Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

• In Cairo, we consecrate the freedom of religion

• Jewish Federations drop JVP leader from ‘Heroes’ ballot without explanation

• Muslim and Christian cemeteries desecrated in Jaffa on eve of Yom Kippur

• In memoriam: Hanan Porat, an extremist by any other name

In Cairo, we consecrate the freedom of religion

Oct 09, 2011

Philip Weiss

I don’t think I have ever had such a meaningful Yom Kippur as yesterday in Cairo.

It began as a journalistic stunt story. I used to do these stories all the time for mainstream media in my adventurous 30s. Can you do X? (get into X club, ask celebrity X an unseemly question) Well, I was determined to find a congregation on Yom Kippur—for the sake of the finding it. But the Adly street synagogue downtown did not open till 10, the Egyptian guards said; and they sent me on to the Ben Ezra synagogue in Coptic Cairo. I took the Metro to Christian Cairo and walked all around the St George’s monastery till I found the little synagogue in a low alley. It was open, as a tourist attraction. The lady at the desk said I should go to Maadi, the southern suburb where many Jews once lived.

I spent another hour wandering around, and then a cab delivered me to a low domed building in a sprawling residential neighborhood notable for police barricades here and there in the dusty streets. Some were for ambassadorial residences. But at least a dozen cops were posted outside the walls of the tiny Biton synagogue, built in 1934. An iron gate was cracked open. I put on my yarmulke and crept in over recently laid sod and heard the murmuring of prayers.

Inside the synagogue a dozen people, exactly a dozen, sat in a small half circle before the altar. I took a chair in the semicircle, and one of them got up to greet me, a burly bearded guy from the American embassy. How much Hebrew do you know? Not much, I said. Well you will be called on, he said.

The service was led by a doctor at the embassy in what I can only call a downhome manner. The two or three serviceable prayer books were passed along the line so that the rest of us could read aloud. The ark was never opened, I think in an acknowledgement that we did not have a true minyan. One or us was a fidgety 8-year-old boy in glasses, playing with an oversized deck of game cards. Another two or three were not Jewish.

At the break I learned that the service is ordinarily much fuller and more serious; the Israeli embassy staff flies in a rabbi for a couple of weeks. But the Israeli embassy staff fled last month. So everyone in our little group was American. There are a handful of Egyptian Jews in Cairo, but I was told they live downtown, and they are all getting old. There was a thought to bus them to the temple, but it didn’t happen.

For the afternoon service, I brought my wife back, and it was even better. I’m not Jewish, she announced to the leader of the service, who this time was a grad student at the American University of Cairo. That’s fine, he said– neither was the embassy official’s wife. We made up for the lack of prayerbooks with little fawn-colored chapbooks we found in the lobby. They were printed for His Majesty’s troops, with all the Jewish services in about 100 pages. “God Save the King” was right after the Adon Alom.

At dusk an Egyptian Jew came in on crutches, dignifed and severe in an aubergine crepe blouse, and the 8-year-old boy blew the shofar. I felt tears in my eyes as we sang the Avinu Malcheinu. The melody had never been so haunting.

As the sun set, we had a kind of divine intervention. There was a cry from the courtyard. Out the open door, I saw a sharp blaze rising from the foliage and thought, gasoline. The Egyptian minder of the synagogue was running to and fro, and some congregants scuttled out of the synagogue as if we were under attack. “The burning bush,” said the embassy man’s wife. I tried to walk calmly out to the fire. Later we were told that bad wiring in the Sukkot booth in the yard had ignited the vines. The man from the embassy grabbed a fire extinguisher, but it pissed weakly at the fire. Then the Egyptian minder came round the corner with a hose and trained that on the roof of the booth, now fully consumed.

Of course, when it was well and truly out, a dozen policemen came pouring into the yard dragging a fire hose. And in true comic manner the thing was drenched again and again.

We passed around a mug of wine to break the fast, and Egyptian staff brought in trays of sweets. The old Cairene Jew had seen to that–bananas and ice cream and raw red dates, served by Egyptians.

I sat beside her in a pew and told her how hard it had been to find the service. She explained that they had not advertised it on their website, fearing it might provoke a demonstration. Do you have children? I asked. No. Eight dogs. Do your friends in America tell you to come there? Why should I go there? she responded. A relative in Europe presses her to move there. She’s not interested.

I reminded myself that just an hour before I had beaten my breast for being provocative so many times in the year past, then tilted toward her and said, I want to tell you, I am not a Zionist.

That’s good, she said, no intellectual should be an ist.

And what do you think of the revolution? I asked. It is very good, she said. Though we worry about the Muslim brotherhood. So: she is like an American Jew, fighting for liberalism in her land.

It was the most meaningful Yom Kippur of my life because we were affirming the freedom to worship—we were the only congregation for a thousand miles in northeast Africa– and because the service was so non-Zionist at its heart. Zionism insists that Jews are unsafe as a minority in other lands, they must return to their alleged homeland, and this insistence had created a giant wound across the Arab world, where so many Jews had lived safely—75,000 once in Egypt. Now there are just a handful, and the ethnic cleansing, or self-cleansing, that took place here is held up as an affirmation of Zionism, which is invested in the idea of intolerance, because intolerance rationalizes its creed. And so many Jews in Israel hate the Arab spring, and would like to see the dictatorships last forever.

Yesterday we helped the Jews here to hold their place. We insisted that Jews can be anywhere and safe and following our ancient rituals, with an Egyptian firehose.

Jewish Federations drop JVP leader from ‘Heroes’ ballot without explanation

Oct 08, 2011

Henry Norr

The Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella organization that brings together 157 local and regional Jewish federations and hundreds of other Jewish organizations in the U.S. and Canada, runs an annual contest to choose “Jewish Community Heroes.” It slogan: “We honor those making strides to repair the world.” Until Sept. 27 anyone could nominate candidates, and through Nov. 10 anyone – Jew or not – can vote at the contest website; in fact, you can vote as often as once a day, for any number of candidates. That process produces a list of 20 finalists, 10 professionals (people who work for community organizations) and 10 volunteers. From that group five judges appointed by the organization will select the winner and four other finalists. The winner gets $25,000, the other finalists $1,000 each.

This year supporters of Jewish Voice for Peace nominated both Rebecca Vilkomerson, the group’s director, and Cecilie Surasky, its deputy director and editor of its importantMuzzleWatch site, for the contest. Some of their admirers were carrying on a low-key campaign on behalf of Surasky in particular, and she was doing fairly well – in recent days she’d been number 10 in the professional category.

But on Thursday the JWeekly, a paper aimed at the Bay Area Jewish community, published an

article profiling six candidates from northern California, including, in addition to Surasky, a student senator at University of California at Berkeley who helped block last year’s divestment resolution and a professor at UC Santa Cruz who has gained a measure of celebrity by claiming that an anti-Israel climate on UC campuses threatens the rights and safety of Jewish students.

The article didn’t especially demonize Surasky, but it included the observation that she “is the most controversial local nominee, given that many in the Jewish community view Jewish Voice for Peace, the Oakland-based organization, as fundamentally hostile to Israel.”

The very next day, on the eve of Yom Kippur, Surasky’s name abruptly disappeared from the contest’s “leaderboard.” When you go to the pages that once displayed brief profile of her and of Vilkomerson, you get a message saying “Oops. The page you are looking for cannot be found.” In an eloquent commentary on her banishment, Surasky says she received no explanation.

The contest rules, however, include this provision: “Nominees are not eligible if they were nominated for a cause that runs directly counter to the ideals of The Jewish Federations of North America.” Apparently the federations have suddenly concluded that JVP’s ideals run counter to theirs. To that extent,unfortunately, they have a point.

On the other hand, as Surasky notes, one of the remaining candidates is a rabbi from St. Paul, MN, who wrote, in a published response to the question “How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?,”

The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)…. I don’t believe in Western morality. Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.

This spiritual leader currently ranks no. 4 in the professionals category. Evidently the federations see no conflict between their values and his. Again, sad to say, they’re probably right.

One note of interest to Mondoweiss readers: journalist Max Blumenthal remains on the nominee list, and anyone willing to provide an e-mail address and ZIP code can vote for him every day. As of this writing he has only 75 votes. What do you bet he’ll be deleted once this post appears?

Muslim and Christian cemeteries desecrated in Jaffa on eve of Yom Kippur

Oct 08, 2011

annie

(Photo: Facebook)

From the Facebook photo album “Extremist attack Muslim and Christian cemeteries in Jaffa”:

Images of assault by the Zionist extremists on the Islamic cemetery named “Al-kazachana”, and they also made a assault on the Christian Orthodox cemetery adjacent to it.

They left racist statements such as “Death to Arabs” and “Price Tag” on the graves and walls in addition to Smashing and vandalizing a number of gravestones.

While Haaretz opens its report on the desecration of Muslim and Christian graves in Jaffa with Prez Peres’s denouncement Yossi Gurvitz over @+972 hits all the right notes: “So what can be done? We can begin by closing down the hornet’s nest, the yeshiva in Yitzhar, and ban all its teachers and students from the West Bank.”

The fact that they boil over the Green Line is not accidental. These people, after all, are the disciples of Baruch Goldstein; if they had broader horizons, they could name Abu Musab Al Zarqawi as another mentor. Their whole purpose is ending this calmness. They want blood, fire and columns of smoke. When these will appear, they will lean back and say “we told you so.” Another point worth noting is the desecration of the Christian cemetery: Contrary to the myths, it proves that the hatred of mankind of Orthodox Judaism has little if anything to do with the current conflict with the Palestinians. It is the last in a long, under-reported attacks on Christian establishments in Israel.

One further wonders whether this escalation – how many more steps to the gates of hell? – is not a response, among others, to the arrest of a suspect in the burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangaria. Terror organizations often react in this way to the arrest of their members, and the whole logic of the “price tag” pogroms is to punish Palestinians for the actions of the security forces.

The guilt resides, as Tibi noted correctly, with the government of Israel. PM Netanyahu may denounce these pogroms, but he is speaking out of both sides of his mouth: He had no problem whatsoever sitting on the same platform with Dov Lior, possibly the worst of the inciting rabbis. Shmuel Elihau, the municipal rabbi of Safed, keeps drawing his government salary despite publishing illegal calls for denying apartments to Israeli Palestinians. This is the same Eliahu who openly and clearly refused to denounce the “price tag” pogroms. He is still in office. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar – the one suspected of kidnapping and assault, not the one suspected of receiving bribes and inappropriately touching men – said this week that the burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangria “may have been a blood libel.” (Hebrew) It’s easy to imagine the uproar had, say, a Polish bishop said he opposed the burning of synagogues, but we should first ascertain this isn’t a blood libel against good Christians. Amar keeps his job as if nothing happened; we didn’t even had a proper public outcry. In short, the government of Israel looks, when trying to fight Jewish terrorism, like the Saudi government of a decade ago, facing the Salafist terrorists: It is a main source of funds to the terrorists, and they can only exist because the government’s armed forces support them.

The West Bank pogromchiks has made a mockery of the IDF’s legal obligation to protect the indigent population from them. Now they are trying to make it plain to Israeli Palestinians that they, too, will not be protected by the Zionist regime – and the latter know it’s not that the regime can’t, it’s that it won’t.

Read the entire article. Gurvitz is Tweeting (Hebrew) from a protest going on in Jaffa right now.“More than a hundred people, in my estimation.”

Here are some of Gurvitz’s photos from the Jaffa protest of the “price tag” attacks on their Muslim and Christian cemeteries.

 

 

In memoriam: Hanan Porat, an extremist by any other name

Oct 08, 2011

Lizzy Ratner

Late Wednesday night, after I finished devouring the Steve Jobs obituary on the New York Times website, my eye happened to catch the headline for another of the day’s death reports: “Hanan Porat, Jewish Settlement Leader, Dies at 67.” (Actually, my eye didn’t so much catch the headline as was forced toward it by the Times’s “Recommended for You” list, which has apparently pegged me as member of the all-things-Israel demographic, which is a whole other story … sort of.)

My first reaction was disgust followed by a strong desire to register my protest by refusing to read. What was the Times doing running an obituary of a settlement leader, a founder of the extremist movement responsible for gobbling up dunam upon dunam of Palestinian land, for dispossession, violence, apartheid, and an ultra-nationalism so toxic it approaches fascism? If a leader of Hamas died, would the Times eulogize him too? It goes without saying that it would never grant precious death-page real estate to a human rights leader like Michel Warshawski or Raji Sourani.

But then curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the link which brought me, in a matter of seconds, to a 574-word Ethan-Bronner special capped by a photograph of a young and dashing Porat. Based on Bronner’s homage, which is written in a tone that can only really be described as sympathetic-masquerading-as-neutral, here is what I learned:

* Hanan Porat was hot! “[I]n his prime, in the 1970s and ’80s, when the Israeli right began its political ascent, he was a fiery advocate of hard-line Zionism, cutting a handsome figure with a mane of thick dark hair topped by a knitted yarmulke,” Bronner writers. And indeed, the man in the photograph, the one riding high above the shoulders of dozens of men, pants tight, plaid shirt loose, arms spread in ecstasy, looks like a 1970s god, a real-life Berger — so much so that even now I can’t help but wonder: could a guy that good looking really be that bad?

* Porat “establish[ed] Jewish communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.”  Well, gosh, I like communities, communities are good, doesn’t everyone want more communities in this atomized, go-it-alone world? In fact, I was part of a community once, during a semester I spent at an enviro-wilderness high school in Maine. It was cool. We quoted Thoreau and Whitman and kept a communal journal and shared food and clothes and secrets and had really intense, deep friendships.

* Porat “helped turn Israel’s religious settler movement into a powerful force” through the establishment of the aforementioned communities. Hm, a powerful force — oh I get it, like Adele 0r Hank Greenberg or women!

* Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the only outside source quoted in the article (and gets quoted twice), really liked Porat, and Porat really liked the Land of Israel: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Mr. Porat had ‘dedicated his life to building up the land of Israel, and to educating generations of students about religious Zionism and loving the land of Israel and the Jewish people.’” Wow, what a warm and generous-sounding guy, so full of love and altruism. A true mensch!

* Porat was a” fervent advocate of Jewish power across the biblical land of Israel.” How romantic, the biblical land of Israel. Good thing he wasn’t advocating Jewish power across the contemporary land of Palestine.

* Porat helped found Gush Emunim, “which means ‘the bloc of the faithful.’” Well, that doesn’t sound that bad, does it? Sure, “gush” is an unfortunate word (rhymes with tush and mush and whatnot), but “bloc of the faithful” sounds pretty innocuous.

* Porat helped build a Jewish settlement in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron, “where the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs are said to be buried.” Cool, sign me up for a tour! I want to see where the patriarchs and matriarchs are planted.

* Porat grew up on kibbutz Kfar Etzion, “which is on land that was later won by Jordan during Israel’s 1948 war of independence. He re-established the community after the 1967 Middle East war, when the land was conquered by Israel.” Well, that sounds fair enough. I mean, we’re just talking about land, right? First Jordan won the land, then Israel won the land, and since we’re just talking about land, what’s the big deal?

* The Etzion bloc that Porat helped found “is one of the large West Bank settlement blocs that Israel wants to keep in any deal with a future Palestinian state. One reason many Israelis consider it theirs by right is that it had been settled by Jews before 1948.” I guess that means that Jews discovered the area, or at least developed it, and we all know: you discover something, you own it.

* The settlements Porat helped create “remain among the biggest obstacles to creating a Palestinian state.” Bummer.

* Porat “is survived by his wife, 11 children and a number of grandchildren.” Aw, how sweet, he was a dad and granddad — and so prolific!

Now here’s what I could have learned about Hanan Porat but didn’t — not from the New York Times and not from the dozens of other mainstream publications that wrote about Porat’s death:

* The settlements that Porat  helped found are illegal under international law, and their creation is widely consider a war crime, which would suggest that Hanan Porat himself is a war criminal.

* The settlements that Porat helped found, and the infrastructure of oppression that has been built up all around the settlements to keep them well-watered, bucolic, and “secure,” has turned the West Bank into a land of bantustans and Israel into an apartheid state.

* The settlements that Porat and his movement helped found sit on hundreds of thousands of dunams of stolen land and consume as much as (and, at this point, most likely more than) 42 percent of the West Bank. In the process, settlers have forced thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

* The settlements that Porat helped found, and the system of “bypass” roads, apartheid wall, and checkpoints that accompany them, violate Palestinian human rights, including “the right of property, the right to equality, the right to a suitable standard of living, and the right to freedom of movement.”

* The settlement that Porat helped found in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron is one of the most extreme, radical settlements in existence, a place where the occupation is its most foul, violent, and abusive.

* As Porat fully intended, the settlements are not merely obstacles to the creation of a Palestinian state, they have killed any hope and possibility of a true Palestinian state.

* Gush Emunim, which Porat helped found, was not merely the “bloc of the faithful,” it was an extremist, messianic movement that gave birth to a “Zionist fundamentalism“ that was aggressive and expansionist at best and violent and terroristic at worst.

* For all his alleged Talmudic brilliance and religious zealotry, Porat was a pretty bad Jew. As Nehemia Shtrasler wrote in a helpful op-ed in Haaretz, “The abuse in the territories [that Porat helped create and support] is also in total contradiction to the moral teachings of Israel’s prophets – Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah – but Porat and his colleagues knew only the Book of Joshua.”

* After Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 at a mosque in Hebron, Porat, who helped found the illegal settlement where Goldstein lived, was asked by a reporter to offer his thoughts on the massacre. His response: “Happy Purim.”