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An Israeli terrorism tour

By Ami Eden · March 11, 2008

Remember Commentary's "World Terrorism Wall Map" giveaway? Now, in Slate, Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger take a look at Israel's growing terrorist-tourism industry:

So, what can a country do when its tourist industry is eclipsed by terrorism? The answer, it seems, is to market terrorism to tourists. In perhaps one of the strangest twists of Middle East politics, terrorism is being used to lure visitors back to Israel. Our itinerary—which promised participants such highlights as an "observation of a security trial of Hamas terrorists" and briefings on "the realities of Israel's policy of targeted killings" – was not, at first glance, for the casual visitor. But in a way, it was. Israel has a long tradition of combining tourism and lobbying. Most famously, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a helicopter tour to George W. Bush during his 1998 trip to Israel while Bush was still governor of Texas. The two hit it off, and the visit is widely credited with reinforcing Bush's sympathy for Israel's security situation.

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Hitler the architect

By Ami Eden · March 11, 2008

The Times of London examines challenge of tastefully examining and displaying Hitler's vision of Berlin as a city full of bloated marble architecture, capital of the Nazi-run world:

For decades his plans were regarded as so crazed that they were confined to specialist books and institutes.

Yesterday the taboo was broken. Peer Steinbr�ck, the German Finance Minister, unveiled a scale model of Germania, the F�hrer's supersized city. Centrepiece of the display was the domed Great Hall, planned by Albert Speer, Hitler's master architect, to accommodate a crowd of 150,000. ...

The positioning of the exhibition, in a pavilion next to the Holocaust Memorial and two minutes' walk from Hitler's bunker, has made it easier to open it to the public without seeming to glorify the Nazi's aesthetic vision. ...

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Being a white nationalist terrorist is so last decade

By Ami Eden · March 11, 2008

Richard A. Serrano of the Los Angeles Times reports on the post-9/11 decline of white anti-government terrorist groups in the United States:

Three years after foreign terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans in the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Holten left the San Francisco Bay Area, drove east through the Tahoe National Forest, skirted the Truckee River and settled himself in Reno. Here he proclaimed himself a lieutenant colonel of the local chapter of Aryan Nations. He sent an e-mail to area newspapers declaring war on the federal government, the media and the Jews.

But no war came. Holten's career as a domestic terrorist was short and uneventful. FBI agents promptly arrested him, and a federal grand jury indicted him for transmitting a threatening e-mail. He pleaded guilty and served four months in prison. After getting out he contracted the AIDS virus, and he was rearrested, this time for soliciting a man for sex in a nearby city park.

With shaved head and Nazi lightning-bolt tattoos on his neck, Holten is emblematic of how far the anti-government terrorism movement has sunk in the years since the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

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Taking the temperature of Mercaz Harav

By Ami Eden · March 11, 2008

Two different writers take the temperature of the yeshiva attacked last week – and offer different takes on the state of its founder's vision of a partnership between secular and religious Zionists.

Writing in the New York Sun, Hillel Halkin looks back at the founder of the yeshiva attacked last week, and concludes that his groundbreaking vision of a partnership between secular and religious Zionists is coming undone:

What [Palestine's first chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook] did was to provide a powerful intellectual justification for religious Jews to cooperate fully with a secular Zionist establishment — and when this establishment created, after his death, a secular Jewish state, to regard the latter and its institutions as part of a divine plan for Redemption that it was a religious commandment to support and take part in.

As taught at the Merkaz Ha-Rav Yeshiva and the many emulations of it that sprang up, this became the accepted outlook of what is known as Israel's "national religious community," which today comprises some half-million Jews or one-tenth of Israel's Jewish population. And when, after the 1967 war, the territories occupied by Israel in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria became available for Jewish settlement, it was also this outlook that impelled Gush Emunim to co-opt as much of the Israeli state's power as it could in order to settle Jews in these areas. The fusion of state power with religious idealism seemed perfectly legitimate from its point of view.

But what the leaders of the religious settlement movement failed to realize at the time was that the same state power that could be put to use by them had a will of its own that also could turn against them. This was what happened in the disengagement from Gaza in 2006, bitterly opposed by the "national religious" community, and it is what is threatening to happen on a much larger scale in the West Bank.

Today, this community, particularly its youth, feels betrayed and abandoned by the secular state it once championed, and increasingly alienated from it.

The murder of the eight students at the Merkaz Ha-Rav Yeshiva cannot, of course, be directly blamed on Israel's secular government; if anything, the yeshiva itself was negligent in not posting guards and taking sensible precautions.

But the "national religious" community's enraged feeling that it alone today in Israel is fully committed to the war against Palestinian terror, in which its government is at best half-heartedly engaging while continuing to pursue the mirage of peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, will only be strengthened.

The Kookian vision, which (however far it may have strayed from Kook's original intentions) has served as this community's guiding light for 80 years, is now foundering and close to collapse. Needless to say, the Palestinian gunman who chose the Merkaz Ha-Rav as his target was unlikely to have been aware of all this. He did not know the half of what he was shooting at.

Nadav Shragai, in Ha'aretz, is more hopeful:

"The worst Israeli government is immeasurably better than the best diaspora. Ever since the establishment of the state, we have rejoiced in it despite its flaws." That is what Rabbi Haim Druckman, head of the Bnei Akiva religious youth movement, has been saying over and over again since the uprooting of the Gaza settlements.

Druckman is sticking to his support for the state even now, as the minister of education is being ejected from the grieving Mercaz Harav Yeshiva. ...

In such remarks, Druckman expresses the pro-state religious outlook that Mercaz Harav symbolized for decades, and to which its rabbis still adhere even after last week's deadly terror attack. ...

"This incident," [rabbi and educator Benny Lau] believes, "is bringing many back to the main path - to national responsibility, to a partnership with all Jews. And it likely to unite various strains that seem as though they had diverged. This is the spirit of mission and devotion to national goals, from within an outlook of Torah and faith. And it is still very dominant." ...

As though to reinforce Rabbi Lau's impression, students at Mercaz Harav have been hearing the following from their rabbis in recent days: "We make a clear and absolute distinction between the current government, which is temporary and ephemeral, and the state and our renewed sovereignty in the land of Israel. The state of Israel is a positive commandment from the Torah. The first step in settling the land is not to leave it in the hands of another people, in the hands of another regime, and this element cannot be realized except by Jewish rule - regardless of whether it is Solomon or Jeroboam. The main thing is Jewish rule ... Today, we have been stricken by a great disaster, and with all due understanding of the feelings of wrath and anger at the shortcomings and the terrible mistakes that led to this disaster, we are continuing in the path of Torah and faith as part of the Jewish people in the state of Israel, facing the public, and not with our backs to it."

This pro-state line is not easy for everyone at Mercaz Harav, and especially not for the young people, many of whom were in Amona and Gush Katif. But at least the rabbis are making it clear that even after the great disaster, their line will not change.

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Fed Up

By Ami Eden · March 11, 2008

Uri Orbach warns on YNet that the Israeli public is unwilling to tolerate the notion of Israeli Arabs joining in violence against the Jewish state:

Matan Vilnai was not being nice recently when he said that the Arabs could bring a holocaust upon themselves if they keep on shooting at us. It would have been better had he chosen the word "disaster." Effie Eitam was also not being nice when he threatened that we will expel Arab citizens of Israel who have been out of control at protest rallies and in the Knesset. The citizenship rights of Israeli Arabs are not conditioned on anything.

However, it should be noted that the words uttered by both Vilnai and Eitam did not cause great shock around here. This is not because most of the Jewish public thinks we should expel the Arabs, bur rather, because most Jews are simply fed up with the conduct of the Palestinians in Gaza, and most Jews are unwilling to tolerate Arab Israelis joining the waves of hate on occasion. ...

The fact that Vilnai's and Eitam's recent statements were received with relative quiet is a very bad sign for the Palestinians, both within and beyond the Green Line. Those who think that Jewish citizens have no national feelings towards their state may one day discover that we have nationalistic feelings. Those who think that the Jews don't care about their honor, and flag, and sovereignty, will not bring a holocaust or expulsion upon themselves, but they will discover that Israel's Jewish citizens are not suckers, and that we know how to enlist for a cause.

I hope that this question will never face a test, but if it gets to that, heaven forbid, it will suddenly turn out that grave danger overrides tolerance.