This is a longer post than I normally would make, but the words of one of Israel’s leading peace activists, a former Knesset member, writer, and commentator, Uri Avnery, are always important to read and especially this piece – “The Dogs of War.”

“Such terrifying dogs have not been seen since the Hound of the Baskervilles.

They have been bred by an ardent admirer of the late “Rabbi” Meir Kahane, who was branded by the Israeli Supreme Court as a fascist. Their task is to protect the settlements and attack Palestinians. They are settler-dogs, or, rather, dog-settlers.

All our TV stations have reported on them at length and lauded their effectiveness and ardor.

All in preparation for “September”.

SEPTEMBER IS not just the name of a month, the seventh in the old Roman calendar. It is the symbol of a terrible danger, an unspeakable existential menace.

In the next few weeks, the Palestinians will ask the UN to recognize the State of Palestine. They have already mustered a large majority in the General Assembly. After that, according to the official assessment of our army, all hell will break loose. Multitudes of Palestinians will rise, attack the “Separation” Wall, storm the settlements, confront the army, create chaos.

“The Palestinian Authority is planning a bloodbath,” Avigdor Lieberman cheerfully asserted. And when Lieberman predicts violence, it would be unwise to ignore him.

For months now, our army has been preparing for just such an eventuality. This week it announced that it is training the settlers, too, and telling them exactly when they are allowed to shoot to kill. Thus it confirms what we all know: that there is no clear distinction between the army and the settlers – many settlers are officers in the army, and many officers live in settlements. “The army defends all Israelis, wherever they are,” is the official line.

One of the scenarios the army is preparing for, it was stated, is for Palestinians shooting at soldiers and settlers “from inside the mass demonstrations”. That is an ominous statement. I have been at hundreds of demonstrations and never witnessed anyone shooting “from inside the demonstration”. Such a person would have to be insanely irresponsible, since he would expose all the people around him to deadly retaliation. But it is a handy pretext for shooting at non-violent protesters.

It sounds so ominous, because it has happened already in the past. After the first intifada, which was considered a Palestinian success story (and brought about the Oslo agreement), our army diligently prepared for the second one. The chosen instruments were sharpshooters.

The second (“al-Aqsa”) intifada started after the breakdown of the 2000 Camp David conference and Ariel Sharon’s deliberately provocative “visit” to the Temple Mount. The Palestinians held non-violent mass demonstrations. The army responded with selective killings. A sharpshooter accompanied by an officer would take position in the path of the protest, and the officer would point out selected targets – protesters who looked like “ringleaders”. They were killed.

This was highly effective. Soon the non-violent demonstrations ceased and were replaced by very violent (“terrorist”) actions. With those the army was back on familiar ground.

All in all, during the second intifada 4546 Palestinians were killed, of whom 882 were children, as against 1044 Israelis, 716 of them civilians, including 124 children.

I am afraid that the preparations for the third intifada, which is anticipated to start next month, are proceeding on the same lines. But the circumstances would be quite different. After the events in Egypt and Syria, Palestinian protesters may react differently this time, and the “bloodbath” may be much more severe. So will international and Arab reactions. I imagine posters condemning Binyamin al-Assad and Bashar Netanyahu.

But most Israelis are not worried. They believe that the entire scenario has been invented by Netanyahu as a trick to end the huge social protest movement that is rocking Israel. “The young protesters demand Social Justice and a Welfare State, like children demanding ice cream while disaster is lurking around the corner,” as one of the colonels (ret.) put it.

THE SETTLERS and their dogs loom large in the upcoming scenarios.

That is quite logical, since the settlers now play a pivotal role in the conflict. It is they who prevent any peace agreement, or even meaningful peace negotiations.

It is quite simple: any peace between Israel and the Palestinian people will necessarily be based on ceding the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip to the future State of Palestine. A world-wide consensus on this is now in place. The only question is where exactly the border will run, since there is also a consensus about minor mutually agreed swaps of territory.

This means that peace would necessarily entail the removal of a large number of settlements and the evacuation of the settlers throughout the West Bank.

The Settlers and their allies dominate the present Israeli government coalition. They object to giving up even one square inch of occupied territory of the country God has promised us. (Even settlers who do not believe in God do believe that God has promised us the land.) Because of this, there are no peace negotiations, no freeze on building activities in the settlements, no move of any kind towards peace.

The settlers went to their locations in the West Bank specifically for this purpose: to create “facts on the ground” that would prevent any possibility of the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. Therefore it is quite immaterial whether it is the settlers who prevent the return of the occupied territories for peace, or whether the government uses the settlers for this purpose. It comes to the same: the settlers block any peace effort.

As the Americans would put it: It’s the settlers, stupid.

SOME NICE Israelis are indeed playing stupid, or really are.

It is now the fashion in certain circles to “embrace” the settlers in the name of national unity. Jews should not quarrel among themselves, they say, drawing on ancient Ghetto wisdom. Settlers are people like us.

Prominent among those who say so is Shelly Yachimovitch, a member of the Knesset and one of six candidates for the chair(wo)manship of the moribund Labor Party. For years she has done a good job as an advocate of social justice, never wasting a word on peace, occupation, settlements, Palestine and such trifles. Now, as part of her campaign, she has come all out for loving the settlers. As she put it: “I certainly do not see the settlement enterprise as a sin and crime. At the time, it was completely consensual. It was the Labor Party which promoted the settlement in the territories. That is a fact, a historical fact. “

Some believe that Yachimovitch is only pretending to feel this way, in order to garner mainstream votes for a takeover of the party, and that she intends  to merge what remains of the party with Kadima, where she would try to displace Tzipi Livni and perhaps even become Prime Minister.

Perhaps. But I have a lurking suspicion that she really believes what she is saying – and that is an awful thing to say about any politician, male or female, of course.

BUT SERIOUSLY, there is no way to embrace the settlers and fight for social justice at the same time. It just can’t be done, even though some of the leaders of the social protest movement advocate this on tactical grounds.

There can be no Israeli welfare state while the war goes on. The border incidents of the last two weeks show how easy it is to divert public opinion and silence the protests when the banner of security is unfurled. And how easy it is for the government to prolong any incident.

Sowing the fear of “September” is yet another example.

But the reasons for the impossibility of separating social justice from security go deeper. Serious social reforms need money, lots of money. Even after reforming the tax system – more “progressive” direct taxes, less “regressive” indirect taxes – and breaking the cartels of the “tycoons”, tens of billion of dollars will be needed to rescue our schools, our hospitals and our social services.

These billions can only come from the military budget and the settlements. Huge sums are invested in the settlements – not just in heavily subsidized housing for the settlers, government salaries for many settlers (a far higher percentage that in the general population), but also for the infrastructure (roads, electricity and water supply etc.) and the large number of troops needed to defend them. The preparations for “September” show again how much this costs.

BUT EVEN this is not the full story. Beyond all these facts there is the main reason for the deformation of Israel: the conflict itself.

Because of the conflict, we are obliged to keep a huge military establishment. We pay for the armed forces, per capita, far more than the citizens of any Western country. Israel, a country of a mere 7.5 million people, maintains the fourth or fifth largest military establishment in the world. US military aid pays for only a small part of this.

Therefore, putting an end to the war is a necessary precondition for any real effort to turn Israel into a “Scandinavian” welfare state, with a maximum of social justice. The conflict is not just one item among many that must be considered. It is the main item.

You can love the settlers or hate them, oppose them or embrace them as much as you like – the fact remains that the settlements are by far the main obstacle to peace and the welfare state. Not just because of their cost, not just because of the pogroms their inhabitants carry out from time to time, not just because of the way they dominate the political system. But because of their very existence.

Unlike the hound of the Baskervilles, the dogs of the settlements are barking loudly. It is the sound of war.”

Apologies – here is the link to the complete article entitled “Why the Palestinians Can’t Recognize the Jewish State?” and my original but edited and clarified post from last evening:

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/08/why-the-palestinians-can%E2%80%99t-recognize-the-jewish-state.html

This past Kabbalat Shabbat at Temple Israel I reflected on three meetings I had in the 36 hours that preceded the lighting of Shabbat candles; a national phone conference with Jeremy Ben-Ami, President of J Street, that included 25 other individuals among whom were Rabbis and leaders of the J Street national board, a lunch meeting attended by 7 other Los Angeles Rabbis with Brigadier General Nathaniel Dagan, the former chief education officer of the IDF, and a breakfast meeting with an old friend, Daniel Sokatch, now the CEO of the New Israel Fund.

The conversations all concerned Israel and addressed the expected September UN Palestinian Statehood Resolution, the anti-democratic turning of the current Israeli government (arguably the most extreme right-wing government in the history of the State led by settler groups, ultra-Orthodox political parties, and the Russian “Putinist” party of the Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman), and the unprecedented middle class economic revolt (150,000 Israelis took to the streets on Shabbat in at least 10 cities across party lines) protesting strained economic conditions because they cannot afford housing based on their salaries despite the very healthy Israeli economy.

I said that the facts are clear; namely, that unless Israel works out with the Palestinians a 2 states for 2 peoples end-of-conflict agreement she cannot remain both Jewish and democratic.

The first fact is that the government’s policy of building West Bank settlements to the tune of billions of shekels over many years and supporting the ultra-Orthodox Yeshivot and institutions with billions more have exacerbated the problems within Israeli society by misdirecting funds away from building more apartments in Israel itself and sustaining its social networks. Despite the success of a burgeoning Israeli economy the middle class is being squeezed.

The second fact is that unless Israel returns to the 1967 lines with appropriate land swaps and settles all other issues with the Palestinians in an end-of-conflict agreement Jews will constitute 48% of the population of Arabs and Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in 2015, just 3½ years from now. If the status quo continues, and Israel denies West Bank Arabs the right to vote, it will turn into an Apartheid State. If it opens the doors to equal citizenship for West Bank Arabs, Jews will be a minority and the Zionist vision of building a Jewish state will be consigned to the trash bins of history.

On Saturday morning following services, a young man (about age 15) who had been at services the evening before, approached me and said, “My name is Jacob and I am a member of a Conservative synagogue in Florida [he was in LA to attend the bar mitzvah of his cousin], and my Rabbi holds the exact opposite position as you about the Middle East conflict.”

I asked, “So…what do YOU think?”

He said, “I agree with you.”

He then explained that his high school debating club had a debate this past spring on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that he was assigned the position of arguing the Palestinian side. “Because I had to research the Palestinian story, I now understand why they want a state of their own and why they have been so frustrated for so long.”

“True!” I responded. “There are two narratives here, Israeli and Palestinian, and this conflict is not simply a political zero-sum game, but a moral one involving two peoples and two nations. We cannot claim for ourselves what we deny others.”

I told him, “Jacob – You keep at it. We need visionary, smart and strongly identified Jews such as you.” We shook hands and wished each other Shabbat shalom.

I was heartened by this young man and thought that if this is what we can expect from the younger generation, then there is reason for hope.

Back to my meetings of last week – Several weeks ago there appeared an article on the Op-Ed page of The NY Times written by four Israeli experts on the upcoming UN Palestinian Statehood Resolution; Yossi Alpher, Colette Avital, Shlomo Gazit, and Mark Heller. I recommend that you read it – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/opinion/25iht-edalpher25.html

Stay tuned. Now that the debt limit crisis seems to have ended, we turn to the Middle East. These next 6 to 8 weeks are going to be very interesting indeed!

As you may know the Palestinian Authority is attempting to have the United Nations vote on a resolution that would grant them statehood. Our Reform movement has always supported a just and secure peace for our people as well as for the Palestinian people in a two states for two peoples end-of-conflict resolution to all issues between them. The Reform movement also has stood by negotiations between the two sides to reach an agreement and eschews unilateral actions as an obstacle to progress towards peace.

ARZA (the Association of Reform Zionists of America) is circulating a petition on this subject on behalf of all the arms of our American Reform movement. I ask you to read this petition, to sign it and to share it with your friends. You can  print and post it in a public space or simply forward this email with a link below along with this explanation.

http://www.arza.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=2322

Kol tuv ul’shalom,
Rabbi John Rosove

When Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed that the 1967 borders (i.e. the 1949 armistice lines) are indefensible in response to President Obama’s call for Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a two-state for two-people’s end of conflict solution to the conflict on the basis of that line with appropriate negotiated land swaps, no credible military and security voices corroborated his view. So claims a group of Israeli generals and security experts who are in the United States this week. I will be meeting with one of these generals later in the week and will report back what I hear, but I wanted folks to read the Haaretz account of their journey to the US (they were brought by J Street) and why they are here. They will be meeting with the National Security Council officials and groups around the country urging a two-state solution before it is too late.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/former-israeli-diplomats-in-washington-1967-borders-are-defensible-1.375235

This past week a new poll of American Jews was released by J Street, a pro-Israel, pro-Peace political organization based in Washington, D.C (see J Street link to learn more). The poll shows continuing support by American Jews in numbers far exceeding the non-Jewish population for President Obama and US leadership to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Click on below and then go to the “Power-Point” presentation to get the poll’s essential findings:

http://jstreet.org/blog/american-jews-continue-to-back-president-obama-us-engagement-in-israeli-palestinian-conflict/

As we move towards September with an expected UN vote on Palestinian statehood, it is important for American Jews to know how our community actually feels about the President’s general job performance and his policies in the Middle East, the UN, and his  efforts to bring the Israelis and Palestinians back to negotiations for an end-of-conflict agreement of two states for two peoples.

The right-wing of the American Jewish community (under 30%) has led many to conclude that the President is anti-Israel. Most American Jews don’t buy it because it isn’t true. Obama’s record of support for Israel’s security and its long term interests are clear.

L’shalom,

Rabbi John Rosove