The other day an axe-wielding Palestinian terrorist entered a West Bank settlement between Jerusalem and Hebron and murdered a 13-year-old boy with axe blows to his head. The same attacker wounded a 7-year old, who managed to run away. Attempts to subdue the attacker failed.

This is the first challenge for the new right-wing government installed on March 31. Prime Minister Netanyahu has of course called for the apprehension of the terrorist, and the army is on it. Meanwhile, the newly appointed Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman sends conflicting messages.

One day he insults Egypt, another he wants to exchange visits with them. One day he seems to reject the Annapolis peace process, another day he accepts prior cabinet decisions in support of the two-state solution. One day he comes up with a loyalty oath for all Arab-Israeli citizens, and only them, while another he tries to explain why he is not a racist.

Bemused Jewish Congressional Representatives and other American Jewish leaders are trying to figure out how to deal with this guy. Obama and Hillary Clinton are silent, but can’t be happy. But aside from laying out a carpet for Netanyahu-Lieberman, stained red with Jewish children’s blood, this attack was also fueled by the questionable moral stance of the Israeli Army in the recent Gaza action.

According to The New York Times, confirmed by major Israeli newspapers, a left-wing army commander who runs an army preparatory school wrote an unsettling article in an army publication. In it he quoted Jewish soldiers who were very disturbed by some things they had done in Gaza and, more importantly, by what they described as a permissive attitude toward IDF attacks on civilians.

It’s one thing when Amnesty International or some anti-Israel UN relief workers describe what could be war crimes committed by Israel; it’s quite another to read Israeli soldiers describing their own behavior in similar terms. If you are doubtful, read the transcript of the meeting where the soldiers told their stories. They describe a cavalier attitude in some army units toward the killing of civilians. Aviv, a squad commander, said this:

"You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most.

"One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious – I don't know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood."

In another instance, a family was ordered to leave a house and did, but mistakenly went left instead of right from the front door, and the mother and two children were shot dead. There is no doubt from the transcript and from other reports that these are complex situations and that tragic mistakes are inevitable.

According to the official United Nations estimates, 14,000 buildings in Gaza were completely or partially destroyed and over 1300 people killed, 40 percent of them civilians. If we accept these estimates, the record is far better than has been the case for most armies fighting in urban conditions in recent decades, and there is an anomaly here that nobody discusses.

Consider: How do you destroy 14,000 buildings and kill five hundred people? It can only happen if the vast majority of the buildings are empty. Why were they empty? Because Israel warned people to leave them before they were destroyed. So as callous as it seems to say it, the so-called “collateral damage” was far less than could be expected.

But what is far more disturbing is the description here and elsewhere of an attitude on the part of the IDF leadership, encouraged especially by Orthodox rabbis, that may be making these errors far more numerous than they have to be. Racist graffiti scrawled by Jewish soldiers on the walls of homes. Soldiers spitting on family photographs and defecating routinely inside the houses, even on piles of clothing, and talking in a cavalier manner about the killing of large numbers of civilians.

The army’s official doctrine of ethics, Spirit of the IDF, was once famous for its concept of Tohar HaNeshek—Purity of Arms. It was said to have made the Israeli armed forces the most ethical in the world. In Israel this is now widely considered to be a thing of the past. True, there were always war crimes, but fewer than in many armies, and frequently tried and punished.

Now there may be a permissive attitude toward them, stemming from a new code of ethics—that of right-wing rabbis who see the Palestinians as nothing but permanent enemies and obstacles to resettlement of all their Holy Land. For an army once run mainly by kibbutzniks whose Zionism coexisted with social responsibility and universalist humanism, this is a sea change of large and frightening proportions.

The editors of Haaretz conclude: “The army is absorbing more and more religious extremism from the teachings of the IDF's rabbinate. It would be appropriate to investigate the problems from outside the IDF and root them out before the rot destroys the IDF and Israeli society.”

And, one might well add, American enthusiasm for Israel.

Full disclosure: The novelist Zoë Heller is my sister-in-law. But she doesn’t exactly need my praise. Her first two novels were published to wide critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic; the second, Notes on a Scandal, was a huge bestseller in England and became a film—also acclaimed—starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.

Her new book, The Believers, is her best. I’ve just finished my second reading—I read it first in manuscript—and liked it even better. It’s the story of a Jewish family in New York, and although it’s her first book with a Jewish theme, it shows great depth of understanding of Judaism and Jewishness.

The central power of the family is pointedly moribund throughout the book. He is Joel Litvinoff, a radical lawyer in the William Kunstler mold who has defended near-lost left-wing causes all his life. He is a shaggy, arrogant, womanizing lion of the left who keels over in court while defending an alleged Muslim terrorist. He spends the rest of the book in a coma, but even from his hospital bed he motivates the complex, moving story.

His wife Audrey is sharp-tongued harridan who blisters every living creature in her path. Their daughters, Karla and Rosa, are respectively a fat ultra-liberal social worker beaten down by her upbringing and a beautiful and smart young teacher who, having spent four years in a disillusioning Cuba, wanders into a synagogue service and is amazed to see a tear make a pale spot on the page of the siddur under her eyes.

Their adoptive, drug-addicted brother Lenny is by far Audrey’s favorite, although he is kept in a cage of dependency partly because his mother relies on it. She was a mother twice over when she took him in, but one proud of her lack of “maternal zeal.” Still, when his natural mother was finally jailed for violent plots against the government, “something had changed on the night that she found Lenny in the Harlem apartment.

“Gazing down at his owl-eyed face—noticing the chalky mustache of Yoo-Hoo on his upper lip, the glistening scribble of dog drool on his pants, she felt an aperture being opened, a pilot light being lit somewhere deep within. Her temples throbbed. She had a panicked sense of onrush, of internal torrent. She wanted to pick the boy up and—she didn’t know what—squeeze him, kiss him, swallow him whole.”

This is Audrey’s first epiphany, a life-saving wobble in her orbit of Joel’s volcanic planet. Audrey, Karla, and Rosa are the heroes of this book, and to reviewers who find them hard to like, I have to say I am puzzled. Like the main characters in her earlier books, they are tormented people fighting to find meaning, and yet to keep meaning at arm’s length when it leans in toward them.

But somehow they experience epiphanies that crush their defenses and make them almost whole. These women are explorers as much as believers, cynical yet reflective and passionate in their searches. All three have been stifled and shrunken by their dogmatic paterfamilias–a leftist pope, and all are freed as much as bereft by his stroke.

The New York Times Book Review quotes a long passage about Audrey, prefaced with, “The author seems to have little patience or empathy for her, either.” The reviewer simply misreads the point of view; we are inside Audrey’s head, not Heller’s:

“By the time she woke up and discovered that people were making faces at her behind her back—that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant—it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted.”

This anguished woman is bemoaning what she has become but is unable to change, and her self-loathing mitigates (if it doesn’t justify) many sins. Audrey’s destructiveness is detestable, but she deeply loves the most important of those she hurts. How many of us are so different?

Karla and Rosa, on the other hand, are very likable. Karla is so trapped in her body and her marriage–to a severe leftist union man with her father’s arrogance but not his intellect—that you want to hug her whole bulk and feed her delicacies. This is what happens when she succumbs to an Arab news vendor, a big warm bear of a man who leads her into a clumsy but exquisitely poignant love affair. The contrast with the perfunctory, punctilious, fecundity-conscious sex she has in her marriage is stunning.

Rosa’s romance with Orthodox Judaism is warm and funny. Skeptical of her new God’s ability to replace the god that failed her, she nevertheless opens her heart to the possibilities that only a formal religious tradition offers:

“Rosa loved the methodical process of unwrapping the layers of meaning in the Torah. She loved the modesty that the process demanded. Above all, she loved the atmosphere of scholarly comradeship—of shared commitment to deciphering a complex, intricate text. It seemed to her that in excavating the wisdom of the rabbinical sages, she was discovering something distinctively Jewish about her own way of thinking.”

A religious Jew might say: Of course! You are simply standing again at Sinai. But whether this echo is one of revelation or just of resonant tradition, Rosa gets it—and so does Heller.

Not surprisingly for a modern woman (ex-Red or not), Rosa balks at mikvah and certain other laws affecting women. Yet her mind is open; while spending Shabbos at the rabbi’s, she is struck by his recitation of Ayshes chayil, the praise song from Proverbs for “A woman of worth”:

“And when Rosa glanced down at the other end of the table, she saw that Mrs. Reinman’s eyes were demurely lowered. There was something ludicrous, she thought, about this elfin man yodeling a uxorious hymn to his matronly wife at the dinner table: ludicrous, yet touching also. Her own childhood mealtimes at Perry street had been napkinless, slapdash affairs, presided over by a fuming mother for whom food preparation was the focal point of all housewifely resentments.”

It is not surprising that Jewish family life becomes in turn a focal point for many of this young woman’s unfulfilled longings.

All three of these stifled, hurt women break out of their sphere of doctrinaire submission when the man they have revolved around falls away. Rosa romances religion, Karla a kind stranger, and Audrey a new take on her old vision, cynical but marvelously triumphant. When she speaks to the crowd at her husband’s funeral she is so brilliant we want to stand and cheer with the assembled mourners. In the last words of the book we are treated to a hilarious movie metaphor that flags Karla’s own ambiguous triumph.

Each of the women has a foil—Audrey’s rich friend Jean, Rosa’s hip black co-counselor in the after-school program, and, most ironically, Karla’s Arab lover—who emphatically is not a believer. Each tries to teach the lesson that we live not for belief, but life. I’d be the last to accuse Zoë Heller of optimism, but there is hope in these women’s futures.

Her two previous novels were brilliantly structured, tightly plotted fictional machines, with characters moving relentlessly along a path between resentment and redemption. The Believers is a much more ambitious work, with more varied and compelling characters and a large, successfully tendered philosophical theme. With it she confirms her status as one of the most skilled novelists of her generation, and makes a plausible bid to become one who will matter long after we are gone.

In a series of events that were disturbing to Jewish Americans, especially those of us who backed Obama, an intensely anti-Israel partisan named Charles W. Freeman, Jr. was nominated to, ran into controversy over, and yesterday finally withdrew from, consideration for one of our nation’s most sensitive intelligence posts.

Freeman bitterly and arrogantly blasted Israel and its supporters on his way out just as he has so many times in the past, and the press chalked it up to a victory for the “Israel lobby.”

But there is more to it than this, and there is good cause for all Americans to be concerned. Freeman’s own think tank was funded by the Saudi royal family, since his behavior in the past as U.S. ambassador to, and later as an informal lobbyist for, that backward and autocratic kingdom was so gratifying to its rulers.

He also had until very recently strong financial ties to China and wrote things that many interpreted as justifying China’s brutal crackdowns on the Tienanmin Square protests in 1989 and on the Tibet protests last year.

Whether these writings were misinterpreted is debatable, but there is every reason to believe that his financial ties have made him soft on the Chinese communist dictatorship just as he has been toward the Saudi regime, well known to be an exporter of extremist forms of Islamic belief and “education”—not to mention the source of fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists.

Bear in mind that Freeman was not being proposed as an ambassador to one of these countries or as an assistant secretary of state for the Far East. He was to become Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, one step below the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, who still unaccountably defends his choice of Freeman.

Freeman’s past experience in the field of intelligence? None.

Thus we were expected to accept as a top intelligence official, whose main responsibility would be to sift intelligence from all over the world and present his objective findings to President Obama,  a man who not only consistently and irately opposes Israel, but who has for many years had financial ties  the Saudi royal family and the Chinese communist rulers, and who to top it off has no intelligence experience.

The people in the Obama White House did not even bother to push back on this appointment as the outrage against it grew. Who is minding the store there? It’s one thing to have nominated tax-evaders for economically sensitive cabinet posts, and be forced to withdraw them in a humiliating way that exposed an embarrassingly weak vetting process.

It’s quite another to hand one of the nation’s most important intelligence roles to someone who not only could not be objective, being an outspoken opponent of Israel and a friend of Saudi Arabia and China, but also someone with no relevant intelligence work on his resumé.

This move rivals the Bush administration’s appointment of “Brownie,” the former Arabian horse expert, to head FEMA. If Freeman had not been stopped, we might well have had the equivalent of the post-Katrina debacle, only this time in the national security equivalent of a category 5 hurricane, broken levees and all.

Freeman’s fall was a narrow escape for the nation, and it leaves me wondering whether Jewish Americans will live to regret our overwhelming support for Obama. He and his people have to do better than this.

The Supreme Leader of Iran—not that nutcase I’m-a-dinner-jacket, but the more sober Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—told a crowd on Wednesday that Israel is a cancerous tumor.

He compared Obama to Bush and the U.S. to Satan, warning the new administration that, "Change means giving up your satanic, coercive and aggressive ways and instead adopting more human morals.” Israel and the U.S. are both “Satans” of different sizes, but the “cancerous tumor” metaphor is reserved for the Jewish state.

It extends a long history of disease-related attributions applied to the Jewish people. In the 19th century it was widely agreed that Jews carried certain medical conditions so much more than others did that you could call them Jewish diseases. This began before Hitler was born, but it was in the air while he was growing up.

Syphilis and tuberculosis and were two of the “Jewish diseases,” and obviously could be given to others, making the Jews even more dangerous than they would be just on the grounds of wanting to rule the world. Syphilis of course had moral implications, and suggested depraved Jewish men not only defiling but crippling pure Aryan women. But TB too had a moral dimension, since it was associated with weakness, and Jews were considered weak in more ways than one.

They supposedly had neurasthenia, which today we might call an extreme form of neurosis or a mixture of anxiety and depression, but in those days it had connotations of moral laxity and laziness. We don’t think of it as communicable, but before the germ theory of disease was understood, many believed that neurasthenia could be conveyed by Jews to others, at least by psychologically weighing down and leading astray right-thinking, hard-working, healthy Christians.

Obesity, diabetes, flat feet—important since the claim kept Jews from serving in Europe’s armies—and even foetor Judaica, a distinctively Jewish bad smell, were accepted as conditions that Jews had much more of than anyone else. Amazingly, both Jewish and non-Jewish physicians endorsed this picture as medical reality. Even the Jewish nose was considered a biological defect, and after the 1890s could be surgically fixed to make a Jew look “normal,” with untold psychiatric and social benefits.

But the great step was to see the Jews themselves as the disease, bringing all their physical, mental, and moral weakness to the nations of Europe by racial mixing.

This idea culminated at the end of the century in Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s book, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899. (Though English by birth, he first published the book in German.) He later wrote Race and Nation, making clear the racial “history” of two millennia and trying to prove that the fall of nations could be explained by the importing of Jews, while nations rose again by getting rid of them.

These works greatly influenced the Nazis (Chamberlain himself joined the Nazi party), and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, wrote in his diary after reading Chamberlain, “It is true and one has the impression that it is objective, not just hate-filled anti-Semitism. Because of this it has more effect. These terrible Jews…”

By the 1930s these theories were not just history but “science,” complete with anthropological institutes and training programs throughout Germany. Children were taught how to identify Jews, using the most up-to-date methods of racial classification. Countless publications from articles in scientific journals to anti-Semitic tracts and even cartoons spread throughout Germany and then throughout German-occupied Europe the idea of Jews as a disease contaminating civilization.

A cartoon in the Nazi publication Der Stürmer was typical but especially revealing. It showed a large microscope with a field blown up to illustrate what was glimpsed under the instrument: tiny hammer-and-sickle symbols, triangles representing homosexuals, and most of all, Stars of David. The picture is titled, “Infectious Germs.” And below it is a poem:

With his poison, the Jew drags

Weaker peoples’ burdened blood,

So a disease-picture appears

That speeds them downward.

But our report resounds:

The blood is clean. We’re healthy!

When Joseph Mengele, M.D., Ph.D., made selections for the gas chambers, he signed an order to ensure that the murders were medically justified—essentially prescriptions for preserving the health of the Aryan peoples by eliminating the Jewish “germs.”

So when Ayatollah Khamenei calls Israel a cancerous tumor, he follows a time-honored tradition of associating Jews with deadly disease. And the consequences are the same. Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly called for wiping Israel off the map. Obviously, if you have a cancerous tumor, you want to cut it out.

Also this week, the head of Iran’s military said in a speech that his country has missiles that can reach any nuclear facility in Israel, and that no amount of international pressure will prevent Iran from completing its nuclear program.

Once again, a medical metaphor is brought to bear on the minds of millions to convince them that the Jews don’t merely have a disease, they are a disease, and one that can only be cured by extermination.

I’ve been blogging all week at a website called Jewcy.com, on the subject www.nytimes.comof my new book, The Jewish Body. The entries are called “The Circs,” “The Sex,” “The Nose Jobs,” “The Muscle-Jews,” and “The Warriors.” If you haven’t been to Jewcy.com, it’s worth a visit, and not just for my contributions. Based in Brooklyn (but not your father’s Brooklyn) it’s a lively, colorful, enlightening potpourri of things young Jews are thinking—about politics, culture, lifestyle, religion, and sex. This old Jew was glad to be included. I was particularly touched by Melissa Seligman’s series on being the wife of a soldier deployed to Iraq.

Learn more about The Jewish Body, watch the video trailer, listen to the podcast, or buy the book.

Israel went to the polls on February 10th and narrowly gave the Kadima party under Tzipi Livni a lead over right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Kadima won 28 seats, Likud 27. It sounds like a victory for Livni, whom I have admired for a long time, and written about in the past. But of course it was nothing of the kind.

Labor, once Israel’s primary powerhouse, gained a measly 13 seats, and the result was that Kadima is twisting in the wind, not even remotely capable of forming a government in the 120-seat Knesset. Shimon Peres, the President and titular head of state, gets to choose who will be Prime Minister and wield real power. But he doesn’t really have much choice.

Only Netanyahu can form and lead a government, because Labor’s loss has been Avigdor Lieberman’s gain. Lieberman, who has been described as a neo-Fascist by the intensely pro-Israel New Republic editor Martin Peretz, was the real winner in this election. His Yisrael Beitenu party won 15 seats, changing places with Labor for third largest party, as his extremist anti-Arab views took hold among a sufficient minority of Israeli Jews to make him the kingmaker of Israel’s politics of the moment.

So we have the supreme irony of Shimon Peres, a lifelong Labor leader, liberal, and peacenik—and arguably the only figure in Israel today who commands the kind of respect due to someone who goes back to the beginning—about to tap a right-wing Likudnik for Prime Minister, mainly because he has the support of a neo-Fascist anti-Arab bigot.

Except for an even greater irony. Bibi, as Netanyahu is known, is afraid to form a government. He could have done so ten days ago if he had wanted to, but he seems to have looked over at Lieberman—and at Shas, the ultra-religious party that would also join him in a rightist regime—and found cause to tremble.

Why? I suspect it is partly because Lieberman has demanded so much in the way of cabinet posts as to make himself a laughingstock. But not only that. It’s because Bibi has seen Lieberman in the mirror, and he doesn’t really like it.

Bibi has played the role of Menachem Begin’s heir very well over the years, even during his first stint as Prime Minister. But times have changed, and Bibi is no Begin. Begin was a Holocaust survivor who spoke Hebrew with a thick European accent and—quite understandably—carried his murdered family in his arms in every encounter public and private.

Bibi is a modern man who speaks impeccable English and who can’t feel completely comfortable with those he has to embrace in order to make a right-wing government work. He looks at Europe and sees not his family’s murderers but necessary allies and a vast market for Israel’s future. He looks at India, China, Russia, and globalization and sees a world Begin could not have fathomed.

More importantly, he sees an America—for better or worse, Israel’s great-big brother—that is losing patience with Israel’s right wing. He sees a new, popular, very smart African-American president who is almost diametrically opposed to former President Bush on some aspects of foreign policy. Is Israel one of them? We don’t know.

But we do know that things have changed. Barack Obama will not sign the blank check that George W. Bush endorsed over to Israel first thing every morning. He owes a lot to Jewish Americans, but how patient will they be with an Israeli government that is openly bigoted against Arabs, and that asks for carte blanche with American weapons to do as they will in the dangerous Middle East?

Tzipi Livni has set forth conditions under which she and Kadima would be willing to form a government with Bibi. Will he pay attention to her and her many followers, who gained more votes in the election than he did? Or will he let the religious right and the anti-Arab fringe capture his last best chance to make a permanent mark on the history of his country? We will soon see.

“Why are you still alive?” This was one of the first questions put to Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian-Israeli journalist who spoke at my university on a recent evening. I was moderating, at the request of the Hillel director, who feared disruptive speechifying or worse from the audience.

They were mainly students, but our campus has had some nasty confrontations, with pro-Palestinian and Jewish students almost coming to blows–and that was before the Gaza war. Also, controversial speakers on both sides have attracted folks from the off-campus community who have not always behaved well, and on one occasion a pro-Israel speaker was shouted down and unable to finish his remarks—not a distinguished episode for a university.

Khaled and I talked before the event. He is a slight, quiet man in his mid-forties with thinning hair and a modest manner, polite and grateful that anyone is interested in what he has to say. Knowing that he is an outspoken moderate who criticizes all sides, I asked him if he and his family were in danger. He said with a wry smile that the only places he feels threatened are American college campuses.

When he took the podium he remained soft-spoken and matter-of-fact—“matter of fact” could be his watchword–but spoke rapidly and forcefully with a calm and even-handed passion for the truth. He began by summarizing his remarkable career—one that began with excursions into Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah and led to NBC News and U.S. News and World Report.

He began as a stringer reporting on Arafat and his henchmen in Arabic newspapers, but graduated to become the West Bank and Gaza correspondent for The Jerusalem Post and The Jerusalem Report, and finally a respected commentator and columnist for numerous American and European publications and broadcasts. As he has said, “My job is to serve as the eyes and ears of the international media.”

Khaled is a Palestinian Muslim Arab and an Israeli through and through. If you think that’s a contradiction you need to hear and read him. He is an equal-opportunity despiser of bad governments, whether in  Israel, Palestine, or the larger Arab world, but he understands perfectly well that Israel is unique in that part of the planet for its freedom of expression.

As he put it, he can walk freely in Jerusalem—his and his family’s lifelong home—without fear, regardless of what he writes about the government, but if he goes to Ramallah today, or if he were allowed to go to Gaza, he might be arrested or killed. He thinks and says that a succession of Israeli governments from three different parties has bungled the conflict and brutalized the Palestinians, but he loves the fact that his speech, his life, and his family are protected–on the Israeli side of the border.

He hates the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, little changed since Arafat’s death. He thinks Israel made a terrible mistake in bringing Arafat back as part of the Oslo process. He hates Hamas but acknowledges their honesty and commitment, and he publicly predicted their landslide victory in the 2006 elections. He hates the web of checkpoints in the West Bank that choke normal Palestinian life and the collusion between Israel, the international community, and a corrupt Palestinian leadership. He says that if Israel’s army withdraws from the West Bank, the leadership there will collapse and Hamas will take over as it did in Gaza.

He loves the truth and says, “I find it ironic that as an Arab Muslim living in this part of the world that I have to work for a Jewish newspaper or for the international media in order to be able to practice any kind of real journalism.”

The question period was civil in the end, partly due to the presence of the campus rabbi, Victoria Armour-Hileman—Rabbi Vicki–and Sgt. Garrison of the university police sitting quietly in the back. I called on people after Khaled rejected the option of making them submit their questions on index cards. He wanted an open exchange.

His view of the Middle East is not encouraging. He does not expect real peace but he thinks the conflict can continue to be managed.

When asked why he is still alive, he told of many death threats but said that you can only die once. “If they kill me, they kill me. I have done what I needed to do, and others will continue it.” I could only marvel at this calm, determined man’s quiet courage and his modest, unassuming passion for the truth.

Biographical information on Khaled Abu Toameh, along with links to many of his articles, can be found here.

Once again, I feel a responsibility to answer a heartfelt comment from a young person who loves Israel but questions the need for so much violence. As you will see if you read on, he has a very special reason to care so much about peace:

“Dr. Konner,

“This is indeed my first time commenting on your blog, but I have found it insightful and thoughtfully written in the past.  As a current junior and history major at Emory, I am enrolled in a plethora of classes with a focus on Judaism.  Unfortunately, I find myself in a bit of a quandary concerning how I am to act within these classes when I find myself confronted by a slew of Jewish students, who I would normally assume to be my closest allies, calling for further violence and unilateral action against the embattled Palestinians in Gaza.  Indeed, it would appear that for many of these students, further bloodshed is the optimal answer for the occasional bottle rocket being launched out of Gaza.  While I fully respect Israel's right to defend itself, and furthermore can vouch that my family has given more to the state than most others, I firmly believe that we, as American Jews, are immensely out of touch with the situation in the Middle East.  It is my sad duty to now question: ‘have we, as American Jews, become the militants and the terrorists in this bloody and utterly wasteful conflict?’”

-Yoni Argov

Emory 2010

Posted Thursday, January 29, 2009, 11:37 AM

Dear Yoni,

Thank you for your thoughtful and searching comment. As you say, your family has given more to Israel than most others, yet you feel outnumbered on Emory's campus–very comfortable and very distant from Israel–by fellow students who think they know what Israel should do and state their views not tentatively but belligerently from their safe haven in Atlanta.

I hope you won't mind if I let readers know just what your family sacrificed. Your grandfather, Shlomo Argov, who was a wounded and decorated hero of Israel's War of Independence, became the victim of an Arab assassin’s bullet on a London street when he was serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1982.

The gunmen were apprehended and sentenced to 30 years in British prisons, but your grandfather faced a more severe sentence. Gravely wounded in the head, he survived as a once-energetic and active man permanently paralyzed and confined to a hospital bed in Jerusalem, where his family had lived for seven generations.  He eventually died after more than two decades of imprisonment in his own body.

Thus you grew up with a grandfather who, instead of playing ball with you or bouncing you on his knee, could only be a sad presence you visited in the hospital, able to talk with you but serving as a constant reminder of the dangers faced by Israelis and all Jews even in the supposedly safest places in the world. So it is very ironic that you are the one who speaks about Palestinian suffering, while your classmates who know so much less about Middle East realities try to shame and silence you.

But you are a true grandson of your grandfather. Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel at the time he was shot, used his tragedy as the pretext for invading Lebanon a few days later.  This war is now widely recognized in Israel as having gone much too far and lasted much too long. From the confines of his hospital bed, your grandfather spoke against that war and stated his anger at the use made by Begin of his shooting as a casus belli, a reason to go to war.

Your grandfather had risen to prominence as a man of the Israeli left, but was so gifted a diplomat that he attained one of the country’s most important posts under a right-wing government. No one questioned your his right to challenge Israel when he thought it was wrong, and no one should question yours. I have strongly criticized American Jews who think they can tell Israel what to do in situations where they as Americans will never have to face the consequences. This in my view applies to Americans who attack Israel from the left as well as those who enthusiastically urge her on to war.

But in your case, because of the terrible price paid by your family, I believe you have the right to speak up—certainly in the midst of war-mongering fellow students who will never have to pay the price of Israel’s actions, whether mistaken or not, in war or in peace.  At least eighty percent of Israelis supported the action in Gaza, and for that reason I supported it as well. But that doesn’t mean a loss of compassion for the people of that suffering piece of land, nor does it mean a reflexive enthusiasm for war.

So hold your course, speak your mind, and, if necessary, tell the story of your grandfather Shlomo Argov, who paid the price for Israel’s boldness both in war and in peace, and who lived up to his given name, advocating shalom even from the bed to which his grievous wounds confined him. Where another man might have been consumed by vengeance, he thought constantly and wisely about what was best for his country, and he died a hero of war and of peace.

Of course, Yoni, I hope you will never be called upon to make the kinds of sacrifices your grandfather made, but you can try to live up to the ideals he set for you, defending Israel from all enemies even while vigorously pursuing the path of peace.

Sincerely,

Mel Konner

Alexandra Lazar, a recent university graduate, contributed this comment on my earlier blog entry, “Pulling the Wolf’s Tail.” I found it a particularly wise and moving expression of the doubts raised by many about Israel’s action in Gaza, and I have tried to answer it below.

“First, Mel, thank you for your beautifully written piece, and for opening a forum for the thoughtful and lively discussion that has followed.  I’ve struggled quite a bit over the past few days with how to think about the events in Gaza, trying to reconcile a sense of human rights granted to me almost exclusively by my Jewish faith with what looks, at times, like unjustifiable brutality in the name of protecting Israel.  While you are absolutely right, Israel is not at fault for the deaths of the five Balousha daughters, the pointing of fingers, though perhaps unavoidable, doesn’t at all address the fact that they are gone, that their parents are mourning and that their siblings, those who are left, will live the remainder of their lives missing half a family.  No, Israel is not to blame, but someone has to speak for these five girls. If not find one, then the world must at least look for an answer for their deaths, and for the thousands of other innocents on both sides of the Gaza fence who have lost their safety or their lives.

“It is here that I feel particularly paralyzed, particularly without solutions, and particularly unsatisfied by the placing of blame on one party or another.  My Jewish heritage taught me that we are our brother’s keepers, that each of us has a responsibility to be a bearer of light in whatever small way we can. While I know Israel can’t lie down and ignore attack, I find it difficult to reconcile this most important part of my Judaism with the five coffins, girls younger than me, that the Balousha family will now be putting in the ground. That Hamas picked a fight with the big-kid on the school yard, that they pulled the tail of a wolf they couldn’t kill, is no doubt true, but it should not satisfy us, as Jews or as human beings, as an answer to the deaths of five innocent people in a cycle of brutality where blame is so much easier found than hope.  

“Again, I have the deepest respect, Mel, for what you wrote in your blog-post, and for the many responses that mourned the loss of the Balousha family while still encouraging Israel to move forward in its offensive. You may very well be right, but the question that troubles me more than blame is what can be done now, what actions must I take as a young person and as a Jew to prevent the ending of lives and the filling of coffins in the months and years ahead.”

Posted Saturday, January 10, 2009, 11:11 AM

Dear Alexandra,

Of the many comments expressing grief or outrage over the civilian losses in Gaza, yours has haunted me most. Aside from its being very well written and free of anger, you appeal to Jewish tradition and you focus on the future.

As you say, someone must speak for the five Balousha girls, “the world must at least look for an answer for their deaths, and for the thousands of other innocents on both sides of the Gaza fence who have lost their safety or their lives.” As others accuse, you wisely write, “the question that troubles me more than blame is what can be done now, what actions I must take as a young person and as a Jew to prevent the ending of lives and the filling of coffins in the months and years ahead.”

Although I am not young, I feel that obligation too, along with one to you and others in your generation who care about Jewish tradition and destiny, but also care deeply about others. Although some might object that you and I wrote on Saturdays, I find it fitting to have this important colloquy on the day set aside for reflection as well as rest.

I will try to answer within the Jewish tradition that you, as a daughter of Israel, appeal to. I can’t think of a more fitting tribute to the slain daughters of the Balousha family, the Abu al-Aish family, and many others than for us to try and light the way forward.

When you say your Jewish heritage taught you “that we are our brother’s keepers,” that each should be “a bearer of light,” you are profoundly right. We are taught tikkun olam—repairing, perfecting, completing the world. God, in this tradition, deliberately left the world unfinished so we could contribute to creation.

Your idea that we are our brothers’ keepers harks back to the denial of it by the man who committed the first murder. His question reveals his emptiness; to extend your metaphor, he is a black hole sucking light out of the world.

During the war I had the privilege of talking for an hour with the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks. He had recently addressed the European Parliament, where he drew on the same story:

“Literally,” Rabbi Sacks pointed out, “the Hebrew says as follows: 'And Cain said to Abel, and it came to pass when they were out in the field that Cain rose up against Abel and killed him.'” He explained, “It cannot be translated because it says ‘and Cain said’, but it does not say what he said…The syntax is fractured.” Why? Because the conversation broke down. And Cain said to Abel…nothing! And then he killed him.

Rabbi Sacks was asked to speak to the assembled nations of Europe because he has spent his life advocating “the dignity of difference”—the need for all of us to recognize and respect each other’s paths to meaning and to God. This has been the bright light that he has brought to the world.

You ask with an open heart what actions you must take to prevent the filling of coffins in the months and years ahead. I believe the answer is, resume the dialog. I don’t mean just a dialog among important people with high official positions, although that will be a good thing. I mean dialog at all levels between every kind of Palestinian and every kind of Israeli, every Muslim and every Jew.

And I don’t mean just words. Shimon Peres, the president of Israel, has a plan to revitalize the economy of the West Bank in cooperation with Jordan and the Palestinians, using scores of millions of dollars contributed by Germany, Japan, and other nations. This is the dialog of livelihood and sustenance that lead to a better life, and it must be pursued with all possible speed.

As for Gaza, humanitarian aid must pour in to heal the pain and give people reason to believe in a future free of terror and reprisals for terror. This is the dialog of hope and dreams, and it must replace the mirroring soliloquys of despair that descend into the nightmare of unending reciprocal violence.

I have often said that Israel must be bold in war, but also bold in peace. I have to tell you that our tradition includes both. Psalm 83 cries out, “O God, be not still. See how your enemies are astir…With cunning they conspire against your people…’Come,’ they say, ‘let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more.’" The psalm begs God to “pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your storm…may they perish in disgrace.” With songs like this, ancient Israel went to war.

But Isaiah later tells us, "If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.”

As I write, at dusk, the light is going out of the world, but only for a while. Some “simpler” peoples believe they must take action to bring back the light of day or spring. I believe we do have to act to bring it back after the darkness of war.

I don’t know you well, Alexandra, but I know you will be “a bearer of light” long after I am gone. For the sake of those Palestinian girls who did not live to be your age, and also, for the Israeli girls who have lived in fear of rockets for years, I beg you not to lose hope, and to keep your light burning.

Mel

Israel’s Inaugural Day gift to Barack Obama will be to complete its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Two unilateral cease-fires, somehow coordinated through Egypt, have for now brought an end to the fighting. For now.

Yesterday I was on a conference call (sponsored by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) with military historian Michael Oren, a former American-Israeli paratrooper, combat veteran, and author of the acclaimed Six Days of War. He believes the Gaza operation reached its goals. He points out that it had the support of 80 percent of the population, including that of left-wing parties such as Meretz.

As it ended, the left was saying that the army stayed in Gaza too long, while the right was saying it should have stayed and finished destroying Hamas. Oren takes this as evidence that the length of the action was just about right.

Militarily, he said, “The war went very well.” It showed that “an Israeli army can march pretty much to the center of Gaza City” with minimal casualties. Hamas promised to turn Gaza into a “graveyard” for the IDF, which at this point has lost fourteen soldiers. Hundreds of Hamas fighters were killed, around a fourth of their armed force, including key leaders. Two hundred tunnels used for smuggling were destroyed; although many remain, they will be easier for Egyptian and other forces to monitor and control.

Oren is under no illusions. He urges that we wipe the word “solution” from our vocabulary, replacing it with the concept of managing the conflict. He predicts Israel will be fighting for many years to come, and he believes the question of the long-term impact on Hamas’s prestige is a “no win” one for Israel.

But he also believes Hamas has been significantly degraded in its ability and credibility as a fighting force. They will have to explain to the people of Gaza why they hid in their holes and let everybody else take the consequences. They will also have to explain the difference between Gaza and Bethlehem, which had very nice Christmas celebrations this year.

As for Israel, after an ambiguous result in the Second Lebanon War, its deterrent capability is firmly reestablished. The destruction of 40 or 50 targets from the air in the first five minutes of the war demonstrated to Iran the exquisite skill of the Israeli air force, and the action as a whole is Iran’s most important defeat for many years. As for the northern front, “The 2006 war, for all its deficiencies, succeeded in deterring Hizbollah in the current conflict.”

He compared Iran to a boxer leading and jabbing with his left–the fighting by proxy forces Hizbollah and Hamas–while holding his right in reserve for a future nuclear attack. While he denied having top-level inside information, Oren said, “Israel will not allow Iran to nuclearize.”

On the diplomatic front, he considers the war a complete success. It “revealed serious rifts in the Arab world” and “almost an Arab cold war,” with important support for Israel’s action. “Egypt generally acted in a positive fashion throughout the war,” and “Mubarak said publicly that Hamas must not be allowed to win this war.” Most Arab countries want to see a weakened Iran, and they did.

Europe has been drawn into the region in a larger role, as indicated by the 15 countries represented at the Sharm-el-Sheikh meeting on Sunday. The fact that the U.S. is between administrations expanded Europe’s role, and there is a new diplomatic reality. NATO agrees to patrol Gaza’s Mediterranean shore, and Egypt has taken new formal responsibility for smuggling across its own border.

Oren does not believe that this will prevent all smuggling, but it will establish an international cover for any future Israeli action. If Egypt and NATO fail in their responsibilities, they cannot object to an Israeli response, which will follow any significant resumption of rocket attacks.

All in all, he said, “it was a very successful operation.” And, “at the end of the day, it really comes down to us as Jews, How are we going to defend ourselves? …We haven’t had a nanosecond of peace, but we’ve survived and thrived.”

Regarding the civilian casualties, Oren said that as a military historian, he knows that modern urban warfare results in a typical casualty rate of 75 percent civilians, 25 percent fighters. According to the IDF, these proportions were reversed in Gaza. Even if we accept the UN estimate of 40 percent civilians, or the unlikely Hamas estimate of 50 percent, the rate was still substantially below that expected in urban combat.

But of course Oren’s analysis did not include the human face of the war. On Saturday, Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish, a Palestinian physician who was trained in Israel, lost three of

his daughters—Bisan, 22, Mayer, 15, and Aya, 14–and a niece—Nour Abu al-Aish, 14–when an Israeli tank shell hit his home, reportedly because a sniper had fired from its vicinity. His wife died recently of cancer.

Abu al-Aish, who spoke Hebrew well, had appeared regularly by phone on Israeli television news throughout the conflict, providing eyewitness reports of events in Gaza. The reporter who took the call considered the doctor a friend was visibly moved; many calls came from Israelis who knew and loved Abu al-Aish. "I want to know why my daughters were harmed,” he said. “This should haunt Olmert his entire life." His daughters, he said, were "armed only with love."

Today’s lead editorial in Haaretz, “With the power of hope,” calls for a vigorous peace initiative. “Obama's grace period won't last long; would that he use it for the benefit of the Middle East.” That will no doubt happen, and we can indeed invoke the power of hope as we have done so often in the past, but it won’t bring back Bisan, Mayer, Aya, or Nour Abu al-Aish, nor assuage the boundless grief of a father and doctor who until just the other day had been one of those Palestinians who could have helped build the bridge to peace.