From The Times of London on January 3: “In recent days government troops, supported by helicopter gunships and fighter jets, had overrun rebel strongholds in clashes that left hundreds dead and wounded . . . Accurate casualty numbers are unobtainable because of a ban on the media entering the conflict zone . . . Civil rights activists believe that the Government’s military successes have come at an unacceptable human cost. An estimated 250,000 civilians were forced to flee their homes . . .”

Familiar rhetoric? Certainly, but it isn’t what you think. It’s a rare report on the ongoing and very bloody fight waged by the government of Sri Lanka against the Tamil Tigers, the most recalcitrant Asian terror group. An independent report filed online today said that the government in Colombo is “armed now with modern jets and unashamed to use the weapons regardless of the civilian casualties.”

Kilinochchi, Elephant Pass, Jaffna (not Jaffa), and in the next few days Mullaitivu have seen and will see an untold number of deaths of women and children as the Sri Lankan government attempts to decisively defeat this separatist terror group, which incidentally invented suicide bombings. Why don’t we know these names? Where is the international outcry? The UN resolution? The “Just stop now” from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon? The front-page coverage? The round-the-clock CNN and BBC stories displaying the bloody bodies of civilians? The burning of the Sri Lankan flag in Paris and Athens?

At this writing, Israel is in the third and likely final phase of its more modest military action in Gaza, and despite some critical voices, there is strong support within the country for what the army is trying to do. Some rockets continue to strike southern Israel, but they are far fewer than they were in December. Palestinian deaths mount, including civilians.

Criticize Israel all you like, but do understand what it is up against. Yesterday Hamas television played a tape of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza, who said: “‘Gaza will not break – our victory over the Zionists is near . . . Our fate is in the hands of Allah, so what power could the sons of Zion [have] against him? Allah will take his revenge on them.’ . . . Meanwhile Monday, other Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip declared victory to be ‘closer than ever.’” This is not new rhetoric; eliminating Israel is Hamas’s deeply religious founding vision.

Hamas, like Israel, has rejected the UN cease-fire resolution. Israel’s condition for cease-fire is that Hamas rockets against its civilians stop; Hamas’s condition is complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and complete reopening of the border crossings. In other words, in order for Hamas to cease firing, Israel has to invite its remnant army of vengeful terrorists into Israel proper, in large numbers, to wreak havoc at will as it did in the early years of the decade. Obviously this cannot happen.

Meanwhile, there is clear evidence that Hamas rocket batteries are situated in schools and that large caches of weapons are stored in mosques:

1. This January 8 video shows a Hamas group preparing to launch a rocket from a schoolyard, but destroyed by the IDF before the launch, as well as documenting Hamas firing during the daily cease-fire begun that day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN9WzUc7iB0&feature=channel_page

2. This video from before the war shows mortar shells being fired by Hamas from within a United Nations school compound, on October 29, 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmXXUOs27lI&feature=channel

3. These videos document secondary explosions in bombed mosques, due to the delayed detonation of large weapons caches in the mosques:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCVr7MBhgj0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwP_LusgPAw&feature=channel

Under international law, Israel is within its rights to attack such targets, provided that it takes appropriate care to avoid unnecessary civilian deaths. In fact, an official international report after the 2006 war in Lebanon praised Israel for dropping warning leaflets to protect civilian populations.

Is Israel taking such care now? Retired IDF General Yaacov Amidror, whom I talked with in England a couple of weeks ago, spoke on BBC World News yesterday. He described a recent action in which the IDF came upon a five-story apartment house where Hamas had placed a bunker in the basement.

Residents of the building were telephoned and told to leave. They did not. Time passed, and the IDF directed a small bomb at the roof of the building, damaging it in one area. The residents then got the message and evacuated the building. Finally the IDF attacked and destroyed the bunker.

As General Amidror put it, a military operation that could have taken five minutes took five hours. Look at the behavior of the American or British armies during World War II, or the actions of NATO in Afghanistan, and you will see nothing resembling this kind of care for civilian life. Multiplied by hundreds of operations, the result is a campaign that takes weeks instead of days.

Nevertheless, there have been hundreds of civilian deaths. Hamas, while expressing outrage over them, has done everything possible to maximize their number and is making clever use of them in its public relations efforts. Its goal has not changed: the elimination of Israel. It is not shy about stating this goal. It repeats it over and over again.

On January 4, Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan said on CNN that they would continue to attack “the southern part of what they call Israel.” Another spokesman vowed “attacks on Zionist interests everywhere.” In case you are in doubt about what that means: Synagogues, Jewish community centers, Hillel houses, Jewish tour groups, Jewish day schools, religious services, peaceful demonstrations, lectures. Everywhere.

At the dinner, during the Limmud conference in Warwick, I sat with General Amidror and two other Israelis, a distinguished journalist and a government advisor, both more dovish than the general. At his retirement, he was head of Israel’s military colleges, and he is writing his second book on long-term strategy.

His English is not perfect. He has a big gray beard now, and wears glasses and a small knit kippa. The war had been going on for a few days, and like the vast majority of Israelis, he accepted the need for it. I asked him about the long-term future.

He said quietly, “My mother, who is 91, was a member of the Irgun,” the radical group that fought against the British occupation during the 1940s. “Her son became a two-star general in the IDF. Her grandson is a full colonel in the special forces. And her great-grandson is about to enter the army in an elite combat unit. At one point ten of her descendants were in the army at the same time. If you ask her what will happen, she will tell you: It will continue. We will always have to fight.”

I actually don’t think that they will “always” have to fight, but they will have to fight for some time. They fought to establish the Jewish state, and at tremendous cost they won. They fought to preserve it, and they won. They achieved peace with Jordan and a “cold” but very effective peace with Egypt, now their ally against Hamas terror. They fought to a standoff in Lebanon, and their northern border, like their borders with Egypt and Jordan, is quiet. By all reports and against all odds they are inching ever closer to peace with Syria.

The Gaza war will not go on much longer. Cracks are appearing in the Israeli government’s unity, even within the security cabinet, even among the top three leaders, Olmert, Livni, and Barak. Tony Blair, the French, and the Egyptians are circumventing the rhetoric and behind the scenes may soon achieve a cease-fire. Will the result have been worth it?

Ari Shavit, a leading journalist in Israel who supports an early cease-fire, said on BBC news on January 2 that in the Middle East, “Nothing is what meets the eye. In closed rooms, many, many moderate Arab leaders, including moderate Palestinian leaders, actually are happy, and they actually encouraged the Israeli operation, because Hamas is not only a threat to Israel, it’s a threat to moderate Egypt, it’s a threat to moderate Jordan, and it’s definitely a threat to the moderate Palestinians…

“There is a silent coalition of the moderates—Israelis, Arabs, Palestinians—who understand that extremism, Fascist-like organizations like the Hamas, who oppress women, who persecute homosexuals, who persecute Christians, who do not let a free Palestinian society emerge—this is a threat to all of us in the region and therefore the moderates want a constructive, positive Palestine to evolve out of this tragedy we are witnessing right now.”

Can this happen? I believe it can. Does Hamas have to be crushed, in will if not in body, in order for it to happen? I believe it does. Can Israel accomplish this? We will soon see. But whatever the outcome, the innocent people of Gaza will have paid an exceedingly high price.

Think of them. Pray for them. But also, in the next few days, spare a thought or a prayer for the women and children of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu, who are dying without a glance from a world whose outrage is completely focused on Israel and Gaza. The fight against terror is costly in human terms in any part of the world, but it is often unavoidable and it sometimes in the end leads to a better life.

These are today’s lead editorials in the two major Israeli newspapers that appear in English as well as Hebrew.

From the Jerusalem Post, January 11, 2009:

The UN's hollow Gaza resolution

There can be nothing more valid or just than Israel's security cabinet's pledge to press on with the Gaza operation regardless of UN disapproval. It is exactly as the prime minister's statement encapsulated: "Israel has never agreed that any outside body would determine its right to defend the security of its citizens."

Friday's rocket attacks, following the UN Security Council's call for an immediate cease-fire, the statement continued, "only prove that UNSC Resolution 1860 is not practical and will not be honored in actual fact by the Palestinian murder organizations."

Even before Israel's official reaction, Hamas responded with more violence to the council's resolution. The terrorists – who hold sway over Gaza, arm it to the teeth, cynically turn its inhabitants into human shields and indiscriminately rocket an ever-broadening range of civilian targets within sovereign Israel – rushed to reject the resolution. The endorsement the resolution won from the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority is irrelevant.

This, however, doesn't necessarily remove the onus from Israel – though in a fairer world it certainly should. The international community, which for over eight years calmly tolerated the targeting of ordinary Israelis, chose to speak out only when Israel finally acted to protect its populace. In that context, the council's alacrity to impose a cease-fire looks more like a bid to impede Israel's self-defense.

From Haaretz, January 11, 2009:

A big shudder on the wing

Around two weeks after the start of fighting in Gaza, there are only vague reports on Israel's success in damaging Hamas' terrorist infrastructure. On the other hand, statistics on the harm done to civilians accumulate. More than 800 Palestinians have been killed and around 3,000 have been wounded, an overwhelming majority of them from air strikes. According to UN figures, half of those killed are civilians, and half of the civilians killed are women and children.

Alongside reports on the number of dead and injured are reports of doctors being denied entry, the inability of aid groups to reach refugees and give them food, and a serious shortage of medicine and supplies. Blame does not rest with the Israel Defense Forces for all these issues. Hamas and other Palestinian organizations deliberately fired at a food convoy heading to Gaza because it sought to enter the Strip through a different crossing than what Hamas had desired. Hamas also liquidates its adversaries at home and is not ready to adopt the Egyptian cease-fire initiative. But these cannot serve as a pretext for a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians.

Yesterday Israel announced, by dropping leaflets into densely populated areas in Gaza, that it plans to escalate its military operation. This stirs concerns that, similar to what occurred during the Second Lebanon War, the reason for going to war has been forgotten and replaced by an unrealistic desire to topple the Hamas regime in the Strip. If a few years ago the public cried out in protest over the bombing of a home in Gaza and the statement by former pilot and chief of staff Dan Halutz, who said he felt a "slight shudder on the wing" when he bombed a house, today it responds indifferently, even satisfactorily, to the harming of Palestinians.

The lessons of previous wars, during which the IDF destroyed infrastructure targets and the homes of civilians but did not gain the quiet it had sought, have not been internalized. Israel's justified rationale in acting against rocket launchers has been increasingly damaged over two weeks. The legitimacy and understanding extended to Israel melt away amid the pictures of killing and ruin. Accusations of war crimes are already being bandied about in Israel. This war needs to move immediately to the diplomatic track and agreements that will end the fantasies and delusions of both sides.

This (with quotation and question marks added) is the title of today’s lead editorial in the English-language Haaretz as it appears on haaretz.com. The editorial notes that Israel’s security cabinet is now divided, with a substantial minority of four members voting to stop the operation and withdraw from Gaza. It goes on to say in no uncertain terms, “The fighting needs to stop now and the IDF should exit Gaza immediately.”

And it ends, “Israel must withdraw from the Gaza Strip and seek an agreement that will secure a long-term cease-fire and prevent the rearmament of Hamas,” through the auspices of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the European Union, Egypt, and the United States.

The editorial comes hours after the UN Security Council voted to call for an immediate cease-fire. The vote was unanimous except for the United States, which could have blocked the resolution as it has for two weeks, but which instead chose to abstain. Hamas rejected the resolution. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel declared the cease-fire unworkable and, with the support of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, continued the air and ground assault in Gaza.

Those of us who love and defend Israel are having a more difficult time of it every day. Of course, this is nothing compared to the difficulty faced by Israelis, much less that faced by Palestinians in Gaza. A few days ago a wonderful family I once stayed with over a peaceful Shabbat in Israel lost a son in the fighting; he was Major Dagan Wertman, 32, known for his devotion to the men serving under him.

At his funeral, “One officer said he was the kind of commander who worried that his soldiers had enough money and who stayed up all night talking with them. He would go around for days with red, swollen eyes from lack of sleep.” He had returned from a two-year break in his army service to join the Gaza fighting. Two of his brothers are also in the army.

His father, Eli, remembered often putting a blanket over the boy when he fell asleep with his clothes on: "’But I didn’t take off your shoes, because you would not let me,’ Eli said, his voice broken with tears.” He went on to tell his dead son that the family would be unified and strong. The grief of Dagan’s gentle parents—his father is a distinguished neurologist, his mother a dedicated social worker—is echoed by many who loved their son and his family.

It is also, of course, mirrored by that of hundreds of Palestinian parents who have lost sons and daughters, including many small children, in the tragic war in Gaza over the past two weeks. The images of their deaths, their grief, have been transmitted instantaneously around the world. They are now the image most strongly associated with Israel in the minds of not millions but billions of people.

The deaths of civilians are inevitable in war, and for the first week of this conflict it was possible to point to the exceptional care taken by the IDF to prevent and reduce such deaths. In the second week the balance of public opinion has changed. Israel’s effort to protect the innocent by warning them to flee to safer places has backfired in major ways at least twice. A home in which over a hundred people were taking shelter was bombed by the IDF, killing at least thirty.

And, with what looked like flagrant disregard of international law and custom, Israel shelled a United Nations school in which it had encouraged civilians to take refuge, killing and wounding many. Israel claimed that mortar fire was coming from the vicinity of the school and that it returned fire. The UN representative stated that a preliminary investigation made him “99.9 percent certain” that no such mortar fire had occurred.

Let’s say we believe Israel—let’s say that in both cases Hamas was hiding among the civilians and using them as human shields, as it has often done in other situations. Let’s say even that Hamas plotted to make this happen, to draw Israeli fire upon places of refuge, including a United Nations school.

This would be a point of great moral importance, but of no importance at all in the battle for hearts and minds. The spectacle of a UN representative and an Israeli spokesman arguing bitterly on CNN over what happened at the school is a no-win situation for Israel, and those of us who defend its legitimate interests look increasingly insensitive and difficult to believe.

Despite a daily three-hour lull in the fighting, despite scores of truckloads daily of humanitarian aid being allowed into Gaza, the situation for the 1.5 million people who live there is increasingly dire. Yesterday the UN suspended its aid operations, citing the risk to its personnel, and saying that the IDF had fired on aid trucks, killing one driver and injuring two others. Yesterday too, the Red Cross accused Israel of breaking international law by allowing children to starve to death in Gaza.

The Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights is trying to raise $700,000 for desperately needed medical and surgical supplies for Gaza, but has only been able to raise about $100,000 privately. Yesterday Ari Shavit, a journalist who supported the incursion into Gaza, called upon the Olmert government to simply give PHR the rest of the money; it did not.

Israel is now losing a huge, worldwide battle for hearts and minds that has long-term strategic importance. It was obvious to all from the beginning that this would have to be a time-limited operation, and that world opinion would ultimately set the limit, just as it did in many of Israel’s wars. The US has been able once again to delay the inevitable, but now there is a UN cease-fire resolution, and the President who gives Israel all the rope it wants will be gone in 12 days.

The justification of this war was easy to accept for many of us, and it was not even very difficult to rebut the argument of “disproportionate” response. To justify ongoing operations at the daily cost that Israel is inflicting—inadvertently or not–on innocent Palestinians and, to a lesser extent, on its own best and brightest young people, is far, far harder.

American airmen were once dragged through the streets of Somalia, their bodies mutilated and brutalized, their country humiliated. This is now happening to Israel’s moral standing; it is being dragged day after day, mutilated and brutalized, in the metaphoric streets of the whole world.

Is the ongoing advantage of pursuing the military goals of this operation worth the cost? I don’t know, but I know the cost is enormous, and I am beginning to wonder if Israel’s leaders fully understand that cost. I also know that four members of Israel’s security cabinet and the editors of its most respected newspaper have now said, with appropriate safeguards and conditions, “Just Get Out.”

Note: I recommend the New Israel Fund as a conduit for American contributions to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel:

US residents may make a tax-exempt donation via the New Israel Fund (NIF). Checks should be made payable to “New Israel Fund”. A note with the check should be marked “donor-advised to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, ID# 5762.”

NIF Address in Washington: New Israel Fund, P.O.Box 91588, WashingtonDC 20090-1588

NIF Bank details: Citibank, 1000 Vermont Ave NW, Washington, DC20005, ABA #254070116, Acc# 66796296

I’m taking my title from today’s lead editorial in the English-language Ha’aretz, which used it without the question mark. Thus the “New York Times of Israel” explicitly calls for a cessation of hostilities, adding, “it is difficult to understand the purpose of prolonging the ground operation, which is liable to end in a difficult entanglement and casualties.”

The call appears to be (initially at least) for a unilateral cessation by Israel in an attempt to see whether Hamas will respond with a cessation of rocket fire, reserving a right to resume the use of force should rockets continue. Significantly, it suggests that Israel accept the proposal made by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, also a leader of the European Union. 

“Sarkozy,” the editorial goes on, “is a friendly leader who during his term in office has contributed to Israel's improved standing in Europe. Israel can return the favor for his support and bestow on him a diplomatic achievement if it adopts his initiative for a lull in the fighting and declares its readiness to begin immediate negotiations on a new, stable security arrangement in the Gaza Strip.”

This is a very important strategic argument, despite the fact that it is about diplomatic rather than military strategy. Clausewitz famously observed that war is diplomacy pursued by other means; if so, they are somewhat interchangeable, and in the long run an intelligent diplomatic strategy in Europe could conceivably save more Israeli lives than a continued military operation.

Ha’aretz wanted no ambiguity: “A few more days of fighting and hundreds more dead on the Palestinian side will not enhance Israeli deterrence; it will only undermine the political and moral basis of the operation.” Moral strategy too can save Israeli as well as Palestinian lives in the long run.

Ha’aretz is only one voice among major Israeli news organizations, and it is well known to be a liberal voice, but it is also an important one. I am on record refusing to take sides in disputes within Israel, and I suspect that the Ha’aretz position is a minority one, although perhaps shared by a large minority.

In any case it is up to the IDF and the security cabinet, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the Labor Party leader and (as Prime Minister) one-time peacemaker. I look to them to lead and decide in the interests of Israel. The decision of when to end a military operation has been as important in Israel’s history as the decision of when to begin one.

But I hope they read the Ha’aretz editorial and think about it carefully. Every hour means more lives lost. Although every hour of continued military action may mean a little more security in the short run—one more weapons cache destroyed, one more tunnel destroyed—there are other strategic considerations. In the long run, diplomacy matters as much or more.

And although Israel must not try to be “a light among the nations” at the expense of its survival, it must ask itself not whether, but when, the moral cost of an operation, in the eyes of its friends as well as its enemies, exceeds its ongoing military value. Moral cost translates into diplomatic cost, and that translates into a loss of security, sooner or later.

Much has already been gained by this operation. Perhaps continuing it uninterrupted will yield further gains greater than that inevitable moral cost. But perhaps not.

Early Tuesday morning I was in the Coventry station waiting for a train to London, and I bought three British newspapers— The Times, The Daily Mail, and The Guardian.

All, appropriately, reported the tragic deaths of five girls, all in one family, in Gaza in an Israeli strike. Only The Guardian, known for its support of the Palestinians, covered the front page with the story, but it needed to be reported and it was. As a father, it brought tears to my eyes.

The family is named Balousha. “The seven eldest girls,” The Guardian wrote, “were asleep together on mattresses in one bedroom and they bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 15, Samer, 13, Dina, eight and Jawahar, four.” Their mother, Samira, had lost five of her nine children; she said, “I didn’t see any of my girls, just a pile of bricks.”

Most of us who have not lost a child cannot begin to imagine the magnitude of the grief. We have to hear their words. We have to know their names. But what we do not have to do is blame Israel.

It was not the fault of Anwar and Samira Balousha that they moved their family into a small house next to a mosque. It was not their fault that the mosque was used as a weapons cache and military facility. But this was also not Israel’s fault.

It was not the fault of the Baloushas that the leaders of the Gaza territory aimed and launched thousands of rockets at civilians in southern Israel during the eighteen months they have been in power and in the months before that after Israel withdrew completely from their territory, dragging recalcitrant Jewish settlers out by force.

It was not the Baloushas’ fault that the same leaders ignored countless pleas and warnings from Israel, one as recently as three days before the air strikes began, to stop the rocket fire. But these things were also not Israel’s fault.

The mosque was precisely targeted because of its military value. The explosion caused the collapse of the Balousha family’s house, beside the mosque. It was no one’s fault that the house was next to the mosque, but it was the fault of the Gaza “leadership”—the fault of Hamas—that the weapons were in the mosque and that the provocations of rockets targeting Israel’s civilians yielded their inevitable conclusion.

An editorial in Al Ahram, an Egyptian weekly, addressed Hamas directly and clearly: “If you can’t kill the wolf, don’t pull its tail.” Forget for the moment the fact that Egypt is no great friend of Israel, and that the image is not complimentary. Concentrate on the practical meaning of this advice, and you will know who is to blame for the sudden, bloody deaths of Tahrir, Ikram, Samer, Dina, and Jawahar Balousha, and for the grief of their parents Anwar and Samira.

Hamas has gotten this advice in one way and another from Egypt and other Arab moderates for years and has ignored it. Instead it has listened to the advice of Iran and Hezbollah. Sure, they said, go ahead, pull the wolf’s tail. By Monday the cost was clear; Hamas could have read Al Ahram Monday morning and taken it, and perhaps the Balousha sisters would be alive.

Those who call this a crime against humanity are living in a dream world and have no knowledge of the history of war. They also have no knowledge of the difference between targeting civilians and accidentally killing them. As of this writing the UN estimates that around 60 of the more than 400 Gazan deaths have been civilians. Every one is a tragedy. But in the crowded conditions of Gaza these numbers reflect exceptional care taken by the Israel’s Air Force and intelligence services to avoid the deaths of innocents.

In contrast, of the 542 deaths in Israel between 2000 and 2007 due to terror attacks by Hamas and others, the great majority were civilians. Why?–because mainly civilians were targeted. As for the rocket attacks, almost every one is directed against civilians. Watch this 47-second Hamas video to find out how they view the deaths of children, women, and non-combatant men in Israel. Warning: it is bloody, but it is theirs, and it will leave you no doubt about who the targets are.

Nizar Rayyan (Ghayan), a top Hamas leader, was interviewed two years ago by Jeffrey Goldberg, who asked him if he could envision a 50-year hudna (cease-fire) with Israel. His answer: "The only reason to have a hudna is to prepare yourself for the final battle. We don't need 50 years to prepare ourselves for the final battle with Israel . . . Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God."

On Wednesday of this week, Rayyan went on television and warned Israel against a ground action: “We are the ones who know Gaza’s every corner and know how, with the permission of God, we will kill and imprison their men and rub their noses in the sand.” On Thursday he was killed by an Israeli air strike, together with his four wives and nine of their twelve children, among whom Rayyan insisted on staying while he issued his bloody directives against Israel. Are those children’s deaths on Israel’s hands? I don’t think so.

Golda Meir said that she could forgive her enemies for killing Israel’s children but could never forgive them for forcing Israel to kill theirs. The deaths of Gaza’s children will be difficult to forgive, but it will not be Israel that needs the forgiveness.

The government of Israel almost begged the other day, pleading with the Hamas terrorist government to stop its rocket barrages against civilians in Ashkelon and other population centers near Gaza. These pleas fell on deaf ears. As a friend of mine who lives in Binyamina, near Haifa, said to me Thursday, “You know they fired sixty rockets into Ashkelon yesterday?”

Through Skype, I was able to see her face as well as hear her voice. She is a slightly left-of-center psychologist, a combat veteran like her husband, a mother of three grown kids who also served their country. She wants a Palestinian state. She is willing to make sacrifices to see it come about. But she does not belong to the suicidal left in Israel, and she does not respect the Palestinians now running Gaza.

“They are so stupid,” she went on. “We withdrew completely from Gaza three years ago. What did they do? They went on provoking us relentlessly, just like Hezbollah did after we got out of Lebanon. What do they think we are going to do? Sit back and be rocketed forever?”

The answer became apparent this morning as Israel launched its most severe reprisal in decades for Hamas’s stepped-up rocket attacks. Forty security strongholds belonging to the Hamas military wing were destroyed in five minutes, with more in an ongoing assault. At this writing almost two hundred people were killed, mainly soldiers serving a government bent relentlessly on perpetuating terror.

Tragically, some civilians were killed, and the responsibility for their deaths rests squarely with their leaders. Predictably, a Hamas spokesman called it “a twenty-first century Holocaust,” which they say began when Israel tried to starve the Gazan people with its blockade. But of course it did not start there. It started when Hamas and other Palestinian groups decided to continue the real, original Holocaust by wiping the Jews off the map of the Middle East.

As with Hezbollah, Hamas has strong ties to Iran and has the explicitly stated goal of destroying the Jewish state. One of their spokesmen today called on all fighters to attack “every Zionist house in Israel”—in other words, Jewish civilians. In their own media, their anti-Semitic propaganda is vicious and relentless.

Notice the difference here. Israel withdraws from Gaza, dragging recalcitrant Jewish settlers out by force. Hamas and other terror groups gain power in the territory, increasingly targeting civilians and only civilians on the Israeli side of the border, a campaign of terror. Israel, along with Egypt (“Notice,” my friend said, “that they never mention Egypt when they criticize the blockade”) and almost the entire international community, enforces a blockade around Gaza, but one that allows food, medicine and other essential supplies to go through.

Even this does not stop weapons from flowing, since of course Hamas is cynical enough to smuggle them in as food or medicine and in tunnels under constant construction. But the food and medicine still get through.

Still, Hamas’s suicidal determination creates economic havoc in the densely populated territory. People suffer terribly, and of course they blame Israel. With growing self-destructive intent, Hamas and its allies impose a terror campaign on Israeli men, women and children by sending more and more rockets.

Today’s completely predictable response has very broad support within Israel. It is no right-wing gambit. Tzipi Livni, the moderate Foreign Minister and candidate for Prime Minister, has called for the understanding of the international community. Ehud Barak, Defense Minister and would-be peacemaker when he was Prime Minister at the end of the ‘90s, said this would not be an easy or short campaign, but that “the time has come to fight.”

Government spokesman Mark Regev says that the strikes are surgical and that we must be skeptical of Hamas claims about civilian casualties, “We are targeting the Hamas military machine . . . We have to create a new reality where those 250,000 people in Southern Israel do not have to live in bomb shelters.”

This is a tragic outcome brought on by the worst elements among the long-suffering Palestinian people, the elements who at the moment are unfortunately in power in the painfully but inevitably isolated Gaza Strip. Israel is doing what it must do in the circumstances, and what any country would do under this kind of attack.

The Bush administration has called on Hamas to stop sending rockets into Israel. It has called on Israel to avoid civilian casualties. These statements correspond precisely to Israeli government goals. Now, what will Barack Obama say?

Dear ———–,

In the twenty and more years we have been friends, we have sometimes disagreed about how vocal Jewish Americans should be about politics and policy in Israel. But througout that time, there has been little doubt of the fundamental support for Israel on the part of the American Jewish community. That may now be changing.

If you are as open-minded as I think you are, you'll read this carefully: “Think Again: Ships Passing in the Night,” by Jonathan Rosenblum in the Jerusalem Post.

If this analysis is right, we are heading for another period in Jewish American history like the 19th and early 20th centuies, when large parts of our community (the Reform movement, the American Jewish Committee, etc) were anti-Zionist. If that happens, I will stand with Israel and against American Jews.

I will fight for Israel's right to decide for itself, free of pressure from a community a large minority of whom say they would not consider Israel's destruction a personal tragedy. To me this is far, far more important than anything doddering old Jimmy Carter says or does–although I do see American Jews playing right into Carter's sullied hands.

Israelis call George W. Bush their best friend ever, and they are now poised to elect Bibi Netanyahu again. Not only have your friend Yossi Beilin and others like him completely failed to win over a significant part of the Israeli electorate, in fact Labor itself is poised for a massive defeat, dwindling to single digits for the first time in history.

To me that is very sad, but my opinion matters very little. My conclusion is not to say that Israelis are wrong and you or I am right, but the opposite. When a large majority of Israelis arrive at a decision about what they must do to survive, I support that decision. Period.

This is not a close call. Yossi Beilin has become a political nonentity in Israel, and there are reasons. He pushed the Oslo process, now deemed by most Israelis to have been an abject failure. He has worked all his life to persuade Israelis and Palestinians that they can come to a political agreement and make real peace, and he has failed.

Events have proved his convictions naïve and premature. Fifteen hundred terrorist murders of innocent Israelis, including Muslims and Christians, discredited Oslo. And the hated “apartheid” wall has save countless Israeli lives since it was built in the face of international condemnation. Most Israelis know this. Even with the support of a substantial Arab minority in the electorate and the Knesset, Beilin cannot make his opinions credible with any significant number of Israelis.

Seasoned and brilliant leaders from Shimon Peres on the left to Natan Sharansky on the right—not to mention Tony Blair and “the Quartet”—have concluded that Israel needs a bottom-up process that strengthens the Palestinian economy to the point where people on their side have much more to gain from compromise than from stubbornness.

Do I think that peace must come eventually?—in years, not decades?—absolutely. Do I think that the settlers and their supporters are part of the problem, not the solution? Certainly. But do I think that the small minority in Israel who support the conventional peace movement have the key to accelerating the process? No. And even if I did, it would not be my business.

I frankly am baffled by the conviction of so many Jewish Americans that they know more about what is best for Israel than Israelis do. In this Jewish-American liberals are in the same category with the Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn and Los Angeles who “knew” that the withdrawal from Gaza was a tragedy and that the two-state solution—in my view inevitable and just—is treason against the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

If someone put a gun to my head and said, “You must choose one or the other,” I would probably choose you and Beilin over them. But no one is, and that is the point. No one is putting a gun to my head, or yours, or the heads of the rabbis in Brooklyn.

They are putting the gun to the heads of the people with the courage to live surrounded by guns pointed at them. It is they who have given two or three years of their lives to army service, often in harm’s way. It is they who send their sons and daughters to fight and die in the first Jewish army for two millennia. It is they who sit in cafés and buses and pizza parlors that are blown up by terrorists.

It is not me, it is not you, and it is not the Brooklyn rabbis. It is the citizens and permanent residents of Israel.

That is why they have a vote, and we do not. And that is why I will never tell the Israeli electorate that I know more than they do about what they must do to survive in the hostile environment you and I don’t live in. I am amazed and dismayed that any Jewish American, comfortably eating bagels and attending testimonial dinners in a safe country with an all-volunteer army, could possibly think that he or she has a right to tell Israelis what to do—whether on the right or the left, it is to me an immoral stance.

And of course it is not a very courageous one. It is no mystery how to earn the right to vote in Israel and to get up on a soapbox and tell Israelis what to do. All we have to do is become one of them. They’ve invited us. They want us. They are waiting for us.

But of course that isn’t easy, is it? If it were, we would already have done it. We wouldn’t just be talking about our love for Israel, we would be there living the dream and the nightmare every day. That is called earning the right to an opinion. But I am not there and neither are you.

If I can put on my biological anthropology hat for a moment, I am considered an expert on human nature and mind. I can tell you that to make wise decisions you must experience the feedback of your body and your emotions. The idea that you can make good decisions in the abstract has been proven false. What is true is the folk wisdom that you have to make certain decisions with your gut.

I believe in the gut decisions of those in the line of fire, not in mine, not in yours.

So I have decided to fight against any Jewish Americans who try to throw their weight around to pressure Israel from the safe side of the ocean. I voted for Obama, but if liberal American Jews tell him it’s okay to pressure Israel into a peace process for which it is not ready, I will stand against them.

This is where my energy will go in the years to come; if a fight is needed to prevent the American Jewish community and the Obama administration from bringing undue pressure to bear on the Jewish state, I’ll be there. And I will use all my skills, however modest, to publicly oppose all who think they know better than our friends who live every day in the line of fire and in the cauldron of terror that is the Middle East—so different from Atlanta or Brooklyn that it might as well be on another planet.

You want to tell Israel what to do? Make aliyah, join the IDF, earn your vote—and I will be the first to say you are doing the right thing. In fact, I will take your opinion very seriously, just as I do those who have already made those choices. Vote with your feet and your body, and I will give full weight to any vote you cast with your mind.

From your friend as always, Shalom,

Mel

Please note: The comments below were accidentally deleted when the site was under repair by the site manager. We have restored them exactly as they originally appeared. The actual date and time of posting is shown first, before the January 2nd date and time when they were restored. Thank you all for your effort and your patience.

I am in Paris at the moment, but the other evening a colleague, Doron Shultziner, wrote to a number of us to celebrate his grandmother’s life on the occasion of her passing. She was a Holocaust (Shoah) survivor who lived through the worst and on to the best, bringing up a family in Israel. To paraphrase the great Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, Bracha Shultziner followed the “614th commandment”: She did not grant Hitler a posthumous victory. Her first name means “blessing,” and her memory will surely be for a blessing. Doron himself is a brilliant young political scientist, an Israeli doing research for two years at Emory University in Atlanta. I was very moved by his account of his grandmother’s life, and with his permission, I am posting his letter below:

6th December, 2008

Saying Goodbye to My Grandma

This passing night, my good grandmother, Bracha (Bitzia) Shultziner, passed away; she was 88 years old. I will not be able to participate in her funeral because the earliest possible flight to Israel will arrive already after the funeral tomorrow afternoon. Indeed, it is customary in Jewish tradition to bury the dead as early as possible in order to protect the dignity of the deceased (whether or not the deceased is Jewish). I decided that the best way for me to say goodbye is by recalling and retelling moments of bravery and dignity in her life. Indeed, she experienced some trying moments in life, and I exist today because of her persistence and clinging to life in the Holocaust.

My grandmother never knew her father who left home when she was a little child. She was brought up by her mother and grandfather who she loved dearly. He was a well known Rabbi from the Pizem family in a Romanian Jewish community not far from the capital Bucharest. His picture is still hanging in my grandparents’ living room. My grandmother met my grandfather (who recently turned 90) when the Second World War was closing on eastern European Jews.

After the Nazis took over parts of the Ukraine, they handed the area known as Transnistria to Romania which helped the Nazis in their war against the Soviet Union. Thereafter, Transnistria was transformed into a concentration area for the Jews of Bessarabia, Buokovina, and north Moldova. My grandparents were among 150,000 Jews who were deported to Transnistria and put in Ghettos and forced working camps. My grandmother saw the daily death toll around her during those years: 90,000 Jews of those deported were murdered. My grandparents were forced to march tens of kilometers together with thousands of Jews to Transnistria, major portions of the way were in mud and snow. They witnessed how many of those who were too weak or slow to march were simply shot dead. So my grandfather literally carried my grandmother’s mother on his back through long portions of the way so that all three of them would survive, and they did.

It was in one of those Ghettos that my grandmother gave birth to my father. She was alone; my grandfather was taken to forced labor elsewhere, several months earlier. She managed to get into a Christian hospital “illegally” in order to give birth. That was a very dangerous thing to do. Had the authorities knew that she was there, they would not have hesitated to kill her, and then my father, and hence I, would not exist. Yet, her survival was even more miraculous than that.

My grandmother did not have an easy birth with my father. She was so weak and lost so much blood while giving birth that she came close to death. In fact, she was left on the hospital bed bleeding and unattended, and would have died that night if it was not for a good Christian doctor who happened to be there that day and to notice her. After a short query, he realized that she was a Jew who was “not supposed to be there.” He could have turned her in. In fact, it would have been much safer for him to do that. But instead, he decided to save my grandmother. He told the nurse to bring him ice in order to stop the bleeding. “More ice, get me more ice!” he shouted and ordered the nurse time and again during that fateful night, his face full of concentration, as he was trying to save her. I remember her telling me this story in minute details, with tears in her eyes and in a broken voice, as she delved into that hurtful past and relived those moments for me, moments that were carved into her memories and self. She passed out and regained consciousness the following morning to discover that she was still alive. She could not stay in the hospital for long and so after she regained some strength she went back to the Ghetto. My grandfather did not hear any news about his first son, my father, until much later.

That was not the first or only time my grandparents came close to death during that insane time, but they clung on to life. Indeed, my grandparents were among the lucky Jews who survived the Holocaust. In the early 1960s, they immigrated to Israel. Starting in a transition camp in northern Israel, they slowly built their lives there, my grandmother as a professional seamstress, and my grandfather working at the Haifa sea-port.

She was a very noble and caring person, very intelligent, and held the family closely together through weekly Shabbat dinners at their house in Haifa. I will never forget those dinners: delicious Romanian food, family warmth, and laughter. But I would also not forget how her hands often trembled as she brought the plates to that little packed Shabbat dinner-table. Being the curious child that I was, I asked her about that. She explained that the shivers began after the Holocaust. When I grew up, I discovered many other incredible stories that my grandparents had from the Holocaust, stories and memories, which they seldom talked about.

It was difficult to see my grandmother gradually transform in old age due to illness, first physically, then psychologically. Hers was a combination of Parkinson’s and strokes in her 80s. The most deplorable thing was that her acute thinking was eventually impaired too. By this time she was already aided by Luchi, a dedicated caretaker from Romania. This is somewhat an irony of history. In Romania my grandparents experienced anti-Semitism from the Nazis and the local community and eventually moved to Israel. In Israel, my grandmother was taken care of by a wonderful Romanian Christian who became attached to my grandmother as if she was her mother, so she told me while crying earlier today over the phone; and my grandmother came to see Luchi, or Luchika as she fondly used to call her, as the daughter she never had. So in a symbolic way a circle is closed: my grandmother made her peace with Romania and with her hurtful past there.

Despite her illness, my grandmother maintained this amazing grace until her last moments and died in dignity. I spoke to her briefly a few weeks ago, and with her loving voice she wished me all the best. I will forever treasure the moments and memories that she shared with me.

Blessed be her memory,

Doron Shultziner

When I wrote about my Yom Kippur experience in Stockholm I got some interesting responses, but none more so than the exchange of messages with Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, who was the brilliant and inspiring spiritual leader of Beth Jacob (Orthodox) Synagogue for four decades, who writes often for The Jerusalem Post, who was for years the editor of the distinguised Orthodox journal Tradition, and whose diary of the Six-Day War I have written about. Our messages touched on many things, but the focus of this exchange was the role of women in synagogue services. We do disagree on this and other issues, but there are few people in this world I admire as much as I do Rabbi Feldman. To put it simply, if the word “character” (in the moral sense) appeared in the dictionary next to a photograph, it could easily be a photograph of him. Rarely have I known a man of such high character. (His sense of humor is a bonus.) We both edited the exchange a bit, and the version below has his approval:

Dear Mel,

Your Stockholm experience was most interesting. Three quick reactions:

  a) Sobering and humbling, was it not, to know that a teen-age girl took your Levi aliyah in front of the Torah. I hope she realizes whom she replaced. Was she a Levi-ette?

  b)  Regarding Neilah and the gates of prayer and heaven closing: A rabbi very close to me told his congregation this year that, yes, the gates were closing, but that we were all inside those gates, not outside…

  c) Something nags at me: that Stockholm synagogue about to go full mixed seating: how do they answer to the ghosts of all their forebears who constructed a shul that was in keeping with full Jewish tradition: separate seating for men and women. With all their intelligence, learning, sensitivity, etc., what happened to these present-day good people and their sensitivity to the feelings of those who built the place from the ground up? Is there not a touch of arrogance in their implied statement that they know better than their predecessors how to pray to our Maker? I have always been troubled by the cavalier attitude with which synagogue boards change the orientation of their synagogues. It displays a certain misunderstanding about the role of a shul – which is to help us reach out to Gd and not simply to be a social occasion.

   And one question:  I am curious: how many people come to that synaogue on ordinary Shabbat mornings? (Not that any Shabbat can be ordinary.)

    Have a meaningful Succos.

            Emanuel F.

——————————

Dear Rav,

As always, I am honored that you take notice of my dithering. I love your point in b. It resembles the point made in the essay here, which I sent to my kids: http://www.meaningfullife.com/torah/holidays/1b/Vistas.php

You, being who you are, can cut to the chase and read the last three paragraphs.

On your points a and c, we are dealing with a very difficult matter, and I do not minimize its difficulty. I vividly remember your account of your arrival in Atlanta three days before Rosh Hashanah and finding that they had taken down the mechitza without consulting you. As I recall, you asked your wife to prepare for the possibility of returning to Baltimore. You stood your ground and you won, and I have always completely respected your position despite my different views of the role of women.

I doubt that the young lady who took my aliyah knew of it, and I hope she didn't. I was inspired to be replaced by her; it made me feel connected to the future. Nevertheless, I take your point about the expectations of their ancestors, although it so happens that the Stockholm shul was Reform before it was Conservative. Yet, go another century back (a short time in my calculations or yours) and you will find Jews who respected Torah law about roles of men and women. I have no illusions about that, and to an important extent I follow your lead in respecting the wishes of our ancestors. Had I any say in the matter, I would recommend that they leave the balcony to women only and set off a smaller section downstairs for men. As it was, the mixed seating was overcrowded and the other sections thinly populated, but I know that Halakhah is not a popularity contest.

Yet my own reading of Jewish history and the history of Halakhah suggests that there have been changes. I am sure you are aware of egalitarian groups who claim to be Orthodox–who deeply desire to be Orthodox– with the exception of the separation and separate roles for men and women. I know that your choice is to keep within the Law, and I respect that. But is there no possibility that Halakhah will one day in the future change on this matter? Some other things appear to have changed over the centuries.

If we have to choose between the continuity of Jewish religion and tradition and the preservation of different treatment of men and women, would you not consider a compromise? Must we go on relegating the intellectual and spiritual gifts of half of the Jewish people to roles in the private sphere of the family only? I would bet that you have ideas about how to give gifted women a larger role, even within Halakhah.

In any case, I would love to hear your thoughts about this difficult and sometimes painful issue. Perhaps it is simple in terms of law, but you know as well as I it is no longer simple in human terms. I know that many in the Orthodox community turn to you for guidance on this most important question. Can you pioneer a compromise within Halakhah?

With warm regards for Sukkot and beyond,

Mel

—————————-

Dear Prof.,

A quick non-edited reply to your note– and not proof read…

You assume that the mechitza in shul is a statement that woman's place is not in the public but the private sphere. Not necessarily so. Mechitza is strictly for the purpose of kavannah in prayer. A man is distracted by women in all areas of life. In the area of prayer, this distraction can destroy the essence of prayer, which has as its fundamental goal a full identification with Gd. Which requires, ideally, total concentration – kavannah – upon the object of prayer, which is the Creator.

This sounds strange to modern ears (even Orthodox ones), for we are accustomed to a relaxed social atmosphere in shul. But ideal prayer of course is not social. It is serious business. If it were social, sure, let men and women sit together. But if it is really serious, and my goal is to concentrate on Him Who made me and holds me in the palm of His hand, then all possible distractions must be removed. And women are a primary distraction. This has therefore nothing to do with the different roles that women play in Jewish life.

Women are gifted, women are insightful, women are perceptive, women are caring, women are (often)  lovely to look at– but because they possess a certain magnetism that men cannot resist, a magnetism that is often sexual, they become, willy-nilly, a distraction to men during prayer. Although sex plays a major role in Jewish life, it is nevertheless physical enough for it to be out of place in prayer. Look at the orgies which accompanied Canaanite prayer, a pattern completely rejected by our ancestors in ancient Israel. To avoid even a hint of this, and to distance ourselves from such things, Jewish men and women do not sit together during prayer.

Full disclosure: the comment that the closing of the gates finds us inside the gates, not outside was spoken by my son, Rabbi Ilan Feldman, to the congregation in Atlanta during Neilah last week.

Be well, and have a gutten Shabbes and a gutten simchas toirah.

ef

——————–

Rav,

I appreciate all that you say. If I accept your argument (one of the standard ones) against mixed seating in the interest of men's kavannah–although I could argue that this is men's problem, not women's–do we not still have something to discuss about women's roles?

If I grant you the mechitza, I still have to ask why women's role as scholars, interpreters of Jewish law, and spiritual leaders is minimal compared to what they could contribute. Why not a woman rabbi for an all-female congregation–there would be no effect on men's kavannah–with women reading the Torah, etc? In fact this would improve men's kavannah by reducing the number of women in their shul.

But where are the intellectual and spiritual descendants of Berurya today? Why no female Soloveitchik? Theoretically, with the huge recent increase in women's education, we should long since have had many women among the greatest Torah scholars–but there are too many barriers in the Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law. Is there no way to elevate women as scholars to the very highest heights without distracting men?

Good shabbos, and chag sameach, Mel

—————————————

Melvin:

Thanks for your response, In the outside world where there are no barriers to women, why are there few female physicists or mathematicians of great note? Why are men overwhelmingly dominant in certain fields, ( this is well known,is it not), while women are not? I know it flies in the face of feminist ideology, and it is not politically correct. (Look what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard when he dared to mention such things!), but could it not be that women are structurally not endowed with the intellectual means to be physicists or mathematicians (I would phrase this more elegantly if I were not rushing to shul this Friday afternoon). I don’t want to get into areas in which you are far more expert than I and in which I am not even a rank amateur, but is it not possible that there is an innate ability that men possess which enables them to excel in certain skills, and that women possess to excel in other skills?  Could this possibly be one reason there is no female Soloveitchik? (By the way, there was one female Soloveitchik in terms of Biblical interpretation — though not Talmud and Halacha – and that was the late Prof. Nechama Leibowitz of Jerusalem- who was personally very Orthodox.) With respect to the "huge increase in women’s education" that you mention, why are there not more great Torah scholars in the non-Orthodox movements, who do not have "many barriers" that you claim the Orthodox put down?

I would see no problem with a female rabbi of an all female congregation. (But most women are too smart to want to be pulpit rabbis…)

Have a good shabbos.

Note: I will return to some of the questions in Rabbi Feldman’s last message, and will try to persuade him to continue with the dialog.

To all (or almost all) who wrote about my CNN appearance and my last blog entry, I thank you.

Comments have come from all over the world, from Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics (at least), and almost all were positive, expressing condolences, reaching across religious and national boundaries with messages of hope and peace. I extend the same message of hope and peace across those boundaries back to you.

Let me try to make some general points and then try to answer some of the questions and criticisms you raised.

Most of you realized that because I know something about the history of the Jews and because this website is called “Jews and Others,” it was appropriate for me to focus my remarks on the Jewish victims, and that was of course why CNN called me. However, my heart aches for all the victims and their families, and I know that the Jewish ones, although directly targeted, made up only a small fraction of the total.

Many of the victims were Hindus, many Christians, and probably some were Muslims, Buddhists, and Sikhs. We have a saying in Judaism that if you save one life it is as if you saved the whole world. By chance I was driven to and from CNN by Ahmed, a Muslim-American from Somalia; we had a good conversation, comparing notes about our children and our religions. He told me of a Muslim saying, that if you kill one person it is as if you have killed the whole world. So from both Muslim and Jewish viewpoints we lost at least 170 worlds in the Mumbai terror attacks, and we are grieving.

Most of you also realized that in a four-minute television segment I had to compress and simplify some complex ideas. I was also nervous; I don’t do this every day. If you forgive me for oversimplifying, I’ll forgive some of you for not listening carefully.

For example, I said, “The United States has strengthened its ties with India, Israel has strengthened it’s ties with India, there’s an attempt to bring Pakistan into this alliance, and the extremists, the terrorists, the Islamist radicals hate all that. They hate the prospect of peace among these nations and the possibility of progress and getting away from this violence.”

Despite the obvious time pressure, I indicated in four different ways that I was not talking about Muslims or Islam in general; first, by saying that Pakistan could be part of the alliance, then by calling the perpetrators “extremists,” “terrorists,” and “Islamist radicals.” I never say “Islamic” when I mean “Islamist,” which generally refers to an aggressive, politically motivated minority within Islam, but just to make sure there would be no confusion, I added “radicals.”

Let me make myself clear here: This is not about Islam versus the West, or Hindus, or Jews, or anyone else. As “Maggie Jarry,” “Your average Catholic in the Midwest, USA,” wrote in her message of peace, the Jews had a Golden Age in Muslim Spain. This clash is not between different civilizations but between all civilization, including Islamic civilization, and a ruthless fringe group of violent radicals.

In my blog entry “Terror in India,” on my other website, I talk about the anthropology of terrorism and I mention Jewish, Christian, and Hindu terrorists, comparing them all to primitive headhunters and even to violent chimpanzees. Islam has no monopoly on terrorism and only a tiny minority of Muslims engage in it. “Alex S.” is like the Muslims I know and love and is the kind of Muslim I consider typical; he writes, “I really don’t think God sees us as Muslims, Jews, Hindus or any other religion, he sees us as his children and we should see each other as brothers and sisters.”

I do know that India is a secular country, as some of you emphasize, but the great majority of Indians are Hindu, and it was the Hindus (“Vedics,” according to one comment) who had the closest relationship to the Jews in India throughout history. India is mainly Hindu just as the United States is mainly Christian; but India has a long history of tolerance of not only Jews but Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Christians. However, this is not a spotless history of tolerance, and Christians (see the videos posted by “Indian Christian”) and Muslims have had serious trouble in recent years.

I did not say that Hindus brought polytheism to the world (it is worldwide and far older than the Vedic texts), but I did say that Hindus are polytheists. I accept the point two of you made that the various gods and goddesses can be viewed as different manifestations or attributes of one God—a point of similarity with Jewish mysticism, which personifies some aspects of God—but in fact we know that hundreds of millions of ordinary Hindus in India take the gods and goddesses literally, and in the Temples I have visited incense is burned and sacrifices made to statues of each god or goddess. There is nothing wrong with polytheism, and in fact it may be related to the tolerance showed by Hindus—what’s the problem with somebody else’s god if you already have a number of them yourself?

“Proud Indian” says “I wonder if you have any sympathy for Palestinian people? I can see your hatred towards Muslims.” Where is this hatred? I have re-read my last blog and listened to my CNN interview repeatedly but I can’t find it. Certainly almost none of the other comments point to any such thing, quite the opposite—almost all saw my message as one of peace and hope.

As for the Palestinians, I strongly favor a two-state solution and peace and independence for Palestine as soon as possible. I wrote articles in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a major regional newspaper in the U.S., promoting the peace process in 2001, 2002, and 2007, and I wrote a blog last March—one of the first things I posted on this website—called “Israel Must Do More for the West Bank Now.” Unfortunately, the same night I posted that there was a terrorist attack in which a Palestinian murdered 11 students in a Jerusalem religious school. This is the problem. My blog the next day was called “Grieve, Respond with Measured Force, and Continue to Work Toward Peace.”

“Anonymous” of Sunday at 12:09 am says that the rest of us “are bunch of one-dimensional clueless simpletons, with no perspective of history.” A reply from “Hoping Education Will Create More Moderates” made sense to me. This “Anonymous” seems to be extremely erudite and knowledgeable about recent diplomatic history, but doesn’t see the forest for the trees. This is a time of crisis and grief in which most of us want the big perspective, which I gave, and which is one of hope.

This same “Anonymous” thinks it’s naïve for Indian-Americans to try to emulate the success of Jewish-Americans because we are not all like Einstein. I would be very happy indeed to see Indian-Americans do as well as the best Jewish-Americans and avoid the mistakes we made and the bad apples in our very good barrel. My Indian-American students have greatly improved my life as a professor for the past ten or fifteen years, and some have gone on to do great things in medicine, science, law, and other fields.

But one of my very favorite students was a religious Muslim girl from Libya via Alabama. She always wears hijab, is now president of her law school class, and is destined for a career defending women in some countries where their rights are very limited. When a national magazine named her one of the top ten college women of the year, she named me as her most inspiring professor. It’s one of the things I will think about on my deathbed. I couldn’t be more proud.

By the way, pride is good. Muslim pride, Hindu pride, Jewish pride, Christian pride, American and Indian pride, all good—as long as the pride doesn’t come through denigrating others. Contrary to a recent book, you may sometimes have to be wrong for me to be right, and vice versa; but you don’t have to be humiliated for me to be proud. And you certainly don’t have to be murdered in order for me to find justice.