Jewish State

Re " 'Jewish State' Has Become an Anachronism," Commentary, Oct. 10: As a Jewish refugee from Iran, I read with amusement Tony Judt's opinion that the "Jewish" state is anachronistic. For thousands of years, Jews have self-described themselves as "Am-Israel," or the People of Israel, but Judt has now decided that the Jews are not entitled to their own state because of its effect on non-Jews. Perhaps he also thinks that the U.S. should not exist because it might discriminate against noncitizens.

Re "Is a two-state solution dead?," Editorial, May 9 The Times' editorial advocating a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians focuses on Israel. The current Israeli government supports a viable two-state solution, which is not the case on the Palestinian side. Hamas in the Gaza Strip has no intention of accepting Israel. The "moderate" Palestinian Authority distributes maps that do not show Israel as a country, instead showing only Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Until the Palestinians are willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state, peace talks are useless.

Marjorie Miller (in "Home at Last," June 30) writes that Joel and Donna Zeff and their family "left Los Angeles for Israel in 1994 for the same reason millions of Jews from around the world have migrated to the Middle East in the last half century: to take part in what Joel Zeff calls 'the greatest Jewish adventure in 2,000 years'--the building of a Jewish state." In fact, it is well known that the vast majority of immigrants to Israel were spurred not by ideological conviction but by political or economic necessity.

JERUSALEM — Historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, the father of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the man said to have had the most profound influence on the conservative Israeli leader, died early Monday in his Jerusalem home. He was 102. The elder Netanyahu served as the personal secretary of Zionism's prominent Revisionist leader, Zeev Jabotinsky, in the United States during World War II, lobbying for the creation of a Jewish state. He also pursued his academic work, specializing in medieval Spanish Jewry and the roots of the Spanish Inquisition.

The second intifada, or Palestinian war on Israel, is 4 years old. Although it has featured guns and suicide bombs, it has failed just like the first intifada, in 1987-93, which featured rocks and Molotov cocktails. For every dead Israeli, there are three dead Palestinians. Thousands have been injured. Thousands more have been turned into refugees by Israel's unsubtle policy of avenging suicide bombs by destroying the houses of the bombers' relatives.

The events of the last six weeks in Israel's occupied territories have shed new light on the existential dilemma of the Jewish state, for Israel is at the same time more and less of a state than any ordinary nation in the world.

At the dawn of the 20th century, in the twilight of the continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Hapsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, a flurry of new states did emerge.

It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept." For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism. Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position.

This past week thousands of Palestinian Arabs who fervently want Israel extinguished rained stones on Jews worshiping at the Western Wall. Israeli police responded with tear gas, with rubber bullets, and finally with live ammunition, and 19 Palestinians died. Then the U.N. Security Council condemned Israel for the "excessive" response. The only effect on Israel will be to further embitter its peace movement, for the condemnation gives new meaning to the word hypocrisy.

Israel at 60 is a sad place. It is sad despite the prosperity that is apparent at every turn. By most Western political and economic standards, the country is a phenomenal success story. It is one of the few states created after World War II to have emerged and remained a functioning, indeed vibrant, democracy; its citizens, including its Arab citizens (1.

Several readers responding to Israeli historian Benny Morris' Feb. 14 Op-Ed article calling for a military attack to stop Iran'snuclear program noted that Morris did not acknowledge the Middle East's lone nuclear power: Israel. Some said the doctrine of mutually assured destruction worked for the United States and the Soviet Union, so the likelihood of two nuclear-armed states in the Mideast wiping each other out is minimal. But others who discussed Israel's status as a nuclear power said it, and not Iran, presented the greater threat to peace.

President Obama can't show enough love for the Jewish vote - er, community. With his approval rating among Jews down 20 points from his showing in the 2008 election -- and with Republicans eager to exploit Jewish anxieties about Obama's commitment to Israel -- the president isn't passing up many chances these days to proclaim that he's a loyal friend of the Jewish state. On Friday, he spoke to the Union for Reform Judaism and maintained that his administration has done right by Israel.

After decades of failed negotiations over a Palestinian state, it is tempting to imagine that the potential vote in the U.N. General Assembly on Palestinian statehood might help finally resolve one of the most vexing problems that the world has inherited from the previous century. And after all, that's just how a Jewish state was born — by a U.N. General Assembly vote in 1947. But a U.N. vote that seeks to bypass negotiations and impose a fait accompli on Israel will only undermine a two-state solution.

Taking a stand on Israel Re " 'Delegitimization' is just a distraction," Opinion, July 17 M.J. Rosenberg writes: "Rather than seeking Israel's elimination, the Palestinians … are seeking establishment of a state alongside Israel. " Of the inconvenient truths Rosenberg avoids, none undermines his point more than the actual opinions of Palestinians, as revealed by a survey conducted by pollster Stanley Greenberg. That poll found that only 34% of Palestinians accept the two-state solution; 66% believe Palestinians should start with a two-state solution and then move toward making it one Palestinian state; and 72% supported efforts to deny the thousands of years of Jewish connection to Jerusalem.

Few countries are as active in courting international opinion as Israel. An entire ministry is devoted to a kind of global PR called hasbara , the Hebrew word for "explaining. " Israelis studiously track public opinion in the United States and Europe, and Israel's military has taken to using YouTube, Twitter and an army of bloggers to disseminate real-time updates around the world, sometimes in the middle of battle. But the public diplomacy campaign, which has largely focused on the West, has ignored the Arab world, which many in Israel have viewed as a lost cause.

Al Schwimmer, a former aircraft engineer who smuggled American planes to Israel for its 1948 war of independence, founded its aerospace industry and later became a figure in the Iran-Contra affair, died in Tel Aviv on Friday, his 94th birthday. The cause was complications of pneumonia, according to a spokesperson for Israel Aerospace Industries, the company Schwimmer developed and led for more than 25 years. Schwimmer was a 2006 recipient of the Israel Prize, considered the state's highest honor.

Israel declared a formal state of national emergency early today, shortly after the United States launched air strikes against Iraq. But by dawn, the Jewish state had not been attacked by Iraq despite President Saddam Hussein's threat to do so, and a senior Israeli general told Israel Radio: "The more time passes without missiles hitting Israel, the more the chances of that happening--happily--approach zero." Israeli army sources reported early today that U.S.

Even by the standards of Kafka's uncannily prophetic insights, the parable of the vulture is remarkable. Examined as a lesson for Israel in its protracted struggle for survival in the Middle East, the tale is right on the mark. Indeed, it reads as if it were written originally with no other struggle in mind. Consider the scenario. A man is being destroyed, slowly and painfully, by a fierce and predatory bird.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent statement that Israel can't defend itself with borders drawn along pre-1967 lines has been questioned in certain foreign policy circles. These critics have noted that Israel successfully fought two wars, in 1956 and in 1967, while based within those borders. And they have claimed that borders don't matter as much in modern warfare. But Netanyahu is right. The idea that the 1967 line isn't defensible has actually been around for decades. Indeed, the architects of Israel's national security doctrine reached that conclusion soon after the Six-Day War. The main strategic problem that Israel faced at that time was the enormous asymmetry between its small standing army, which needed to be reinforced with a timely reserve mobilization, and the large standing armies of its neighbors, which could form coalitions in times of tension and exploit Israel's narrow geography with overwhelming numbers.

Who wants peace? Re "Expectations dim for Netanyahu's U.S. trip," May 17 The canard that the U.S. or Israel must make a hoped-for "bold move" to further motivate the Palestinians to come to the table to negotiate for their state is another example of either misguided optimism or downright malice toward the Jewish state. The statement that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his trip to the U.S., is "going to have to give Obama something to work with if he wants America to help" is particularly vexing.