by Roger B. Jacobs

June 11, 2009

It must be my own paranoia. I have been wondering if there is an overall offensive going on to undermine Israel in the American psyche.

The president made a major address in Cairo to the Muslim world. I have not been able to fully understand the approach.

Every day in the media I have been reading and hearing different accounts of how Israeli “settlements” have undermined any forward movement in the peace process in the Middle East. I am confident those settlements include my cousin’s in Gilo, a fully integrated neighborhood of Jerusalem for several generations, and my friends’ in Ariel, now a functioning city with a university and full infrastructure. So how does the existence of Ariel and cities like it threaten the peace process and hamper Arab/Palestinian growth and development on its own?

Several newspapers have focused all at once on the plight of the Palestinians. Recently, there was an op-ed in the Financial Times by an Arab journalist expressing his indignation at Israel’s intransigence. (The same paper recently carried a “news” article calling the growth of settlements “one of the main obstacles to a two-state solution and a lasting peace.”) Last week The New York Times published a few articles in the arts section about young Palestinian musicians hampered by the Israeli occupation. More articles in several other leading papers discussed the administration’s “messages” to the Israeli government regarding a modification of American support for Israel, with speculation that the United States could signal its displeasure with Israel through its voice in the United Nations or by other means.

By no means do I consider myself a Mideast expert despite a dozen trips to Israel and several to Egypt as well. The selection of Cairo as the site of Obama’s major address to the Muslim world, however, strikes me as curious.

During one trip to Egypt I was reading in the government-sponsored English-language newspaper a vilification of Israel and America — this despite a cold peace with Israel and enormous foreign aid funding to Egypt by the United States over many decades at this point. And this is a moderate and friendly Arab government?

The bigger quandary that I have is trying to understand what is meant by the term “settlement.” Is it an Israeli outpost of a few homes, many of which are occasionally bulldozed, or cities like Ariel, which is now a city of 35,000 flourishing in a harsh land? Ariel’s longtime Mayor Ron Nachman once explained that when the land was purchased for the city, the Arab neighbors who sold it considered it to be the “hills of death.” The builders of Ariel brought electrification, education, and suburbia to many citizens who were simply priced out of such a lifestyle in Israel’s main cities.

Frankly, what has stopped the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the overall Arab community of hundreds of millions from improving life in the areas of the West Bank and Gaza which they control? It cannot be funding, because those pipelines have been opened for years.

It is too easy and convenient to continue to blame Israel and Jews, in general, as the impediment to Arab progress. Perhaps a real dialogue is necessary to understand why Israel has flourished out of the desert and brought life and growth to many areas that were inhospitable and impenetrable.

Instead of vilification, cooperation could make the desert bloom in those Palestinian communities for its citizens as well. As far as the notion of a “state” goes, I am reminded of my visit with Yasser Arafat a few years ago at his Palestinian Authority headquarters, where he maintained the fiction of his interest in a “state” from his “capital” in Ramallah.

Words alone will not create a nation whose leaders continue to say different and contradictory things to different audiences, with little actual commitment to developing infrastructure and delivery of basic services. It is simply too easy and acceptable even in America and particularly throughout Europe to blame Israel for all the failings with its Palestinian neighbors and citizens.

By no means do I suggest that Israel is a perfect society with full integration and cultural equality.

However, I am struck by a now distant memory of watching people arrive in the early morning from the former Soviet Union and a particular young boy who took out his violin at that hour and played “Hatikva” to all those gathered.

When such a spirit of arrival and rebirth reaches the Palestinian people, the blame game may end and a nation may yet emerge.

Roger B. Jacobs, an attorney, is a vice president of the NJ State Association of Jewish Federations and former chair of the Community Relations Committee of the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ. The views he expresses are his own.

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