week in London at a meeting of the donor countries, the U.S. urged the Europeans to unfreeze the funds out of concern that the delay would hurt Mahmoud Abbas' standing in the upcoming elections and weaken the position of Fatah members who are close to the leadership. The attempt to interfere with internal Palestinian politics is not consistent with the position of the U.S. administration, which a few weeks ago pushed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into backtracking on his threat to disrupt the elections in the territories if the PA allowed Hamas to take part. The U.S., which has placed democratization of the Middle East at the top of its priorities, will find it difficult to dictate to the Palestinians not to include Hamas in the government if its candidates receive widespread voter support and it is willing to lay down its arms. The resolution by the U.S. Congress, which is couched in vague terms, is typical of its behavior in an election year (elections are in November 2006) in which its members need funding and political support from the pro-Israel AIPAC. A decade ago, Congress and the Senate passed the resolution to require that the U.S. Embassy be moved to Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999. However since that time, presidential orders have delayed the implementation of the decision, citing national security interests.

12/18/2005

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/658967.html Since the beginning of the 1990s, more than a million immigrants have come to Israel from the former Soviet Union. About a quarter of them, some 300,000, are not recognized as Jews by the State of Israel. Most do not define themselves as Christians, so, by default, the Central Bureau of Statistics decided to classify them as "other." Haaretz recently devoted a series of articles to examining the situation of these "others" and to considering ways of improving it. The hundreds of thousands of immigrants designated as "other" do not belong to a recognized religious sect and therefore cannot marry, divorce or be buried in a religious burial. This intolerable situation led Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the heads of the Jewish Agency to seek a solution to the problem by means of converting the immigrants. With Sharon's blessing, jurisdiction over the conversion courts was transfered from the rabbinic courts administration to the Prime Minister's Office. Ultra-Orthodox entities that had shown hostility toward the immigrants were sidelined and their place taken by rabbis from the religious Zionist stream. Rabbi Haim Druckman and his deputy, Rabbi Moshe Klein, made a substantial effort to make the conversion system more friendly to would-be converts, but that did not bring about an upturn in the number of conversions. Only 0.5 percent of the non-Jewish immigrants convert each year - a rate that does not keep up with the annual increase in the immigrant population. Things are different in the Israel Defense Forces, which has been operating a military conversion system for the past three years. About a third of the IDF's non-Jewish soldiers now opt for conversion during their military service, and to that end take part in courses on Judaism and Zionism under army auspices. One of the deterrent factors in the conversion procedure in its current format is the requirement that a convert's family members also observe the commandments. This requirement is controversial from the standpoint of halakha, or Jewish law, and imposes numerous difficulties on the immigrants. Individuals undergoing conversion are forced to find religious schools for their children, as well as to bring their spouses with them to their studies, even if they are Jewish. The IDF, by contrast, does not place demands on the soldiers' families. The military conversion system operates on the assumption that the army is the soldier's home. And the IDF observes the halakhic rules. The success of the IDF's constructive approach poses a fateful challenge to the state's conversion establishment. If the latter does not provide creative solutions within a halakhic framework, it will be considered a historic failure of the religious Zionist approach and of Orthodox halakha generally. The State of Israel and its leaders are morally and publicly responsible for the plight of the non-Jewish immigrants. The country's leaders must understand that in the absence of an enlightened religious solution, conversion will no longer be deemed "an admission ticket" into Israeli society. If the state conversion does not justify the resources poured into it and does not meet the expectations riding on it, then it will be necessary to draw the obligatory conclusion and resolve the plight of the non-Jewish immigrants another way, by means of solutions such as the civil unions and civil burial.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/ Satellite?cid=1132475615555&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Nov. 24, 2005

If Labor is to win back the Prime Minister's Office under Moroccan-born leader Amir Peretz, the party will first have to win over the Mizrahi residents of Tel Aviv's Hativka Quarter. Standing outside the Labor Party's national headquarters in Tel Aviv's Hatikva Quarter, former MK Avi Yehezkel, who grew up in the neighborhood, recalled how the locals would ask him what this bourgeois Ashkenazi party, this "foreign implant," was doing there. It was Ehud Barak's decision in 2000 to move the party headquarters from its old office building on Rehov Hayarkon, near the beach, to its current home - a one-story, beige compound next to a walled-off empty lot in what is probably the best-known urban, low-income Mizrahi neighborhood in the country. The idea was to change Labor's image and attract the amcha - the salt-of-the-earth Israelis, mainly Mizrahim, who tend to vote heavily for Likud or Shas and, on the whole, are said to hate Labor like the plague. "It was a phony gesture, just like Barak's apology to the Mizrahim was phony," said Yehezkel, who is of Moroccan heritage. But Amir Peretz, the Moroccan-born Histadrut leader from the Negev development town of Sderot, is the real thing, continued Yehezkel, who plans to run for Knesset again. "The Labor Party," he asserted, "isn't a foreign implant in the neighborhood anymore." This is Labor's hope: that Peretz will be able to do what Barak's gestures didn't, and thereby give the party a shot at winning back the Prime Minister's Office - if not in the coming election, then after Sharon is gone. A poll in Yediot Aharonot last weekend put some ballast behind that hope, indicating that Peretz has lifted Labor's popularity dramatically since his November 9 election as party chairman, especially with development town residents, who are also mainly lower-middle-class Mizrahim. Hatikva Quarter is probably as good a place as any to test this hopeful notion - to see if Peretz has a shot at convincing Mizrahi voters to put aside their old, bitter memories of the ma'abarot (immigrant transit camps) and the decades of Ashkenazi establishment patronization, to lose their preoccupation with Labor's perceived "bleeding heart" attitude toward the Arabs and indifference to Judaism, and vote for a party now led by someone who, by background, is "one of them," and who says that he, unlike both Labor and Likud leaders of the last generation, will put the economic welfare of people like them at the top of his agenda. HATIKVA QUARTER is a large network of narrow streets with old, low apartment houses and seemingly jerry-built houses, some of them gentrified by the yuppies who've moved into the neighborhood for its matchless character. It's an aged area, with groups of Yemenite, Iraqi and Moroccan pensioners sitting around and talking on chairs and benches, although there has been an infusion of new blood in recent years from Russian immigrants. The heart of Hatikva is Rehov Etzel, an angular throughfare-cum-promenade where drivers have to watch out for the old lady shoppers, old men on bicycles and flashy operators hollering into their cell phones who think nothing of suddenly darting into traffic. The street is named for Menachem Begin's pre-state underground militia, which was prominent in the neighborhood; one of the Middle Eastern grill restaurants on the street features framed photos of Etzel and Lehi fighters hanged by the British. Rehov Etzel used to be known as a drug depot, but not anymore. Now it's a Mizrahi commercial fair, with pita bakeries, vendors selling hot, sweet sahlab, hole-in-the-wall restaurants selling kubeh or melawah, swanky grill restaurants like the original Shipudei Hatikva and Yehuda Avazi's, and the once gritty but recently remodeled Hatikva outdoor market. Geographically, this is Labor's "street." Politically, Peretz seems to have brought it a lot closer to Labor than it was before, but he still has a long way to go. THE HATIKVA outdoor market played a historic role in the 1999 campaign won by Barak. It was where Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, just retired as IDF chief of General Staff and the instant front-runner in the race for prime minister, got stopped cold. Coming off his entry into the campaign with the charge that incumbent premier Binyamin Netanyahu was "dangerous for Israel," Shahak went to do the traditional walkabout in the shouk, to show that he was beloved by the amcha - but instead, he got accosted by a furious vendor in a large, white kippa named Avi Levy, who hollered in the war hero's face about the Netanyahu remark and even shrieked that his wife, journalist Tali Lipkin-Shahak, was a miserable leftist. Shahak's aides had to get between him and Levy. The candidate, who wasn't exactly used to this sort of treatment, didn't fight back, as if he was either caught off guard or didn't want to lower himself to the level of some pickle-seller. It was a fatal move. Right away, Shahak's standing in the polls sank like a stone. "He was a general and he got brought down by the rabble. People said, 'If that's the way he handles some guy from the shouk, how will he do when he's really under pressure?'" recalled Levy, who still runs the same vegetable stand with his brother that he did in 1999. But the kippa is gone, and Levy's political allegiance has changed, too. In the 1996 and 1999 campaigns he worked for Netanyahu. In 2001 he worked for Likud and Ariel Sharon. In 2003 he worked for Am Ehad - One Nation - and its leader, Amir Peretz. One Nation activists approached him, he says, and he went to meet Peretz at his office. "He convinced me that he really wanted to lead a social change in this country. He's a special personality. To me he's the Israeli Che Guevara," said Levy. He organized Peretz's 2003 campaign stop at the shouk. "We decorated the place in orange [which was One Nation's color well before the anti-disengagement movement adopted it]. People lifted him on their shoulders, they threw rice and candy at him." The Yediot poll showed that development town residents, who once were a major part of Netanyahu's electoral base, have deserted him in droves, and hold him responsible, above anyone else, for the increase in poverty. Levy is part of that political migration. "Netanyahu acted with a lot of arrogance when he was finance minister. I have five kids, and I used to get NIS 1,500 in child allowances. But with the budget cuts, I'm getting half that or less," he said. For many of Israel's amcha, including Levy, the rise in poverty works strongly in Peretz's favor. But Peretz has one big problem in their eyes - his party. While his background as one of Peace Now's early adherents, and his unreconstructed faith in the Oslo accord still isn't that well known - although in a national campaign, Likud and Sharon's new centrist party will certainly make it so - the Labor Party remains an albatross around Peretz's neck as far as Levy is concerned. "In the next election, it's hard to say how people here are going to accept him, because now he's running for prime minister on the Labor ticket," says Levy. Pointing to the photo of Begin above his stall (next to the pennant of Bnei Yehuda, Hatikva's soccer team), he continues, "When it comes to peace and the territories, I'm very right-wing. I used to be with Kahane, I used to hang out in Hebron. I'm an independent now, but I would find it hard to put a Labor slip in the ballot box. My hand would shake. So as far as voting for Labor, even with Peretz, I'm 50-50. That's how everybody here feels." IN A CORNER of the shouk where little cafes stand next to tea kiosks, scores of old men are playing dominoes. There, Morris Binyamin, 65, is working behind the counter of his "Kubeh Center" restaurant, tending to his kubeh in their pots of boiling water. Taped to his counter is a photo of him standing next to Peretz, taken during the Labor leader's campaign visit with One Nation. "I like Peretz a lot. He doesn't sell out the workers. He helps everyone," says Binyamin, who came to Israel from Iraq shortly after independence, and supported Mapai in the ma'abara at Rosh Pina, but switched to Likud after moving to Hatikva in 1952. Will he vote Labor in the next election? "I like Peretz, but I won't leave Likud," Binyamin replies. "I'm crazy about Likud. I'm a Herutnik [referring to the Likud's original core party] in my blood." This is the stereotype about Mizrahi amcha - Likud is in their blood. Around the shouk, though, there are quite a few people who don't hesitate to say, without whispering, that they always vote Labor. Eli Srugo, a dried fruit vendor and Laborite of Yemenite heritage, says Peretz is winning over some of his Likudnik customers. "They say that if we can't have a Yemenite chief of General Staff [as Ben-Gurion foresaw], then maybe we can have a Mizrahi prime minister," he says with a broad smile. The walls next to the old tea kiosks are plastered with death notices. A pair of cats chow down on a hunk of chicken tossed to them by one of the cooks. "Do you see garbage like that at any Ashkenazi social clubs? Only at the Sephardi ones," says Ezra Tzemach, 74, who alternates between Labor and Likud, but almost always votes against the party in power. At the dominoes tables, where the clatter of slapping tiles mixes with the guttural, rasping chatter of the players, Avraham Purim, 74, says he was with the Etzel as a teenager in Hatikva and stayed faithful to Herut-Likud until the Lebanon War. "Then I decided that Israel can't live by its sword forever," Purim says. He is prepared to vote for Peretz and Labor, but only if the new party leader convinces him that he'll help the poor and not just the Histadrut, and that he'll "go for peace at any cost." Yossi Habib, a nephew of Binyamin's and an employee at Kubeh Center, says he was raised a Likud loyalist, but Netanyahu's budget cuts pushed him over to Labor. "Bibi took money from my grandmother and gave it to the rich. If he came to the shouk now, they'd throw tomatoes at him. If Peretz came, they'd hug him and kiss him," said Habib, 28. "Peretz is my man. If I had to choose between Bibi and Arafat, I'd vote for Arafat, how's that?" he declared. Generalizations, no matter how valid, don't always apply. ANOTHER TEST that can be done in Hatikva Quarter is whether the Labor Party's move there was, as Yehezkel puts it, a phony gesture, or whether the party really did try to connect to the community. People in the shouk cafes and in the Rehov Etzel restaurants say the only Labor higher-up who comes to eat there on a fairly regular basis is Binyamin "Fuad" Ben-Eliezer, the Iraqi-born "king of the grassroots" with the king-sized appetite. As for the others, "They only show up before elections," says Motti Elimelech, owner of Shipudei Hatikva, sitting with two cell phones, a pack of Kents and a ringful of keys out on the table, waiting for the lunch crowd. His walls feature photos of Labor's Dalia Itzik, Haim Ramon and Shimon Peres, but this eatery, he says with a smile, is "Likud territory." He brings over his latest prize - a photo taken the previous week when the party's first couple, Silvan Shalom and Judy Nir Mozes-Shalom, came by for dinner. Still, it turns out that while the Labor Party's stars may not be making many appearances on the local kebab circuit, the party has made a genuine effort in recent years to help the people of Hatikva Quarter, says Arik Shua, general manager of Beit Dani, which, with weekly activities that attract 7,000 local participants, is one of the busiest community centers in Israel, as well as the most vital social institution in the neighborhood. "On Passover [the Labor Party] contributes boxes of food for the old people, they sent a choir to sing here on Rosh Hashana, they give computers and all sorts of other things to the children's classes. Every time we have some event, we're in contact with them," says Shua. Moreover, Labor's donations to Beit Dani have been made in a strictly low-profile manner, with little or no "donor recognition," Shua notes, because the center, being a publicly-funded institution, cannot be politicized in any way. "When we tell them that their involvement has to be done without headlines, they always agree," he said. One of the walls in Yehuda Avazi's grill restaurant is devoted to Yitzhak Rabin, featuring photos and newspaper clippings from his stopover there on the 1992 campaign. The sub-headline of one clipping reads, "'You're a helluva guy,' they shouted at Rabin in Hatikva." The stories tell how Rabin, while not really knowing his way around a skewer of shishlik, nevertheless won the locals over with his lack of pretension. The fact is that over the decades, Israel's Mizrahi amcha have given their hearts and votes to a remarkably wide range of leaders - a bespectacled, ultra-nationalistic Polish gentleman (Begin); a defiant, Moroccan-born, working-man upstart (David Levy); and a handsome, rich, supremely confident, American-style hawk (Netanyahu). Will they turn this time to Peretz - or will their hands shake too much to vote Labor? "If the election is fought mainly over social issues, then he could win," says Avi Levy. "I may or may not decide to vote for Peretz, but even if I do," he says, pointing again to the photo hanging over his stall, "My veins will still have Begin's blood in them."