Rediscovering Israel

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Jonathon Narvey — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 01:16:31 +0000

The Prisoner. Part 2

Jonathon Narvey — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:55:25 +0000

This is the second part of an essay exploring the tragedy of Israeli IDF Sergeant Gilad Shalit, held prisoner by Hamas in Gaza, and the larger challenges of prisoner exchanges and redemption of captives

When I was growing up, I would occasionally read in a newspaper that the Soviet Union had granted an amnesty to several hundred or even thousands of prisoners. Occasionally, I noticed that other thuggish regimes around the world would do the same thing. This is still a fairly common practice – in 2009, the Tajik President announced an amnesty for half of his prison population.

Even at that early age, I knew this wasn’t how things were supposed to work. You commit a crime. You’re caught. The judge sentences you. You go to prison.

That’s how it works in societies that have rule of law. Even in societies that aren’t democratic, the rulers don’t want to see thieves, rapists and murderers let loose to commit more crimes.

Why were these weird regimes letting go of these prisoners, then? Well, I learned that in undemocratic societies, you can go to jail for things that aren’t really crimes in places like Canada. Their prisons are filled with all sorts of people who really shouldn’t be there.

You’re a journalist and write something scandalous (but true) about an apparatchik? You go to jail. Your wife has caught the amorous attention of the police chief? You go to jail. You say something bad about the Dear Leader on your private telephone to your friend? You and your friend both go to jail.

Of course, it costs money to run prisons and there are only so many prison cells. Besides, a short stint in a moldy dungeon is all that’s required to ensure that most people behave. So when an effective police state results in prisons so overcrowded that the guards are going to be overwhelmed, then it’s time to grant an amnesty for the masses. Long live the generous Dear Leader!

The corrupt prison system defecates its assimilated and cowed population so as to make room for the next batch of political opponents, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and other inconvenient types.

This is how most educated people view prison amnesties. This is why these sorts of mass prisoner releases don’t happen in places like Canada, where democracy and the rule of law are as strong as anywhere.

Now, back to the idea of trading Gilad Shalit for Palestinian prisoners. Hamas takes as a starting negotiating position that this one soldier is worth 1000 Palestinian prisoners on a list, in addition to all female and young prisoners.

The Israeli response? “Let’s make a deal.” Not that deal, mind you. That’s too many prisoners. Besides, some of the people on the list have blood on their hands. This guy stabbed a toddler. This other guy was a bomb maker for suicide squads…

But these are mere negotiating ploys for a process that will take place behind closed doors. Long story short, the Israeli state is willing to make a deal involving large masses of Palestinians for a single Israeli soldier. There are recent precedents for this, like when Israelis traded 6,000 Arab POWs for four Israeli prisoners taken in the Six Day War, or when Lebanon received 4,500 Lebanese for six Israelis.

So now people from other countries like Canada start noticing this weird situation. They may not be aware of Jews’ tradition of “redemption”.

All they know is that Israel is preparing to let large numbers of Palestinian prisoners go free, negating a lawful process that supposedly provided justice to their victims. And they’ve seen these sort of mass releases before, typically by governments that rule by force and terror.

And they will start to ask uncomfortable questions. “If Israel is going to let all of these prisoners go in a deal, then why can’t they just go now? What was the real reason you were holding them? Is it simply because they are Palestinians and you want to terrorize them?

“Doesn’t that make Israel an Apartheid state? And if you’re arresting Palestinians as bargaining chips in the event that Israelis are taken hostage, doesn’t that mean that an Israeli prison cell and a makeshift Hamas dungeon in a basement have the exact same level of legitimacy?”

Of course, all of these questions can be answered in a way that provides reasonable legal and ethical cover for the Israeli state. You could go over the case records of Palestinian prisoners including the crimes they committed, one by one. You can point out that the policing arm of a sovereign state is very different from the sort of illegitimate terrorist raiders who indiscriminately snatched Shalit. You could point out that Israel allows visits by the Red Cross to prisoners, while Hamas has refused to honour this basic tenet of international law.

But these answers are complicated and they take time.

In the meantime, as a result of a laudable effort to get back a hostage from psychotic and genocidal extremists, Israel is the one coming out looking like a Stalinist thugocracy.

It’s horribly unfair. But that’s just how a prisoner trade looks, at a time when Israel is already in dire danger of becoming an international pariah state.

Israelis will continue to do what is in their own best interests, regardless of how if may look to outsiders. I get the feeling that in the end, Israelis will negotiate with their sworn enemies to win Shalit’s freedom. I know how bad it looks, but they’ll do it anyway. They can’t help it. In a sense, all Israelis are prisoners of conscience.

The Prisoner. Part 1

Jonathon Narvey — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:44:37 +0000

Gilad Shalit is watching the World Cup. At least, that’s what his captors are telling the rest of the world.

No one can know for certain, but I guess the Hamas propaganda department thinks this will demonstrate the generous hospitality of their genocidal movement. It’s no Hilton, but you don’t get sports on satellite at a Budget 8 Motel.

It is four years since Shalit was snatched by a Palestinian hit squad through the Kerem Shalom crossing in Israel. It’s a long time – particularly spent in the company of Islamist fanatics known for using power drills and crowbars on their own people.

From the beginning, I felt a real horror at Shalit’s predicament. Not least because the images of him on television and newspapers in those first weeks in 2006 reminded me of another skinny Jew in army fatigues. I served as an army reservist with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles infantry many years ago. I could see in the lenses of Shalit’s glasses a reflection of my own self that might have been, had I ever been taken prisoner on some distant battlefield (Some of my colleagues in the battalion ended up serving in the former Yugoslavia as peacekeepers, risking their lives to stop Serbs, Bosnians and Croats from killing each other).

Redemption and Choosing the Lesser Evil
Despite my heartfelt sympathy for Shalit, I’ve never had much sympathy for the idea of a prisoner exchange to secure his release. How do you give in to terrorists’ demands without giving them an incentive to keep doing it?

I was surprised to find myself in opposition to a majority of Israeli society on this. Most seem to favor a negotiated release that will most likely involve trading hundreds, perhaps thousands of prisoners for Shalit’s freedom.

“Israelis are deeply divided on this,” my guide noted while looking at Shalit’s face on a billboard along the road. Our guide had served with the paratroopers in the 2008 war in Lebanon and knew quite well the danger of being captured by the other side. “It’s very painful for us. But Jews have a strong need deep in our souls to do whatever we can to redeem captives.”

This stems in no small part from the historical founding myth of a Jewish nation that itself arose out of captivity in Egypt. But it is also part of a Jewish tradition going back to the scholar Maimonides, who wrote letters exhorting his fellow Jews to redeem captives and collected the money to get them back.

And of course there is a practical military argument for going to extreme, even absurd lengths to get back captives: if soldiers fear they’ll be on their own if taken prisoner, they may refrain from moving too quickly into enemy territory.

But what about giving terrorists an incentive to kidnap more Israelis. “Look, it’s not like Hamas and the rest of them are ever going to stop trying to get us,” my guide says with a shrug. “They’ll keep trying no matter what. Not negotiating doesn’t keep us more or less safe. The IDF keeps us safe. Our own security measures keep us safe, and for the most part, they’re working.”

To an extent, you can’t argue with that logic. The time when Israelis endured a suicide bombing or other outrage on a weekly basis is already a fading memory. Controversial measures like checkpoints and the infamous security “wall” may keep Palestinians and international human rights advocates in a perpetual frenzy, but bombs aren’t getting into discos and pizza parlors anymore.

I’m still not quite convinced. The problem of trading Shalit or any individual Israeli for hundreds of Palestinians is one of perception to outsiders.

I’m aware of the historical Jewish tradition of redemption. In that sense, it shows a generosity of spirit and perhaps even a higher ethical standard. But outsiders, most Canadians included, won’t see it that way.

In fact, any such lopsided trade would seem to provide evidence of Israel as a deeply unethical, unlawful rogue state. Let me explain.

End Of The Dream

Jonathon Narvey — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:51:12 +0000

Terry Glavin helps explain the sad end of the dream of global solidarity and peace between Israelis and Palestinians. An excerpt from The Mark:

Jerusalem Divided

Jonathon Narvey — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:24:54 +0000

There was a glum mood in the van as we set off from our hotel in downtown Jerusalem for a day of travel around the holy city. “You’ve heard the news?” asked our unusually chagrined travel guide. “What a screw-up. The politicians couldn’t at least wait a few days for Joe Biden to leave?”

Israel’s foreign ministry and press people were in full damage-control mode that morning. The blowout of USA-Israeli relations over the announcement of a new settlement project in East Jerusalem was on every TV screen, every radio show and (as I found out later, scanning my RSS feeds on my iPhone) seemingly every blog in the universe. A lowly bureaucrat in the Israeli civil service had announced approval for the Ramat Shlomo development project and now Israeli’s PM was getting hit over the head by a representative from Israel’s best friend, the USA, for sabotaging the “peace process.”

It was embarrassing. Even those who were genetically defensive about bad press for Israel were pissed. On the eve of a USA-Israel summit, the Israelis had poked their best friend in the eye.

The timing was the worst part; most people presumed that if the American delegation had simply stopped in for some photo ops and backroom diplomacy and left, and the announcement about Ramat Shlomo had been made a week later, with Biden and his buddies safely ensconced in Washington, there would have been no story.

A rumor had it that the announcement was a accident by a bureaucrat. After all, the development proposal had been in the works for years, long before Biden had even come into the White House on the Obama ticket. And Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t be expected to know what was on tap for municipal zoning approvals any more than Canadian PM Stephen Harper might know about every new condo building going up in Ottawa. Still, it looked bad.

The spotlight was on Israel, now, and would be for months afterwards. The story making the rounds was that Israel was engaging in a sort of gradual, piecemeal ethnic cleansing (semantically putting Israelis in the same camp as Serbian soldiers who massacred their ethnic minorities in the 1990s) by building homes for Jews in East Jerusalem while holding up building permits for Palestinians in the same part of the city.

That morning, we drove past the area of the proposed settlement. As we looked on the green hillside, one salient fact came through: there were no buildings there. There was a Jewish neighborhood already adjacent to the spot. But the nearest Arab-Israeli neighborhood was way over on the other side of a valley. The new settlement was essentially an organic expansion of an existing community.

It’s worth noting here that there used to be more mixed neighborhoods in Jerusalem where Jewish and Arab Israelis mixed more or less as they would in any other diverse Western city – though this is much rarer now, since the days of the terror campaigns of the 1990s.

In any case, the view from the Israeli side and the Palestinian-international media perspective were pretty much irreconcilable. While many Israelis do criticize settlements in the West Bank, those same critics will put an asterisk next to East Jerusalem. “To us, it’s like dividing East Toronto and West Toronto – it’s still Toronto,” says our guide. “And it’s still Canada.”

This contrasts starkly with the view from outside Israel; that building in East Jerusalem compounds an illegal annexation. But this is where it gets tricky.

First of all, when Palestinians talk of East Jerusalem as their future capital, one should note that there isn’t really any historical precedent for that. And if you go by the argument that the Palestinians are only reclaiming their most historic religious sites located in East Jerusalem, then the Jewish Israeli claim is even stronger; after all, Muslims built the Al Aqsa mosque on top of the remains of the old Temple.

As well, there’s certainly no doubt about who built Jerusalem in the first place. Besides, if Palestinians (and the rest of the world) state that conquest does not confer legitimacy in the 21st century, then why apply an immoral standard to the conquest of this city in 638 AD?

The future status of a united or divided Jerusalem will be decided in part by history, but hopefully to a larger extent by modern standards of what successful cities look like.

What’s being demanded right now on the Palestinian side is essentially an ethnically homogenous Muslim capital free of Jews and other pesky minorities (while West Jerusalem and other majority-Jewish Israeli cities are expected to fully absorb a Palestinian demographic flood at some point in the future). This would probably require a completely separate municipal infrastructure, as East Jerusalem becomes a no-go zone for Jews.

A comparable situation in Canada would be if the Musqueam nation on Canada’s west coast essentially demanded a wholesale evacuation of all non-First Nations residents from the prime real estate in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver. As the Musqueam moved into the vacated houses, they would declare a restored national capital – in a territory that had never had anything of the sort. Except that in this ridiculous situation, the Jews of Jerusalem would actually have a stronger case to stay put, being an indigenous group alongside the Palestinians.

What is to become of this divided city? Municipal rezoning and development projects that are routine in any other city in the world will continue to annoy most Muslims, international media and human rights industry professionals. But transforming East Jerusalem into a Jew-free city state-let hardly seems an improvement. For now the Eternal City will simply plod along as the Indeterminate City.

Identity and Alienation in Israel

Jonathon Narvey — Sat, 01 May 2010 01:56:07 +0000

With her television-reporter good looks and modern style, Nadine Hamed looks like any number of hard-working yet fun-loving young professionals you might find on the streets of Toronto or Vancouver.

Nadine exudes absolute confidence. Indeed, she is articulate in a way that might make Canadian parents wonder how they went wrong in raising their own young-adult offspring who, “like, you know, doesn’t, uh, talk so good”.

We meet in a lively, colorful restaurant on a main street in Nazareth. Nadine is a delightful conversationalist right from the start, thoughtful in her answers yet given to flashes of witty spontaneity. The TV sports journalist speaks North American English without any hint of accent. She is ambitious and indicates she’d move to the USA to work for a big network in a heartbeat if an opportunity came up. While she lives in her mother’s house, she is dating a young man whom she first met in high school.

But Nadine isn’t from Canada. She lives in the West Bank city of Nazareth. That’s not a refugee camp, but she does reside in what the international community defines as Israeli-occupied territory.

As an Israeli Arab, she has the same rights as Jewish Israelis, in precisely the same way as Canadians who are ethnically Italian, Haitian or French all share the same rights. The political system and rule of law that exist in Israel are for all citizens regardless of religious affiliation. Hebrew and Arabic are both official languages in this place.

Still, Israeli-Arabs like Nadine give voice to feelings of alienation.

“I feel like this country doesn’t represent me,” Nadine says, pointing to the symbolic trappings of the Jewish state such as the flag and anthem. “Although Arabic is a official language in Israel, you use it only with Arabs. I want each student to learn Arabic at high school so they can be more open to our society.”

I pause for a moment and realize what she seems to be asking for is something akin to Canada’s official bilingualism, where pretty well all Anglophone students at least receive one French class a day until grade 11. In Canada, these efforts have not resulted in functional bilingualism; Canadians with those skills all tend to live in Quebec and Ontario. But perhaps this sort of thing could work in Israel, given the far smaller geographic distance separating Jewish and Arab Israelis.

Of course, even the phrase, “Arab-Israeli” is contentious. That is what Jewish Israelis call those people who are ethnically and culturally Arab, who live within internationally-recognized Israeli territory. But Nadine doesn’t see it quite that way. “I’m a Palestinian Israeli,” she says, noting that other “Arab-Israelis” tend to define themselves in the same way, in unity with Palestinians living in Gaza or parts of the West Bank.

Other aspects of Israeli life seem unfair to her. For instance, all Israeli students can study the Jewish religion in high schools, while Islamic studies are not included. Job opportunities in government seem limited for Arabs, she says.

Nonetheless, Nadine seems to feel that much of the tension between Jews and Arabs in Israel is augmented by stereotypes and media drama rather than genuinely irreconcilable differences. “If each person learned how to accept the other without judging him from first sight, everything would be different. I know this sort of thing exists everywhere in the world, but here -- and because of the fact that I'm part of a minority, I can face this type of situation more often.”

The lunch is over far too soon, but the tour group has a few minutes outside the restaurant as we wait for our driver. I ask our tour guide, Uri, about Nadine’s comments about her feelings of alienation from the Israeli state. A professor at an Israeli university, he’s an expert in cultural identity, naturally enough, as a living example of a multi-cultural identity; he was born in Jerusalem and raised in South Africa the U.S. and Israel.

He has empathy for Nadine’s perspective, but he doesn’t hold back. “Nadine feels that the Israeli state doesn’t really represent her. Actually, she’s right. It doesn’t. But that’s not necessarily a critique of the Israeli state so much as an indication of the challenge of Arab-Israelis like Nadine to come to grips with the national character of this country.”

Unlike Canada, Israel was never envisioned as a country with several founding peoples (Indeed, even that Canadian founding myth has been the result of a bit of modern revisionism, evolving over time to explicitly add First Nations to the two European colonial powers as brothers in Confederation).

When Israelis declared independence, they explicitly planned on creating a Jewish state, in the same sense that France is French or China is Chinese – only a far smaller territory that wasn’t even contiguous. That was the country that the original Zionist founders wanted.

It is only through an unlikely historical sequence of surviving and counter-attacking against a genocidal onslaught from Arab nations that Israel has found itself in possession of Arab (or, if you choose, Palestinian) territory. But these territorial acquisitions through conquest do not make it incumbent on Israelis to change the nature of their state any more than the American conquest of Mexican territory might have obligated Americans to adopt Latino customs. Today, the American flag remains the stars and stripes, with the eagle from the Mexican national symbolism nowhere to be seen.

Thus, If Nadine and other Arab-Israelis are waiting for the Israeli state to change to accommodate their minority culture and heritage, their sense of alienation is unlikely to go away any time soon.

But as Israel gets on in years and even those who explicitly oppose the state come to realize that the country is here to stay, perhaps simple pragmatism will begin to tweak those expectations. With the passage of time, this may happen, in the same way that Quebecois (well, some of them) and most Newfoundlanders seem to have come to grips with - and even take pride in - the reality of a Canadian state. But in the meantime, patience may be a virtue in short supply.

This Is the Part of the Zionist Plot Where They Save the Lives of Children From Around the World

Jonathon Narvey — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:59:25 +0000

There is a cardiac ward in a hospital in Tel Aviv where children have an off-putting sort of serenity. The little ones smile often, but they do so with a wise look that belies their short years.

Some lie on cots near each other, as doctors and nurses check charts and adjust advanced medical equipment. It is busy here. Some of the children sit up on stretchers in the halls, watching, playing with toys or taking spoonfuls of cereal from their parents. In this place, the parents are never far from their offspring.

These kids in this part of the ward are not Jewish. Indeed, none hold Israeli citizenship. Many come from China, Russia, Hungary, Yemen and other nations far from Israel. On closer inspection, you will discover that half of the children being treated here are Palestinians from the West Bank. All of these kids are receiving some of the best medical care available in the world, to heal their broken hearts.

The Save A Child’s Heart program was started by Dr. Ami Cohen, born in Brooklyn. He moved to Israel in 1992 to work at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon. Three years later, he was asked to operate on two Ethiopian children suffering from heart disease. With that, the Save a Child's Heart foundation was born. Since then, the center has saved the lives of more than 1100 children.

It is privately funded, though indirectly subsidized by the Israeli state. Skeptical critics of the Israeli state will surely view the entire program as a propaganda exercise. On the other hand, who could argue with a program that saves the lives of sick children?

“Politics is outside this hospital,” says a doctor on the ward. “When children come here, they all receive the same treatment. Of course, there are parents who are bringing their child from some countries and cultures where this would seem complicated, but when a child is sick, everything else is secondary. They do what they have to do.”

Almost all parents would agree, anyway. The doctor seems to lose focus and his smile drops for a moment as he recounts the tale of an Egyptian man who contacted the program's branch office in London. “We were excited because this would be our first child from Egypt, but it turned out that the father who made the inquiries thought we were a British organization.” As soon as he found out it was an Israeli program, he reportedly told the consultant on the phone that he would rather that his child died than be treated by Israelis.

That seems to be an exception to the rule, though. While Egypt and Jordan still have yet to participate in the program, this hospital has treated children from Iraq and other parts of the Arab world.

One part of the ward is reserved for Palestinian children and their parents, which the medical staff have politically-incorrectly nicknamed the occupied territory. Two Palestinian mothers covered up except for their faces in traditional garb dote over their babies who are in recovery. The situation here contrasts sharply with the image that both Palestinians and human rights activists outside Israel keep in mind. “We hope to leave them convinced, or at least confused,” the doctor notes.

Happy St. Patrick's Day Almost Everywhere

Jonathon Narvey — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:33:28 +0000

On this St. Patrick's Day, I'm reminded of a telling incident a Canadian working in Israel mentioned to me last week in Jerusalem:

There was this Irish guy working for UNRWA in the West Bank. He gets out of one of the armored vehicles in a convoy and steps gingerly onto the street. It's St. Patrick's Day, so naturally, one of us inquires as to why he isn't wearing green.

"Er, it might be misconstrued," he answered

Political correctness takes on a lethal seriousness in some parts of the world.

Quiet Riot

Jonathon Narvey — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:28:43 +0000

My colleagues back home might have noticed a tiny item in the news ticker at the bottom of their TV screen saying "Israel locks down West Bank". I only found out about the restriction as a colleague was checking her email on a Blackberry. We were traveling north towards a kibbutz in northern Israel along a road firmly located in the West Bank.

Why was the lock-down happening? Israeli police had been tipped off about a "planned riot" which was to be led in Jerusalem by certain malcontents from the West Bank.

The phrase struck me as odd. A planned demonstration, maybe. A scheduled protest, perhaps. But a "planned" spontaneous outburst of violent mob action?

But in this region of the world, "planned riots" are par for the course. Think back to the beginning of the Second Intifada. The popular myth is that it was sparked when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount. Sharon said at the time:

"I came here as one who believes in coexistence between Jews and Arabs... I believe that we can build and develop together. This was a peaceful visit. Is it an instigation for Israeli Jews to come to the Jewish people's holiest site?

According to reports in Western media in those days, it was.

We know now, from insiders such as the son of the founder of Hamas that the Second Intifada was completely premeditated by Yasser Arafat, who had rejected the peace plan of Oslo.

Mr. Yousef tells me that he was horrified by the pointless violence unleashed by politicians willing to climb "on the shoulders of poor, religious people." He says Palestinians who heeded the call "were going like a cow to the slaughterhouse, and they thought they were going to heaven."

Premeditated or not, the threat of the riots was enough to prompt a security clampdown. "When it comes to the international media coverage, a police crackdown is going to look a lot better than a riot," said one of my traveling companions from Canada, with a shrug.

What did the clampdown look like? Our van barely slowed down as we passed through the first checkpoint along the way. We were simply waved through. At the second checkpoint, we were actually stopped for about twenty seconds as a sentry asked our driver and guide a few questions. With a nod of his head as he stepped back from our vehicle, we were on our way.

Of course, Palestinians on their way out of Ramallah or other nearby towns might have been stalled in lineups elsewhere. The Israelis don't rely on "magical thinking" when it comes to security -- in a country where 100 per cent of terror attacks on Jewish Israelis come from Palestinian men (and very rarely, women), the political correctness of profiling is made irrelevant, even if such practices makes outsiders squirm. But just as likely, the vast majority of Palestinians heard about the lockdown and barring an emergency, simply stayed in place.

Inconvenient for the Palestinians? Yes. Infuriating? Of course. But this is a different neighborhood than where I come from. You can't avoid the fact that Israelis are very much the targets for all kinds of violence that is both planned, random and types in-between.

Conflict management (as opposed to conflict resolution, which seems to be out of reach for now) dictates a level of security that people in other countries would find awfully intrusive and offensive -- at least until they've experienced it themselves.

The Case of the Kidnapped Conscience

Jonathon Narvey — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:40:06 +0000

"Without realizing it, the left has essentially joined forces with the extreme right as they aim to deligitemize Israel," said the longtime political analyst. "Those who speak the language of human rights only as a wedge to get attention have taken advantage of the conscience of Israelis who support things like democracy, free speech and human rights. They are are co-opting these people for their own ends."

The Goldstone report was merely one of the latest Israel-bashing exercises, slamming Israel for alleged war crimes during the Cast Lead operation in Gaza, while providing a free pass to Hamas militants who used human shields and of course fired 8000 rockets into Israeli territory that ultimately set off the Israeli response.

Why are Israelis so concerned? More than terrorism, making Israel into a pariah state would cut out the heart of this country, the official said.

This problem is not exactly new, though the trends have certainly worsened over the past few years. For years after Oslo, virtually everyone agreed on a two-state solution. This made sense, since Palestinians themselves were asking to remain separate from Jews.

But now, we hear lots of talk of a one-state solution, in which the Jewish remnant in a unified nation would very soon lose its unique character through simple demography. "It would have been beyond the pale years ago, but now they talk of an Apartheid state, even though Israel is a multicultural country where all citizens, Jew and Arab alike, have the very same civil rights -- and next door in the Palestinian territories and the Arab lands, Jews were kicked out of their homes and would not be safe in those countries today. Yet none of this is even discussed."