יום שבת, 23 באפריל 2011

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Sidney Lumet's legacy in Zionism, civil rights - and hasbara

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 03:45 PM PDT

Here is a chapter of American Jewish history I was not aware of:
Academy Award winning film director Sidney Lumet, who passed away on April 9 at age 86, is remembered for classics such as "Twelve Angry Men," the courtroom drama that challenged racial prejudice and which Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has cited as a major influence on her career.


What is not widely known is that before he became a director, Lumet, as a young actor, was at the center of a 1940s controversy in Baltimore involving Zionist activists and the fight over racial segregation.  
In the summer of 1946, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors languished in Displaced Persons camps in postwar Europe. The British refused to let them enter Mandatory Palestine, for fear of alienating the Arabs. In New York City, the Jewish activists known as the Bergson Group came up with a new way to publicize the survivors' plight: a Broadway play. They called it "A Flag is Born." 
Ben Hecht, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter, was active in the Bergson Group. So were the Adlers, the "first family" of the Yiddish theater. Hecht wrote the script for "A Flag is Born." Luther Adler directed it. Adler's half-sister Celia and another ex-Yiddish theater star,Paul Muni, costarred as elderly Holocaust survivors straggling through postwar Europe. Their sister Stella, the statuesque actress and acting coach, cast her most promising student, 22 year-old Marlon Brando, in the role of David, a passionate young Zionist who encounters the elderly couple in a cemetery. Celia Adler's son, Prof. Selwyn Freed, told me: "When my mother came home from the first rehearsal, she said of Brando, 'I can't remember his name, but boy, is he talented'.The actors all performed for the Screen Actors Guild minimum wage, as a gesture of solidarity with the Zionist cause.

"Flag" played for ten sold-out weeks at Manhattan's Alvin Theater (today known as the Neil Simon Theater). British critics hated it. The London Evening Standard called it "the most virulent anti-British play ever staged in the United States." American reviewers were kinder. Walter Winchell said "Flag" was "worth seeing, worth hearing, and worth remembering…it will wring your heart and eyes dry…bring at least eleven handkerchiefs."


Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of the political weekly The Nation, was a teenage usher who collected contributions for the Bergson Group after each performance. "The buckets were always full," he told me. "The audiences were extremely enthusiastic about the play's message. For me, too, it was a political awakening about the right of the Jews to have their own state."

After New York City, "Flag" was performed in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore (and, reportedly, in a DP camp in Europe). Brando's contractual obligations prevented him from taking part in the out of town shows. He was replaced by Sidney Lumet.

Lumet was just 22 at the time, but as the son of Yiddish actors Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, he had been on stage since childhood and made his Broadway debut at age 11. Lumet told me that having grown up in the world of the Yiddish theater, it was "a special thrill" to perform alongside Paul Muni in "Flag." (He did not know Brando well at that point, but Lumet would later direct him in the 1960 film "The Fugitive Kind.") 

When Lumet and the other cast members of the Broadway hit arrived in Baltimore, local reporters were clamoring for interviews. Lumet spoke to the Baltimore Sun about the inspiring struggle to rebuild the Jewish homeland. "This is the only romantic thing left in the world," he said. "The homecoming to Palestine, the conquest of a new frontier, against all obstacles."

On the eve of their performance at Baltimore's Maryland Theater, controversy erupted when it turned out that the theater restricted African-Americans to the balcony. Neither Hecht nor the cast would tolerate such discrimination. The Bergson Group and the NAACP teamed up to protest: the NAACP threatened to picket, and a Bergson official announced he would bring two black friends to sit with him at the play. The management gave in, allowing African-American patrons to sit wherever they chose. NAACP leaders hailed the "tradition-shattering victory" and used it to facilitate the desegregation of other Baltimore theaters. Lumet, reflecting on the episode six decades later, told me was "very proud" of his part in the protest and "pleasantly surprised that it was so successful."

For the Bergson Group and its supporters, the fight for civil rights in Baltimore was just as important as their fight for Jewish rights in Palestine. As Ben Hecht put it: "To fight injustice to one group of human beings affords protection to every other group."

Sidney Lumet's admirers will remember his extraordinary talents as a filmmaker when they enjoy watching "Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon," or "Twelve Angry Men." But it's also worth remembering the role he played in the real-life fight for justice six decades ago. 
Now all the plays being written for political purposes are anti-Israel.

We can learn a lot from the Bergson Group in the 1940s.

The "Merchants of Peace" racket (Toameh) (UPDATED x2)

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 11:10 AM PDT

From Khaled Abu Toameh in Hudson-NY:
A "peace activist" based in Jerusalem this week sent out the following email to friends: "For my birthday on May 2, I'm asking my friends and family for a special gift: help me raise $5,000... It's a great cause that advances peace –two states for two peoples – Israel and Palestine. Please consider giving to my Birthday Wish, and together we can help to make peace."

The Palestinians call such people who go out asking for money in the name of coexistence and a two-state solution "Merchants of Peace." And there is no shortage of such "peace activists" in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

There are, in fact, dozens of non-governmental organizations that raise millions of dollars every year under the pretext that they want to help the cause of peace in the Middle East.


Most of the money goes to paying high salaries to the directors and employees of these organizations.


Some of these organizations also invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in "seminars" and joint Israeli-Palestinian meetings in five-star hotels in Europe in the name of peace.

Those who are invited to these gatherings are usually people with close ties to the heads of the organizations and government officials on both sides. Only a few represent the grassroots in both societies.

Many Palestinians and Israelis who attend these meetings say that they rarely contribute to the cause of peace.

In many instances, Palestinians and Israelis who go to these meetings as friends return home as enemies after being forced to confront each other in front of foreign audiences.

It is time that the donors who fund such organizations start revising their policies and think of better ways to invest their money.

They should, for example, consider supporting Palestinian university students who come from poor families. The money could also go to build sports facilities and create job opportunities for Palestinian youths. In short, there are one million projects that the donors, some of whom appear to be extremely gullible, could make use of their money to help the cause of peace.

Giving a US-born "peace activist" a $5,000 gift on his birthday is certainly not one of the ways to help advance the cause of peace. It is also hard to understand how such a gift would help bring about a two-state solution.

There are, however, so many deprived Palestinian families who, with $5,000, could feed their children for weeks and months.
Indeed, as we have seen, the average West Bank worker earns $22 a day. $5000 would feed his family for over seven months.

I confess I am not so familiar with the many dozens of groups that say they foster peace. Some do seem to be doing important things, others seem more like what Toameh is talking about.

But it does bring up the question: who funded Vittorio Arrigoni's life in Gaza for the past couple of years? The ISM? The ISM says that donations are
...used to cover operational expenses in Palestine such as communications, transportation, legal expenses, apartment maintenance expenses and small stipends for key coordination positions.
Sounds like a scam right there - probably the bulk of ISM's contributions (many of them laundered through the A. J. Muste Institute in order to be tax deductible) go to maintaining the lifestyle of Greta Berlin, Adam Shapiro and other rabid Israel-haters.

I wish Toameh would have named names. It would be fun to track back the money trails of useless "peace" organizations.

UPDATE: Stan says he got the same email: from ICPRI's Gershon Baskin.

Sure enough, a quick look at its website shows that ICPRI does essentially nothing. It styles itself as a "think tank" and holds lots of meetings and conferences that accomplish little. (I only found one exception: helping sewage treatment in an Arab community. Even that project's link doesn't work to find out more information.)

Even more outrageous, many of their "policy papers" are not available at their website (they claim that many of them are "classified!") The only articles I could find are the ones that Baskin writes for the Jerusalem Post and elsewhere, with very few exceptions. Their downloadable e-books are all over ten years old.

If the only output that ICPRI generates is stuff that Baskin writes, then maybe I should turn this blog into a think-tank! I probably generate more content than he does.

Hey, donate some money to EoZ! I need to work on my begging techniques!

UPDATE 2:  Here is the email (h/t Stan):



Here you can see his progress towards the $5000.

38 reported killed in Syria protests today (UPDATE: 68)

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 09:27 AM PDT

Ha'aretz writes:
Security forces shot dead at least 25 pro-democracy protesters in Syria on Friday, human rights campaigners said, as protesters flooded into the streets after prayers in at least five major areas across the country.

The protesters were killed in suburbs and towns surrounding Damascus, in the central city of Homs and in the southern town of Izra'a, two established Syrian human rights organisations keeping a tally of civilian deaths told Reuters.

Syrian security forces fired live bullets and tear gas at the tens of thousands of people shouting for freedom and democracy.

"The people want the downfall of the regime!" shouted protesters in Douma, a Damascus suburb where some 40,000 people took to the streets, witnesses said.

It is the same rallying cry that was heard during the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.

Al-Arabiya in Arabic says that the number of deaths is at 38. AFP echoes that number.

Before today, some 228 people had been killed in the anti-regime protests in Syria.

UPDATE: Al Arabiya says 68.

Egypt closes Rafah. No one cares.

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 08:22 AM PDT

This week, Israel severely restricted Palestinian Arabs from crossing the Green Line for Passover, as it does every year. The chance for terror attacks increases greatly during Jewish holidays, as we had seen in the Park Hotel Passover massacre of 2002 that killed 30, 21 of whom were over 70 years old.

Anti-Israel sites are keen on pointing out how horrible Israel is for doing this, and how especially delicious the irony that Israel seems to celebrate its holiday celebrating freedom by restricting the freedom of Palestinian Arabs.

It just so happens that the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza has been closed since last night and will continue to be closed from now through Tuesday. It is also closing it for a national holiday.

Not one English-language news source is mentioning this story.

And what holiday is Egypt celebrating?

"Sinai Liberation Day", April 25th, is the anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from Sinai in 1982.

I guess that irony that Gazans are imprisoned during Sinai Liberation Day (and the days before and afterwards)  is not the right kind of irony.

Don't forget - send a message to Gilad!

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 06:55 AM PDT

I am trying to get 250 of my readers to write a message to Gilad Shalit, and then you can also write to various leaders and NGOs demanding that our messages get delivered.

Do it now!

Finally, an Israeli official responds to unilateralism

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 06:01 AM PDT

From JPost:
Dr. Uzi Landau, Israel's Minister of National Infrastructure, warns that in the event of a unilateral United Nations declaration of a Palestinian state, he will call upon Israel to annex the Jordan Valley and large, Jewish populated blocs in the West Bank:

"We'll have to take care of our interests," Landau told Inside Israel's Mordechai I. Twersky in a wide-ranging interview April 21. "We'll have to take protect ourselves. If such a thing happens, I'm going to suggest to my government to extend out sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and over the highly-populated blocs we have in Judea and Samaria, just to start with."

The former chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee invoked the Bush Road Map and a letter of commitment issued by the former president committing to Israel's retention of major Jewish population centers in the West Bank in any negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. If that signed agreement can't be honored, he said, all bets are off.

"If we don't see negotiations, and if we do a policy which basically makes the entire Road Map agreement a hoax, Israel should take care of its own interests," said Minister Landau.
This is exactly what Netanyahu should be saying. If the PA wants to act unilaterally and abrogate Oslo and the Road Map, they need to understand that Israel is under no obligation to adhere to the same agreements either. And the result will be far, far worse for Palestinian Arabs than if they would have stayed with negotiations.

The world needs to understand this as well. Nations are sympathetic to the idea of a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state but they are basing it on the assumption that Israel will continue to adhere to its commitments that the PA is ignoring. If they know that Israel will not play a game where it is the only one that has to follow the rules, they would be much less likely to support something that will inevitably destabilize the region and make things worse for everybody.

Right now, under so-called "occupation," there is peace. It is not ideal for anyone but it is stable and getting better every year. If the PA abrogates the peace treaty, that peace will end and the Palestinian Arabs who are supposedly going to be helped by living in "Palestine" will be the real losers. This fact is self-evident but Western nations do not seem to have grasped it.

Landau's other observations are worth reading as well:
Landau said the Arab Spring has brought chaos to the Middle east, and could well spread to the important western allies of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. He questioned the logic of Israel signing a peace deal with a Palestinian leader, whose own future and that of his government, remains tenuous at best.

"Who knows what's going to happen in the future to any agreement we sign with, let's say, another chief of tribe in Judea and Samaria?" asked Minister Landau. "Today it's Abu Mazen (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas). Who is it going to be in the future?"

Landau said the US Administration's continued insistence that a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is key to wider stability in the region – even in the face of spreading Arab unrest – is incomprehensible.

"This is clearly, totally detached from the present reality of the Middle East," said Landau. "Anyone who lives here clearly understands that this is totally detached from the Middle East reality."

(h/t Yerushalimey)

Ira Chernus' agenda

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 04:15 AM PDT

In Salon and the Huffington Post, Ira Chernus pooh-poohs Israel's security concerns.

Chernus lists three "myths" about Israel's security. I will only discuss the first one. It should be enough to show that Chernus is not being intellectually honest, to say the least.
Myth Number 1: Israel's existence is threatened by the ever-present possibility of military attack.
This is a straw man argument. I'm not aware of anyone who says that Israel's existence is threatened by any conventional military attack.

Israel's security posture is not aimed primarily at defending the existence of Israel. Rather, Israel's army is an almost unique position where it must defend its citizens from the threat of being wantonly attacked.

The US Army has no such worries. NATO members have no such worries. For them, all wars are far away and only soldiers are at risk. Israel is perhaps the only Western country in the world where every single citizen is under the credible threat of an attack in any given week.  


This simple fact, which Chernus ignores altogether, is the security issue that Israel faces. Chernus, for all his supposed analytical ability, does not even mention Hezbollah once in his article. It is as if the 2006 Lebanon war - where the hundreds of thousands of citizens in the northern part of the country were forced to become temporary refugees - never happened. Chernus downplays Hamas rockets and ignores the 40,000 more deadly and accurate rockets that are aimed, today, at Israel's population centers. And, as in 2006, it takes only one border incident to escalate into a full scale war.

Would such a war threaten Israel's existence? No. But such a war is still not acceptable. Concern about such a war is still a primary security issue. And those who cannot even acknowledge that this type of war is a possibility less than five years after the last one is either willfully blind or adhering to an agenda.

Chernus also downplays the possibility of a nuclear threat against Israel, with this almost unbelievable sentence:
While the Israeli government constantly sounds alarms about imagined Iranian nuclear weapons -- though its intelligence services now suggest Iran won't have even one before 2015 at the earliest -- Israel remains the region's only nuclear power for the foreseeable future.
Is Chernus really suggesting that a nuclear threat that is perhaps four years away is not a significant security concern? How can one take anyone who writes such a sentence seriously?

Moreover, only in 2007 did the world discover that Syria has a secret nuclear weapons program as well. Is Chernus so naive as to think that this is not a threat to Israel either? (Or does he believe that Syria just gave up, and is now a peaceful neighbor that can be trusted?)

In short, Chernus uses multiple false arguments to imply that Israel has no real security concerns.

So why is he purposefully mis-characterizing Israel's security posture?

The answer can be seen in how he sums up his article:

But what if the American public knew the facts...? What if every solemn reference to Israel's "security needs" were greeted not with nodding heads, but with the eye-rolling skepticism it deserves? What if Israel's endless excesses and excuses -- its claims that the occupation of the West Bank and the economic strangulation of Gaza are necessary "for the sake of security" -- were regularly scoffed at by most Americans?

It's hard to imagine the Obama administration, or any American administration, keeping up a pro-Israel tilt in the face of such public scorn.
Chernus has an agenda - to turn the US against Israel.

That agenda is what drives his knowingly deceptive analysis. That agenda is what makes him downplay Iran's nuclear program and political program to surround Israel with Iranian satellites. That agenda is what makes him ignore Hezbollah's rockets and Syria's nuclear ambitions altogether.

And any analysis of Israel's security needs that is based on such an agenda is not worth the disk space it takes up.


Israel Matzav and Yisrael Medad have also written some criticisms of the piece, as did HuffPoMonitor in three parts:
http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/04/ira-chernus-and-more-myths-part-3.html
http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/04/ira-chernus-and-more-myths-part-2.html
http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/04/ira-chernus-and-more-myths-part-1.html

The last gasp effort to make the UNHRC relevant

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 03:00 AM PDT

A very interesting dispatch from AP:
Several members of the U.N.'s top human rights body are pressing for an emergency meeting to examine the government crackdowns against popular protests that have swept the Middle East and North Africa, Western diplomats said Wednesday.

The countries, from Latin America, Europe, North America and Asia, are trying to collect 16 signatures necessary to force a special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council next week, the diplomats said.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, which was underlined by the innocuous title proposed for the meeting — "Promotion and protection of human rights in the context of recent peaceful protests."

The title was chosen to avoid singling out particular countries, the diplomats said. But they confirmed that Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria would be among the nations whose violent suppression of protests would be on the agenda.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference, whose members carry significant weight in the 47-nation Human Rights Council, said it wouldn't consent to holding such a meeting.

"We think that the events that are taking place do not merit some kind of a special session," said Zamir Akram, Pakistan's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva.

He accused those advocating a special session of double standards, and said the OIC would use any such meeting to focus on human rights abuses by Israel instead.
We already know that the UNHRC is a joke. (Leading UNHRC advisor Jean Ziegler edited a book that likened Libya's dictator Moammar Gaddafi to philosopher Jean Rousseau.) Yet there are those who cling to the idea that it has some relevance; pointing to the very few non-Israeli statements it has made or to the fact that it finally, belatedly kicked Libya out.

The UNHRC's actions over the next few days should be the final nail in the coffin of this thoroughly corrupt institution as well as proof positive that the Organization of Islamic States has an agenda that is fundamentally opposed to human rights.

And how much more proof do you need that Israel is used as a scapegoat for Muslim human rights abuses than the statement by the Pakistani ambassador to the UN?
פורסם על ידי zoom ב- 0:11

אין תגובות:

הוסף רשומת תגובה

הירשם ל- תגובות לפרסום (Atom)