A Palestinian friend who now lives in Atlanta recalls fondly that she grew up in a part of Israel where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in harmony, and she sees no reason why that can’t happen again. That is why she believes that the two-state solution is wrong, and that there must be one democratic, tolerant, multiethnic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

She doesn’t feel this way because she wants to bring about an end to the Jewish state, although that in effect is what it means. She doesn’t want what Hamas wants, which is a Muslim state that gets the Jews out of there. She wants the tolerance and harmony she remembers from her childhood, and the democracy she loves in her adopted country.

She is not alone. Her dream may be naïve, but it is increasingly widely shared, among moderate Palestinians and among fair-minded people throughout the world. Many believe it is an idea whose time has come.

That is why the recent threat by Abu Mazen—Mahmoud Abbas—to resign as the leader of the Palestinian Authority could be a game-changer. He has made such threats before, but this one may be different. It was provoked by the (also recent) change in America’s position on the settlement freeze, in which what Israel views as “natural growth” of existing settlements under certain “restrictions” will be tolerated by Obama’s administration.

Some American Jewish leaders are taking credit for this change, and certainly I don’t like to see a U.S. administration trying to make policy for Israel. But I’m not sure those Jewish leaders fully understand the powers of the weak, which were prominently on display in Abu Mazen’s threat to resign.

At a minimum, it is a brilliant political gambit, and one that has apparently already borne fruit. In the few days since that announcement, he and his colleagues have succeeded in postponing the scheduled January elections, so that Abbas can remain in place for the immediate future.

In a seeming contradiction that is of course part of the game, his government has also said it may go to the UN to seek recognition of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has duly counter-threatened that if the Palestinians do that, Israel will also begin to act unilaterally. However, all this depends on there being a government in the West Bank.

What if there isn’t one? The threat to walk away may be a kind of nuclear option for Abu Mazen, because a number of others in the leadership have said that they will follow him. What happens if the Palestinian Authority effectively dissolves itself?

In that case, Israel will be left holding the bag, and it will be filled with nasty things. Hamas will try to fill the vacuum as it did in Gaza when Fatah failed miserably there. But Israel cannot withdraw from the West Bank. There are not just a few thousand settlers there, there are hundreds of thousands, and there is no popular will in Israel in favor of removing them by force.

So the IDF stays there, protects the settlers and their roads, tries to root out Hamas terrorists, just as it does now. The difference is that there will not only be no negotiating partner on the other side, there will be no authority there except Israel. And the world will gradually give up on the idea of a two-state solution, because the Palestinians won’t want it any longer.

Some Israelis will be happy about that, but most (in poll after poll) realize that only a two-state answer is compatible with the long-term existence of a Jewish state. Moderate Palestinians who have no truck with terrorism do understand the demographic realities, and they can be patient for another generation or two. Meanwhile, the “apartheid” epithet applied so often to Israel will become a recognized truth.

It’s not apartheid when you wall off enemies in a bordering state, or an entity perceived as being on its way to becoming a state. It’s quite another if there is no authority there but you, and the world increasingly sees you the way it saw South Africa: a unified state in which a racial minority rules a racial majority in a clearly discriminatory and even brutal way.

As an American, I don’t ever tell Israelis what to do. However, I try to keep them informed about American opinion. I do not believe that Americans will be friendly toward a Jewish state with a non-Jewish majority that will never have a chance at equal rights.

Saib Erekat, a key spokesman for Abu Mazen’s government, said recently that if Israel continues to refuse to freeze settlements, the only course open to Palestinians will be to “refocus their attention on the one-state solution where Muslims, Christians and Jews can live as equals." He went on to say, "It is very serious. This is the moment of truth for us."

It could be the moment of truth for Israel too.

This appreciation of the work of Lévi-Strauss in a Jewish perspective appeared in slightly different form in The Forward of November 13, 2009, and in The Forward online:

The death of Claude Lévi-Strauss October 30 in Paris at age 100 closed an epoch in anthropology. His name was synonymous with structuralism, the dominant theory of culture in the late 20th century, and his mind and work were emblematic of French intellectual life at its

most grand. Like Emile Durkheim, the great sociologist whose mantle he picked up and wore very comfortably, Lévi-Strauss was a Jew. But in neither case, nor in those of many other Jewish social thinkers, is it easy to find explicit Jewish references in their lives or work.

From his youth, Lévi-Strauss identified first and foremost — perhaps solely — as a Frenchman. But the Nazis and their French minions had other ideas. Serving in the army on the “impregnable” Maginot Line, Lévi-Strauss, like his comrades, fled the blitzkrieg, a stray cog in a broken army in disarray.

Somehow he evaded the nets cast by both the Germans and their collaborators among his countrymen, and in 1941 took up an academic life in New York. Quite properly, he recognized New York as a great cultural center, collecting not just intellectual light but the creativity of all the world’s traditions. He did well there, befriended by (among others) the father of American anthropology, Columbia’s Franz Boas — another, much more senior, Jewish immigrant.

In the early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss returned to France, where, in spite of everything, he felt he truly belonged. He had done superb fieldwork in Brazil along the way, and among many scholarly works published the semi-popular Tristes Tropiques— a sort of bilingual pun that can mean  “sad tropics” but also “tropical encounters.” It began, “Travelers and travelogues are two things I hate,” but its masterful prose was an unprecedented blend of ethnography and travelogue, intellectual challenge and tropical adventure.

Yet after this inspired account of a jungle trek, where the human landscape mattered more than the flora and fauna, he turned decisively to theory. He once frankly told an interviewer that he felt more comfortable in the study than in the field. In any case, what he did in his study, in the confines of his mind, changed the way we think about human behavior.

In works like Totemism, The Savage Mind and the magisterial, multi-volume Mythologiques, he explored the universals of human thought that he believed must underlie social structure and myth. Social rules, myths and rituals are as they are because, as Lévi-Strauss put it, they are “good to think” — social expressions of the way the mind is set up.

Above all, perhaps, he respected what he called the savage mind, and the adaptive knowledge even the most “primitive” people had about the world around them, notably botanical and zoological expertise. He also identified with those minds, using the term bricolage — the French handyman’s ability to make use of any materials available to build, repair and create — to describe their thought processes as well as his own.

In what way if any were these thoughts Jewish? As Durkheim, who began life as David Émile, was the son of a rabbi before being the father of sociology, so Lévi-Strauss was a Versailles rabbi’s grandson before fathering structuralism. Marx, long before them, had been descended from long lines of rabbis on both sides of his family, and Freud, also descended from rabbis, had been taken hand in hand to the synagogue by his father.

All these social thinkers lived and wrote as if their Jewishness was something to ignore, evade or criticize. None seems to have considered himself and his work a manifestation of centuries-old patterns of Jewish argument refracted through the prism of modernity. Einstein (a hard scientist who did acknowledge the value of Jewish tradition) used to say half-seriously that he was reading the mind of God; Lévi-Strauss and his fellow social thinkers were reading the mind of man. For millennia their ancestors, including rabbis, had tried to do both, but none of them really acknowledged his debt to that tradition.

Lévi-Strauss, like Durkheim, wanted to be thoroughly French. As Durkheim saw the Dreyfus Affair as an aberration, so Lévi-Strauss saw the Vichy years as something that had little to do with his homeland. Later, inseparable from the French intellectual scene, he was elected to the Académie Française, and was very active in that centuries-old coterie of immortals. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Code had emancipated the Jews of France, and temporary setbacks did not make them anything but French.

Yet behind him, too, were the immortals of Jewish thought — the rigorous Talmudic sages, the philosophical Maimonides, the imaginative minds of Kabbalah and all their countless students and admirers. With two-tenths of a percent of the world’s people, Jews have won well over 20% of the Nobel Prizes, a hundred-fold excess, and that doesn’t count the human scientists mentioned here. Jewish thinkers turned their lenses on the modernity that had freed them; thinking outside the box of the dominant religion, they shaped 20th-century thought.

For Lévi-Strauss, as for Boas and other Jewish anthropologists, there was another dimension to being a cultural outsider: It drew them to a sympathetic view of simpler cultures, which most of their contemporaries viewed with disdain. The young intellectual who probably didn’t feel quite French — whose people were driven into hiding and murdered because of their odd and separate customs — became the fieldworker who penetrated the Amazon forest and recorded the odd customs of even more separate people, respecting and preserving them for posterity.

And, ironically, in the end it brought him back into the pantheon of the great minds of France; thus the country he loved so well acknowledged a debt to a man whose grandfather had led a congregation of French Jews in prayer and hovered over sacred books, trying with all his heart to read the minds of God and men, in words set down and debated far from Paris, at a time when no one in France could read. Modernity makes strange bedfellows, and even stranger disciples.

I gave a talk the other day at the Jewish Community Center of Virginia Beach/Norfolk, where they were having a sort of fair observing Breast Cancer Awareness month. It seemed a little anomalous, with scores of children roaming their huge back yard running races and eating cotton candy, teenagers off in corners chatting about their secret and public lives, a local talent show, pink t-shirts everywhere, and the author of The Jewish Body speaking about breast cancer and the Jews.

The people who invited me knew that I had lost my first wife to this terrible disease, and so they asked me to talk about the state of the art in breast cancer treatment and about the Jewish angle in particular, with an emphasis on genes, and with a personal touch. I tried to do all that, and wrote about the general and personal dimensions on my other website.

But what does it have to do with the Jews?

There is an increasing perception that Jewish women have more breast cancer than others, but this has not been shown. Once you control for reproductive life, you find no differences. But because Jewish women (like most educated upper middle class women) start childbearing late, have few children, and don’t breast feed for very long, they are more vulnerable.

The perception that this disease is somehow Jewish arises from the genes that help cause it, some of which are indeed more common in Jews. The first two genes discovered to play a specific role in breast cancer are the BRCA genes (often pronounced “bracka”), which are tumor suppressor genes. They aren’t restricted to Jews, but they are more common in Ashkenazic Jews than in others.

Both sexes have them and can pass them on to their children, but women are 100 times more susceptible to breast cancer than men—one in eight women will get it at some point in life–and the BRCA genes cause cancer of the ovary as well as the breast. Any one of a number of different mutations in either of them will reduce your ability to suppress a tumor (microscopic ones pop up in all of us) and increase your chances of cancer.

The way it works is, you inherit one BRCA mutation in one of a pair of chromosomes. That doesn’t lead straight to the cancer. But all cells in your body, including the ones in the lining of the milk glands, have this mutation, and when radiation or toxins or just the bad luck of DNA damage when the cell divides leads to a mirror-image mutation in the other chromosome of the pair, that cell will be able to divide much more easily, and give you the runaway growth that is cancer.

So why the Jews? Like the genes for Tay-Sachs Disease (a form of mental retardation leading to early death) and several other nervous system diseases, Ashkenazic Jews are more likely to have the BRCA genes. They are a lot less the “property” of Ashkenazic Jews than the Tay-Sachs genes, but their particular form of hereditary cancer is more Jewish than not.

And this leads to some questions about how the Ashkenazic Jews got them. The consensus is that Ashkenazim—eighty percent of the world’s Jews today—arose from a very small “founder” population, and may have experienced other “bottlenecks” in their history when plagues shrank the population to a small size again. Also, the strong desire to marry other Jews kept any genes that randomly appeared within the population.

But there is a new theory about Ashkenazic diseases that goes beyond the idea of genetic isolation. It was put forward in the Journal of Biosocial Science in 2006 and has caused a lot of controversy. The authors are not Jewish—they are Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and my old friend Henry Harpending—so (as we say in Georgia) they don’t have a dog in the fight.

In a nutshell, they argue that there has been selection for high intelligence in Ashkenazic Jews throughout their history, and that this selection has sort of “dragged along” the genetic diseases, the way resistance to malaria “dragged along” sickle cell anemia. Carriers for the sickle gene resist malaria better, and the theory is that some forms of the Ashkenazic disease genes promote brain development in early life.

This is far from proven, but there are arguments. First, Ashkenazic Jews have higher average IQs in many studies, and with 0.2 percent of the world’s population have won over 20 percent of the Nobel prizes in science. Second, all the Ashkenazic genes affect just a few of the body’s physiological pathways, and these seem to be also implicated in brain development.

In the case of the BRCA genes, laboratory experiments with embryonic rat brain cells show that normal versions of the genes suppress brain cell growth just as they later suppress tumors. This means a mutation could cause both added brain development and cancer. A lot more research is needed before we conclude that this is true, but one thing is certain. Jewish genes–for better or for worse–are once again a legitimate subject of scientific discussion, and we have to deal with it.

I’ve been appearing in New York to promote my book, The Jewish Body, which (says the publisher, who wants to sell books, God bless him) inspired a slew of activities called “Jewish Body Week,” with events in many parts of this city and others—dance performances, “Jewish” yoga, food events, mikvah tours, etcetera.

I spoke Sunday at the JCC in Manhattan, an imposing, shiny, seven-story building at Amsterdam and 76th, a center of Jewish life on the upper West Side. It was abuzz with activity Sunday–three security guards screening and directing people at the entrance, an art exhibit and people giving out food samples just past the entrance, a bustling store, children everywhere. Jewish life is thriving here.

The story was similar later in the afternoon at the 14th Street Y. After a just-finished renovation they had a full house for a variety of activities, only one of which (blessedly) had anything to do with me.

Wayne and Alyssa, my handlers from Nextbook publishers, had duly whisked me downtown after my JCC event and book signing, and we were on time for the panel that preceded my appearance. This was really wonderful.

Dr. Ruth Calderon, Founder and Chair of Alma Home for Hebrew Culture, and Ruby Namdar, a novelist and teacher of Jewish texts, were speaking. Both are Israeli, both articulate in accented, lilting English, both charming, and both were insightful and moving in what they had to say.

Ruth had given out some texts, particularly one that she wanted to talk about—the one where Moses, seeing the burning bush, is told by God to “put thy shoes from off thy feet, for the ground you stand upon is holy.” Similar language is used later with Joshua, and Ruth asked the audience, “What do you think this means?”

People said interesting things: it’s a sign of respect, it makes you vulnerable. But the one she seemed to be looking for was a little different: to take away the barrier between your body and the soil, the earth, the world.  To confront it and connect to it in a way you never have before. I will never read that text in the old way again.

Ruby spoke next, and said that when he teaches the Bible to non-Hebrew speaking audiences, he likes to use the King James Version. I found myself nodding as he said it, but our reasons were different. I find it simply, and by far, the most beautiful English version. Ruby, not being a native English speaker, couldn’t easily make that judgment, but he made a different point.

For English speakers, reading the King James is something like the experience modern Hebrew speakers have when they read the original Hebrew text. It’s archaic to them, challenging to access, and all in all representative of a different, distant time. When we read the text in Shakespeare’s English, we get something of the flavor of that experience.

He then told a story that reminded me of my own. He had not been in a synagogue for many years when his first child was born, and he found himself going back. His daughter became accustomed to being there with her father, and at age seven was curled up in his lap, “regressing,” sucking her thumb. This was fine with Ruby—he wanted her above all to be comfortable there, and she clearly was—embedded in the womb of Jewish tradition.

But in one brief exchange Ruth gently pointed out to him that he came originally from the men’s side of the shul, while she came from the women’s side. In a real sense, he is a native of synagogue culture, while a woman, however religious, could until recently only be an immigrant. The unspoken question was, what would Ruby’s daughter be?

When it was time for my on-stage interview–by the able and engaging Gabe Sanders, who had read my book–I was ready to answer his questions, but I wanted to say first that I had learned three things from the panel.

First, the great Jewish texts are not the sol property of the Orthodox rabbis; they belong to the Jewish people.

Second, strong links between Israelis and the American Jews are vital and bring us something we cannot get any other way. As time goes by, I believe that connecting to Israel will be a key to my (as yet unborn) grandchildren’s Jewish identity.

Third, the Jewish future rests above all with women. First, for the old reason that the next generation of Jews will come out of their Jewish bodies. Second, for the new reason that in this period of transition, they must decide whether they can cross over from the role they have had until now, to the equal role they must have going forward. Only if they decide the transition is worth making will Jewish life have a future.

Yes, I know the Orthodox arguments. Women have the most important responsibility already—their role in the private sphere of the family. Fine. That continues. But their role in the public sphere is destined to grow dramatically, and Judaism and Jewishness rest more in the hands of my daughters than they do in the hands of my son.

Ever wonder why the Jews have a persecution complex? Could it be, um, that they’ve been so often persecuted?

I was put in mind of this by the cover story (by Paula Margulies) of the current Jerusalem Report, about the descendants of anusim— Jews who converted during the Spanish Inquisition to save their lives and families. The Jews had perhaps their greatest historical epoch in Muslim Spain, but it ended with the return of Christian rule.

In the mid-1300s systematic massacres began, with rioters murdering thousands of Jews throughout Castile and Aragon. In 1391 alone some fifty thousand were murdered. All the synagogues of Barcelona were destroyed, and eight centuries of Jewish life were ground into dust and blood.

Many survived by converting, and some of those were sincere. But by 1480 Ferdinand and Isabella, of Christopher Columbus fame, commissioned the Inquisition to root out backsliding Jews. They and their descendants, including many devout Christians, were often tortured. Many were burned alive in autos-da-fe—“acts of faith.”

Acts of race would be more like it; Ben-Zion Netanyahu, the history-professor father of Israel’s prime minister, wrote the Inquisition‘s definitive history. He concludes that this persecution was the forerunner of the Third Reich, since it consisted essentially of a refusal to accept conversion. “Blood will out” could have been the Inquisitors’ battle cry.

Part way through this murderous process, the royal pair—the same year they supposedly bankrolled Columbus–expelled Jews who would not convert. “In the first week of July they took the route for quitting their native land, great and small, young and old, on foot or horses, in carts . . . They experienced great trouble and suffered indescribable misfortunes on the road, some falling, others rising, some dying, others being born, some fainting, others being attacked by illness. There was not a Christian but that pitied them and pleaded with them to be baptized. Some from misery were converted, but they were few.”

This from a chronicler known to be no friend to the Jews; he also said rabbis encouraged young people to play on pipes and tambours, to speed their grieving people on the way. Thus a hundred thousand Jews left Spain, with as many or more staying behind as Christians. Of those, true or false, many preserved some Jewish customs.

Those who left stayed Jewish as they circled the Mediterranean. They were embraced by the Sultan of Turkey, who thought Ferdinand and Isabella very foolish for kicking these useful people out. They established themselves in Greece and the Balkans with great success until they met with Hitler’s minions, persecutors even worse than the old Inquisitors. Luckier Sephardim went to Amsterdam, London, and the New World.

Fast forward five centuries—twenty generations. Torture had tutored many in fear, so that even in times and places where it was not very dangerous to be Jewish, Sephardic families customarily held their Haggadahs under the table at Passover seders and taught their children to count the three evening stars that ended the Sabbath without pointing their fingers.

But many Catholics descended from forced converts—b’nei anusim—kept traces of Jewishness. Some families had an antique pair of candlesticks they considered sacred, or declined to eat meat with milk. To this day the Chuetas, a community of silversmiths and their families on the island of Mallorca, have distinctive names and tend to avoid marriage with outsiders. A group of 1500 Catholics in the American Southwest feel and in some sense are partly Jewish; one woman found the words Somos Judios—We are Jews—inscribed in an old family Bible. She prayed for it not to be true, but that prayer was not answered, and she found herself steadily more drawn to Judaism.

Others have similar stories, and The Jerusalem Report’s Margulies collected several. Patience Rojas-Taylor, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, remembers her grandmother saying “We’re Catholic, but we don’t participate.” That lady lit candles and said Psalms on Friday nights, and the family did not eat pork or shellfish, both staples of Puerto Rican cuisine. She managed to trace her ancestry centuries back to forced converts in the Canary Islands; she fell in love with Judaism and she reversed their destiny in a formal Orthodox conversion. Now she is not Patience, but Avigail.

Many people are seeking Sephardic Jewish ancestors on the Internet, in genealogy chat groups, or using DNA. Facebook has a Centro Bnei Anusim group. Rabbi Rigoberto Emmanuel Viñas, the spiritual leader of an Orthodox synagogue in Yonkers and a descendant of anusim himself, said, “The ghosts of 500 years are crying.” Juan Mejia, 32, a rabbinical student in New York, began as a devout Catholic student in Jesuit schools in Bogota. On a visit to Israel he pressed his head to the Western Wall and felt a profound sense of loss, “that an incredible injustice had been perpetrated on my people.”

Both men give counsel and guidance to b’nei anusim who are drawn to Judaism. So does Rabbi Stephen Leon of Congregation B’nei Zion in El Paso; he began holding services in Spanish and has been “inundated with people who are curious.” Mejia asks, “Why can’t we have tacos and empanadas at Kiddush?” Why not, indeed? In today’s Latin America, millions of spiritual seekers have left Catholicism for Evangelical Christianity. Why shouldn’t other seekers become Jewish–especially if their Jewish ancestors were forced to become Catholic against their will?

As Mejia also said, “The story of the anusim is the absolute triumph of conscience. You can control me on the outside, but you can’t control what I eat, what I believe. The idea is so profoundly Jewish, so profoundly human.”

The stories and quotes from Rojas-Taylor, Viñas, Mejia, and Leon are in Paula Margulies’ “Cries Across the Centuries,” the cover story in The Jerusalem Report of October 12, 2009. To subscribe to this biweekly magazine, which I usually read from cover to cover, click here. References for the other material can be found in Chapter 8 of my book Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews.

Is Richard Goldstone a naïve dupe of Hamas terrorists or a legitimate hero of the Zionist left? I’m guessing more than a little of both.

Alan Dershowitz predictably took the former view, and you would hardly know from reading his assault on Goldstone, published on the Huffington Post, that Dersh had a law degree, much less that he is a Harvard law professor and respected legal mind. Lumping Goldstone not just with Noam Chomsky but with Norman Finkelstein, a Jew known for nothing at all except his virulent anti-Israel rants, seems to me to discredit Dershowitz’s own commentary, which does little to illuminate the issues of international law.

Goldstone is a world-renowned jurist who helped bring about an end to apartheid and then helped engineer the reconciliation that prevented the new South Africa from degenerating into civil war. He was instrumental in shedding light and bringing judgment upon war crimes and crimes against humanity in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a former president of the respected Jewish charity ORT. Everyone who knows him says he loves and supports Israel. His daughter lived there for years and very recently gave an interview in Hebrew to Israeli Army Radio saying her father agonized over the decision to take on the UN Human Rights Council mandate to expose Israel as guilty of the gravest crimes. He did it, she said, to keep the resulting report from being even worse than it was, and to make Israel live up to its best self.

Could such a man be duped by Hamas operatives into telling the world what they wanted it to hear about Israel’s actions in Gaza? Certainly. Can he be dismissed with flippant remarks about “Planet Goldstone” as Dersh effectively slammed “Planet Chomsky”? I don’t think so. Dershowitz followed up with a more serious article, but his attacks on Goldstone do not reflect well on him.

Passions are high and positions are far apart. Consider two editorials in Haaretz in the past few days.

Gideon Levy says, “There’s a name on every bullet, and there’s someone responsible for every crime. The Teflon cloak Israel has wrapped around itself since Operation Cast Lead has been ripped off, once and for all, and now the difficult questions must be faced. It has become superfluous to ask whether war crimes were committed in Gaza, because authoritative and clear-cut answers have already been given. So the follow-up question has to be addressed: Who’s to blame? If war crimes were committed in Gaza, it follows that there are war criminals at large among us. They must be held accountable and punished. This is the harsh conclusion to be drawn from the detailed United Nations report.”

But Avi Shavit says, “Some two weeks ago American airplanes fired on two oil tankers in northern Afghanistan . . . The attack was successful – the two tankers were hit, went up in flames and were destroyed. But the overwhelming American-German air attack killed some 70 people. Some of those brought to hospitals were severely injured – with mutilated faces, burned hands and charred bodies . . .

“If the international community is committed to international law and universal ethics – which do not discriminate between one sort of killing and another – then it should investigate this villainous assault . . .

“Obama would probably be the principal defendant in this case. He was the one who believed in the war in Afghanistan and intensified it. As U.S. commander-in-chief, he bears direct responsibility not only for the deaths of those who were burned with the tankers, but the death of many hundreds of innocent Afghan civilians.

“If there are is such a thing as an international community, international law and universal ethics, they must seriously consider putting Obama on trial for his responsibility for severe war crimes.

“Absurd? Yes, it’s absurd. No sane person in the world believes that the United States, Russia or China could be subjected to purist international law. The United States has killed thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the last few months encouraged Pakistan to make an extremely brutal military move in its Swat Valley. The United States was not required to account for it because everyone understands that this is the price of the terrible War on Terror. Russia committed blood-curdling war crimes in Chechnya, while China deprives its citizens of basic rights and is conducting a wicked occupation in Tibet. They are not asked to pay for this because everyone understands that you don’t mess with superpowers.

“But not only superpowers are immune. Saudi Arabia practices an open, declared policy of discrimination against women and the international community does not see. Sri Lanka is crushing the Tamil national movement, causing a ghastly humanitarian disaster, and the international community does not hear. Turkey is brutally oppressing the Kurdish minority, and the international community does not speak.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, in the three years since the UN Human Rights Council came into existence, it has criticized or condemned Israel more often than all other 191 UN member nations combined.

The Goldstone Report gives short shrift to critiques of Hamas for sending thousands of rockets against civilian targets in Israel, for systematically and consistently using civilians as human shields, for storing weapons in and firing them from schools and mosques, and for torture and other crimes against Palestinian opponents in Gaza.

One clear sign of the committee’s bias is that they refused to interview Colonel Richard Kemp, an authority on urban conflict who has strongly defended the IDF’s efforts to protect civilians during the Gaza war, saying “I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people.” What justifies omitting his testimony?

Were there avoidable errors and even crimes committed by the IDF in Gaza? Almost certainly, and they are under investigation in Israel, not just in international organizations. But the UN and Justice Goldstone only discredit themselves with their vastly disproportionate criticism of Israel.

President Obama addressed the United Nations and the world yesterday with his usual eloquence and his usual concessionary tone. He denounced tyranny, of course, but he was talking to an audience of world leaders who, according to The Economist’s report on world democracy, was made up one fifth to one third of tyrants.

Speaking to this group, he devoted 32 lines of his speech to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Afghanistan and Pakistan, discussed together, got a total of 5 lines; Iraq, 4; and Iran and North Korea, discussed together, a total of 9. Darfur got 2 lines, with no mention of the mass murders.

Almost 6 times as much space for Israel and the Palestinians as for Iran, which will soon threaten Israel with nuclear weapons. Practically no mention of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and the attendant risk of nuclear terror, and no mention of India and Pakistan’s potential nuclear confrontation.

There was no mention of Sri Lanka, which conducted an action this year against the Tamil Tigers that caused thousands of civilian deaths. Haiti, Congo (where civil wars have killed millions in recent years), and East Timor were mentioned in passing. Zimbabwe, Somalia, the unstable former Soviet republics, and Tibet also got no mention.

Thus President Obama confirmed in his speech the completely distorted outlook that pervades the United Nations: that world peace depends far more on Israel and the Palestinians (read: on Israel) than on any other conflict or instability. I think his reason for this emphasis was to satisfy his audience. But the reason for their emphasis is extreme anti-Zionism, which in my view includes a large dose of anti-Semitism.

Certainly anti-Israel sentiment motivated the recently released UN report on civilian casualties in the Gaza war.  It was denounced by Shimon Peres, who said it “makes a mockery of history,” and by many others in Israel. Although headed by a South African judge who is Jewish, Richard Goldstone, it was obviously biased against Israel from the outset—so much so that Mary Robinson, the former Irish Prime Minister and former UN Commissioner for Human Rights, refused to lead the investigation.

Robinson has been one of Israel’s sharpest critics for many years, but of this project she said:

“I absolutely condemn what Hamas does. And that also should be a subject of inquiry. And unfortunately, the Human Rights Council passed a resolution seeking a fact-finding mission to only look at what Israel had done, and I don’t think that’s a human rights approach.”

In other words, the report’s foregone conclusion was included in its mandate, already a unilateral condemnation of Israel. It recycled Palestinian estimates of the number of civilian deaths, and included police officers as civilians. For a list of 205 police officers, including supposed “children,” identified by name as members of military units, visit this website.

Strategy expert Edward Luttwak wrote during the war that even the Hamas estimate of 25 percent civilian casualties during air strikes represents “an extremely accurate bombing campaign,” sparing civilians more than American bombing campaigns in both Iraq wars. British commander Colonel Richard Kemp, who led troops in Afghanistan and is very familiar with Gaza, said during the war, “I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more effort to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.” He explained in detail how Hamas uses civilians as shields as a key part of their explicit, planned tactical regime.

He also said, and I agree, that all civilian deaths are tragic, and I have written about evidence that some Israeli troops caused needless civilian deaths and mistreated Palestinians in an inexcusable way. But that does not justify a one-sided UN report that was explicitly biased from the outset, and which reached grossly exaggerated conclusions about Israel’s misdeeds.

Intriguingly, new polls out today offer good tidings about the West Bank and Gaza. According to the International Peace Institute, an independent polling group, a clear majority of Palestinians, 55 percent, now favor a two-state solution, with only 11 percent favoring a unified state or a union with Jordan. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has a 55 percent approval rating, while his Hamas rival Ismail Haniyeh is at 32 percent. According to the poll, parliamentary elections if held now would give 45 percent of the vote to Fatah and only 24 percent to Hamas.

This is a dramatic change from just a few years ago or even from immediately after the Gaza war. The popularity of Hamas has declined precipitously, and although Palestinians are still wary of corruption in Fatah and still very skeptical of Israel’s intentions, they are more ready for peace than they have ever been.  That is true of Israelis as well.

Meanwhile, checkpoints have been reduced in the West Bank, building is going on in Ramallah and Jenin, and the Palestinian economy is coming to life. Palestinians may be beginning to see a future for themselves beyond violence. Tony Blair said yesterday in an interview with Christiane Amanpour, “You’ve got to negotiate from the top down and build from the bottom up.”

Let us hope that both governments are as ready for peace as their people seem to be. Blair also predicted yesterday that peace talks will soon resume. President Obama certainly wants that. Blair said that both Palestinians and Israelis want a two-state solution but don’t really believe it can happen. “It’s our job to close that credibility gap.”

Fun zeyner munt tzu Gottes eyer. From his mouth to God’s ear.

The moral hypocrisy of some Orthodox rabbis has now reached a new height, and their morals a new low, as five New Jersey rabbis were arrested on charges related to bribery, money-laundering, and illegal trafficking in human body parts. What was lately the undisputed domain of Tony Soprano is now the turf of Rabbi Sopranowitz.

The Sopranos didn’t sing and maybe the Sopranowitzes won’t either, but plenty of tunes came out of the mouth of a rabbi’s son named Sol Dwek. He was arrested three years ago and faced a stiff prison term when he thought better of it and not only ratted out on his old pals, but whooshed them into a law enforcement vacuum cleaner. And that sucking sound they didn’t hear was being recorded on a device strapped to Solly’s treacherous bosom.

And so, the end of the line for three mayors, a couple dozen other government officials, some civilians, and—count them—five Orthodox rabbis. Alright, they’re swamped by the 150 Joisey officials arrested since ’01. Alright, Da Gahden State is da mos’ corrupt in da whole U.S. of A. But rabbis? Orthodox rabbis?

Maybe it figures. When you’re a stickler for the fence (no, not that kind of fence) around the Torah, when you shout Shabbes! Shabbes! at every little kid who rides a scooter into your neighborhood, when you yell at your wife that she might miss the candle-lighting time by a second, when even glatt kosher isn’t really good enough—well, haven’t you stored up so many points with the Almighty that you can ignore little mitzvahs like Thou shalt not steal?

But then again Orthodox rabbis are obsessed with cleanliness. Maybe they thought it was a mitzvah to launder tens of millions of dollars. Through Jewish charities. In Israel. Okay, Bernie Madoff could have bought and sold these yarmulked clowns with his pocket change. But at least he stuck to ripping off his own landsmen, so it wasn’t quite such a shanda fir di goyim. These guys robbed New Jersey.

Wait, it gets better, in case you haven’t heard. Some of these kosher culprits—maybe not the rabbis themselves, but folks they were involved with–were buying human organs. In the Holy Land. And reselling them at huge profits on the not-so-holy Jersey Shore.

Maybe they saw the corruption of the rabbis running the huge, filthy, and exploitative “kosher” slaughterhouse in Iowa, and they said, hey, we can do better than that! So instead of double-dealing cow parts they triple-dealt human ones.

These guys would drive over their grandmother to get away from a cheeseburger, but turning human kidneys into cash? No problem!

Two of these rabbis are, um, spiritual leaders of congregations. One of them is Saul Kassin, 87, the heir of a great rabbinical dynasty. He sat shiva for his daughter Anna, now 62, when she intermarried 40 years ago–despite the fact that she stayed Jewish, teaches in a religious school, and tutors bar and bat mitzvah kids. That’ll teach her!

So he’s a huge crook, so what? At least he considered his daughter dead for four decades, even though she still speaks well of him, obeying the fifth commandment while he breaks half the others. Surely breaking his daughter’s heart over and over again will get him a front seat in the world to come! I’m just not saying which end of it.

These pathetic holy rollers hailed from the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn. That doesn’t matter except that they’re a small, proud, faithful group of Jews who now will never rub off the stain on their reputation. They’re not saying much at the moment, but I hope they’re thinking about the difference between a little mitzvah and a big one.

Hint: super-glatt-kosher meat is a little mitzvah. Not stealing and not bearing false witness? Those are big ones. I don’t know exactly which mitzvah covers why you shouldn’t deal with folks who buy kidneys cheap ($10K) from poor people in Israel and sell them dear ($160K) to fat cats in Jersey, but I’m guessing that’s a big one too, maybe more than one. For starters, how about not desecrating a body made in the image of God?

As for giving your daughter the cold shoulder for forty years, that’s no mitzvah, that’s a shanda–a shame.

Sadly, I must once again write about accusations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. This is not because Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch says they happened. It’s because a new report has been released by an organization of Israel Defense Forces soldiers called “Breaking the Silence” (Shovrim Sh’tika). Their booklet has testimonies from 26 soldiers concerning IDF actions during the recent Gaza war, and they reflect badly on Israel—some of them very badly.

I wrote before about reports that the Orthodox rabbinate is exerting undue influence over IDF troops in the field, pushing young soldiers to take harsher action against Palestinians. That is disturbing because it might reflect a systemic problem in the army, and because it would represent a historic departure from the secular humanist (alright, socialist Zionist) traditions that prevailed in it for most of its existence.

The new collection of testimonies has been heavily criticized by the IDF on the grounds that all of them are presented anonymously, making it difficult to impossible to counter or investigate the allegations. Breaking the Silence replies that these are serving soldiers who fear reprisal. That fear in itself is a serious accusation against the army. But if you watch or read their testimony, it seems honest and heartfelt.

Breaking the Silence summarizes them by saying that "accepted practices" during the Gaza war included “the destruction of hundreds of houses and mosques for no military purpose, the firing of phosphorus gas in the direction of populated areas, the killing of innocent victims with small arms, the destruction of private property, and most of all, a permissive atmosphere in the command structure that enabled soldiers to act without moral restrictions.” Several of these could be prosecuted as war crimes.

A soldier said he was walking on the beach and found an area of glazed sand that would result from a white phosphorus bomb. He went on to say, “in training you learn that white phosphorus is not used, and you’re taught that it’s not humane”. It turns out that these bombs are not illegal (Israel has admitted using them) if they are used within the guidelines of the laws of war. But were they?

Another soldier, from the elite Golani brigade: “Sometimes a force would enter while placing rifle barrels on a civilian’s shoulder, advancing into a house and using him as a human shield.” This is illegal, period, not to mention immoral. Several soldiers testified that there was an atmosphere that encouraged indiscriminate killing and destruction.

So the question is, were they really accepted practices? If so, high-level commanders could end up being prosecuted. If not, there is still a heavy responsibility to punish any and all wrongdoers.

Another organization, “Soldiers Speak Out,” has posted videos of many other soldiers testifying to the humane nature of actions they witnessed and took part in during the Gaza war—for example, helping a woman in labor get to the hospital, helping a man get back the chickens scared off by the conflict, and most importantly, refraining from firing to make sure they were not shooting civilians.

These are heartening stories. These soldiers took serious risks to do these things. They also talk about finding rocket launchers in a Palestinian ambulance and arms caches under schools and clinics. Hamas doesn’t merely use civilians as human shields, it makes that practice a central part of its doctrine of war.

These testimonies provide balance and show that there was no pervasive cavalier or inhumane attitude in the force as a whole. But they don’t negate those other stories. Every army has its bad apples and excesses in the heat of war. The IDF must leave no stone unturned in investigating them.

During the war, Colonel Richard Kemp, who had been one of the British commanders in Afghanistan and who knows Gaza, calmly responded to BBC questions about Palestinian casualties. After saying that any civilian deaths are “absolutely tragic,” he said, “but Israel doesn’t have any choice apart from to defend its own people.”

He went on to say, “From my knowledge of the IDF and to the extent to which I’ve been following the current operation, I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more effort to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”

Pressed on UN reports that the IDF told Palestians to go into a house that was then bombed, he said, “The Israeli army operate under a strict code of conduct, and they’re answerable to the Israeli government and the Israeli courts, and if it turned out that there was a deliberate crime committed there, I’ve no doubt that people would be held to account.”

In the end he said, “War itself, the whole nature of war, any military commander will tell you this, war is chaos, war is full of mistakes . . . It’s a real tragedy, but it’s just what happens when you go to war.” Israel must find out what was a mistake and what was a violation of its own code of military conduct. It must thoroughly justify Colonel Kemp’s statement: I’ve no doubt that people would be held to account.

It must also consider very carefully whether there is, in part of the army, the kind of attitude that the Breaking the Silence soldiers describe. If there is, and if it is not rooted out, then war crimes will surely be committed—if they haven’t been already—and not just international condemnation but international prosecution may follow.

It’s July 4th, and that always puts me in mind of my relatives who fought and died for our country. I was named after my mother’s favorite cousin, Melvin Levine, a captain in the Army Air Corps (no Air Force then). He was a devastatingly handsome bandleader in college, but became the co-pilot of a B-25 bomber, downed in a lightning storm in a training exercise in 1943. On the wall I can see, from here at my desk, a certificate of land bought in his memory by our grandparents—a fifth of a dunam (about 200 square meters) in “Soldiers Village,” a war veterans’ settlement in what was then Palestine.

My much older uncles Dave Pechenik and Herman Adelstein (photo) were heroes of a different war. They were about as old as the century, and not yet eighteen when they fought for the country they loved; as they aged they only loved it more. Dave used to tell how his commanding officer called the men together and asked, “Which one of you knows anything about chemistry?” No hands. “Okay, Pechenik, you’re the Gas NCO.”

“Gas NCO!” Dave exclaimed to me six decades later. “I didn’t even know what a chemistry set was! But I had a Yiddishe kup…”—a Jewish head. He’d been brought to the States as an immigrant babe-in-arms, and now he was back in Europe fighting for his new country. Poison gas was used in that war, and for the rest of his time in France it was his job to investigate unexploded shells for mustard gas. Once he was crawling through a tunnel to find one and a regular shell hit, giving Dave’s Yiddishe kup a heck of a zetz, and Dave a Purple Heart.

Herman, his brother-in-law, brother-in-arms, and best friend didn’t like to talk about the war. He was a huge man with fingers as big as most thumbs, and he was as gentle and good-humored as he was big. I’d ask for a war story and he’d tell me the old one about yelling across no-man’s land, “Menschen, kommn-zi hir, mir darfn a minyan!”—“People, come on over, we need a minyan!”—a quorum for a prayer service. (British and German troops actually celebrated together during the Christmas Truce of 1914, so I’ve never been a hundred percent sure that the minyan story was just a joke. There were plenty of Jews on both sides.)

But here’s the real story. Herman was a plumber’s apprentice in 1915, when he lied about his age (he was an outsize 15) to join up. He went with “Blackjack” Pershing to chase Pancho Villa, who was raiding into the U.S. along the Mexican border. By the time America entered the Great War, he was already an artillery sergeant and an Expert Gunner, and he led an artillery unit in the Fourth Division as it hammered its way across France. The war over, he and Dave came home more or less intact, and both became active in the Jewish War Veterans and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

One day in the ‘70s, his wife, my Aunt Anne, found this battlefield citation as she organized old papers in their condo in Lauderhill, Florida:

“Sergeant Herman D. Adelstein distinguished himself in October 1918 while serving with Battery C, 16th Field Artillery, Bois de Breuilles, France. Although enemy machine gun bullets were flying around his gun constantly and shells were landing in the immediate vicinity he bravely volunteered to help straighten out the ammunition. When the barrage started he served the piece as gunner and although several men of the platoon were wounded during firing, he continued to perform his duties so effectively and laid on all data so correctly that several direct hits were made on the enemy. His gallantry in this instance was very conspicuous, and helped the battery to destroy the enemy machine gun nest and artillery.” It was signed by General John Hershey.

Now, machine guns were the great weapon of World War I. The reason whole armies sat in trenches facing each other for years was that if troops tried to advance they were mowed down by machine-gun fire. So the name of the game was knocking out machine-gun nests, usually with artillery. Herman helped enable an American infantry advance.

“Herman,” said my aunt, holding the yellowed piece of paper, “You should’ve got a medal for this!” I can almost hear his laconic voice in the answer I learned of later: “Yeah, I was supposed to, but they never got around to it.”

Anne decided they would get around to it now. She wrote to her Congressman, who duly forwarded her request to someone at the Pentagon, who duly passed it on to someone else, and so on. I read the correspondence in their scrapbook. Nobody said, Hey lady, you’re asking about a medal for something that happened sixty years ago! They just answered her in polite bureaucratese, and passed it on.

Herman was still active in the JWV and VFW until he died, and just then he and Dave were working toward getting a new VA hospital built in that part of Florida. So it didn’t seem strange that they were expected at an event where Senator Richard Stone of Florida was going to speak about the proposed hospital. Herman, an active member, was seated in the front row when the Senator took the podium.

“The wheels of the bureaucracy sometimes turn slowly,” he intoned, “but they keep on turning. Sergeant Herman Adelstein, front and center!” Herman made his slow way up the stage and the Senator pinned to his chest America’s second highest combat medal, the Silver Star, for gallantry in action in a French wood fifty-eight years earlier.

I was reminded of all this recently when my wife and I visited with Herman’s son and daughter-in-law, Stan and Elaine, after don’t-ask-me-how-many years. (“Too long,” Elaine said when she welcomed us.) Stan had been a Navy man trained to repair ships under water at the end of the World War II, but he revered his father and keeps a kind of shrine to him in his den. He sent me copies of the photo, the citation, and the correspondence. The Silver Star is on their wall, and will be passed to their children and grandchildren. I hope they understand as we do what their great-grandfather did.

It’s because Herman Adelstein stayed with his artillery piece among exploding shells and wounded friends, and Dave Pechenik crawled, shell-shocked, through tunnels to sniff out mustard gas, and Melvin Levine took his seat in a doomed B-25, and all the Americans like them yesterday and today serve in sad, bad places all over the world, that I am able to sit here in a comfortable house in Atlanta and write this story.

And don’t think for a minute that I am not grateful.